Genocide, Forced Assimilation, Denial and Capitalist Development

Like the rest of the country, California has two separate histories - one that's sterilized, disemboweled and taught to children in grade school, and the truths that Native Americans know on a visceral level. But if the state's native past is especially brutal, it also has been hidden particularly well.
"It's kind of a buried past," said Dave Singleton, program analyst for the California Native American Heritage Commission. "It's an untold history."
Maybe that's why the past constantly resurfaces in the present.

Throughout North America, the struggles of First Nations peoples continue. The Elsipogtog people of New Brunswick have been using their bodies to blockade at a fracking project on sacred land by Houston-based Southwestern Energy Company. Their efforts resulted in a paramilitary-style raid on their encampment in October by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. But their action continues.
Meanwhile, as Native Americans nationwide are pushing to change the name of an NFL team from a racial slur, Lakota Indians are petitioning the United Nations with complaints against the US government of genocide. The Kizh-Gabrieleño of Los Angeles and Orange counties filed a grievance with The Hague over desecration of Indian burials in Downtown L.A., an issue that continually plagues them in a region beset by high land values and relentless development.
Environmental destruction and cultural desecration of sacred sites and burials have driven Native Americans to initiate broad indigenous-led movements like Idle No More and the Dakota Unity Ride, demanding protection of the Earth, natural resources, sacred ancestral lands and grave sites.
But while those battles rage on the national and even global level, in California, many indigenous find themselves blocked from achieving the most basic hurdle in self-determination - federal recognition. Specifics of California history make it impossible for many to meet federal criteria as they battle misperceptions that no California Indians are left.
"How many people think all California Indians are dead? But we are still here,"

This is the opening of an article with links which can be read in full here and what follows are snippets from the same. Genocide, forced assimilation, denial of history, repeated traits of capitalist development. These people are not dead - they are alive and kicking back.

In the layered history of Spanish missions, Mexican and American rule meant tribes were dispersed genetically and geographically, many brought to the brink of extinction. In the mid-1800s, 18 treaties setting aside 7.5 million acres of land were negotiated with Indian communities, but thanks to powerful political lobbying, none of the treaties was ratified.
"People assume no reservation means no Indians, but that's backward,"

As settlers spread west at the commencement of American rule, discovery of gold and high-value real estate created a zeal to take land and rid it of its original inhabitants, resulting in unquenchable bloodlust, with the government paying people to kill California Indians.
"In 1854 alone, the federal government paid in excess of $1.4 million (to kill Indians) at $5 a head, 50 cents a scalp," Sayers said. "In the 1850s and 1860s, to say you were Indian was suicidal with the amount of money paid to professional Indian killers."
Furthermore, the need for free human labor prompted the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, known to critics as the Indian Slave Act, which allowed whites to basically kidnap Indians and force them to work against their will.


While Californians are generally familiar with large out-of-state tribes like the Iroquois, Cherokee, Navajo and Sioux, few have heard about the Ohlone, Kizh, Esselen or Kumeyaay. The three-layered history of colonial conquest in California was so ruthless that destruction of the state's native peoples seemed inevitable. Throughout California, there are little-known or unrecognized sites of Indian massacres – Las Flores Canyon, McCain Valley, Mendocino and Modoc counties, just to name a few.
"All those massacres around the gold country, California has not owned up to the genocide,"

While entire family units fleeing Europe were landing on the East Coast, the Spanish were intent on protecting geopolitical interests by creating a physical buffer zone with native converts and colonial subjects. The task of Franciscan padres and accompanying soldiers was to subjugate Indians, not wipe them out.
But Spanish imperial rule set off a disastrous chain of events so destructive that between 1769 and 1900, the California Indian population declined by a catastrophic 95 percent.

"There really is a very specific California story that comes out of these missions," said Leslie Dunton-Downer, writer for the California Mission Ride, a documentary film team that rode 600 miles on horseback through all 21 missions. "There is the universal colonial story, but what happened here was a very particular thing."
Even though the goal wasn't outright genocide during the 64 years of Spanish rule, the missions, stretching from the San Diego border to Sonoma, were characterized by forced conversions, dehumanizing corporeal punishment, slave labor, deadly disease outbreaks and widespread rape and abuse by Spanish soldiers.

But when the Spanish era ended in the early 1820s, Mexico secularized the missions. And for the Gabrieleño, this resulted in a massacre at Las Flores Canyon near what is now the Rose Bowl. According to the eyewitness account of a Californian named Philippe Lugo stored at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Mexican forces destroyed "the greater part of them."
The few survivors lived in fear and hid with Mexican families, changed their names and identities, gave up their native language and learned Spanish, Salas said.
Or tribe members were terrorized and physically separated from each other.

"Many of the native peoples would go back to their village that was no longer, and they were rounded up. Usually, one or two were killed to set an example for runaways,"

The Bureau of Indian Affairs' Office of Federal Recognition criteria require that native tribes applying for recognition demonstrate a semblance of cohesion from "historical times" to the present period, something rendered impossible for many California Indians.
"About 50 percent of California Indians are not recognized tribally," Sayers said. "The criteria for recognition, for anyone that's affiliated with a mission, there's no way in hell they can make the requirements. So consequently, it leaves the un-federally recognized tribes in a very horrible situation."
For example, she said, federal law makes it impossible for the Ohlone to claim about 12,000 burials sitting in a basement of an old gymnasium at UC Berkeley. They are prevented from burying their kin according Ohlone beliefs and customs.


Whole article with links here