Native American
Genocide Still Haunts
United States
By Leah Trabich
Cold Spring Harbor High School
New York, USA
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.
![[ Bald Eagle Drawing by Student ]](http://iearn.org/hgp/aeti/aeti-1997/eagle.gif)
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.