Murder State Quotes

“the most general condition for guilt-free massacre is the denial of humanity to the victim. You call the victims names like gooks, dinks, niggers, pinkos, and jags. The more you can get high officials in government to use these names and others like yellow dwarfs with daggers and rotten apples, the more your success.... If contact is allowed, or it cannot be prevented, you indicate the contact is not between equals; you talk about the disadvantaged, the deprived. Troy Duster, "Conditions for Guilt-Free Massacre" (1971)”
― Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California's Native American Genocide, 1846-1873

“Admission to the Union followed on September 9,185o. However, the federal government continued to play a vital role in California: the role of a bystander and enabler of genocide. With as many as 15o,ooo Native Americans living in the soon-to-be state, California had by far the largest Native American population in the Union. The federal government was the legal authority responsible for dealing with Native peoples, who were considered people of sovereign nations in terms of diplomacy and treaty making. In the course of the next two decades, though, the
federal government would prove reluctant to contradict the will of the white citizens in California in their democratically driven campaign of physical extermination through violence, kidnapping, exposure, and compulsory starvation.”
― Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California's Native American Genocide, 1846-1873

“He abandoned any thought of stemming the tide of such extermination because as part of God's master plan, genocide of the Indian "race [was] beyond the power and wisdom of man to avert."' Indeed in the minds of some nineteenth-century Euro-Americans, to turn away from genocide would be to contravene God's plan. More important, in Burnett's mind, to do other than”
― Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California's Native American Genocide, 1846-1873

“Others included gambling, prostitution, drunkenness, and using Native Americans and their villages as target practice. At other times, rape was mixed with murder, arson, and thievery, leading to campaigns of extermination of entire communities.141 But not all elements of the genocide of Native peoples were as visible as murder, arson, or even rape. As a result of malnutrition, rape, and forced cohabitation, disease was destroying the health and fertility of Indigenous peoples throughout California.”
― Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California's Native American Genocide, 1846-1873

“What perhaps made it all the better for non-Native residents of Long Valley was that not one member of the community had ever been killed-not in raids, not by unexplained murder, not in action as a member of Farley's company.121 In fact no evidence exists of any Euro-American even being wounded."' Hundreds of Native people had died to make sure cattle, horses, and oxen could roam free.”
― Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California's Native American Genocide, 1846-1873

“The taking of trophies, especially the mutilation attendant to beheadings and scalping, was elemental to the genocide of Native peoples. Reinforcing the savage, animal, and inhuman nature of their victims lay behind the collection of such trophies by the perpetrators. 117 Wright and his men were rewarded economically with bounties paid by the community and reimbursement and pay by the state, and socially with adulation from their local communities. In part, this helps to explain the rise of a
category of men known as "Indian hunters," who came to prominence in northern California during the r85os and i86os.”
― Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California's Native American Genocide, 1846-1873

“Given that many Euro-Americans thought Indians were animals, it was easy to rationalize killing them as something more akin to killing a pesky animal near one's home or herd, rather than accepting it as murder of another human being. As the Chico Weekly Courant described it, "Nothing but extermination will keep them from committing
their depredations. It is a false notion of humanity to save the lives of these red devils. There should be no prisoners taken, but a general sacrifice made of the whole race."The”
― Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California's Native American Genocide, 1846-1873

“In most cases, governments were at least willing to turn their heads,
if not send help, when Native populations were being exterminated. Yet above all else, settlers, ranchers, and miners, like their brethren in the southern portion of the state, used voluntary, democratic associations to greatest effect in bringing about the genocide of California's Indigenous people.”
― Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California's Native American Genocide, 1846-1873