native american genocide essay

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Genocide and american indian history.

Jeffrey Ostler Jeffrey Ostler Department of History, University of Oregon
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.3
Published online: 02 March 2015

The issue of genocide and American Indian history has been contentious. Many writers see the massive depopulation of the indigenous population of the Americas after 1492 as a clear-cut case of the genocide. Other writers, however, contend that European and U.S. actions toward Indians were deplorable but were rarely if ever genocidal. To a significant extent, disagreements about the pervasiveness of genocide in the history of the post-Columbian Western Hemisphere, in general, and U.S. history, in particular, pivot on definitions of genocide. Conservative definitions emphasize intentional actions and policies of governments that result in very large population losses, usually from direct killing. More liberal definitions call for less stringent criteria for intent, focusing more on outcomes. They do not necessarily require direct sanction by state authorities; rather, they identify societal forces and actors. They also allow for several intersecting forces of destruction, including dispossession and disease. Because debates about genocide easily devolve into quarrels about definitions, an open-ended approach to the question of genocide that explores several phases and events provides the possibility of moving beyond the present stalemate. However one resolves the question of genocide in American Indian history, it is important to recognize that European and U.S. settler colonial projects unleashed massively destructive forces on Native peoples and communities. These include violence resulting directly from settler expansion, intertribal violence (frequently aggravated by colonial intrusions), enslavement, disease, alcohol, loss of land and resources, forced removals, and assaults on tribal religion, culture, and language. The configuration and impact of these forces varied considerably in different times and places according to the goals of particular colonial projects and the capacities of colonial societies and institutions to pursue them. The capacity of Native people and communities to directly resist, blunt, or evade colonial invasions proved equally important.

Native Americans
American Indians
colonialism
imperialism
Indian removal
ethnic cleansing
Indian reservations
assimilation

The title of this essay, by suggesting that genocide is a part of American Indian history, is likely to evoke diametrically opposed responses. Did the actions and policies of Europeans and U.S. Americans toward Indians qualify as genocide or not? Academics, students, citizens, in short, almost everyone has an opinion on the subject. Some are certain that the answer to the question is yes, that the massive depopulation of indigenous America after 1492 was a clear-cut case of genocide. Others, however, are equally certain that the answer is no, namely that European and U.S. American actions and policies toward Indians were (at least sometimes) deplorable but cannot be labeled as genocidal.

This essay begins with the premise that the issue of genocide in American Indian history is far too complex to yield a simple yes-or-no answer. The relevant history, after all, is a long one (more than five hundred years) involving hundreds of indigenous nations and several European and neo-European empires and imperial nation-states. While it would be absurd to reduce this history to any single category, genocide included, it would be reasonable to predict that genocide was a part of this history. With this in mind, the essay invites readers to resist a tendency toward a quick or easy resolution of the question of genocide in American Indian history and to engage in an open-ended exploration. The object is not a definitive answer but a clarification of the issues.

More than many debates, those about genocide often center on definitions. Because of this fact, readers might expect an essay on genocide to begin by discussing various definitions of the term (and related terms such as ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide) and proceed either to argue for one definition as authoritative or to propose a new one. This approach, however, would work against my objective of facilitating an open-ended exploration of the issue, and so a formal discussion of definitions will be deferred to the historiographical section at the end of this essay, though, as the essay develops, it will pause periodically to consider how specific events or phases might or might not be regarded as genocidal depending on definitions that have been or could be applied to them. As will become apparent, debates about whether or not specific cases and phases qualify as genocide typically center on these issues: the intentions of historical actors (including but not limited to governments), the extent of depopulation of particular groups, and the causes of their depopulation.

Virgin Soil Epidemics and Native Depopulation

Discussions about genocide in the Americas often begin with the moment of initial contact between Europeans and Native people and emphasize the catastrophic impact of European diseases (especially smallpox and measles) for which Indians had no acquired immunity. Until the 1960s, scholars lacked an appreciation for the massive loss of life from what Alfred Crosby termed “virgin soil epidemics,” and so they drastically understated the size of the pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere population. A standard estimate was 8 million for the entire hemisphere and 1 million north of the Rio Grande. In the 1960s, however, the anthropologist Henry Dobyns took account of disease to provide much higher estimates of 75 million for the hemisphere and 10–12 million north of Mexico. Although Dobyns’s estimates have been hotly debated, even advocates of much lower figures acknowledge the impact of devastating epidemics. 1

Advocates of the “yes it was genocide” position have generally accepted high estimates for the pre-Columbian population and a correspondingly very high figure for initial depopulation. If 75 million people lived in in the Western Hemisphere in 1491 and the death toll from epidemic disease was 70, 80, or even 90 percent (as was sometimes the case), the sheer numbers (50–60 million) are overwhelming and compel recognition as genocide when measured against the numbers for commonly accepted cases of genocide in the twentieth century. 2

Ironically, however, an emphasis on a very high number for initial depopulation can provide an opening for a counter position. Since Europeans who brought pathogens to the Western Hemisphere did not do so with the intention of killing indigenous people and since under many definitions intentionality is a crucial criterion for genocide, a high number can be used to support a “no it was not genocide” position on the grounds that the vast majority of deaths do not qualify. 3 To counter this position, some writers have provided examples of Europeans intentionally inflicting Indians with disease (usually through blankets inflected with smallpox) and argued for their typicality. 4 But the evidence marshaled thus far has failed to dislodge a scholarly consensus that the intentional infliction of disease was rare. To the extent, then, that the question of genocide and American Indian history centers or depends heavily on the question of the size and intentionality of disease-caused depopulation, the “no it was not genocide” position remains credible.

Good reason exists, however, to challenge the premise that the extent and intentionality of initial depopulation from disease is crucial to the question of genocide and American Indian history. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that European and European American actions toward the Indians of eastern North America during the eighteenth century (long after the first epidemics) were consistently genocidal according to the most conservative definition of the successful execution of a societal or governmental intention to physically kill all Indians. An arithmetic approach assigning the majority of total deaths to disease would argue against regarding the last phase in depopulation as genocide, yet why should the number of Indians in that region who had died earlier from disease have any bearing on an assessment of whether the annihilation of the survivors would qualify as genocide or not? Whether the annihilated survivors were 10, 30, or 50 percent of a pre-Columbian population would be irrelevant.

For a discussion of genocide, then, the issue is not so much the impact of initial epidemics but the effects of direct actions Europeans and European Americans took toward Indians through wars of conquest, enslavement, forced dispossession and removal, and destruction of material resources. In this context, disease is relevant as part of an assessment of the consequence of colonizers’ actions. War, for example, can result in displacement, impoverishment, and social stress, thus increasing vulnerability to pathogens. Often, in fact, epidemic disease did not appear at the moment of initial contact but instead emerged at a later stage when processes of colonization were well underway.

