What's the Role of Dispatches in the Selling of the West?

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In some instances, people had unfree or very poorly paid California Indian laborers. They were then targeted by people who did not have access to that sort of reserve labor pool. So if you're going to inscribe your colonial fantasy on the land, you have to realize that vision of emptiness is through mass murder.

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.