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Around the time Madley was finishing his manuscript, in the fall of 2015, Pope Francis arrived in the United States. During his first stateside visit, the pope canonized Junípero Serra, the 18th-century Franciscan missionary from Spain responsible for the first nine of California’s famous Catholic missions, of which 21 still stand. During the canonization, the pope praised Serra’s devotion and evangelism while also noting that Serra “sought to defend the dignity of the native community, to protect it from those who had mistreated and abused it.”
Three days later, Mission Carmel, where Serra is buried, was struck by vandals who apparently disagreed with the pope’s generous assessment. They toppled a statue of the newly minted saint, splashed paint on walls and defaced surfaces with graffiti. “Saint of genocide,” one scrawled message said.
08_26_CalIndians_03Pope Francis pauses in front of a sculpture of Spanish-born Franciscan Friar Junipero Serra in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. on September 24, 2015. MICHAEL REYNOLDS/REUTERS 
The Gold Rush and the years that followed may have marked the bloodiest period of white-Indian relations, but there was plenty of cruelty before—and after. The Mexicans ceded control of California to the United States in 1846, which is why Madley begins An American Genocide in that year. He ends it in 1873, with the Modoc War, which concluded with four Modoc leaders hanged and beheaded, their heads sent to the Army Medical Museum in Washington. After that, organized mass killings became less frequent.
But that hardly meant the suffering was over for Indians, in California and elsewhere in the United States. Reservations were established in the mid-19th century, and the conditions there were so brutal, Adolf Hitler is said to have used them in part as a blueprint for his Final Solution. On the Round Valley Reservation, Native Americans were getting only between 160 and 390 calories a day from federal officials, as part of what Madley calls “institutionalized starvation conditions.” Eighty years later, the daily ration for prisoners at Auschwitz was 1,300 calories.

The Sugar-Cube Missions

When my wife was a young girl, she, her mother and grandmother toured the California missions, the very ones founded by Serra and his fellow missionaries. Like just about every fourth-grader in the California public school system, she also built a model mission out of sugar cubes, during a standard curriculum unit on California history. The state’s practice is to portray the missions as quaint symbols of a benign institution that marked the true beginning of California, which is to say the beginning of white California.
Almost everyone I spoke to for this story mentioned the sugar cube missions, for they reveal much about how we teach American history, sweetening depredations until the bitterness is gone. Of course, there is a limit to how much depravity a 9-year-old can grasp. Which may be the point. Consigning the history of California Indians to the fourth grade is a convenient means of forgetting it. And yet the same state that now teaches the Armenian genocide and, earlier this year, amended history textbooks after complaints from some South Asians is hesitant to look deeply into its own history.
My wife went to a middle school in Sacramento named after John Sutter, the celebrated Swiss colonist who was also an Indian slaver. Nearby is a middle school named after Kit Carson, who served as a scout for John C. Frémont and participated in some of Frémont’s most notorious massacres. Frémont’s name is all over California: a street in San Francisco, a city in the Bay Area. Countless place-names in California include the word squaw, an obscene term for Native American women. The most famous of these is the ski resort at Squaw Valley, near Lake Tahoe, but there is also Squaw Creek, Squaw Canyon and many others.
08_26_CalIndians_02American explorer and statesman Major General John Charles Fremont, general for the Union Army during the U.S. Civil War, poses in his uniform with his sword, circa 1861. In 1856, Fremont became the Republican party's first presidential nominee and was one of four major generals appointed by President Lincoln during the Civil War. He was decommissioned three months later for his unorthodox methods. HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY 
Another derogatory term for California Indians, digger, is attached to the Pinus sabiniana tree, commonly known as the “digger pine.” Last year, Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill that prevented public schools from using Redskins as a team name or mascot. That step is laudable but slight, especially in a nationwide context: A 2014 analysis by the polling site FiveThirtyEight found more than 2,100 sports teams in the United States using Indian team names like Redmen and Warriors. Plenty of such teams still play in the Golden State.
Madley concludes An American Genocide with a discussion of place-names, which he says raise “awkward questions.” If we spurn the name of Robert E. Lee, why do we accept that of John C. Frémont? Don’t red lives matter as much as black ones? “If we call it genocide, then something has to be done,” he says. “We have to speak about it, we need to remember it, we need to memorialize it. And we need to teach it.”
Presumably, this would be a lesson without sugar cubes.

The Ravages

On a hot spring afternoon, I drove south from the Bay Area, past the office parks of Silicon Valley, into an inland golden country untouched by ocean breezes. Less than an hour’s drive south of San Jose, the Hollister Hills felt somehow primeval, raw. The roads got thinner and more sinuous, until I was on a dusty one-lane path winding past a vineyard, fearing I’d missed my turnoff for Indian Canyon.
It makes sense that Indian Canyon would be so remote: It was even more so when Cienega Road was a swamp, not just a thoroughfare named for one. This is where the Costanoan/Ohlone people escaped from the nearby Mission San Juan Bautista, knowing that whites would not pursue them into the hilly wilderness. Indian Canyon thus became a long-standing sanctuary from the ravages of colonialism.
Today, Indian Canyon remains in Indian hands: Though it is not a reservation, it is a federally recognized tribal land, which gives it some of the same sovereignty. It is run as a sort of spiritual retreat by Ann Marie Sayers, an energetic woman with a penchant for fragrant Benson & Hedges cigarettes. Sayers grew up here, on land her predecessors reclaimed from the federal government. After living in Southern California, she returned to Indian Canyon and further expanded its land holdings by adeptly citing historical claims. Today, she lives with her daughter and several dogs of varying ferocity on 300 minimally tamed square acres. Poison oak grows with alarming fecundity.
Sayers took me on a tour of Indian Canyon, a gash in the mountains about a mile long. Wilderness hemmed us in, threatening to close up this little stream of civilization. In glades, there were sweat lodges and gathering places: Tribes often come here to perform ceremonies they can’t host elsewhere. Recently, a holocaust ceremony had been held; Indian Canyon also hosts a run from Mission San Juan Bautista, to honor the path ancestors took to freedom.
As we walked the grounds, Sayers picked leaves of poison oak, utterly unafraid of its infamous effects. She could always rub a little mugwort, if need be. Her one-with-earth attitude, part Ohlone and part Beverly Hills, reminded me that much of the green thinking popular today reworks Native American attitudes about the land, its sanctity and its wisdom. The farm-to-table movement is, in part, a repudiation of Big Agra and a return to the kind of season- and climate-aware cooking that Native Americans prized long before the culinary wizards of New York and San Francisco put raw kale on a plate. Holistic medicine has its roots in Eastern practices but also Native ones. Perhaps instead of merely celebrating Native Americans we can finally learn from them.
08_26_CalIndians_05Kathleen Navales, left, and Delphina Garcia Penrod comfort each other while honoring their ancestors inside the cemetery at the Carmel Mission in Carmel, California, on September 23, 2015. MICHAEL FIALA/REUTERS 
Then I drove home, through the town of Hollister, which was once Mutsun Ohlone land, and past Fremont, the Bay Area city named for the famed Indian killer. Then Oakland, which has a health center dedicated to Natives, and Berkeley, where the famous university’s Hearst Gymnasium pool has been thought to be haunted because of the 12,000 Native remains stored beneath it. Recent construction in West Berkeley, on the waterfront, unearthed an Ohlone burial site, a reminder that there were people here before the whites came and decided that these golden hills, and this sparkling bay, were going to be the last and greatest acquisition of their empire.