Sorry if I hash anyones mellow but..... From espressostalinist.wordpress/genocide/native-american-genocide/ Native American Genocide The American Indian Holocaust, known as the “500 year war” and the “World’s Longest Holocaust In The History Of Mankind And Loss Of Human Lives.” Genocide and Denying It: Why We Are Not Taught that the Natives of the United States and Canada were Exterminated Death Toll: 95,000,000 to 114,000,000 American Holocaust: D. Stannard (Oxford Press, 1992) - “over 100 million killed” “[Christopher] Columbus personally murdered half a million Natives” “Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination – by starvation and uneven combat – of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.” – P. 202, “Adolph Hitler” by John Toland Native Americans have the highest mortality rate of any U.S. minority because of U.S. action and policy. The biggest killers though were smallpox, measles, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, and scarlet fever. All imported by the Europeans colonists. Smallpox was instrumental in killing the American Indians GENOCIDE OF NATIVE AMERICANS: A SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW The term Genocide derives from the Latin (genos=race, tribe; cide=killing) and means literally the killing or murder of an entire tribe or people. The Oxford English Dictionary defines genocide as “the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group” and cites the first usage of the term as R. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, (1944) p.79. “By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group.” The U.N. General Assembly adopted this term and defended it in 1946 as “….a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups.” Most people tend to associate genocide with wholesale slaughter of a specific people. However, “the 1994 U.N. Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, describes genocide beyond outright murder of people as the destruction and extermination of culture.” Article II of the convention lists five categories of activity as genocidal when directed against a specific “national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” These categories are: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of group; Deliberately infliction on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Genocide or the deliberate extermination of one ethnic group by another is not new, for example in 1937 the Pequot Indians were exterminated by the Colonists when they burned their villages in Mystic, Connecticut, and then shot all the other people — including women and children — who tried to escape. The United States Government has refused to ratify the U.N. convention on genocide. There are many facets of genocide which have been implemented upon indigenous peoples of North America. The list of American genocidal policies includes: Mass-execution, Biological warfare, Forced Removal from homelands, Incarceration, Indoctrination of non-indigenous values, forced surgical sterilization of native women, Prevention of religious practices, just to name a few. By mass-execution prior to the arrival of Columbus the land defined as the 48 contiguous states of America numbered in excess of 12 million. Four centuries later, it had been reduced by 95% (237 thousand). How? When Columbus returned in 1493 he brought a force of 17 ships. He began to implement slavery and mass-extermination of the Taino population of the Caribbean. Within three years five million were dead. Fifty years later the Spanish census recorded only 200 living! Las Casas, the primary historian of the Columbian era, writes of numerous accounts of the horrendous acts that the Spanish colonists inflicted upon the indigenous people, which included hanging them en masse, roasting them on spits, hacking their children into pieces to be used as dog food, and the list continues. This did not end with Columbus’ departure, the European colonies and the newly declared United States continued similar conquests. Massacres occurred across the land such as the Wounded Knee Massacre. Not only was the method of massacre used, other methods for “Indian Removal” and “clearing” included military slaughter of tribal villages, bounties on native scalps, and biological warfare. British agents intentionally gave Tribes blankets that were intentionally contaminated with smallpox. Over 100 thousand died among the Mingo, Delaware, Shawnee and other Ohio River nations. The U.S. army followed suit and used the same method on the Plains tribal populations with similar success. FORCED REMOVAL FROM HOMELANDS For a brief periods after the American Revolution, the United States adopted a policy toward American Indians known as the “conquest” theory. In the Treaty of Fort Stansix of 1784, the Iroquois had to cede lands in western New York and Pennsylvania. Those Iroquois living in the United States (many had gone to Canada where the English gave them refuge) rapidly degenerated as a nation during the last decades of the eighteenth century, losing most of their remaining lands and much of their ability to cope. The Shawnees, Miamis, Delawaresm, Ottawans, Wyandots, and Potawatomis watching the decline of the Iroquois formed their own confederacy and informed the United states that the Ohio river was the boundary between their lands and those of the settlers. It was just a matter of time before further hostilities ensued. Indian Boarding School - Cultural Genocide FORCED ASSIMILATION The Europeans saw themselves as the superior culture bringing civilization to an inferior culture. The colonial world view split reality into popular parts: good and evil, body and spirit, man and nature, head and hear, European and primitive. American Indians spirituality lacks these dualism’s; language expresses the oneness of all things. God is not the transcendent Father but the Mother Earth, the Corn Mother, the Great Spirit who nourishes all It is polytheistic, believing in many gods and many levels of deity. “At the basis of most American Native beliefs is the supernatural was a profound conviction that an invisible force, a powerful spirit, permeated the entire universe and ordered the cycles of birth and death for all living things.” Beyond this belief in a universal spirit, most American Indians attached supernatural qualities to animals, heavenly bodies, the seasons, dead ancestors, the elements, and geologic formations. Their world was infused with the divine – The Sacred Hoop. This was not at all a personal being presiding ominpotently over the salvation or damnation of individual people as the Europeans believed. For the Europeans such beliefs were pagan. Thus, the conquest was rationalized as a necessary evil that would bestow upon the heathen “Indians” a moral consciousness that would redeem their amorality. The world view which converted bare economic self interest into noble, even moral, motives was a notion of Christianity as the one redemptive religion which demands fealty from all cultures. In this remaking of the American Indians the impetus which drove the conquistador’s invading wars not exploration, but the drive to expand an empire, not discovery of new land, but the drive to accumulate treasure, land and cheap labor. from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Wars#Colonial_period Effects on indigenous populations On the 2010 census 0.9 percent of the U.S. population identified themselves as being Native American (or Alaskan Native).[1] No conclusive evidence exists to determine how many native people lived in North America before the arrival of Columbus.[2][3] As the direct result of disease, wars between tribes, wars with Europeans, migration to Canada and Mexico, declining birth rates, and of assimilation, the numbers of Native Americans dropped to below one million in the 19th century. Scholars believe that the main causes were new infectious diseases carried by Europeans explorers and traders. Native Americans had no acquired immunity to such diseases, which had been chronic in Eurasian populations for over five centuries.[4] For instance, some estimates indicate case fatality rates of 80–90% in Native American populations during smallpox epidemics.[5] According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census (1894), The Indian wars under the government of the United States have been more than 40 in number. They have cost the lives of about 19,000 white men, women and children, including those killed in individual combats, and the lives of about 30,000 Indians. from rationalwiki.org/wiki/American_Indian_Holocaust American Indian Holocaust is a term used by American Indian activists to bring attention to the mass destruction of American Indian populations following the European arrival in the Americas, which has hitherto received very limited mention in history, partially because most of the deaths happened before European chroniclers arrived to record them. Estimates of the pre-Columbian population vary, from a minimum of 50 million to a maximum of 100 million;[citation needed] 80 to 90% were killed.[citation needed] Although the vast majority of the deaths at that time were caused by factors beyond most human control — e.g., smallpox epidemics — Europeans, especially the Spanish conquistadors, also killed thousands deliberately.
Posted on: Fri, 29 Nov 2013 00:29:44 +0000