Refusing Genocide

The Coloniality of Disciplinarity

This chapter is focused primarily on the current discourse of genocide in California. I am not concerned, necessarily, with critiquing or engaging genocide deniers or wading into the debate to assert a genocide occurred in California, a debate that is at its core already negationist of the destruction. We need no proofs. Rather, I focus on those who seek to prove or support the claim that a genocide took place using a strict sense of proof in order to understand the force of such meaning-making. The open acknowledgment of the genocidal history of California, evidenced by Governor Gavin Newsom’s 2019 apology made via executive order and by the ongoing Truth and Healing Council investigations into the state’s treatment of Indigenous people, has shifted California Indian studies and created renewed interest in how we discuss the destruction. Because it is based on an international legal definition and because that legal definition doesn’t apply to actions prior to 1948 (or to cultural genocide, thanks to U.S. and other settler state interventions in the international legislative process), genocide has generally been the domain of historiography related to Native Americans and many other Indigenous populations. The structure of meaning and narrative that had previously made sense of the violence, even if through repression, now no longer seems to hold sway. This shift in public discourse indicates that the articulation between meaning and violence has become somewhat untethered. It presents new opportunities and risks for California Indian peoples.

The first risk is the juridical nature of the term genocide. Often considered one of the defining achievements of international human rights legislation, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was passed in 1948, though it was not ratified by the United States until 1988 and only after adoption of a series of conditions called the Lugar-Helms-Hatch Sovereignty Package. Among other things, the package includes the language that “nothing in the Convention requires or authorizes legislation or other action by the United States prohibited by the Constitution of the United States as interpreted by the United States.”6 For the United States to be tried for genocide as the ICJ requires, according to this genocide treaty, “the specific consent of the United States.”7 The law presents a conundrum for Indigenous people in settler states, many of whom turn to the international arena to assert rights outside the authority of those states. Investigations, for instance, even when mandated by an international body, tend to take place through state apparatuses, and the tools of redress tend to be reconciliatory according to state terms, such as reparations.8 The United States, which effectively made itself immune to international oversight and has continuously asserted its sovereignty over that of the international community, exacerbates this problem. Add to this the machinations of the United States and other settler states in ensuring that cultural genocide was removed from the draft legislation and the fact that the law is not retroactive, and one wonders what it even means to declare that the state of California enacted a “genocide” against California Indians.9 What is the force of the term?

If it is for the sake of truth, one can question the relation between truth and the law as it relates to the destruction. I discuss in this chapter the debates between historians and scholars critical of historiographic claims to empirical truth, specifically why these debates, which took place throughout the 1980s and ’90s, revolved around the question of genocide (and the ferocious debates that took place within historiography over the question of comparative genocide in relation to Native Americans and the singularity of the Holocaust), culminating in some ways in the critical field of genocide studies. What is telling is the way that genocide studies relies so rigorously on the international legal definition for a historiographic discourse, using the juridical form for a representational practice to decide the truth without drawing on the performative force of the law. On one hand, this indicates the inherently juridical nature of institutional narratives such as historiography, the good, universal humanism, progressive revelation, settler common sense and reason. It clearly shows the complicity between history as a discipline and the violence of the rule of law, in the name of which genocide was committed anyway, rendering institutional history, as a settler discipline, complicit with genocidal violence. On the other, it opens a conversation about the destruction outside the terms of the law’s violence within the realm of study, a rupture in the law’s inherent means-and-ends thinking, a perhaps unintended consequence of the discourse that may be worth following.

If it is for the sake of holding states accountable, for justice, for “law and order,” beyond even the obvious lack of effectiveness detailed in this chapter, it must be noted that law here takes on a clearly racial-colonial form. Martinican anticolonial poet and scholar Aimé Césaire, in 1950, described the coloniality of the definition of genocide, two years after the law’s passage. Naming the law as a response to intra-European violence—and particularly violence against white Europeans—he notes how the law ignores the brutal histories of colonization and the western humanist project that resulted in the deaths and enslavement of hundreds of millions of non-white peoples around the world. Beyond even this horrific empirical and structural challenge to the universal claims of the law, the very idea of appealing to a legal order logically predicated on expansion and territorial acquisition in the name of civilization and law and order, state-formation and western reason, is deeply counterintuitive. Adding to this, Samera Esmeir describes a form of juridical humanism imposed through colonial expansion and the paradoxical ethics of nonviolence that produces extreme amounts of violence done in the name of the law itself.10 These are the conditions for the monopolization of violence by states that rely on the law as guarantor of this right. The irony, of course, is that the category of genocide was created to place limits on this violence, to create thresholds between humanitarian and inhuman forms of violence by states. But David Kazanjian shows how the category of savagery transmits across a vague temporal threshold as a force of humanization, in which colonized Indigenous populations now hold states accountable for their past savagery. It is a co-constitutive reconciliatory project based in what Kazanjian, citing Louis Althusser, calls an “international of decent feelings” as the ongoing disciplinary practice of making-human.11

Across the divide between the savage and the Native, History as a discipline taps into this promise of humanization. It turns the savage into a void as condition for the creation of meaningful oppositions (colonizer/colonized, separation/reconciliation, human/nonhuman, nature/culture) to be overcome. Progress as historical development has always moved by filling this space with meaningful action, with content, with narratives. The savage, as figure of emptiness beyond even the historical a priori conditions of legal categories such as “discovery” and “terra nullius,” prepares the way for the Native. Indigeneity is, then, the manageable category of this divide, allowing the work to continue by both being accomplished in it, by definition, and realized in its needs, as developing, such that the emptiness of the savage becomes a certain capacity of and/or for the human. This version of the void is part of the system, a faux discontinuity that works in its service. Such is perhaps the basis of Brendan Hokowhitu’s profound critique of Indigenous studies as either a field of universalization through rational development or of opposition that functions as a conflictual dialectic (what he calls “decolonization”), neither being a true discontinuity.12 These positions are manifest in both the state and the university institutionally by the professional critic who negates in service of the institution, who reforms and manages risk.

