Indigenous peoples' complex analytical issues include historical misrepresentation, struggles over sovereignty and autonomy, and Euro-American "conquest" including invasion, genocide, culturicide, and coercive assimilation, ranging over half a millennium of invasion and colonization. Perhaps the most critically contentious of these issues is genocide. We review historical construction of racial formation and cultural domination, focus on California genocide of Native peoples, and present articles in this special issue as means of understanding these processes and proposing future directions for indigenous studies.
Introductory OverviewIndigenous peoples represent the most complex social analytical issues in the world today, including invasion by foreign groups, outright genocide, culturicide and multiple forms of coercive assimilation, and ranging over half a millennium of modern colonization histories covering the Americas and globally. Perhaps the most critically contentious of these issues would be genocide, especially in North America and the United States, in terms of how scholars employ this relatively new term over social histories obfuscated by dominant group histories.
During the 1850s and 1860s, white settlers perpetrated genocide against California Indians. Militia and regular troops supported by the state and federal governments committed acts of genocide as defined by the United Nations. Government officials, newspaper editors, and pioneers documented the genocide. History and social science textbooks ignore or barely mention murders, rapes, kidnappings, and enslavement of California Indians during the Gold Rush era. The California State Department of Education denies the genocide and textbook companies are silent of Indian genocide in spite of overwhelming evidence.
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