Disease and Other Forces of Destruction

To make these observations more concrete, let us look at what happened in the place where Columbus first landed, the Caribbean. Given the common narrative of Europeans bringing destructive microbes, it is perhaps surprising that Columbus’s first voyage did not result in the transmission of epidemic disease to Caribbean Indians, but, of course, groups of Europeans who encountered Indians did not always include people who were sick and contagious. The situation was different on Columbus’s second voyage ( 1493–1496 ). Soon after landing, some of the crew became ill, probably from influenza, and infected the Native populations of Hispaniola, Cuba, and Jamaica. The severity of the epidemic was probably related to the prior lack of exposure of Indians to the pathogens in question, though the epidemic cannot be separated from other forces of destruction. The expedition’s goal was not to kill Indians, but as its leaders and men pursued their main objective—acquiring gold—they did exactly that. To obtain gold, Spaniards needed Indians’ knowledge and labor and so enslaved them, using violence to secure Native peoples and keep them in chains. Some accounts, such as one by Bartolomé de Las Casas of Spaniards making bets “as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off his head at one blow” or tearing “babes from their mother’s breast by their feet, and dash[ing] their heads against the rocks,” suggest a genocidal mentality, though such accounts may imply that these actions were the product of particularly depraved men and unrelated to the purposes of the expedition. In fact, however, the expedition’s leaders saw violence as essential for achieving their goals. To create and maintain slavery and to suppress real and imagined insurrections, the Spanish regularly maimed, murdered, and waged war against Native people. The purpose was not to kill every single Indian (some were needed to work) but to terrorize them into submission. Rape, evidently common, did not simply reveal individual or group pathologies, it functioned as a tool of terror. Violence, then, was central to Spanish colonization in the Caribbean, although far more Indians died from disease, malnutrition, and starvation. 5

Little evidence is available for the death toll for the first few years of Spanish colonization. It is clear, however, that as the Spanish colonizing project expanded in the early sixteenth century, its destructive impacts escalated. Violence continued to be a factor (in 1502, Nicolás de Ovando, the Spanish governor of Hispaniola, massacred some six to seven hundred Indians from the chiefdom of Higüey who had rebelled in protest of the Spanish use of attack dogs) as did malnutrition and disease (dysentery, typhus, etc.) under conditions of coerced labor and economic disruptions. Another major epidemic—smallpox—swept through the islands in 1518–1519. By this time, however, the indigenous population of the major islands had been greatly reduced. On Hispaniola only twenty to thirty thousand adult Tainos remained alive, far fewer than the pre-Columbian population of at least several hundred thousand and by some estimates as high as 8 million. In this instance, then, smallpox, so often appearing as an initial destroyer, arrived with a horrific catastrophe well underway. By 1542 , the Native population of Hispaniola was only two thousand. Enslaved Africans were now the main source of labor. 6 Only a small percentage of Caribbean Indians died from virgin soil epidemics in the commonly understood sense of epidemics arriving just in advance of, or at the moment of, initial contact, though disease was undoubtedly the largest killer, flourishing under conditions the Spanish created as they colonized the islands. Some analysts might apply a strict interpretation of intent and conclude that the Spanish did not commit genocide, since they did not establish a formal plan to exterminate all Indians. Other analysts, however, might observe that the large majority of Indians who died during these fifty years did so under conditions that the Spanish created as they pursued their objectives and contend that this should be considered genocide under a looser interpretation of intent.

The timing of disease and its intersection with other forces of destruction varied from region to region within the Americas. In what became the southeastern United States, as historian Paul Kelton has shown, Ponce de León’s 1513 expedition and subsequent Spanish explorations did not introduce new diseases into the region, though disruptions from these expeditions created conditions for already existing pathogens like syphilis and yaws to spread. It was not until the late seventeenth century that the classic killer smallpox appeared. When it did its spread was closely connected to the British colonial project of exploiting existing indigenous practices of captive taking to create markets both for slaves outside Indian country and for European goods (manufacturers, alcohol, clothing) within it. The slave trade directly contributed to the depopulation of many Indian communities, but its most damaging consequence was the creation of conditions for the transmission of epidemic disease. When smallpox broke out in Virginia in 1696 it spread rapidly along networks of human contact that had been shaped by violence, deracination, and deprivation, destroying Indian communities from the Carolinas to the Gulf Coast and up the Mississippi River to Illinois. It was only now, two hundred years after the first European set foot in the Southeast, that Native populations experienced the catastrophic population declines usually associated with initial contact epidemics. As in the Caribbean, when smallpox struck, it was a consequence of European economic pursuits. 7

In one of the last regions affected by the European invasion, the Pacific Northwest, the story is closer to the usual one of devastating initial contact epidemics. It was not until almost three hundred years after Columbus that Europeans began exploring the coast of what is now Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Smallpox first appeared in the region in the mid-1770s, probably transmitted by Spanish expeditions landing along the coast. Over the next fifty years, smallpox epidemics continued to devastate Native communities, though in contrast to expectations of a linear population decline, northwestern Indians were able to recover a good part of their post-contact losses. Indians had time to recover between epidemics, and these epidemics became less severe over time as surviving populations acquired immunities to a greater range of disease. 8 During these decades, Indians in this region were not subject to other massively destructive forces. The main European colonial project in the Northwest was the fur trade. The exchange of furs for European goods occasionally led to disputes that sometimes became violent. Over time, the trade encouraged consumption of alcohol, prostitution, and destruction of game, all forces that damaged Indian health and community well-being. Compared to many other colonial enterprises, however, the fur trade was relatively benign and had positive short-term consequences for individuals and communities who were positioned to improve their material well-being and advance strategic objectives.

However, in the 1830s malaria—a new disease—repeatedly struck Chinooks and Kalapuyas along the lower Columbia and Willamette Rivers. According to anthropologist Robert Boyd, between 1830 and 1841 , the Native population in this area declined by as much as 90 percent. Unlike the 1696 smallpox epidemic in the Southeast, the 1830s malaria epidemics in the Northwest were only indirectly related to colonialism. Europeans, of course, introduced malaria (probably by way of Pacific trade networks), but the disease spread in an environment that European colonial projects had not yet disrupted. 9 More than many epidemics, then, this one fits the standard story of a massively devastating inadvertent virgin soil epidemic. As suggested earlier, however, an “unintended” population collapse may be irrelevant to an assessment of genocide. The crucial question is what happened next. One thing that happened is that Native populations did not recover or, to put it another way, were never allowed to recover. The reason was the advent of a new phase in the region’s colonization: the coming of American missionaries and settlers with an intention to remake Indian country in their own image. Although missionaries offered Christian conversion, as historian Gray Whaley has argued, they saw colonization as a progressive development that might allow for the salvation of a few individual Indians but would otherwise result in their general dispossession and extermination. Once settlers arrived, they forced Indians off their land, often squatting on Native land in advance of treaties, which eventually legalized dispossession. Indians sometimes forced treaty negotiators to make concessions and thereby gained certain advantages, but this does not mean that Indians “voluntarily” ceded their land. Instead, the on-the-ground facts of squatter occupation combined with severe material deprivation and the threat and actual use of violence constituted powerful means of coercion. Violence was especially pronounced in southwestern Oregon in the early 1850s when gold rush settlers waged a war of extermination against Indians, a clear-cut case of genocidal intent. For some, though, even this case might not qualify as genocide, since the federal government did not directly sanction settler actions (even though it did underwrite expansion into the region). In the same decade, settlers in the Puget Sound area went to war to subdue a Native resistance movement led by the Nisqually chief Leschi. In this situation, however, war did not escalate into one of total elimination, as a relatively small settler population lacked the inclination, impetus, and power to eliminate Indians. 10

New England and the Pequot War

If discussions of genocide in the Americas are initially hemispheric and give some attention to Spanish imperialism in the Caribbean and Mesoamerica, they usually soon look north to English colonial settlements in Virginia and New England. The actions of the Pilgrims and Puritans toward Indians, especially, are seen as constitutive and emblematic of a subsequent colonial and U.S. national history.

