At a time when establishments throughout the country are re-examining their history, Native leaders in California say a broad reckoning over the therapy of American Indians is overdue. The longstanding notion that they died as an accidental consequence of Western settlement, of disease and displacement, they argue, must be revised with acknowledgment of the purposeful killing campaigns. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that California state legislators established a state-sponsored killing machine,” Benjamin Madley, a history professor on the University of California, Los Angeles, mentioned. For the previous 4 years, the University of California, Hastings College of the Law has been investigating the position of its founder, Serranus Hastings, in one of the darkest, yet least discussed, chapters of the state’s historical past. Mr. Hastings, one of the wealthiest men in California in that era and the state’s first chief justice, masterminded one set of massacres. A ardour for Chinese … Read More
