American Indian Genocide

[Guest guest]

American Indian Genocide Still Haunts

United States

 

 

By Leah Trabich

Cold Spring Harbor High School

New York, USA

http://www.iearn.org/hgp/aeti/aeti-1997/native-americans.html

 

In the past, the main thrust of the Holocaust/Genocide Project's

magazine, An

End To Intolerance, has been the genocides that occurred in history

and outside

of the United States. Still, what we mustn't forget is that mass

killing of

Native Americans occurred in our own country. As a result, bigotry

and racial

discrimination still exist.

"In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue" . . . and made the first

contact

with the "Indians." For Native Americans, the world after 1492 would

never be

the same. This date marked the beginning of the long road of

persecution and

genocide of Native Americans, our indigenous people. Genocide was an

important

cause of the decline for many tribes.

"By conservative estimates, the population of the United states prior

to

European contact was greater than 12 million. Four centuries later,

the count

was reduced by 95% to 237 thousand.

 

In 1493, when Columbus returned to the Hispaniola, he quickly

implemented

policies of slavery and mass extermination of the Taino population of

the

Caribbean. Within three years, five million were dead. Las Casas, the

primary

historian of the Columbian era, writes of many accounts of the

horrors that the

Spanish colonists inflicted upon the indigenous population: hanging

them en

mass, hacking their children into pieces to be used as dog feed, and

other

horrid cruelties. The works of Las Casas are often omitted from

popular American

history books and courses because Columbus is considered a hero by

many, even

today.

Mass killing did not cease, however, after Columbus departed.

Expansion of the

European colonies led to similar genocides. "Indian Removal" policy

was put into

action to clear the land for white settlers. Methods for the removal

included

slaughter of villages by the military and also biological warfare.

High death

rates resulted from forced marches to relocate the Indians.

The Removal Act of 1830 set into motion a series of events which led

to the

"Trail of Tears" in 1838, a forced march of the Cherokees, resulting

in the

destruction of most of the Cherokee population." The concentration of

American

Indians in small geographic areas, and the scattering of them from

their

homelands, caused increased death, primarily because of associated

military

actions, disease, starvation, extremely harsh conditions during the

moves, and

the resulting destruction of ways of life.

During American expansion into the western frontier, one primary

effort to

destroy the Indian way of life was the attempts of the U.S.

government to make

farmers and cattle ranchers of the Indians. In addition, one of the

most

substantial methods was the premeditated destructions of flora and

fauna which

the American Indians used for food and a variety of other purposes.

We now also

know that the Indians were intentionally exposed to smallpox by

Europeans. The

discovery of gold in California, early in 1848, prompted American

migration and

expansion into the west. The greed of Americans for money and land was

rejuvenated with the Homestead Act of 1862. In California and Texas

there was

blatant genocide of Indians by non-Indians during certain historic

periods. In

California, the decrease from about a quarter of a million to less

than 20,000

is primarily due to the cruelties and wholesale massacres perpetrated

by the

miners and early settlers. Indian education began with forts

erected by Jesuits, in which indigenous youths were incarcerated,

indoctrinated

with non-indigenous Christian values, and forced into manual labor.

These

children were forcibly removed from their parents by soldiers and

many times

never saw their families until later in their adulthood. This was

after their

value systems and knowledge had been supplanted with colonial

thinking. One of

the foundations of the U.S. imperialist strategy was to replace

traditional

leadership of the various indigenous nations with

indoctrinated "graduates" of

white "schools," in order to expedite compliance with U.S. goals and

expansion.

Probably one of the most ruinous acts to the Indians was the

disappearance of

the buffalo. For the Indians who lived on the Plains, life depended

on the

buffalo. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were an

estimated

forty million buffalo, but between 1830 and 1888 there was a rapid,

systematic

extermination culminating in the sudden slaughter of the only two

remaining

Plain herds. By around 1895, the formerly vast buffalo populations

were

practically extinct. The slaughter occurred because of the economic

value of

buffalo hides to Americans and because the animals were in the way of

the

rapidly westward expanding population. The end result was widescale

starvation

and the social and cultural disintegration of many Plains tribes.

Genocide entered international law for the first time in 1948; the

international community took notice when Europeans (Jews, Poles, and

other

victims of Nazi Germany) faced cultural extinction. The "Holocaust"

of World War

II came to be the model of genocide. We, as the human race, must

realize,

however, that other genocides have occurred. Genocide against many

particular

groups is still widely happening today. The discrimination of the

Native

American population is only one example of this ruthless destruction.

Credits: Sharon Johnston, The Genocide of Native Americans: A

Sociological

View,

http://www.iearn.org/hgp/aeti/aeti-1997/native-americans.html