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"The genocide against American Natives was one of the most massive, and longest lasting genocidal campaigns in human history. It started, like all genocides, with the oppressor treating the victims as sub-humans. It continued until almost all Natives were wiped of the face of the earth, along with much of their language, culture and religion."
"The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world."
David E. Stannard.
"By then [1891] the native population had been reduced to 2.5% of its original numbers and 97.5% of the aboriginal land base had been expropriated.... Hundreds upon hundreds of native tribes with unique languages, learning, customs, and cultures had simply been erased from the face of the earth, most often without even the pretense of justice or law."
Peter Montague
What happened to the Indians in North America was the result of conquest and culture clash, human greed and callousness. It was NOT an organized genocide.
Josef Stalin, in the 1920's, was personally responsible for the deaths of approximately 20 million people, from outright slaughter, or by deliberate starvation..
Mao Tse-tung, by most acounts, personally oversaw the deaths of 14 to 20 million people, most of them Chinese, as a result of China's "Great Leap Forward"...again. most of them deliberately starved to death..
I know, these two "leaders" weren't Westerners, so we can't REALLY hold them accountable to our Western standards...that would be "racist"...But how about Adolf Hitler...HE was a Westerner...and he ordered the purges that succeeded in very methodically "exterminating" 6 to 7 million Jews and various 'undesirables'.
ALL of these situations, and many more, reflect events and "purges" that were FAR more single-minded, and FAR more 'focused', than what happened to the natives of North America (many of whom survived, and integrated, and married into the population at large, and have lost their unique identity, not their lives)...and ALL of these numbers reflect populations FAR greater than most reasonable estimates of the 'numbers' existing in North America before the invaders' arrived.
As has been stated before but not sunken through to some evidently----the VAST majority of Indian deaths were caused by disease. That's not genocide.
I would suggest reading American Holocaust
The Conquest of the New World
by David E. Stannard
"Stannard begins with a portrait of the enormous richness and diversity of life in the Americas prior to Columbus's fateful voyage in 1492. He then follows the path of genocide from the Indies to Mexico and Central and South America, then north to Florida, Virginia, and New England, and finally out across the Great Plains and Southwest to California and the North Pacific Coast. Stannard reveals that wherever Europeans or white Americans went, the native people were caught between imported plagues and barbarous atrocities, typically resulting in the annihilation of 95 percent of their populations. "
The Conquest of the New World
by David E. Stannard
"Stannard begins with a portrait of the enormous richness and diversity of life in the Americas prior to Columbus's fateful voyage in 1492. He then follows the path of genocide from the Indies to Mexico and Central and South America, then north to Florida, Virginia, and New England, and finally out across the Great Plains and Southwest to California and the North Pacific Coast. Stannard reveals that wherever Europeans or white Americans went, the native people were caught between imported plagues and barbarous atrocities, typically resulting in the annihilation of 95 percent of their populations. "
You're attributing European characteristics to those Indians in question - is that not racist!?
There was no Kurkkawa nation with an economy, military, school system, bridges, industry, etc.
So how do you explain the fact that the framers of the U.S. Constitution, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin to name two, themselves credited the League of the Iroquois as the their model?
How do you explain the fact that copper from the mines in Northern Michigan was found among native people in Florida, and Florida sea shells are found in Northern Michigan. They had very sophisticated comerce.
The genocide of the indigenous people of the Americas started in 1493, when Columbus returned to the Carribean and began a systematic extermination of the native people. In three years time, nearly 5 million indigenous people had been killed. I would say that rivals anything the Nazis did.
According to priests who witnessed the atrocites first hand, and who by the nature of their work tend not to lie, native communties were hung en masse, women were raped, babies and children were hacked into pieces to be used as dog food. I don't consider this any more "wholesome" than the dragging of white babies at Fort Parker.
You stated that the U.S didn't bother the Indian as long as he stayed on his reservation. What do you call the systematic removal of indigenous people from Cape Cod and the Outer Banks in North Carolina all the way to the Mississippi and beyond if not genocide?
When Lewis and Clark set out on their expedition, they encountered more than 50 tribes, many of whom had never seen a white man. Today, there are 200 indigenious groups of Americans that are extinct- gone....forever.
Indian Removal was the offical policy of 19th century American government. To remove all Native Americans east of the Mississippi so white folk could live there. Have you never heard of the Trail of Tears? A quarter of the Cherokees living in the Carolinas and surrounding areas died on a forced march nearly two-thousand miles to Oklahoma. The Choctaw suffered a similiar fate, dying of pneumonia in the winter and cholera in the summer.
Methods of removal also included wholesale slaughter by the military; and by biological warfare. The indigenous people did not have an immune system that could fight European illnesses. The U.S. Army wiped out thousands of Indians by giving them blankets that had been used on smallpox victims in the East. This is the very reason Brazil, I think it is, is working so hard to save the indigenous people in the Amazon jungle from developers. Some native villages have been completely erradicated in the past two years because they could not fight off the common cold.
