This week in American Indian Studies, I learned more detail about some of the stuff that we read/talked about in class last week. One of the most tragic pieces of literature I read this week was the California’s Yuki Indians: Defining Genocide in Native American History by Benjamin Madley. In his article he talked about the details of the genocide of the Yuki Indians in California. As if the murder, rape, and other mistreatment of the natives wasn’t enough, they all turned a blind eye to it. They being the government. Not only was the government ignoring this, they were actively enforcing it. I just can’t believe that anything like that would ever be able to go as far as did. I thought hearing about slavery of African Americans in America was bad enough. It makes me wonder what was all sugarcoated even about that time.
Going along with this article, we talked about the definition of genocide. For the definition there are five actions that really make it a genocide. The five were; killing members of the group, causing bodily or mental harm, making circumstances intended to destroy a group, preventing birth in the group, forcibly moving the children to another group. These are the five actions that define genocide according to the UN. While reading California’s Yuki Indians: Defining Genocide in Native American History, Benjamin really displays the events of the Yuki genocide that fit each of these actions. One action that really stuck out to me was how they forced the Yuki to only be able to eat about 400 calories a day, or less. I literally eat more than that for my snacks. I can’t imagine what all of the Yuki were going through during these times, and I hope nobody has to go through something like this ever again.
Jake June 22, 2018
Stuff like this is truly heartbreaking. It’s sad that we have that in our history.
Replying to what you said about the calorie intake, that was really hard to comprehend. I think that last bag of fruit snacks I had was roughly 100 calories. I could not imagine living on only four bags of fruit snacks a day.
I think that a lot of times we turn a blind eye to genocides, such as the one that has taken place with Native Americans, simply because it’s embarrassing. Our governments don’t want to acknowledge the wrong they’ve done. The Yuki are just one of many tribes that experience things like this.
I wish history could be rewritten.
mikerose June 22, 2018
Brandon,
This article was very overwhelming to me. I was even telling Professor McClung that I started to highlight when the author stating something about killing, rape, or kidnapping in the text, and I literally started to highlight the whole thing. To me, it is already bad enough that this has happened in our history but even worse that I am just hearing about it now as a freshman in college! And when we went over the five aspects of a genocide it really was not hard at all to prove any of the five. This was obviously a genocide of the Yuki people.
-Mike