History: A nightmare from which we never awake

Good to see John Briscoe's op-ed in the Chronicle on the systematic killing of California's Indians (The moral case for renaming Hastings College of the Law):

In America’s ever-evolving relations with race, we ride a new wave of sensibility. A moment’s reflection reveals the extent that our streets, schools, buildings — even our nation’s capital — are named for slaveholders. Many more, no doubt, are named for “mere” racists.

A college at Yale no longer bears the name of John C. Calhoun, in response to increasingly vocal outrage that Calhoun owned slaves and, perhaps worse, was an ardent and eloquent proponent of slavery.

The University of San Francisco just renamed its Phelan Hall, originally named for a former San Francisco mayor who railed against Chinese immigrants and whose campaign slogan was “Keep California white.” The hall is now named for legendary football star and magnanimous public servant Burl Toler, an African American.

In this rising crest of new awareness, where, in relation to slavery and racism, might we place genocide?

Between the first European “contact” in 1542 and 1834, the native Californian population dropped from 350,000 to 150,000. The causes of the population collapse were European diseases, abuse at the hands of the Spanish and suicides. 

After 1834, however, when the native population plummeted from 150,000 to 18,000, the cause was different: Indian hunting was sport for the mostly white gold-seekers and settlers. Indian-hunting raids nearly annihilated the population and had the added benefit of ridding the state of those who might assert their land rights, rights guaranteed under international law.

Serranus Clinton Hastings was promoter and financier of Indian-hunting expeditions in the 1850s. Hastings later founded Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, now the oldest law school in the state, and a part of the University of California system.

Leland Stanford solicited volunteers for his Civil War-era army campaigns against California Indians and, as governor, signed into law appropriations bills to fund those killing expeditions. He later founded Stanford University in the name of his son, Leland Stanford Jr. Both Hastings and Stanford had made fortunes in real estate.

Their ability to acquire land titles was facilitated by the massacre of the rightful claimants, a near-extinction they promoted and funded. As UCLA professor Benjamin Madley wrote in his sobering “An American Genocide,” published in 2016 by none other than Yale University Press. Both Stanford and Hastings had “helped to facilitate genocide.”

Our rising sensibility obliterates the names of those who sought to enslave or discriminate against a people. How ought we treat the names of those who sought to exterminate a people?

John Briscoe is a Distinguished Fellow of the Law of the Sea Institute at UC Berkeley School of Law and an adjunct professor at UC Hastings College of the Law.