History isn’t really about time, then; it’s about revelation and narrative as the work of making sense and making safe (making sense: making certain people who fulfill the figure of the normative human and the state safe); it’s about creating a “global narrative of the universal history of humanity,” a mode of knowledge, as Rey Chow reminds us, that is geographically specific with universalizing pretensions and military in origin.13 History attempts time’s redemption, which is necessarily its betrayal. Defined by Walter Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh (following Anibal Quijano) as the control and management of knowledge by the “universals” of western humanism, eurocentrism, and global capitalism, the coloniality of time subtends History’s attempts to control the past and thereby control the present and future.14 As a mode of western humanist knowledge and practice, History claims to be neutral, universal, and apolitical in its methodology and has led to the erasure of entire Indigenous knowledge systems and frameworks for understanding both time and violence. Further, all the talk about humans and nature, about denaturalization, the critical mastery of what exceeds human control (the inhuman in the form of commodification, technology, and domination), that which places finite limits on human freedom and marks the project of historicity, is what must be redeemed, a nature that precedes and survives history’s humanizing force. The dialectical tensions between culture and nature, determination and freedom, presume this force of humanization, what Giorgio Agamben calls the “anthropological machine” that renders the world human, anthropogenic, according to human mastery over nature’s forces, including time.15 For Chow, a visual logic brings this clearly into view, through a combination of technomediated visuality that seeks ultimate reduction and efficiency (the entire world as an accessible picture for human consumption and control) and a form of peace integrated with the visuality of war (world as target). Together these form a knowledge based on information for targeting. Area studies, anthropology, culture as containment, and, specifically, history as a philological discipline of civilizations—disciplines that are complicit with state security and intelligence agencies—contribute to this mode of weaponized knowledge. For Chow, it is representative of a self-reflexive arrogance that produces a “circuit of targeting the other that consolidates the omnipotence and omnipresence of the sovereign [human] self,” a knowledge destined to destroy or assimilate, which is another way of describing knowledge as destruction.16 In this sense, the settler colonial project has always sought to insulate itself from risk (or assimilate it as its own), to take pleasure in the spectacle of the Native, a spectacle that is destructive, without risking anything in the encounter. Historians risk nothing by declaring our genocide or negating it.

Making Meaning Out of Violence

Was it a genocide or not? The various events and forms of violence that mark “the destruction of California Indians,” as anthropologist Robert Heizer in 1974 dubbed settler violence during the gold rush era, have invariably become sites of intense investigation and debate in historiography, to the point that the discipline of History has largely claimed the exclusive right to narrate the truth of what happened. This narrative and debate have, at least since the 1990s, often boiled down to the question of whether the violence can be construed as genocide.17 The narrowness of this question and its institutionalization through historiography and international legal definition operate through what Rodríguez describes as a “discursive regime that attempts to fold an alleged extremity of modern power into an accessible conceptual-juridical artifact. In this sense, ‘genocide’ invokes, but cannot fully engage, a deep tracing of the violences, exterminations, and fatalities encompassed by the long preceding processes of the global Civilizational project.”18 This regime of genocide discourse, which seeks to make sense of and make “accessible” (one wants to say consumable) the destruction, the end of the world, to render it into an articulable truth, is a power made visible by three intertwined discursive contexts that make up the historiographic poetics of genocide in California: (1) the coloniality of disciplinarity as the site of the production of truth as a plot; (2) the crisis that the discipline of History underwent, beginning in the 1990s, in relation to representational politics revolving around the question of writing genocide; and (3) the role California has played as a case study of genocide committed against Native Americans, a role most clearly explicated and argued for by historian Benjamin Madley in his book An American Genocide (2016).

The term genocide, coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1943, seeks to account for and render legible as a crime mass violence done with the intent to exterminate, or the effect of attempting the extermination of, entire peoples. Defined in the midst of World War II in direct response to German atrocities committed against various peoples but especially the killing of six million Jews and adopted (though in modified form) in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, the coloniality of the term was immediately recognized by members of communities that had been undergoing racial and colonial mass violence for centuries, as evidenced by this passage from Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1950):

And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.19

David Kazanjian, in his essay “Re-flexion: Genocide in Ruins,” in the context of the Armenian catastrophe enacted by the Turkish state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, describes Lemkin’s development of the definition of genocide and relates it to earlier terms he used to define mass violence. Cautioning against the new “international mentality” based on a universal humanist “moral campaign,” Kazanjian asks: What is concealed by use of the term? What sociopolitical complexities and realities do not get acknowledged?20

Dylan Rodríguez, noting the canonical point of reference that the Holocaust performs for the term genocide and “the hegemonic humanist (and thus anti-Black, racial-colonial, juridical and epistemological) assumptions that structure its circulation within the modern global text,” offers an answer: “While the (seemingly) exceptional, acute, and temporally discrete character of the Nazi-administered genocide is incommensurate with the epochal violence that structures the formation of Black and Indigenous being in the Civilizational period, the Nazis nonetheless relied on such precedents and coterminous examples of racial-colonial violence to conceive, plan, and actualize their modernist innovations of industrialized killing.”21 Noting that Lemkin, in his 1933 Madrid Proposal, used the terms “barbarism” and “vandalism,” old European terms for old European crimes, Kazanjian shows how Lemkin’s coinage of the term genocide combined these two categories. With an appropriately modernizing hybrid of ancient Greek and Latin etymology, this portmanteau, genocide, becomes the means to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate violence along the modernizing and humanizing lines Rodríguez describes.22 For Lemkin, the crime of genocide is “only new in the civilized world” and therefore needs a coinage to mark the distinction between a “premodern” violence that is understandable if irrational (understandable as irrational) and a modern crime, which is a vestige of “uncivilized” irrationality that occasionally irrupts in “civilized” “modern” states.23 His distinction produces a racialized and civilizationist threshold, especially as it moves into the international institutions of the west. This is most clear in Lemkin’s exclusion of imperial and colonial violence from the definition of genocide, forms of violence that contribute to the story of progress, “serv[ing] civilization by clearing inferior races off the earth.”24 Genocide as a concept thereby creates a temporal distinction between a humanizing and an inhuman violence, with modern Euro-American civility cast as the human norm threatened by both the “primitive” inhuman violence of the savage and the excesses of state violence, which channel atavistic savagery; both are an affront to modern civility. As Rodríguez notes, “The logics of genocide, shaped in the material-historical domains of global racialization, thus paradoxically precede the inauguration of ‘genocide’ as a formal lexicon—in this sense, anti-Blackness and racial-colonial power are the unspoken, illegible preconditions for the term’s articulation as a meaningful referent to the intra-racial nadir of (white) modernity (The Holocaust).”25 As we’ll see in this chapter, through the adoption of the legal definition, in whole or in part, the civilizationist line is reproduced by the representational powers and impotencies of historiography and its use of the definition of genocide for the sake of “truth.”

