The Role of the Media in California Massacres

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The way that newcomers saw California Indians was very much calibrated by journalistic representations of Indians. People came not an exaggeration to say as kind of walking arsenals. A heavily armed population is, as we know, prone to be more violent. And a lot of people were interested in trying those weapons out on innocent Native American civilians in California.

In this extended interview, we speak with UCLA Associate Professor Benjamin Madley about his book, "An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe," and discuss how newspapers, tracts, and paperbacks were an essential element in assisting and priming the public for the genocide of California's native population.

Prof. Madley's work was instrumental in our research for previous Citations Needed episodes - namely, "Episode 158: How Notions of 'Blight' and 'Barrenness' Were Created to Erase Indigenous Peoples" and "Episode 172: The Foundational Myth Machine - Indigenous Peoples of North America and Hollywood" - so we were thrilled to dig even deeper into his work on this special News Brief.