What Is Genocide and How Do We Know When It's Coming?

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There's this idea that we cannot be fundamentally based on genocide. And your book makes a very kind of sober legal argument that that's not the case. Not everything is genocide, but some very particular things are. The more we understand about it, the better we will be able to have early determination of when genocide is coming.

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.