An American Genocide Quotes

“federal lawmakers expelled California Indians from mainstream colonial California society and relegated them to a shadowy legal and social status between man and beast. This was not preordained. In each phase of legislation, anti-Indian views prevailed over more sympathetic voices, each time pushing Indians farther beyond the bounds of citizenship and community. Through a succession of laws, legislators slowly denied California Indians membership in the body politic until they became landless noncitizens, with few legal rights and almost no legal control over their own bodies. Indians became, for many Anglo-Americans, nonhumans. This legal exclusion of California Indians from California society was a crucial enabler of mass murder.”
― Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873

“a letter, published in the Daily Alta California, on January 14, 1851, “To the People of California, residing in the vicinity of the Indian Troubles,” in which they argued: “As there is now no farther west, to which they can be removed, the General Government and the people of California appear to have left but one alternative in relation to these remnants of once numerous and powerful tribes, viz: extermination or domestication.” The Daily Alta California agreed. On May 31, 1851, its editors predicted that the alternative to treaties would be, “a war . . . of extermination, long, tedious, cruel and costly.” The article then reiterated that without treaties, “subduing and keeping them quiet . . . could be done [only] by a war of extermination.”
― Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873