In 1616 , just prior to the arrival of the Pilgrims, an epidemic (variously identified as typhus, yellow fever, and leptospirosis) struck New England coastal Indian communities and raged for three years. Current estimates are that the epidemic killed up to 90 percent of the Native population in the Massachusetts Bay area. When the Pilgrims arrived in 1620 , they saw evidence of massive depopulation and attributed it to the “good hand of God . . . that he might make room for us there.” Another epidemic—this time smallpox—hit in 1633–1634 . 11 Discussions about genocide in New England have focused less on these epidemics than on the 1637 Pequot War when Puritan leaders authorized military action to punish Pequots for killing English traders. Supported by Naragansett and Mohegan allies, a colonial force set fire to a village of several hundred Pequots on the Mystic River and killed most of those who tried to escape. The colonists hunted down surviving Pequots, killing some and selling others into slavery, and then imposed a treaty that abolished the Pequot nation. 12

Scholars who hold that colonial actions against the Pequots do not constitute genocide argue that Pequot raiding genuinely threatened the colonists and so they were acting in self-defense; that the colonists’ actions at Mystic River were spontaneous; that the colonists’ enslavement of some Pequots shows that they did not intend to kill them all; and that the colonists did not intend to kill all Indians, as evidenced by their alliance with Naragansetts and Mohegans. Those who argue for the Pequot War as a case of genocide respond that the war’s ultimate cause was colonial expansion; that although colonists may have genuinely seen themselves as threatened, this was objectively untrue and ultimately an aspect of a worldview that assumed their cultural superiority over savage Indians; that although the colonists’ cultural chauvinism was not necessarily genocidal toward all Indians, in the case of Indians acting against colonial interests (like the Pequots), it could lead to a genocidal mentality; and that even though colonists did not kill all Pequots, their killing of a substantial number, including noncombatants, and their legal declaration of national extinction constitute genocide by many definitions. 13

To some extent, this debate involves reiteration of older arguments about whether colonists’ actions were legitimate or deplorable. 14 In the end, though, the debate about genocide and the Pequot War hinges on definitions. Under a narrow definition of genocide as requiring an intention to physically eliminate every single individual of an ethnic or racial group (even if the relevant group is limited to the Pequots and is not construed as all Indians), the Pequot War does not qualify. If, however, the definition is loosened to include cases of an intention to destroy a group by physically eliminating a substantial portion of its numbers, it probably does, since evidence is abundant of an exterminatory disposition prior to the Mystic River massacre. On the spectrum of available definitions of genocide, some of which assess impact, not intention, and some of which require only cultural destruction, this one is still fairly conservative since it retains the necessity for intent and massive killing.

For those critical of the Puritans, the Pequot War has the status of a national original sin, and so it is understandable that it would become the focus of intense debate about genocide. What decision is reached about this particular case, however, may not be of more than limited utility in resolving the broader question of genocide in American history. The definition chosen for evaluating the Pequot War, of course, would guide considerations of other instances of massive violence, but it would still be necessary to identify patterns of violence over time, locate them within a broader context of European Americans’ ideologies, policies, and actions, and relate them to other forces of destruction. Ultimately, this involves taking into account complex histories spanning at least three centuries. If conceived of as genocide, the Pequot War may nonetheless be an outlier; if the war is categorized as nongenocidal, it may still be true that colonizers’ subsequent actions were genocidal.

The United States and the Question of Genocide 15

Discussions of genocide in American history generally highlight a few other episodes that occurred prior to 1776 , such as King Philip’s War ( 1675–1678 ), the effort of British general Jeffrey Amherst to dispense smallpox-infected items to rebellious Indians in western Pennsylvania in 1763 , and the Paxton Boys’ slaughter of peaceful Conestogas that same year. But these events are generally treated as precursors to a more extended consideration of genocide in the history of the United States.

Writers who indict the United States and its citizens for genocide cite depopulation from disease, sometimes alleging its intentional infliction. The most frequent charge is that the army or fur traders distributed smallpox blankets to Indians on the upper Missouri River in 1837. 16 Though scholars have generally accepted evidence of an intention to engage in biological warfare for the Amherst case, they have not for the outbreak of smallpox on the upper Missouri. Overall, though, arguments for genocide tend to place more emphasis on massacres and forced removals than disease. Unlike the debate on the Pequot War, in which antagonists have staked out clear positions, there has been no point-by-point response to arguments that the United States systematically committed genocide. This is not because there is a consensus behind the “pro-genocide” position. In fact, although few scholars in the fields of American Indian and western U.S. history have systematically addressed the question of genocide, for many, perhaps most, scholars in these fields, an overarching indictment of genocide seems too extreme. Some might label specific events and cases, such as the Sand Creek massacre of 1864 or widespread settler violence against Indians during the California Gold Rush, as genocidal, but they would not see U.S. policies and settler actions as consistently so. Others would resist arguments for even limited genocide in U.S. history, citing definitions of genocide that would appear to require a federal government policy to physically destroy all (or most) Indians and observing that federal policies were intended to prevent physical disappearance by promoting assimilation. Some scholars would propose ethnic cleansing as an appropriate alternative to genocide. 17 Others might consider assimilation to be a form of cultural genocide but would insist on a strong distinction between this policy and physical elimination.

It is true enough that U.S. policymakers regularly expressed a preference for assimilation, but this does not mean that they rejected physical elimination under all circumstances. To fully comprehend U.S. policy toward Indians it is important to realize that policy was grounded in the nation’s fundamental commitment to territorial expansion. This commitment arose not just from the aggregation of individual settlers’ and speculators’ pursuit of wealth, but also from the premise—central to Americans’ republican political philosophy—that liberty depended on widespread ownership of private property. To build what Thomas Jefferson described as an “empire for liberty,” then, mandated obtaining Indian lands. How would this be done? Policymakers envisioned an ideal scenario in which Indians would willingly sign treaties ceding their lands in exchange for assistance in becoming civilized. But what if Indians refused to cede their lands? What if they rejected the “gift” of civilization? At that point, U.S. policymakers consistently stated, Indians would be subject to war—not the limited warfare that European legal theorists had agreed was acceptable between civilized nations but a war of extermination. In 1790 Secretary of War Henry Knox sanctioned such a war when he ordered the U.S. Army to “extirpate, utterly, if possible” a confederacy of Indians centered in Ohio that had rejected U.S. demands for a land cession. Facing similar opposition seventeen years later, President Jefferson sent word to Indians near Detroit that “if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi,” adding that should Indians go to war, “they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.” Genocidal war, then, was not just an option, it was necessary in situations of Native resistance. 18

War, 1776–1815

Because a significant number of Indians consistently rebuffed demands that they cede their lands and because Americans were determined to acquire them anyway, the United States constantly pursued war against Indians. Indeed, America was born fighting Indians. In the early phases of the Revolutionary War most Indian nations allied with Great Britain in large measure because they saw a new settler nation as an unprecedented threat to their lands. In 1779 the United States declared war on the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) to punish them for raids they had undertaken to roll back colonial settlement. The object, in George Washington’s words, was “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements.” When the Continental Army invaded, the Haudenosaunee decided not to risk the loss of life that would result from defending their towns and instead evacuated them. This allowed U.S. troops to burn dwellings and crops, but as Chief Old Smoke later explained, “we lost our Country it is true, but this was to secure our Women & Children.” 19 The number of Haudenosaunee directly killed by the American army was around two hundred (including some women and children), though as many as a thousand died from disease (primarily dysentery but also smallpox) and starvation in refugee camps. Out of a population of 9,000, the death toll from all causes was probably around 15 percent. Had the Haudenosaunee decided to defend their towns, it would almost certainly have been higher.