According to these terms, “primitive” violence and modern excesses are related under the category of illegitimate violence yet they remain separated/connected by an atavistic, temporal line that marks both of their transgressions as atemporal. Premodern and modern legal and humanizing colonial violence, analogously, are understood as legitimate across the same line but in a linear model of progress, with premodern violence done in the name of monopolizing violence for the state and law and order, seen therefore as necessary. History, in this sense, is the work of legitimating violence, sometimes through retroactive repudiation that serves the present and the capture of the future. Legitimate violence—that which founds and is monopolized by the state (what Walter Benjamin calls “legal violence”)—operates through a discourse of nonviolence that is uttered by and supports the state.26 What connects colonial, imperial, legal, and neocolonial/imperial forms of violence is the self-understanding that they suppress irrational violence and are thereby rational.27 This configuration is evident in nineteenth-century calls for the extermination or protection of California Indians, framed typically as a disjunction: assimilate or be exterminated. Explicit calls for extermination were framed as calls to end violence, for protection of settlers, and for the institution of the rule of law, a violence done in the name of the law itself.28 The creation of the definition of genocide, then, places limits on legal violence by deeming its excesses akin to the “irrational” violence of the savage that motivated the colonial violence to begin with. What makes such a reorganization possible is the humanization of the savage and the retroactive recognition of the inhumanity of the settler along temporally progressive lines. This transvaluation occurs through the self-castigation of the state in the form of apology for always “past” events. It calls forth the human voice in testimony through truth and reconciliation projects as the interweaving of trauma narratives with state mediated forms of healing.29

This logic of violence, and its relation to the differential and differentiating forces of humanization, operates as a racial and colonial logic that continues to inform how violence registers and gets interpreted. As Rodríguez notes about Césaire’s analysis of the category of genocide, “the emergence of Western genocide discourse is animated by a narrative privileging of white death as the instance through which Other peoples’ encounters with Western modernity’s logics of racial extermination and terror are to be apprehended, calibrated, and conceptually qualified.”30 Genocide discourse not only privileges white death as the interpretive norm, but making sense of violence requires an entire western epistemic infrastructure to enable such recognition: an international human rights regime, modern differentiations of violence from the “savage” past formed in the modernity/coloniality complex (as described by Sylvia Wynter31), an emphasis on temporal dimensions of interpretation and the sense of violence as developing or correcting (as opposed to interpretations of violence by the various peoples affected by it), and (especially) the differential categorizations of the human in the colonial racial regime. This categorization includes rendering Indigenous social and political interrelations with all sorts of beings into either beliefs to be tolerated, objects of study, diabolical forms to be eradicated, or nonsense. These together constitute the underpinnings of how western humanism monopolizes and makes sense and use of violence.

But a shattering of the racial-colonial and teleological idea of the state as achievement of (white) rationality—which makes its way into the international basis of human rights and marks the line described by Kazanjian and Rodríguez between a crime against humanity (against the transparent subject) and instrumental colonial violence (against affectable others)—has been made possible, Denise Ferreira da Silva has argued, by racialized and colonized others changing the narrative, not just in content but materially and structurally. “Black activists in Rio, along with graffiti artists in New York, First Nation leaders in Vancouver, and people of color elsewhere had somehow changed knowledge in its production and circulation; black feminist writings in the United States were advancing new statements of ‘truth’ and ‘being,’ challenging scientific and literary canons while defending the validity of their local narratives.”32 The narratives produced by these communities stand in stark relief to the western humanist universal narrative that drives the discourse on genocide.

As Rodríguez notes, Israeli indifference to Palestinian death and suffering is more than a psychological effect; it is a matter of the western humanist and civilizationist narrative that undergirds Zionist ideology, a cognitive regime that renders such violence illegible as violence, a reality-making procedure (the “creating facts” on the ground of the Zionist narrative).33 In contrast, the Palestinians’ story of the Nakba, the ongoing catastrophe of colonial violence, challenges the very conditions of truth and historiography on which Zionism depends, not as a contested or relative narrative but onto-epistemologically. Rodríguez cites Loubna Qutami, who describes a Nakba ontology that interrupts the discursive regime of genocide: “Nakba has come to be a persistent condition for Palestinians across time and space. It has come to be a definitive feature of Palestinian insecurity and lack of permanence. It has become a constant experience of displacement, exodus, siege, imprisonment, and death across generations . . . In the end, the Palestinian ontology of Nakba(at) is caused by multiple dimensions of enclosure and annihilation.”34 This proliferation of stories and widening of the sense of the catastrophe, as could be expected, caused a crisis in the discipline of History that has yet to be resolved, one that revolves around the concept of genocide, truth in history, and the reality of the event.

Truth in History

Gavin Newsom’s apology to California Indians for the state’s “historical mistreatment, violence and neglect” seems finally to openly and officially acknowledge the attempted extermination of California Indian peoples, a hundred seventy years after the state’s inception.35 But how does one understand the implications of such a shift in public perception? What does this mean for California Indian peoples? To answer these questions requires an analysis of how violence gets understood, as the previous lack of acknowledgment of genocide in California was a product of the meaning made of violence. As Mahmood Mamdani writes, “What horrifies modern political sensibility is not violence per se but violence that does not make sense.”36 Settlers, generally speaking, were disturbed more by the perceived inherent violence of Indigenous peoples (the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all sexes, ages, and conditions we met in the introduction) than they were of state-sanctioned genocide. Settlers considered violence against California Indians unremarkable because it made sense in the context of U.S. settler and imperial conquest and in the securitization of those projects (and for most settlers and settler discourse it still does). Why, then, in the apology does this violence suddenly no longer make sense?

To begin to answer this question, it is important to understand how the use of genocide makes meaning out of violence and what the performative force of an apology is. The answer lies in historians’ responses to the crisis in representation History underwent in the early 1990s and why this issue concerned specifically the question of genocide. In that moment, historians understood themselves to be facing a wave of historical revisionism and denialism, grounded in antirealist critique, that largely centered on the singularity of the Holocaust as an event.

