Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

In a true reign of terror, US occupation and settlement saw the extermination of more than one hundred thousand California Native people in twenty-five years, reducing the population to thirty thousand by 1870. Described by scholars as the most extreme demographic disaster of all time, it has also been defined as genocide in terms of the Genocide Convention.49 From the onset of the California gold rush, crazed “gold bugs” invaded Indigenous territories, terrorizing and brutally killing those who were in their path. The settlers ran roughshod over unarmed Indigenous residents of fishing communities in a bountiful paradise of woods, rivers, and mountains, as well as former Mexican citizens who were farmers or ranchers. The role left for the US Army was to round up the starving Indigenous refugees to transport them to already established reservations in Oregon and Oklahoma.