Many U.S. military operations against Indians had similar dynamics. In some instances, Indians were able to take advantage of their knowledge of terrain and the vulnerability of U.S. forces to achieve resounding victories. In 1791 a force of Miamis, Shawnees, Kickapoos, Weas, Delawares, Potawatomis, and others launched a surprise attack on an invading U.S. expedition and killed six hundred troops (over twice the number killed in the far better known Battle of the Little Bighorn). For the most part, though, Indians were unwilling to risk massive casualties (they were especially concerned to protect women and children) and so generally evacuated their towns, knowing they would be torched. All told, from the late 1770s through 1815, U.S. forces (including state militias) burned hundreds of Indian towns in New York, western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, western Virginia, the western Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and western Florida. In most instances, Indians’ intelligence-gathering systems alerted them to impending attacks and so U.S. forces found towns emptied of most inhabitants. Sometimes, however, U.S. forces managed to achieve surprise. When they did, they demonstrated little restraint. In an attack on the Indian town of Ouiatenon on the Wabash River in Indiana in 1791 , for example, a Kentucky militia fired on Indians in five canoes who were trying to escape. The official report stated that militiamen “destroyed all the savages with which five canoes were crowded,” without stating the sex or age of the Indians. Almost certainly, many were noncombatants. In another instance in 1782 a Pennsylvania militia surprised a group of about one hundred Christian Indians at Gnadenhütten in eastern Ohio. In a chilling example of what sociologist Michael Mann has termed the “dark side of democracy,” the militiamen voted on whether or not to kill their captives. When the majority vote was tallied, the militiamen proceeded to slaughter men, women, and children alike. 20

An exception to the general pattern of the reluctance of Indians to risk high casualties was in Alabama, where in the early 1810s the Red Stick Creeks mobilized against American expansion and Creeks they regarded as collaborating with it. When U.S. forces moved against them, Red Sticks repeatedly chose to defend their villages and newly established fortified positions, while at the same time attacking the Americans when they could. Over the course of several months, the Red Sticks sustained massive casualties, culminating in the loss of at least eight hundred in 1814 when Andrew Jackson, “determining to exterminate them,” as he later put it, breached their fortifications at Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River. This event, usually termed a battle, had some characteristics of a massacre. Though most of the Red Sticks killed were combatants, between two and three hundred were shot down while trying to escape by swimming across the Tallapoosa River. Official reports fail to identify them, observing only that “the river ran red with blood,” but undoubtedly many were women and children. 21

Taking stock of the period from 1776 to 1815 , it is clear that the United States never intended to put to death all Indians in the territory it claimed. If that is the standard for genocide, then the term does not apply. On the other hand, U.S. officials consistently demonstrated a willingness to use overwhelming violence against Indian nations it judged to be acting contrary to American interests (self-defined to be just). Most military operations did not result in wholesale slaughter, but this was less a measure of restraint than limited U.S. capacity, on the one hand, and strong Native capacity, on the other. As a general rule, U.S. military operations against Indian communities carried an inherent potential for wholesale violence against combatants and noncombatants or, in the language commonly used at the time, extermination. Military operations often did not result in massacre, sometimes because of their own weakness (inadequate supplies, poor intelligence, failure to avoid detection), more often because of the ability of Indians to avoid being slaughtered, sometimes by fighting back, sometimes by eluding U.S. forces. Over time, what made U.S. military operations effective was their relentlessness. Indians might repulse a single invasion of their country or, if that was impossible, abandon their towns and rebuild, but because the United States had a large and growing population, a high capacity to continuously mobilize young men to fight, and an unwavering commitment to expansion, the nation was able to wage endless war. Faced with the very real possibility that their people would eventually be destroyed utterly, leaders of Indian resistance eventually agreed to U.S. treaties requiring land cessions. The threat of genocide in this very strong sense of the term played a crucial role in allowing the United States to achieve its primary goal of taking Indian lands.

Removal, 1815–1840

After 1815, the United States intensified its efforts to expand. To do so, it adopted a policy, formally institutionalized through the Indian Removal Act of 1830, of moving all Indians living east of the Mississippi River to Indian Territory (the modern states of Kansas and Oklahoma). As measured by lives lost, Indian removal was far more destructive than the earlier period of war. Consider the three largest Indian nations east of the Mississippi, the Choctaws, Creeks, and Cherokees, each with approximately 20,000 people. During the removal process in the 1830s, approximately 2,000 Choctaws, 4,500 Creeks, and 5,000 Cherokees perished, mostly from intersecting factors of disease, starvation, exposure, and demoralization. Many hundreds died during the journey west, though the “trail of tears” metaphor obscures the fact that the majority of deaths occurred in internment camps while awaiting transportation west and in the first few years after relocation. The death toll for all three nations—close to 20 percent—is equivalent to 60 million for the current U.S. population. Smaller nations north of the Ohio also suffered significant losses through removal. A reported forty-three Potawatomis in a group of eight hundred died as they traveled from Indiana to Kansas, while sixty Wyandots, mostly young children, in a group of seven hundred died from disease shortly after their arrival in the West.

To secure Indians’ compliance to relocate, the federal government depended on threats. One was the withdrawal of federal protection, thus making Indians subject to state legal regimes that would leave them vulnerable to settler encroachment and eventual dispossession. U.S. officials also routinely informed Indians that the government would employ violence if they refused to emigrate, a threat that invoked an earlier history of war. When Indians did refuse, officials made good on their word, authorizing war against Sauks and Foxes in the Black Hawk War ( 1832 ) and Seminoles in the Second Seminole War ( 1836–1842 ). In the first instance, an American army had the opportunity to employ unrestrained violence when troops, assisted by Ho Chunk auxiliaries, intercepted Black Hawk’s band as they attempted to cross the Mississippi River from southern Wisconsin. The Americans fired indiscriminately, killing well over two hundred Indians, including noncombatants. In Florida, where the terrain and climate were unfavorable for military operations, the army had a much more difficult time finding, let alone surprising, Seminole settlements and so resorted to tactics such as seizing Seminoles during peace negotiations and sending them to prisons. Although no major massacre occurred during the Second Seminole War, military officers frequently called for the extermination of Seminoles, and so the absence of massacre was not due to a lack of disposition but to the absence of opportunity. Like other Indians in similar circumstances, Seminoles were often able to evade U.S. troops and occasionally inflict casualties on them.

Scholars have begun referring to Indian removal as ethnic cleansing, a term whose aptness seems incontestable. 22 But was it genocide? One response would be that since the United States did not intend to kill Indians (and presented removal as a humane alternative to extinction) and since the deaths that resulted from removal, insufficient to constitute genocide anyway, were the unintended consequence of unforeseen circumstances (bad weather, unanticipated epidemics), genocide does not apply. Another response would be that although removal was not intended to kill, the fact that it had that effect constitutes a limited genocide, especially since government officials had ample cause to know that forcing tens of thousands of people from their homes was likely to result in substantial loss of life, knowledge made more concrete over time as the actual process of removal regularly had this effect. At the very least, it could be said, genocide was present in the removal process in the sense that the policy’s implementation depended on the government’s threats to use unrestrained violence to secure compliance even though officials generally did not have to employ it.