In his book The Historiographic Perversion, Armenian scholar Marc Nichanian draws out the resonances between two conferences held a decade apart on the question of truth in history, one in the domain of philosophy and the other in history, a question ultimately asked in both instances in relation to the definition of genocide. The first, held in France in 1980, was the occasion for a debate between a number of prominent French philosophers over the question of the singularity of the Holocaust, and, more particularly, over the “emblematic name” Auschwitz.37 The debate took place after an early presentation of what later became Jean-François Lyotard’s philosophical treatise on this issue, The Differend. This debate was to predict a court case in France in 1994, in which historian Bernard Lewis was tried and convicted by the state for denying the Armenian genocide. The second conference, held at UCLA in 1991 under the title “Probing the Limits of Representation,” was largely a response by a collective of historians to a perceived threat to their discipline by the crisis in representation. Led by historian Carlo Ginzburg, the conference coalesced as a repudiation of rhetorical and literary analyses of historiography by a number of scholars but especially the work of Hayden White. It was, in essence, a disciplinary re-entrenchment in realist representation and augured a series of debates within History over the use of the term genocide to define the violence committed against Native Americans by the United States.38 Reflected in Alan Rosenbaum’s collection Is the Holocaust Unique? (1995) and summarized by Gavriel Rosenfeld’s review “The Politics of Uniqueness” (1999), the UCLA conference and the subsequent debates created the conditions for the development of genocide studies as a field.39

Rather than seeing in this narrative an intellectual history for its own sake, these moments and developments and their effects condition discursive production through the demand to make sense of violence—and therefore to measure and make definitions and, ultimately, judgments. Rather than paying close attention to the arguments and getting into the weeds of these debates, I focus here on the forces of production themselves. Taking this position indicates the (unconscious) concerted effort of a discourse that is in constant recalibration and refinement (one too easy to get lost in), a situation in which, as White notes, historians—revisionist and otherwise—all use the same basic criteria of truth and objectivity, all use the same archival and other evidentiary materials, to produce a seemingly contentious debate that in its effect supports existing power relations and their representational forces. Nichanian refers to this condition as the “genocidal will,” a circular destruction that destroys not only lives and structures but the very means to measure its destructiveness. The loss of these instruments produces a recursive, if harder or impossible to define, destruction, a black hole of representation in which “the impossibility of quantitatively measuring it does not prohibit, but rather inspires in the minds of the survivors the idea of a great seismic force.”40 We need no proofs because the destruction of representation of violence is the only proof possible. Dian Million describes this situation in the context of an international human rights regime, interwoven with neoliberal modes of multicultural settler colonialism and a reconciliatory politics of recognition, as a paradox in which “the international law that enables Indigenous trauma to appeal for justice is the same sphere in which we articulate political rights as polities with rights to self-determination.” In other words, this regime (which has already found us guilty) demands an appeal to the executioner according to his terms and through his modes of speaking, an epistemic violence felt by those subjected to it as “a great seismic force.”41 Such an impossible condition and its effects maps in the minds of survivors the ongoing destruction.

In this sense, representational and epistemic destruction, for Hayden White, operate through institutional, disciplinary historiography, which acts as a political and colonial domestication of narrative, to render the writing of history into a “comprehensible process . . . to make sense of it one way or another.”42 And this meaning is buttressed by an entire epistemic system of communication and education grounded in such destruction: infrastructures for producing truth, communicating these truths to a public (and thereby defining the public), creating policy based on these truths, and producing, publishing, and teaching them. This is the good history, redemptive of time itself, echoing the goodness of the friend of the Indian. It is the fabrication of facts as part of a colonial linguistic mesh, social understanding, and their transparent paths of communication. Such fabrication raises the question of how, why, and when certain facts become safe, recognizable, and incorporated into the historical record.

Jodi Byrd has detailed the cacophonous space of competing discourses around genocide narratives and shown how they make their way into popular consciousness and representation through the generalized cognitive inability to make sense of their entanglements when they rise to the surface. In their piece “‘Living My Native Life Deadly,’” they discuss the confluence of media storms that swirled around Jeff Weise, a Red Lake Native teen and self-professed neo-Nazi who shot fellow students at his reservation school for ostensibly acting “too black” before shooting himself; and Ward Churchill, the AIM activist and radical Native studies scholar known for making false claims to Native identity and who at the time was under fire for his anticolonial take on the events of 9/11 and, specifically, his statement that the Twin Towers were full of “little Eichmanns.” As Byrd writes, “The provocative enjambment of Native, Nazi, and Holocaust, as well as the two news stories, gestures toward the competition that emerges between US colonialist understandings of Indigenous peoples that perpetually disavow any genocidal conduct on the part of the nation and mainstream media’s awareness and sensitivity to the historical significance that the horror of the Holocaust represents.”43 For Byrd, rival narratives of genocide compete at the cost of disavowing the historical experiences and relations of others, particularly Black and Indigenous peoples. The presence of the Holocaust narrative in both instances is amplified by Ward Churchill’s centrality (or at least visible presence) in the debate with Holocaust scholars over whether or not U.S. violence against Native Americans can be called genocide. His engagements with Deborah Lipstadt, who had won a legal case against the notorious Holocaust denier David Irving (who had sued her for libel) are noteworthy. In his piece “An American Holocaust?,” Churchill makes the argument that not only does Lipstadt uphold the singularity of the Holocaust as reason to deny that U.S. violence constitutes genocide against Native Americans, but also that Lipstadt refuses to acknowledge other groups affected by the Holocaust, such as “Gypsies, Sinti, Roma, Romani.”44 Echoing the argument about instrumental violence common to this discussion, Lipstadt responded, “The Native Americans were seen as ‘competitors’ for land and resources”; it was not a genocide for her, because “there was a certain logic.”45

Jeff Weise’s antiblackness and embeddedness in white supremacist groups online and in Minnesota open up complex historical connections, for Byrd, between U.S. slavery and Native genocide that the media narratives that Byrd analyzes do not register. The contemporaneity of the Civil War and the Dakota War, for instance, creates the temporal confluence of two seemingly disparate events and histories: Abraham Lincoln signed, during the same week, the Emancipation Proclamation and an order to hang thirty-nine Dakota insurgents.46 For Byrd, rather than a comparative moment of U.S. violence against different peoples, genocide and slavery, this confluence marks the uneven and rationalized impacts of U.S. imperial logics on different peoples under the same violent system (as we know, the afterlife of slavery continues, as does the afterlife of genocide). These imperial logics and their disavowal of the violence against Indigenous peoples and other groups create difficult double binds.

