Tens of thousands of Native Americans in California were murdered in the mid-1800s or died of disease, malnutrition or overwork. On that historians agree.

But was it genocide?

Participants at a conference at UC Riverside on Friday argued that it was. They hope the event will increase awareness about what they define as genocide and prod the California Department of Education to use the term in model curricula that shape what public-school children are taught.

“Historians clearly have documented that genocide occurred here in California,” said Michelle Lorimer, a panelist Friday and a history lecturer at Cal State San Bernardino.

Other experts say that no matter how horrible the atrocities committed against American Indians in California were, they did not constitute genocide.

FOCUS ON GOLD RUSH

The conference, “Killing California Indians: Genocide in the Gold Rush Era,” focused on the influx of prospectors to California to mine gold and the accompanying atrocities against American Indians.

When the Gold Rush began in 1848, there were an estimated 150,000 Indians living in California. By 1870, the number had dwindled to 30,000 and by 1900 to 15,000, said Brendan Lindsay, an assistant professor of history at Sacramento State University and author of “Murder State, California’s Native American Genocide 1846-1873.”

Most died of disease, malnutrition and the results of forced labor, but thousands were murdered, many by citizen militias that set out to kill large numbers of Indians, Lindsay said.

The diseases were brought by Europeans; the deaths from overwork stemmed from enslavement; and the malnutrition was a result of Indians being forced off their traditional gathering, fishing and hunting land, he said.

Lindsay said those deaths shouldn’t be discounted in deciding whether genocide occurred.

Many of the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust perished from those causes, and “no one would put an asterisk” next to 6 million or subtract those deaths to minimize the scale of the genocide against the Jews, he said.

In California, there was no formal government order to annihilate Native Americans, like the Nazis’ “final solution” to wipe out European Jews, Lindsay said.

But the government was complicit and facilitated the mass murder, including by reimbursing settlers for killing Indians, Lindsay said.

In 1851, Peter Hardeman Burnett, the first governor of California after it became a U.S. state, said in an address to the Legislature, “That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct, must be expected.”

Most of the murders, along with the kidnapping, prostituting and enslavement of Indian children and adults, occurred in Northern California, because of the hunger for gold and the belief that Indians were in the way, said Cliff Trafzer, director of the California Center for Native Nations at UCR and the organizer of the conference.

Trafzer is an editor of 1999’s “Exterminate Them!” – wording taken from a Chico newspaper that he said reflected widespread public sentiment in the 1800s.

Even though mass murder was less common in Southern California, it did occur, such as in 1866 settler raids on the Serrano people in San Bernardino County, Trafzer said.

It’s unclear how many people were killed in the raids, but after it was over, fewer than 30 people from the Yuhaviatam clan of the Serrano Indians – now the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians – were left alive, said James Ramos, a former chairman of the San Manuel tribe and now a San Bernardino County supervisor.

“They were shooting and killing Indian people on sight,” he said.

The namesake of what is now known as the San Manuel tribe, Santos Manuel, led his people out of the mountains to what is now San Bernardino to protect them.

“If that hadn’t happened, I don’t know if we’d be here today,” Ramos said. “We were almost wiped off the earth.”

DEBATE OVER TERMINOLOGY

Trafzer said the atrocities against California Indians clearly meet the definition of genocide agreed upon by the United Nations in 1948, which is an intent to destroy in whole or in part a particular national, ethnic, racial or religious group. The definition includes acts such as serious physical and mental harm against a group in addition to murder.

Michael Magliari, a history professor at Cal State Chico who is conducting research on enslavement of California Indians in the mid-1800s, said the U.N. definition is too broad and waters down the meaning of the word. Magliari said the definition of genocide most commonly understood by the public is a deliberate policy of extermination.

He said evidence indicates that three California tribes – the Wiyot, Yahi and Yuki – were “subjected to a policy of genocide, but I don’t think you could use it sweepingly to describe what happened to most native peoples in California.”

Magliari said the push to use the word genocide is rooted in part in a concern that not doing so minimizes what happened to Native Americans. But he said the atrocities, and the attempt to destroy Native American culture, stand on their own.

“The record is tragic and brutal enough,” he said.

GUIDELINES FOR SCHOOLS

The state Department of Education is interested in finding out what scholars presented at the conference, said Thomas Adams, director of the department’s curriculum frameworks and instructional resources division.

The state issues advisory guidelines for schools and teachers to use in preparing curricula. The guidelines are used by the state in evaluating textbooks for use in the classroom.

New draft history and social science guidelines released in September do not define wrongs committed against Native Americans as genocide, said Adams. But the commission is still receiving public comment on the guidelines and welcomes any additional historical research that could improve the framework before it is approved by the state board of education, he said.

Lorimer said changing what is taught in California schools is key. When she tells her California history class at Cal State San Bernardino what happened to Native Americans, students are shocked because they never were taught about it in school, Lorimer said.

Lorimer said one reason why atrocities against Indians are downplayed is because it hits too close to home.

“We can talk about genocide in other areas of the world but we can’t discuss it in the United States and in California because it calls into question the romanticized notions of Gold Rush history, manifest destiny and American expansionism,” she said. “We look at the history of that time period positively, from the pioneer, frontiersman experience. We don’t look at the loss from the native perspective.”

Contact the writer: 951-368-9462 or dolson@pe.com