Genocide Begets Genocide

Stop the Cycle of Supremacist Violence

Benjamin Madley’s book American Genocide is Essential Reading for Humans in California

Just like Israel supports its violent settlers in the West Bank who murder Palestinians and take their land, the state of California paid vigilantes and militias for scalps and heads of California's Native people to clear the land and make way for settlers.

Genocide hurts us all. The violence of these experiences is alive in the soil that gives us our food and the ground to stand. The land will tell you the history that some try to keep hidden. You simply have to learn to listen.

Humanity is connected by invisible fibers, like nerves or mycelia, around the earth. An injury to one is an injury to all. To heal, we must stop the violence, understand the ideologies that drive them, categorically reject them wherever they appear and work to correct structures that perpetuate the harm.

“Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war."—Haile Selassie I

As a Punjabi woman born in California, across the planet from my ancestral homelands, I work to support California Native people getting their land back and having the power to shape how we all live here.

Why? 

Because when we correct the harms of history, we can walk forward with greater consciousness and kindness. 

Because California Native people know how to live here well and did it for over 10,000 years. Settlers have destroyed the ecosystem in 255 years.

Because if you sit and listen in the redwood groves and the oak savanna's, by the rivers, among the granite walls and desert lands of this beautiful place, you can hear something ancient. That "something" can teach us how to be good guests here.

Because their cultures are beautiful, based in reciprocity, care and collectivity. 

Because they do not see themselves as above the more than the web of life around them, but rather they understand that they are a part of it.

Because they never had unhoused and hungry people. They can teach us how to be better humans. 

Because their languages sound like the water moving over rocks and the wind in the grass.

Because I believe in learning more through bringing together, instead of extinguishing and destroying. I see more creativity in spaces of mutual respect and engagement. This creativity can helps us get through what is already proving to be a challenging planetary time for humankind.

Because I love their foods, ceremonies and practices of care. 

Because I love this land.

Because their time-space experience is different and invites me to slow to down—so slow that extraordinary encounters with the other beings here becomes ordinary.

Because the racist ideology that led to the California genocide is alive and ongoing. It's the ideology that inspired Hitler that then inspired the founding Zionists in Israel. And it must be discredited and abandoned. Forever.

Because once we let go of ideologies of domination, we can move forward ideologies of care. And California's Native people have that worldview down and are eager to share. Instead of bitterness and rage, there is a steadfast commitment to care.

Because history doesn't correct itself. We correct it.

Because I love chinook and coho salmon, and these are the people doing the work to protect and restore the waterways in California that are literally the cardiovascular system of our land. The Klamath river is now undammed and free thanks to the tribes. The salmon keep our forest systems thriving.

Because they know how to use fire as medicine & how to balance the elements in this incredible place so that forests were not destroyed but tended. 

Because their cultures honor women as they are young, as they bear children & as they age. Because they honor two spirit too.

Because every native plant in this region has a specific purpose and when you learn them you understand that you are still surrounded by an abundance of food and medicine that was tended for 10,000+  years.

Because of beaver, bear, fox, hawk, eagle, hummingbird, rattlesnake, frog, salamander, newt, heron, bobcat, badger, mountain lion, deer.

Because to be human is to heal the harms of the past & build a future where all can find wellness. We must find the courage to do this critical work.

And it starts now, with ending the genocide in Palestine and the ongoing erasure of California’s original people. These horrors are interconnected. Only through understanding these connections can we start to correct the course together. I write this as I prepare for a day of taking care of patients in the hospital and then driving down the coast to the farm Zucigim where the community of Indigenous and Diasporic people are gathering to build the first sweat lodge on the land moving back to Ohlone hands. May we all find healing.