Churchill and the immense body of work he has done to argue for genocide recognition is, in some ways, representative of this issue for Byrd: “the ambivalence surrounding Churchill and what he represents—a liminal figure who is invalidated or invalidating Indianness through his presence, activism, and scholarship—has created a quagmire in which it is difficult to criticize or support Churchill without reproducing colonialist understandings of Indianness.”47 This quagmire was deepened when Churchill was fired from his position at the University of Colorado after a cadre of conservatives put together a committee to review his teaching and publications for potential academic misconduct and plagiarism.48 Heightening the cautions they offer against comparison, Byrd describes a tendency in Native studies either to equate Native genocide with the Holocaust (using many of the same arguments, tropes, and metaphors of Holocaust remembrance used by Holocaust scholars) or in many cases simply to borrow the proper name of Holocaust, indicating the desire for recognition of violence and an inclusion into the noninstrumental realm of the human. This misuse of Holocaust remembrance by Native scholars is complicated by statements such as that by Holocaust scholar Marthe Robert, who claimed that “to speak of other genocides than the Jewish genocide was to demonstrate ‘a very subtle negationism.’”49 This raises the question of how to confront the disavowal of U.S. imperial violence without falling into the logics of recognition or singularity.

But why genocide? What brings about this confluence of the crisis in representation and the question of whether or not the violence committed against Native Americans can be called genocide? In the previous chapter, we saw how the representational crisis anthropology underwent revolved around the force of representational violence and the presumed disappearance of the Native. The discipline of History assumes for itself a fundamentally juridical nature: taking as its task making meaning of violence committed against Native Americans, it locates this interpretive and semantic project within the frame of its own fitness to judge, its own ability to determine neutrally and objectively if genocide happened. That the interpretation of the violence enacted to create the conditions to found the United States becomes the site of a debate over how to name this violence in juridical language indicates clearly the position and power of representation within an institutional and state-funded discourse such as historiography. It is no surprise then that History ended up defining the crisis in representation by the figure of the witness (just as it was defined in anthropology by the figure of the informant). But the identity and position of this witness is a problem. In the United States, what, after all, is the underlying “crime scene” in the nation-state’s unconscious (rising at times to the level of preconsciousness)? As discussed in the introduction, this scene is what Byrd indicates by calling often-unrecognized pop cultural manifestations of Indigeneity, as well as those in theoretical discourses, the return of the repressed.50 The scene also forms the confusion of the double bind that underlies Povinelli’s governance of the prior.

Historians attacked antirealist critique by conflating it with revisionism/denialism, not understanding that their mode of historiography is more closely related to denialism than antirealist critique is, that it allows denialism in the door. For them, what is on the line is not necessarily the truth of the event but History itself, which acts as the guardian of this truth. The significance of the event is that it is seemingly a nonnegotiable truth and yet, because of this, the event is what has caused the most outrage and conflict in the form of revisionism. Both historical truth and revisionist history boil down to the archive and its interpretation. A quantitative question about the amount of documentation stands in for the presupposed ontology, as if interpretation and a preponderance of evidence can hide the material and epistemo-ontological conditions that define the terms of the debate. Historians claim that what is on the line is reality itself, the facts that hold the discipline together. Critiquing White for his argument that history defines itself as a discipline by expelling the sublime, by actively producing this reality, historians translate this argument into a form of absolute relativism based solely on the discourse of power. But, as Nichanian argues, like historical truth and revisionism, relativism is only the inverse of realism; they are two sides of the same coin.51 They are not ontologically that different and differ only over their interpretations and what they mean.

For Nichanian, both historical truth and revisionism contribute to the genocidal will, which is the destruction not only of lives but of the fact itself. The genocidal will is a state negation of the Destruction that is only interested in the preservation of the state form and the management of its narrative, hence the shift toward the recognition of genocide that now serves state interests. Once the cognitive regime and the physical threat of oppressed populations are seemingly eliminated by the state, the recognition of genocide absorbs even death and violence into the state narrative. What we see playing out now in Gaza is the fact that a genocidal event can be infinitely documented and still contested. Negationism is built into the system. That is the destruction of the fact. As Nichanian argues, “Historical truth as dominant representation wavers between the constitution of facts as such and the politics of interpretation (power’s hold on facts as given).”52 Everything reduces down to the common plot, which ensures that there is history, facts, historical sense or meaning—in other words, historical truth. The plot bends flexibly, shifting between evidence and its interpretation, organized around a metaphysical belief in the goodness of the system. This is a rhetorical situation that includes an entire linguistic fabric, modes of social understanding, and various paths of communication that nonetheless tie together this embedded network of communicating truth as power.

What is not on the line are these rhetorical conditions on which both the historian’s truth and the negationist’s lie depend. The difference between the two is that the negationist is on the side of the perpetrator, stubbornly and woodenly. The historian is in a more complex position, seeking to mediate between the perpetrator and the subjects of state violence. The debate in History about genocide and Native Americans and its relation to the crisis in representation indicates the confluence of two anxieties wrapped up in the problematics of the discipline and its poetics: the illegitimacy and insecurity of the geopolitical entity that makes one’s work possible (do all historians, in the end, work for the state?) and the illegitimacy and insecurity of the epistemic foundations that justified genocidal violence as the conditions for that geopolitical entity to be founded and to continue to exist, epistemic foundations that also make ones work possible.

Carlo Ginzburg’s response to the crisis of representation, “Just One Witness: The Extermination of the Jews and the Principle of Reality,” with its title’s seeming despairing note of the embattlement of History and reality, implies that reality itself would seem to depend upon the existence of at least one witness. This, of course, is not Ginzburg’s argument, which is instead an attempt to engage philosophically the crisis of representation through a mediatory position that accepts the critique of positivism—its “highly problematic relationship with reality”53—and calls for attending to the proliferation of viewpoints through what he dubs, elsewhere, “microhistory,” a focus on small events and local perceptions, as a last stand against perceived nihilism and skepticism regarding the relationship between historiography and reality. As he asserts, “But reality (‘the thing in itself’) exists,” a sentence that expresses a certain faith and, in the end, perhaps a note of despair.54 This reality, the thing in itself, produces a proliferating series of narratives, as the swarm of possible perspectives offers as many stories, a perhaps convenient and exploitable situation for the discipline. In relation to the destruction, this proliferation creates an impossible ideal, which is the totality of violence and suffering as witnessed, which can never be presented. The lack in the archive itself—what has been recorded, what has not, and what cannot be—as well as the inherent problematics of testimony, which appears distorted, insufficient, fragmentary, create the representational problem; there are too many voices and each is too individualistic. And here we have the problem of the witness and the archive, which, again, History claims as its purview as guardian of the thing in itself. The just one witness is History, its true assertion: it is sole protector of and witness to the singularity that grounds and stabilizes, institutionalizes and domesticates, the radical proliferation of voices and their materialities, against the coming horde—the fact of reality. To ensure itself of this position and to push back against the swarm of voices, History will take recourse to the law and its fact-making power, even if it has to evacuate the force of both the law and language to do so.