The U.S. government also deliberately attempted to destroy the Native American way of life. In an attempt to force them to become farmers and ranchers, the military was under order to destroy the flora and fauna used by native people for food and other purposes. And I haven't even got to the wholesale destruction of the bison yet!
Children were ripped from their parents arms and sent to missionary schools where they were stripped of their language, their religion, their entire heritage and indoctrinated with the white man's belief system. Now what did they call that when the Nazi's impregnanted Nordic girls and took the babies to be raised by good Aryan families back in dur fatherland? Hmmmm....
And even when the good little Indians stayed on their hellhole reservations, heaven forbid some commodity of value should be discovered, like oil, or gold..... In the California gold rush, miners reduced the population of native people from a quarter of a million to less than 20,000. In the four hundred years since 1492, native population in the America's has been reduced by 95%.
"Genocide by provision of the UN Convention, Dec. 1948 is defined as follows: any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. Also includes a list of 5 types of criminal actions.
Killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction in whole or part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." quoted from Reads2MUCH.
By every definition of the UN, the U.S. Government committed a deliberate and calculated campaign of genocide against its native people. I expect better from my government.
And please don't bother with the diatribe about my white guilt. My family was still fighting off English rule in Ireland when all this was happening!
"The U.S. Army wipped out thousands of Indians by giving them blankets that had been used on smallpox victims in the East. "
That is an outright lie.
During Pontiac's Rebellion the commander at Fort Pitt (a Swiss mercenary in British service) may have distributed smallpox infected articles to Indians, it was discussed. But The United States Army? Nonsense.
You destroy all credibilty with such a reckless and ill informed statement.
I asked a professor about this once - he was an enrolled member of the Cherokee tribe. His answer was a very clear "no," for a rather simple reason - there is a difference between conquest through warfare, and intentional genocide. For one thing, the "Indian Wars" on the territory of what is now the US began in 1540, when Hernando de Soto fought with tribes in southern Alabama, and didn't end until the Battle of Sugar Point in northern Minnesota in 1898.
That's not really a genocidal pattern - it indicates a very long campaign of sporadic conquest and battle that took place over a wide geographic and temporal range, and under many different conditions.
There were also hundreds of treaties signed between US officials and the tribes. One of George Washington's first actions after the Revolutionary War was to conclude peace treaties with several tribes. While many of those treaties were broken, some remained intact, and many are in force today when it comes to things like reservation boundaries, hunting and fishing rights, etc.
There were specific episodes against particular tribes that had genocidal characteristics - such as the Trail of Tears expulsion of the Choctaw and others from Georgia to Oklahoma - but to describe the entire long series of treaties and battles as a single "genocide" seems very lazy, and inaccurate.
It actually tends to diminish the intensity of Indian fighting capabilities. Despite being heavily outnumbered and outmatched technologically, Indian warriors inflicted about 20,000 fatalities on various US military and paramilitary groups, including about 650 in a single day at the Battle of the Wabash in 1791. It took the US government three long and expensive wars to displace most of the Seminoles from southern Florida, with about 100 remaining "unconquered" even after the government declared "victory." For a long time, men looking to rise up the ranks in the US military sought to be known as skilled "Indian fighters," because the Indians were considered tenacious and formidable warriors.
A number of massacres took place, which was part of the nature of war at that time. The Indian Wars were often quite nasty and brutal affairs. However, they typically ended with treaties of various sorts, rather than wholesale ethnic exterminations.
I would describe this foremost as a grand battle for land and resources, the military component of "Manifest Destiny." If that qualifies as a "genocide," then I think we are allowing that term to lose some of its meaning.
"and didn't end until the Battle of Sugar Point in northern Minnesota in 1898."
Sugar Point, good one, not many know that, "common knowledge" is that the Indian Wars ended with Wounded Knee.
The Chippewas don't fit the victim mold. They were very aggressive themselves and fought and defeated the Sioux and the Iroquois at the same time during the Beaver Wars. They were never really whipped by the Americans and still hold substantial portions of their lands (much of which they got by driving out the Sioux) and lost most of their lost lands by selling them to The United States when the Great Lakes furs were trapped out (by the Chippewas) and they needed the dough.
Not many know the Battle of the Wabash either, "St. Clair's Disaster". Worst whippin' The United States ever took from Indians even if they never made a movie about it.
The world was a brutal and uncivilized place in those days. Of course the government wiped out the Indians. They also condoned the killing of Chinese after completion of the Trans Continental Rail Road, look at what they did to the southern states after they had the audacity to decide they wanted self determination. The rule of the 18th and 19th century was survival of the fittest. It was not a place where the weak survived. Right and wrong did not come into the equation.
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