Deborah Jackson Taffa

“My father was born in 1941 and he taught me never to confuse pity with comprehension. His Quechan (Yuma) grandfather was born in a time when California’s Indian population had plummeted 90 percent because of foreign diseases, Catholic slave-labor, and the government’s hiring of private militia to bring in Indian scalps. California’s first governor, Peter Hardeman Burnett, openly promoted genocide, calling for “a war of extermination” in his 1851 second state address. With the help of the U.S. Army, the California legislature distributed weapons to vigilantes, who raided Native homes and killed 100,000 of my ancestors in the first two years of the gold rush alone. The legislature paid $1.1 million to these murderers, and when it was done, the U.S. Congress agreed to reimburse the state.”
― Deborah Jackson Taffa, Whiskey Tender: A Memoir