California Gold Rush

The threat of massive violence was realized more readily in Gold Rush California. Even in this case, though, it was not presented as a first option. In 1851 California governor John McDougal warned Indians that if they did not submit to treaties on U.S. terms California would “make war . . . which must of necessity be one of extermination to many of the tribes.” Officials said much the same thing during the period of removal. The difference in California was that settlers and officials were much quicker to sanction massive violence, in part because impulses for extermination were stronger, in part because settlers pressured California Indians to take actions that fueled these impulses. During the 1850s, settlers enslaved California Indians (especially children), overran their lands, and formed militias to hunt them down. In northern California starving Yukis, deprived of game by settler activities, began killing settlers’ livestock. In one instance, a farmer who lost twenty hogs went to a nearby Yuki ranchería , where he and his comrades killed three on the spot and captured five others whom they hanged after a “trial.” Such actions led Yukis to attack settlers, and in turn, settlers escalated their violence. In 1859 militiamen calling themselves the Eel River Rangers went on a killing spree, targeting as many Indians as they could regardless of sex or age, several hundred in all. Although California state officials tried to distance themselves from the Eel River Rangers, as historian Benjamin Madley has demonstrated, California governor John B. Weller was aware of the militia’s activities and provided official support for it. As well, the state legislature and U.S. Congress appropriated money to support this and other militia campaigns, in some instances with knowledge of militia actions. 23

The American takeover of California caused an indigenous population decline that was sharper than in any other time or place in U.S. history. In 1848 the California Indian population was probably about 150,000. By 1860, it was only 30,000. Direct killing was a significant factor and may have explained the majority of deaths for some nations, such as the Yukis and Yanas, but overall more people died from disease and malnutrition as they were subjected to coerced labor, land loss, destruction of game, and reservation confinement. 24 During this period, it seems that it was more the constant presence of multiple diseases than the sudden appearance of a single epidemic that devastated Indian communities, since communities were unable to rebuild their populations (as they were sometimes able to do after a single epidemic). Although settlers and the public officials they elected did not devise schemes for collecting pathogens and introducing them into Indians’ bodies, to describe deaths from disease during the California Gold Rush as inadvertent seems narrowly legalistic in that disease was so clearly linked to a colonial project that resulted in multiple forces of destruction consistently interacting over many years.

Because the Indian population of California fell so precipitously and because extreme violence was integral to the process, many scholars not inclined to see genocide as pervasive in U.S. history have said that what happened in California is exceptional and does qualify. 25 Even in this case, however, there is some dissent. One argument is that genocide does not apply since disease was the primary factor in the depopulation of California Indians; another is that mass violence was undertaken primarily by settlers and that the state and federal governments did not establish a policy of physically killing all Indians. 26 As with other situations, differences of opinion rest on disagreements about definitions. Under a strict definition requiring a federal or state government intention to kill all California Indians and an outcome in which the majority of deaths were from direct killing, genocide does not seem applicable. Under a less strict, though still fairly conservative, definition requiring only settler intention to destroy a substantial portion of California Indians using a variety of means ranging from dispossession to systematic killing, genocide seems apt, especially since the demographic outcome in California was so catastrophic. The fact that the state government promoted aggressive settlement, undermined Indian land rights, and supported Indian-hunting militias strengthens the case. The role of the federal government is more complicated. On the one hand, federal officials, including army personnel, sometimes took action to protect Indian lands and prevent extreme settler violence. On the other hand, the army did engage in punitive massacre in 1850 when it slaughtered sixty or more Pomos in the Bloody Island Massacre. Congress failed to ratify treaties that might have provided Indians with a buffer against destructive settler actions; Congress also funded militia activity.

The Indian Wars

Any discussion of genocide must, of course, eventually consider the so-called Indian Wars, the term commonly used for U.S. Army campaigns to subjugate Indian nations of the American West beginning in the 1860s. In an older historiography, key events in this history were narrated as battles. It is now more common for scholars to refer to these events as massacres. This is especially so of a Colorado territorial militia’s slaughter of Cheyennes at Sand Creek ( 1864 ) and the army’s slaughter of Shoshones at Bear River ( 1863 ), Blackfeet on the Marias River ( 1870 ), and Lakotas at Wounded Knee ( 1890 ). Some scholars have begun referring to these events as “genocidal massacres,” defined as the annihilation of a portion of a larger group, sometimes to provide a lesson to the larger group. 27

As they had done in earlier periods in U.S. history, after the Civil War federal officials expressed a preference for Indians to cede their lands in exchange for assistance toward eventual assimilation. Policymakers presented assimilation as a benevolent alternative to physical extinction, in this way providing a way for later historians to acquit them of genocidal intentions. But what if Indians rejected the gift of Western civilization? Or what if they attacked or raided settlers who trespassed on their land and damaged its resources? In that case, both civilian and military officials agreed, Indians would be legitimately subject to aggressive warfare.

U.S. military operations against Indians did not intend to kill every single person in their path, though they did intend to inflict massive, catastrophic violence to secure compliance. Since they usually targeted communities rather than armies, these operations inherently carried the potential for massacre. In many instances, U.S. forces were unable to achieve their objectives, in large measure because of indigenous capabilities. Indian fighting forces were highly skilled and, in some cases, most famously at the Little Big Horn ( 1876 ), were able to inflict massive damage on invaders. Indians relied on intelligence-gathering systems to prevent surprise attacks and on established procedures for the evacuation and protection of noncombatants. In this way, they avoided many potential massacres. In some cases, however, troops were able to achieve surprise or break through Indian defenses, and, when they did, they showed little restraint, killing women, children, and older men. In some instances, troops or militiamen attacked Indians who had not actually engaged in resistance or raiding, as in the Sand Creek and the Marias massacres, thus revealing a disposition to regard all Indians as deserving of extermination. Army officers, too, sometimes expressed genocidal sentiments, most famously in Phil Sheridan’s statement, “the only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” 28 Although historians have often treated such statements as isolated expressions, they revealed a discourse of extermination that was in continual circulation among settlers, military personnel, and political leaders and that was periodically activated in what might be described as “genocidal moments.” 29

Violence, of course, was not the only destructive force operating against Indian communities in the West. The U.S. colonization of the West led to land loss, the decimation of the bison and other game, and increased exposure to disease and alcohol. For many western Indian nations, population losses were severe. The Comanches, for example, had a population of perhaps 40,000 in the mid-1700s. In the 1780s, smallpox struck them for the first time and reduced their population to 20,000 to 30,000, where it stabilized into the 1840s. Over the next few decades Comanches were repeatedly hit by epidemics, but because of generally favorable economic conditions, they were able to recover. Sometime around the mid-1840s, however, as bison populations declined, leading to the collapse of the Comanche economy, so did the Comanche population. By 1870 the Comanches numbered between 4,000 and 5,000. A portion of this decline can be explained by war with Texas militias and the U.S. Army, though Comanches also suffered losses in war with other Indian nations as they competed for increasingly scarce resources. But the main causes of depopulation were starvation and disease (aggravated by malnutrition). Between 1870 and 1875, the Comanche population fell even farther—to a mere 1,500. During these years, the army conducted military operations against Comanches to force them onto a reservation in western Oklahoma, killing a few hundred. By far the largest number of deaths during this period continued to be related to material deprivation and social stress. 30