California Indian Studies and Genocide

We are now in a position to understand the roles History and historiography play in both California Indian studies and the discourse on genocide. As non-Native historian Martin Rizzo-Martinez writes in We Are Not Animals, “The study of California Indians began in earnest in the mid-twentieth century, when Sherburne F. Cook and others wrote about the terrible attrition and death rates.”55 This beginning is of course across the divide between the study of California Indian cultures by salvage ethnographers in the early twentieth century, who selectively and deliberately edited out the impact of colonial violence, as I discuss in the previous chapter, and the study of our destruction as a historical event, generally a demographic approach, as evidenced by Cook’s work. This divide, of course, doesn’t hold: the need for documentation and, in particular, for the voices of witnesses causes History to begin eventually to slip across the boundary toward the recorded voices of Native “informants,” on which ethnography seemingly held a monopoly. In the absence of a chronicle or a collection of testimonies (as found in abundance in relation to some of the twentieth-century genocides), the relatively small number of first-person accounts by California Indians are generally couched within the discourse and semiotics of anthropology, which as part of the destruction of the memory of destruction censored out colonial violence. As we’ll see in more detail in the next chapter, California Indians nonetheless often took the opportunity of speaking to a perceived authority in the dominant culture, as well as the anthropologist’s tools and methodologies, to record the stories they wanted to tell, despite the narrow scientific purposes of the anthropologists.

Lucy Young, a Wailaki woman who survived the targeted decimation of her people and gave a harrowing account of her life, allowed anthropologist and ethnobotanist Edith Murphey to record her life, offering a case in point. Beginning her narrative under the sign of prophecy and dream, Young describes her grandfather, who died before ever seeing a white person, dreaming the destruction of their people. This is a common occurrence in Native communities who preemptively accounted for the coming destruction through a Native framework of understanding in dreams or prophecy. Leslie Marmon Silko addresses these storying practices in her account of a gathering of and contest between Native witches to see who was the most powerful. The witch who won created white people as a curse and a display of their power, a power that Silko entangles with the dangerous forces of story, as the witch’s curse works through the performative force of storying and cannot be taken back.56 Young’s account of her fugitive movements and relations, of the violence and bloodshed she witnessed, of the impossibility of surviving outside of the material and sexual economies of settler colonialism is for her like a dream: “All seem like dream to me.”57 This way of narrating her experiences of the destruction, as if it is of another life, registers the absolute rupture, the turning over of the world, and opens onto the infinite destruction. As Young describes, “white people want our land, want destroy us. Break and burn all our baskets, break our pounding rock. Destroy our ropes. No snares, no deerskin, flint knife, nothing . . . I hear people tell ’bout what Inyan do early days to white man. Nobody ever tell it what white man do to Inyan. That’s the reason I tell it. That’s history. That’s truth. I seen it myself.”58 Young’s narration of the event is oddly framed by Murphey as still part of the salvage process of collecting cultural information. Seemingly random cultural information, such as using soaproot to catch fish, interrupt the account of survival.59 This is amplified by Young’s emphasis on the destruction of “cultural items,” which indeterminately offers a sense of what Young imagines matters most to Murphey or a broadening of the destruction from a body count. It is likely Young is either offering this information to appease Murphey, as a way to continue telling what she wants to tell, or responding to direct questioning by Murphey. Either way, in this text, the division and awkward conflation of the cultural informant and the witness to genocide is on full display.

Hearkening back to chapter 1, this conflation of informant and witness speaks to how story operates within the allowable cultural terms by History as representation, at best filling in the space of testimony. Within “cases” of genocide, the scientific universality of European enlightenment, which continues to dominate U.S. history (and education in general), operates through an effaced sense of the cultural. We see this most clearly in the discipline’s oscillations around the role of story as evidence. As Lisa Lowe notes, culture has “become the medium of the present [and] the site that mediates the past, through which history is grasped as difference, as fragments, shocks, and flashes of disjunction.”60 Native historians, on the other hand, have tended to approach story in ways that reflect this difficult formation of informant/witness: culture/history, one not confined to the role of evidence but part of the form of the text. For example, Wailaki and Konkow historian William Bauer and non-Native historian Damon Akins, have written a location-based history that centers stories specific to places. We Are the Land mingles origin and “historical” stories of these locations in a way that centers an Indigenous approach and the lives of Indigenous peoples.

Rizzo-Martinez likewise writes his history of missionary violence and Indigenous resistance in the Santa Cruz area, which centers California Indian accounts and interviews with descendants, under the sign of story tied to place. Beginning with a story about “How They Killed a Serpent That Lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains,” Rizzo-Martinez reflects thoughtfully on the ethics of representation and the role of the historian, which he reduces to the practice of listening, a scribe for a collectively told story. He describes being subtly corrected about his interpretation of the serpent story by a tribal collaborator and how this informs his practice of writing and listening. The epigraph for Rizzo-Martinez’s book is, appropriately, a description of the force and role of story in history by Maria Ascensión Solórsano de Cervantes, told to John P. Harrington in 1929:

A story also grows. It never remains the same. Though one wants to tell it the same as one heard it, one always puts in a word more or less. And there are many people in this world who are great gossips, they fix up a story very nice, even if they don’t know it. And still more so if it is a story of a religion, they always want to make the people believe more. And with time it changes more, so that when a story has passed through the lives of many people surely it is already impossible to tell what story it is, for it is already changed fundamentally, and it is not recognized as the same story that it was earlier. And when the story is written or made into a book, it still is a story and nothing more, they only took the story which was growing, more or less, or took the turns that very various people had given it and gathered them together pruning them off to make a single book. They say that when the story is written it is different, but to me it is the same, it is still a story.61

This vision of a headless and tailless story, of its abundance, capaciousness, and interrelationality, its collectivity and confusion of certainty with uncertainty, its many faces as well as its persistence, even when disciplined into a form, a form that it resists, refuses, fails at, is also that of the form the destruction takes in the lives, mouths, and minds of Indigenous people. This description of story by de Cervantes is also a direct commentary on Harrington’s ridiculous project of gathering stories, pruning them off from this greater vision to make a book (of all things!), which remains nothing but a story. Rizzo-Martinez seems to be referencing this relation of the book to story in order to reflect on his own project and its limits. One cannot contain story or discipline it. The book is only ever a temporary home. Story has all the force and sociality of gossip and pulls even the serious work of anthropology and history into its realm. We are gossips who tell stories and nothing more.

