State and local authorities supported campaigns against groups described as hostile.

The effect was demographic catastrophe.

Native California’s population declined on a scale that historians now widely connect to genocidal violence as well as disease and dispossession.

The word genocide matters because it refuses the old passive language of disappearance.

People do not simply “vanish” when others are killing them.

A culture does not simply “fade away” when families are forced into hiding.

A language does not simply “die” when the community capable of transmitting it has been systematically reduced.

The older museum narrative often treated Ishi as evidence of inevitable cultural extinction.

The genocide framework makes extinction historical rather than natural.

It asks who did what.