An arithmetic approach to the question of genocide in the Comanche case might encourage a conclusion that the United States did not commit genocide against the Comanches since the bulk of the long-term decline from 40,000 to 1,500 occurred before American settler or governmental actions had much direct impact on the Comanches. By this logic, however, it would be impossible for genocide to occur after a certain level of depopulation was reached, no matter what happened after that point (even if it involved successfully rounding up every single member of the group and executing them all)—an absurd proposition. More plausibly, an arithmetic approach applied to the last phase of Comanche depopulation ( 1870–1874 ) might argue against genocide since the majority of deaths were not from direct killing. At this point, we face the familiar problem of deciding whether cases involving multiple, intersecting forces of destruction related to colonial action qualify as genocide or not. Some scholars, such as Jacki Thompson Rand, who in writing about the Kiowas, argues that the United States engaged in a “genocidal attack on Native institutions, cultures, and economies,” would say yes, though my sense is that most specialists who work on the history of western Indians in the late nineteenth century are likely to disagree. 31

Beyond this is the larger question of the extent to which U.S. actions during the period of the Indian wars should be considered as consistently genocidal, partially genocidal, rarely genocidal, or never genocidal. As in many other times and places in the Americas, this is a challenging question, one that depends on a careful evaluation of the histories of multiple Indian nations. These histories varied considerably. Some western nations, such as the Poncas, decided not to resist U.S. expansion and did not face American violence, though they nonetheless lost their economic and political independence and were subject to forced removal and confinement, processes that resulted in significant population loss. Analyzing these multiple histories requires taking into account real differences but without losing sight of a common context of settler colonialism.

Reservations and the Twentieth Century

By the late nineteenth century, Indian nations were no longer pursuing policies involving militant resistance and instead were attempting to adjust to the challenges of living under U.S. authority on reservations. To assert authority over Indians on reservations, civilian officials developed Native police forces and relied on the presence of troops at western posts. Usually, arrests and the threat of violence were sufficient to allow officials to achieve minimal control. In the late 1880s, however, Indians on dozens of reservations participated in a religion-based political movement known as the Ghost Dance. Ghost Dancers hoped to achieve the reversal of colonialism not through violent resistance but through an apocalyptic event that would destroy or remove all or most European Americans from what had recently been Indian country. To suppress the Ghost Dance, the federal government authorized military force against the Lakotas, an action that led to the Wounded Knee massacre, sometimes regarded as the “last” event in the Indian wars, but more appropriately considered an instance of the violent suppression of an anti-colonial movement. 32 Beyond this instance of massive violence and many instances of small-scale violence by settlers, poverty and disease constituted the greatest threat to Indians on reservations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Data are unavailable for all reservations, but existing information indicates that the majority of Indian nations lost population in the late nineteenth century. The Crows, for example, had allied with the United States in the 1860s as a strategy for self-protection, and although they did not endure direct violence, they were nonetheless affected by other forces of destruction. By the 1880s, the Crows had been forced to cede much of their land and had lost access to game and other resources that had once provided economic independence. Their population, at least 3,000 in 1880 , fell to 2,500 in 1887 and 1,900 in 1903 , a decline of over a third in two decades. The Crow population loss was probably greater than average, though the pattern was common enough to result in an overall decline of the Indian population within the United States to a low point (often referred to as “the nadir”) of about 250,000 sometime around 1900. 33

Since then, the population of American Indians has steadily increased. This trend is undoubtedly related to transitions in the needs of settler colonialism, but it is also due to the efforts of Native individuals, families, and nations to rebuild their communities. 34 Despite overall demographic growth, however, it remains possible to characterize at least some U.S. actions toward Indians during the twentieth century as genocidal. Some writers have argued that government policies to force Indians to assimilate fall under the categories of “cultural genocide” or “ethnocide.” 35 The explicit goal of off-reservation boarding schools, articulated in the infamous words of Carlisle Indian School founder Richard Henry Pratt—“to kill the Indian and save the man” 36 —certainly supports these labels. Boarding schools have also been characterized as institutions of outright genocide on the grounds that the mortality rate (from disease) within boarding schools was very high and that boarding schools took children from Native groups and in this way prevented births within them. 37 While most scholars who have studied boarding schools regard them as oppressive institutions and would likely accept cultural genocide as an apt term for their objectives, they have been more interested in documenting students’ and parents’ perspectives and agency rather than in arguing that the institutions were designed to achieve physical genocide or that they (partially) accomplished it. 38 Other federal policies and societal actions have also been described as genocidal. They include, in particular, sexual violence against indigenous women, including forced sterilizations during the 1960s and 1970, as well as the mandating of “blood quantum” as a criterion for tribal membership, which, because of intermarriage between Indians and non-Indians over time, inevitably operates to achieve “statistical extermination.” 39

Discussion of the Literature

The term genocide was coined by the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe . Lemkin’s definition was fairly broad:

[G]enocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. 40

Lemkin applied the term to a wide range of cases including many involving European colonial projects in Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and the Americas. A recent investigation of an unfinished manuscript for a global history of genocide Lemkin was writing in the late 1940s and early 1950s reveals an expansive view of what Lemkin termed a “Spanish colonial genocide.” He never began work on a projected chapter on “The Indians of North America,” though his notes indicate that he was researching Indian removal, treaties, the California gold rush, and the Plains wars. 41

After coining the term, Lemkin worked tirelessly to persuade the United Nations (UN) to criminalize genocide. In 1948 the UN adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such:

Killing members of the group;

Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

Deliberately inflicting 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.

In many ways, the UN convention definition is quite broad, identifying multiple forces of destruction and requiring only partial destruction of a group. The specification of “intent,” however, has sometimes had a restrictive effect, both in international jurisprudence and in historiography, especially if construed to be limited to state actors.

As the field of genocide studies developed in the 1970s and 1980s, scholars proposed multiple definitions for genocide. Some of these expand the term to include political groups; some place greater emphasis on mass killing than in the UN convention; some stipulate a threshold of at least a “substantial” loss of population; others loosen the criteria for intention with formulations such as “sustained purposeful action” that may have “indirect” consequences. 42 More recently, genocide scholars working on indigenous people in settler colonial situations (especially in Australia) have argued for replacing an “intentionalist” with a “structuralist” approach, and they have proposed concepts such as “society-led” (instead of “state-led”) genocides, “relations of genocide,” and a “logic of elimination” inherent to settler colonialism. 43

As applied to indigenous people of North America, the term genocide was not used much, if at all, until the mid-1970s. During the classic period of modern Indian militancy from the occupation of Alcatraz in 1969 to Wounded Knee in 1973 , activists sought to educate the American public about an ongoing history of U.S. oppression, but they did this by calling attention to massacres, broken treaties, and racism and rarely if ever invoked the language of genocide. An early use of genocide can be found in the 1974 “Declaration of Continuing Independence” produced by the First International Indian Treaty Council, which in addition to themes of sovereignty and broken treaties, noted that there is “only one color of Mankind in the world who are not represented in the United Nations; that is the indigenous Redman of the Western Hemisphere” and recognized that this absence “comes from the genocidal policies of the colonial power of the United States.” 44 Not long after, a few scholars began to use the term. Jack Norton’s When Our Worlds Cried: Genocide in Northwestern California , published in 1979 , sought to expose “the genocide committed against the aboriginal peoples of Northwestern California” and noted that several tribes “were annihilated as a people and a culture in the ‘final solution’ to the Indian problem.” 45

