Ghosts of the California Genocide, Part 2

A few feet away from the baskets is the painting Sacramento Indian by Charles Christian Nahl (California's first significant artist, according to Wikipedia, and in the Madley book, the primary documenter of Indian life at the moment of its destruction), made for Milton Slocum Latham, a Southerner and Democratic politician who sat in the U.S. House of Representatives between 1850 and 1852 (when eighteen treaties with California Indian tribes that would have allocated land to the tribes were refused by the U.S. Senate under the pressure of white Californian politicians and newspapers).

The "Sacramento Indian" is portrayed as tamed, an essential distinction for the invaders who shaped the state of California and committed genocide in the first two decades of the state's history.  Wild Indians were categorized and treated as wild animals, with no more rights than other dangerous fauna (another painting at the De Young by Nahl depicts a hunter seated with a dead mountain lion lying before him, reminiscent of the Trump brothers on African safari, but also of the way in which animals and Indian are arranged deliberately in this painting).  The man's expression seems to capture something about both his own strength of character and the impossible danger of his position, even as he sits for the portrait with dignified stiffness.

Also in the museum is the wooden mantelpiece that must have dominated the interior of the Thurlow Mansion, taken over by Latham after Thurlow's bankruptcy, and evoking the brutal aristocratic life of an English hunting lord.

And another painting made not long after the portrait of the Sacramento Indian depicts the bustle of the Sacramento train station a couple of decades later, after the end of the period of systematic Indian genocide.  There are no Indians in this painting.

Ghosts of the California Genocide, Part I

I had two tours at the De Young Museum today, neither of which had any takers.  I took for the subject matter of the second, which goes by "Three Masterpieces in Thirty Minutes" on the marquee, the spectral shadows in the museum of the genocide of California's Indians.  Not a happy subject; but appropriate perhaps for Halloween because these presences have been occupying my own mind like pipe-banging ghosts since I started reading Benjamin Madley's An American Genocide about this crucial chunk of California history, missing in my own picture of the narrative until now.

I began my hypothetical tour by looking at this large early 20th century Pomo burden basket.  Woven tightly enough to hold water or cooking coals, California Indian baskets have been seriously (passionately) collected since just after the period of the extermination of almost all the Indians themselves.  Madley dates the genocide from 1846 to 1873, and sees a reduction in population over the period of something like 80%, a reduction to invisibility as far as most of us who live in the state were and are concerned.  The large burden basket has a fantastic optical banding of overlapping and crossing spirals around a monumental form.

Another vitrine contains a series of baskets that diminish in size down to a truly miniaturist scale, barely larger than a nickel.  Like the large burden basket, all of them were made from materials available in the immediate environment of California, prepared to be suitable to their purpose.  The baskets thus speak to the primary rationale for the particular egregiousness of the California genocide, as compared to the many massacres carried out over the rest of the North American continent: the "wild" Indians, because their ways of living on the land were so seemingly unsophisticated and invisible, were regarded as animals.  The justification of murder and slavery followed accordingly and quite explicitly.  And the end result?  An invisibility, the baskets aside, that allows contemporary Californians to still doubt the claims made by the remaining descendents of survivors of the genocide.