Story’s uncertainty and instability, and yet collective force and endurance, raise the question of how we tell the story of our own death. How do we narrate the destruction? How do we tell the violence underwent by our ancestors? According to historian Michael Magliari, tribal leaders or even Native students who bravely contest genocide denial in a classroom by a teacher should not reproduce the “myth” of scalp bounties in California. Published by the University of California Press (which notoriously publishes very few California Indian scholars), Magliari’s 2023 piece “The California Indian Scalp Bounty Myth” traces instances of descriptions of the bounties that were paid for California Indian body parts in scholarship and public discourse (in the accounts of Native people speaking publicly, as well as in documentaries and literature).62 This tracing is an attempt to prove that stories of such bounties are either fully mythical or at best embellishments of a limited number of cases. I should be clear that Magliari is not a genocide denier; he’s not in the camp with Gary Clayton Anderson, who has argued strenuously that U.S. settler violence doesn’t constitute genocide.63 Magliari is doing something different: he’s shoring up the boundaries of the archive and historiography to protect them from the coming horde of Native gossipers. He’s engaged in the protection of truth in history by appealing to the material evidence that exists of genocidal violence and, in the case of scalp bounties, apparently finding very little.

I have no interest in debating Magliari on this issue and thereby contributing to the negationist discourse of history. We need no proofs. I am interested in how he approaches the archive, the effects of this approach on the narrative of the past, and what its implications are for California Indian studies. What is the effect of choosing one affectively charged aspect of genocidal violence and analytically pulling it apart? What does it do to our sense of the atmosphere of violence in which our ancestors lived and survived, such as described by Young? How are we to understand a historical narrative that accepts the basic premise that there was a genocide but only under the condition that the narrative remains within the control of history and the law? That genocide only applies to certain California Indian peoples and Native peoples more generally in certain well-defined cases? Challenging the premise that only historians who express outright denial are negationist, Nichanian notes that “the ultimate goal of negationism is to make the qualification of the facts the sole concern.”64 By Magliari’s logic—which is the logic of historians—the only scenes or events that become facts and thereby acquire reality are those governed by the archive. And the archive, as we all know, is governed by the state, by the perpetrators. It includes only the voices of killers. It seems, though, that Magliari isn’t aware of this condition and that it is, in fact, the destruction of the archive.

Magliari’s reduction to the archive through a negation of California Indian voices and the force of story attends to what Rizzo-Martinez calls the “earnest creation of California Indian Studies,” and even questions this; he plays a game with the very foundations of historiography and its relation to the archive and the claim to truth. The “not much” evidence he finds is based on witness accounts by settlers, which Magliari assumes must be the source of the public discourse on scalp bounties, ignoring the absolute void of representation of Indigenous voices and representation as well as the networks of story and gossip that exist in spite of that void. Magliari exposes historical truth’s severity, and yet his reduction opens up the black hole of negationism that lies beneath all western humanist historiography. It opens up the question of what California Indians mean when we say genocide and what we mean is something closer to the Destruction. The scalp bounty story is a collective fact because it registers the destruction better than any historical accounting can. Yes, bounties were given for body parts. Again, we need no proofs. The other side of this equation, of course, is that the most effective evidence in proving a case of genocide is the voices of killers: the official documents that express intent. This is because, on top of the negationism of California Indian voice expressed by Magliari, there is a structural negation that renders all accounts by individuals something other than proof because they fail to show intent.

The criteria put forth in the UN Convention on Genocide represents most clearly the strict form of genocide, and the historical text that employs these criteria the most rigorously in the context of California is Benjamin Madley’s An American Genocide. As Tony Platt writes in his review of the book,

Benjamin Madley . . . responds to this challenge as a prosecutor might, building his case on a mountain of evidence until the verdict is undeniable: what happened in California from 1846 to 1873 was a genocide “more lethal and sustained than anywhere else in the United States or its colonial antecedents.” By 1880, the Native population had declined by more than ninety percent since the first Europeans arrived in the region.65

Madley’s text has also garnered the most accolades and has been the most associated with the official recognition of California’s violence (always past); among these honors, Madley gave a private reading for former governor Jerry Brown, and received the California Commendation Medal from the Military Department of the State of California. In keeping with the field of genocide studies and its approach, Madley appropriates the international legal definition for genocide as a “powerful analytical tool” to determine historical truth.66 This use of an abstract definition is a form of positive law that gives Madley a calculus for distinguishing between kinds of violence in order to build a case for the recognition of genocide—that is, to prove a genocide occurred, but as positivist history, a positivist history that is at the same time attentive to critical dimensions of historiography. Abdicating the historian’s claim to truth based on interpretation and installing an abstract legal definition in its stead, as a recourse to the thing in itself, Madley seeks to give history the form of law without enacting its force.

This use of the definition has a disciplinary quality through its interpretive power, as Madley narrates the realization of his methodology as a literature review that recapitulates the various terms used by historians to describe mass violence in California (liquidation, extermination) and the various uses of the term genocide (referring to genocides “only briefly or incompletely”).67 Reiterating the civilizationist schema of progress toward law and order described by Kazanjian, Madley reproduces it methodologically as a march toward truth by painstakingly showing how other uses do not stack up to his use of the international legal definition.68 As he describes, the definition is “more than an academic concept . . . Unlike at least twenty-two alternative definitions proffered since 1959, it has teeth,” and yet, as he makes clear, it does not allow for retroactive prosecution.69 Madley adopts the legal criteria outlined by the UN Convention as a “frame for evaluating the past and comparing events across time,” drawing on the international consensus and effectivity of the law to regulate what constitutes the truth of history without enacting any of the law’s force. Madley, thereby, presents his book as “the first comprehensive, year-by-year history of the California Indian genocide under US rule”; the only account to rigorously use the Genocide Convention’s definition as a rubric, while others “propose expanding, contracting, or modifying the list of protected groups . . . [or] want to enlarge, reduce, or alter the scope of genocidal acts . . . [or] call for different definitions of intent”; and the most comprehensive attempt “to capture the full meaning of genocidal events.”70