More fully developed arguments for the pervasiveness of genocide emerged at the time of the Columbus quincentenary. Two works, David E. Stannard’s American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World and Ward Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present made the case, as their titles indicate, by arguing for moral and analytical equivalences with the Holocaust, going so far as to accuse those who disagreed with them as deniers. For the most part, historians ignored these works and their arguments for genocide’s pervasiveness; when they did engage them, they proceeded from the assumption that the arguments were sufficiently flimsy to require only a few pages to dispatch. 46

In the two decades since the quincentenary, the concept of genocide has had only a modest impact on the writing of American Indian history. As an indication of the status of genocide in the academic field of American Indian history, it is noteworthy that the authoritative Blackwell Companion to American Indian History , a hefty volume containing twenty-five chapters, does not contain a chapter on genocide, nor are Stannard’s or Churchill’s books included in its bibliography, which with 487 entries can hardly be accused of not being comprehensive. 47

To some extent, the relative absence of genocide in much of the scholarship in American Indian history can be explained by the priority of other agendas, especially the often articulated importance of recovering the agency of Native people against an earlier historiography that supposedly portrayed them simply as victims. Indeed, some Native scholars have cautioned that writing indigenous histories as genocide risks reinforcing pernicious ideologies of Indians as vanishing and degraded. 48 That said, indications points to an increasing engagement with genocide and related issues by scholars of American Indian history. One sign is a growing number of studies that use the term genocide , most often in passing as descriptions of particular impulses, actions, or effects, 49 though sometimes as categories of analysis. 50 In addition, some specialists in American Indian history have undertaken work in genocide studies 51 and settler colonial studies, the latter a field with some overlap with genocide studies as it is concerned to elaborate settler colonialism’s demand that indigenous people “go away” through removal, assimilation, or physical elimination. 52 At the same time, scholars in genocide studies, most of whom do not specialize in American Indian history, are increasingly turning to North America as they expand the range of cases to be investigated and compared. 53 Taken together, these points of engagement suggest the possibility of a new, post-quincentenary approach to the question of genocide in the Americas. Such an approach would take the question seriously but without the necessity of providing a predetermined answer either to the general question or to the multitude of specific cases encompassed by it. Such an approach would also consider Native agency, including resistance and other survival strategies, as a crucial variable.

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Yes, native americans were the victims of genocide.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her latest book is An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States .

Mass Grave at Wounded Knee

This paper, written under the title, “U.S. Settler-Colonialism and Genocide Policies,” was delivered at the Organization of American Historians 2015 Annual Meeting in St. Louis, MO on April 18, 2015.

US policies and actions related to Indigenous peoples, though often termed “racist” or “discriminatory,” are rarely depicted as what they are: classic cases of imperialism and a particular form of colonialism—settler colonialism. As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe writes, “The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life—or, at least, land is necessary for life.” i The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism.

In 1801, President Jefferson aptly described the new settler state’s intentions for horizontal and vertical continental expansion, stating: “However our present interests may restrain us within our own limits, it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar form by similar laws.” This vision of manifest destiny found form a few years later in the Monroe Doctrine, signaling the intention of annexing or dominating former Spanish colonial territories in the Americas and the Pacific, which would be put into practice during the rest of the century.

The form of colonialism that the Indigenous peoples of North America have experienced was modern from the beginning: the expansion of European corporations, backed by government armies, into foreign areas, with subsequent expropriation of lands and resources. Settler colonialism requires a genocidal policy. Native nations and communities, while struggling to maintain fundamental values and collectivity, have from the beginning resisted modern colonialism using both defensive and offensive techniques, including the modern forms of armed resistance of national liberation movements and what now is called terrorism. In every instance they have fought and continue to fight for survival as peoples. The objective of US authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples—not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide.

The objective of US colonialist authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples—not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide as contrasted with premodern instances of extreme violence that did not have the goal of extinction. The United States as a socioeconomic and political entity is a result of this centuries-long and ongoing colonial process. Modern Indigenous nations and communities are societies formed by their resistance to colonialism, through which they have carried their practices and histories. It is breathtaking, but no miracle, that they have survived as peoples.

Settler-colonialism requires violence or the threat of violence to attain its goals, which then forms the foundation of the United States’ system. People do not hand over their land, resources, children, and futures without a fight, and that fight is met with violence. In employing the force necessary to accomplish its expansionist goals, a colonizing regime institutionalizes violence. The notion that settler-indigenous conflict is an inevitable product of cultural differences and misunderstandings, or that violence was committed equally by the colonized and the colonizer, blurs the nature of the historical processes. Euro-American colonialism, an aspect of the capitalist economic globalization, had from its beginnings a genocidal tendency.

So, what constitutes genocide? My colleague on the panel, Gary Clayton Anderson, in his recent book, “Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian,” argues: “Genocide will never become a widely accepted characterization for what happened in North America, because large numbers of Indians survived and because policies of mass murder on a scale similar to events in central Europe, Cambodia, or Rwanda were never implemented.” ii There are fatal errors in this assessment.

The term “genocide” was coined following the Shoah, or Holocaust, and its prohibition was enshrined in the United Nations convention presented in 1948 and adopted in 1951: the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The convention is not retroactive but is applicable to US-Indigenous relations since 1988, when the US Senate ratified it. The genocide convention is an essential tool for historical analysis of the effects of colonialism in any era, and particularly in US history.

In the convention, any one of five acts is considered genocide if “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”:

(a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. iii

The followings acts are punishable:

(a) Genocide; (b) Conspiracy to commit genocide; (c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide; (d) Attempt to commit genocide; (e) Complicity in genocide.

The term “genocide” is often incorrectly used, such as in Dr. Anderson’s assessment, to describe extreme examples of mass murder, the death of vast numbers of people, as, for instance in Cambodia. What took place in Cambodia was horrific, but it does not fall under the terms of the Genocide Convention, as the Convention specifically refers to a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, with individuals within that group targeted by a government or its agents because they are members of the group or by attacking the underpinnings of the group’s existence as a group being met with the intent to destroy that group in whole or in part. The Cambodian government committed crimes against humanity, but not genocide. Genocide is not an act simply worse than anything else, rather a specific kind of act. The term, “ethnic cleansing,” is a descriptive term created by humanitarian interventionists to describe what was said to be happening in the 1990s wars among the republics of Yugoslavia. It is a descriptive term, not a term of international humanitarian law.

Although clearly the Holocaust was the most extreme of all genocides, the bar set by the Nazis is not the bar required to be considered genocide. The title of the Genocide convention is the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” so the law is about preventing genocide by identifying the elements of government policy, rather than only punishment after the fact. Most importantly, genocide does not have to be complete to be considered genocide.

US history, as well as inherited Indigenous trauma, cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against Indigenous peoples. From the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the twentieth century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, forced removal of Native American children to military-like boarding schools, allotment, and a policy of termination.

