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.