Was The Murder Of California Indians A Genocide Or Tragedy?

An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873, by Benjamin Madley and just published by Yale University Press, is the latest installment in an on-going controversy stretching back decades. The facts of the events are not in dispute.

Between 1846 and 1873, the first 27 years that California belonged to the U.S., the Indian population in California went from 150,000 to 30,000, an 80% decline. In the 1880 census, there were 16,277 Indians. The preeminent historian of California, Kevin Starr, wrote in California: A History, “60 percent of the deaths [were] attributable to disease, the rest to murder.” (He adds that already California Indians “had been reduced by 90 percent since the arrival of the Spanish.”)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mw-jacobs/california-genocide_b_10701772.html