First, only, and comprehensive. What Madley is attempting to do with his approach—a rigorous interrogation and categorization of other ways of writing about and understanding mass violence in California—is to transcribe the violence into a case that is fully and finally knowable. It is a “case” in two senses: a historical case as instance of genocide and a case made against the state of California, thereby finding the intersection between the performative charge of genocide by law and the referential truth of history. Lemkin, as Madley notes, had retroactively extended genocide into the past in an unfinished historical manuscript on Native American genocide.71 Madley takes up this project with its implied separation between historical and legal uses of the definition. This separation undoes the civilizing distinction between premodern and modern violences at the definitional level and yet upholds it at the discursive level by distinguishing between historical cases and legal instances across a rift in their respective forces. Madley’s use of the legal definition for its “teeth,” to ground historiography and establish a truth-making procedure without actually bringing those teeth to bear, is the fulcrum on which the referential and performative dimensions of genocide are balanced. This strange conflation in the form of a “case” makes clear that what is at stake, for Madley, is not proving that the destruction occurred but proving it was a case of “genocide,” reducing all language and understanding to the abstract criteria of international law, which adjudicates all other ways of knowing the catastrophe, effectively shackling historiography to the fate of the term genocide.

We see this suspension worked out in Madley’s critique of the widespread argument (by Sherburne Cook, Hubert Bancroft, John Collier, among others) that lawlessness in the Western frontier led to genocidal atrocity.72 Madley rightly indicates the legal basis of the violence and has a chapter on how California law itself, including the state constitutional convention held in 1849, contributed to genocide. What he misses is that violence was done in the name of the law’s founding and not merely as an effect of specific laws, neglecting thereby the continued production of violence to instate and preserve the law. Because of this, Madley opts for a liberal progressive argument that things could have been different if only there had been different laws enacted and if only more moderate voices had prevailed.73 Reiterating the call for law and order by retroactively criminalizing the violence done in its name and by imagining a more perfect institution of law, he thereby presumes the legal norm of a liberal humanized order projected into the past as regulative ideal. This projection anticipates the state apology and Truth and Healing Council. In fact, Madley calls for something like truth and reconciliation in his delimitation of California Indian archival voices from the voices of killers as impossible testimonial evidence, distinguishing evidence from ethnography.

In his attempt to prove the case against the state, Madley seeks evidence in the written historical record. When confronted with limitations and erasures performed by the record itself—no forensic or “ethnographic” evidence—Madley opts to build his case using positive archival data/facts found in settler newspapers, state archives, and non-Indian witness accounts, which he transmutes into testimonial confessions highlighting “the voices of killers.”74 This is a decision predetermined by the juridico-historical case for genocide Madley makes, as attending either to archaeological evidence, if it can be found, or to the absence of California Indian voices in the archive would require engaging the question of genocide outside the confines of the fully and finally knowable case. All three approaches, however, raise the problem of voice, offering a comparative site to analyze the construction of voice in relation to violence as it makes meaning. Following Madley’s attempt to “dignify the slain and give a voice to the departed,” by putting his notion of voice into conversation with theories of the archive, stresses the limits of what can be known and said.75

Madley asserts that the “voices of killers” are the only voices available for building a case.76 As he explains, there are relatively few transcribed Indian voices from the time period, a dearth attributable to a host of reasons: there were not many survivors; laws barred and rarely recorded Indian testimony; authors and journalists did not record the words of Indians; many Indians hid their identities to survive; there were traditional taboos against speaking of the dead; many were removed from land where the violence occurred; Native languages were suppressed; there were intergenerational cuts through the abduction of children; there was compulsory federal boarding education; and there were legal prohibitions against ceremonies and gatherings, including for mourning. This overdetermined silence constitutes the destruction, as not only were California Indian lives destroyed but we were barred from even having any relation to our own deaths.

Madley’s response to this silence is to defer and to categorize, as he is clear that his is not an “ethnographic oral-history project,” a project he claims is important and needed but not a part of building a case fully and finally knowable.77 Not only are California Indians asked to depend on the voices of killers to prove their own suffering but Madley’s call to solve the absence of Native voices in the archive with an oral-history project that collects the stories of descendants of survivors bumps uncomfortably up against the other silence of the archive: the editorial decisions made by salvage anthropologists to efface the effects of colonial violence by collecting/creating an ethnographic, cultural voice. As we saw with Lucy Young, even the few extant accounts by survivors are almost always written under the sign of culture, because they are collected by anthropologists. This split between the cultural documentation of the “informant” and the testimony of the witness is simultaneously upheld and suspended in Madley’s separation of his juridico-historical case from the deferred oral-history project, distinguishing between evidence and ethnography.

As I discussed in the introduction, Saidiya Hartman has described the archive as a power-laden space that discursively makes visible only power itself.78 The archive is intractable, and, no matter how one reads it, twists it, turns it, it only ever offers up the voice of the killer. This is why Madley’s approach abides by the law of the archive, accepts this limit, and seeks to highlight and build a case around it. He exacerbates this limit, though, by asserting that the only “complete” response to the violence in the archive is to instrumentalize it to further call on power in the form of the recognition of genocide. Considering the analytic split between the ethnographic voice and the testimonial, the only way recognition can give voice is through a simple transference in which California Indians ventriloquize the voice of power, declaring the state itself to be the savage. We are asked to condemn and judge by speaking in the voices of killers. The discourse on genocide narrows the space of speech and perpetuates the destruction. The discourse also makes demands on our ancestors, asking that their lives and deaths, splayed out in the most vicious language in the archive, be made useful toward this end, naming our ancestors in ways that may have been counter to their own forms of self-identification. The dilemma, as Hartman shows, is that it is, of course, too late.79 We cannot save our ancestors, and that is the hard truth we must accept and that Madley tramples over in his desire to speak for them and to make a case. The archive shows our ancestors remain in the grasp of the killers and we cannot free them, especially through the construction of a case. Such a painful fact asks us to assess our own desire for some sense of justice or completion and why this desire takes the form of calls for law and order. What if we can never be made whole again and this is the standpoint from which we must approach our relation to the destruction and its ongoing afterlife?

The cultural documentation, absence of testimony, voices of the killers, as well as a limited literature, all indicate the impossibility of creating a voice of genocide. This impossibility calls us to another task, to understand. Our goal then is not to save the dead (give dignity to the slain), transforming their deaths into something positive, or to give a voice to the departed, but to save the destruction itself from the positive denialism inherent in a truthful discourse on genocide. This is not the refusal found in both the recognition of genocide and its denial but rather the refusal of genocide itself.