Within the logic of settler-colonialism, genocide was the inherent overall policy of the United States from its founding, but there are also specific documented policies of genocide on the part of US administrations that can be identified in at least four distinct periods: the Jacksonian era of forced removal; the California gold rush in Northern California; during the Civil War and in the post Civil War era of the so-called Indian Wars in the Southwest and the Great Plains; and the 1950s termination period; additionally, there is the overlapping period of compulsory boarding schools, 1870s to 1960s. The Carlisle boarding school, founded by US Army officer Richard Henry Pratt in 1879, became a model for others established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Pratt said in a speech in 1892, "A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man."

Cases of genocide carried out as policy may be found in historical documents as well as in the oral histories of Indigenous communities. An example from 1873 is typical, with General William T. Sherman writing, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children . . . during an assault, the soldiers can not pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.” iv

The so-called “Indian Wars” technically ended around 1880, although the Wounded Knee massacre occurred a decade later. Clearly an act with genocidal intent, it is still officially considered a “battle” in the annals of US military genealogy. Congressional Medals of Honor were bestowed on twenty of the soldiers involved. A monument was built at Fort Riley, Kansas, to honor the soldiers killed by friendly fire. A battle streamer was created to honor the event and added to other streamers that are displayed at the Pentagon, West Point, and army bases throughout the world. L. Frank Baum, a Dakota Territory settler later famous for writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , edited the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer at the time . Five days after the sickening event at Wounded Knee, on January 3, 1891, he wrote, “The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one or more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”

Whether 1880 or 1890, most of the collective land base that Native Nations secured through hard fought for treaties made with the United States was lost after that date.

After the end of the Indian Wars, came allotment, another policy of genocide of Native nations as nations, as peoples, the dissolution of the group. Taking the Sioux Nation as an example, even before the Dawes Allotment Act of 1884 was implemented, and with the Black Hills already illegally confiscated by the federal government, a government commission arrived in Sioux territory from Washington, DC, in 1888 with a proposal to reduce the Sioux Nation to six small reservations, a scheme that would leave nine million acres open for Euro-American settlement. The commission found it impossible to obtain signatures of the required three-fourths of the nation as required under the 1868 treaty, and so returned to Washington with a recommendation that the government ignore the treaty and take the land without Sioux consent. The only means to accomplish that goal was legislation, Congress having relieved the government of the obligation to negotiate a treaty. Congress commissioned General George Crook to head a delegation to try again, this time with an offer of $1.50 per acre. In a series of manipulations and dealings with leaders whose people were now starving, the commission garnered the needed signatures. The great Sioux Nation was broken into small islands soon surrounded on all sides by European immigrants, with much of the reservation land a checkerboard with settlers on allotments or leased land. v Creating these isolated reservations broke the historical relationships between clans and communities of the Sioux Nation and opened areas where Europeans settled. It also allowed the Bureau of Indian Affairs to exercise tighter control, buttressed by the bureau’s boarding school system. The Sun Dance, the annual ceremony that had brought Sioux together and reinforced national unity, was outlawed, along with other religious ceremonies. Despite the Sioux people’s weak position under late-nineteenth-century colonial domination, they managed to begin building a modest cattle-ranching business to replace their former bison-hunting economy. In 1903, the US Supreme Court ruled, in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock , that a March 3, 1871, appropriations rider was constitutional and that Congress had “plenary” power to manage Indian property. The Office of Indian Affairs could thus dispose of Indian lands and resources regardless of the terms of previous treaty provisions. Legislation followed that opened the reservations to settlement through leasing and even sale of allotments taken out of trust. Nearly all prime grazing lands came to be occupied by non-Indian ranchers by the 1920s.

By the time of the New Deal–Collier era and nullification of Indian land allotment under the Indian Reorganization Act, non-Indians outnumbered Indians on the Sioux reservations three to one. However, “tribal governments” imposed in the wake of the Indian Reorganization Act proved particularly harmful and divisive for the Sioux.” vi Concerning this measure, the late Mathew King, elder traditional historian of the Oglala Sioux (Pine Ridge), observed: “The Bureau of Indian Affairs drew up the constitution and by-laws of this organization with the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. This was the introduction of home rule. . . . The traditional people still hang on to their Treaty, for we are a sovereign nation. We have our own government.” vii “Home rule,” or neocolonialism, proved a short-lived policy, however, for in the early 1950s the United States developed its termination policy, with legislation ordering gradual eradication of every reservation and even the tribal governments. viii At the time of termination and relocation, per capita annual income on the Sioux reservations stood at $355, while that in nearby South Dakota towns was $2,500. Despite these circumstances, in pursuing its termination policy, the Bureau of Indian Affairs advocated the reduction of services and introduced its program to relocate Indians to urban industrial centers, with a high percentage of Sioux moving to San Francisco and Denver in search of jobs. ix

The situations of other Indigenous Nations were similar.

Pawnee Attorney Walter R. Echo-Hawk writes:

In 1881, Indian landholdings in the United States had plummeted to 156 million acres. By 1934, only about 50 million acres remained (an area the size of Idaho and Washington) as a result of the General Allotment Act of 1887. During World War II, the government took 500,000 more acres for military use. Over one hundred tribes, bands, and Rancherias relinquished their lands under various acts of Congress during the termination era of the 1950s. By 1955, the indigenous land base had shrunk to just 2.3 percent of its [size at the end of the Indian wars] . x

According to the current consensus among historians, the wholesale transfer of land from Indigenous to Euro-American hands that occurred in the Americas after 1492 is due less to British and US American invasion, warfare, refugee conditions, and genocidal policies in North America than to the bacteria that the invaders unwittingly brought with them. Historian Colin Calloway is among the proponents of this theory writing, “Epidemic diseases would have caused massive depopulation in the Americas whether brought by European invaders or brought home by Native American traders.” xi Such an absolutist assertion renders any other fate for the Indigenous peoples improbable. This is what anthropologist Michael Wilcox has dubbed “the terminal narrative.” Professor Calloway is a careful and widely respected historian of Indigenous North America, but his conclusion articulates a default assumption. The thinking behind the assumption is both ahistorical and illogical in that Europe itself lost a third to one-half of its population to infectious disease during medieval pandemics. The principle reason the consensus view is wrong and ahistorical is that it erases the effects of settler colonialism with its antecedents in the Spanish “Reconquest” and the English conquest of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. By the time Spain, Portugal, and Britain arrived to colonize the Americas, their methods of eradicating peoples or forcing them into dependency and servitude were ingrained, streamlined, and effective.

Whatever disagreement may exist about the size of precolonial Indigenous populations, no one doubts that a rapid demographic decline occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its timing from region to region depending on when conquest and colonization began. Nearly all the population areas of the Americas were reduced by 90 percent following the onset of colonizing projects, decreasing the targeted Indigenous populations of the Americas from a one hundred million to ten million. Commonly referred to as the most extreme demographic disaster—framed as natural—in human history, it was rarely called genocide until the rise of Indigenous movements in the mid-twentieth century forged new questions.

US scholar Benjamin Keen acknowledges that historians “accept uncritically a fatalistic ‘epidemic plus lack of acquired immunity’ explanation for the shrinkage of Indian populations, without sufficient attention to the socioeconomic factors . . . which predisposed the natives to succumb to even slight infections.” xii Other scholars agree. Geographer William M. Denevan, while not ignoring the existence of widespread epidemic diseases, has emphasized the role of warfare, which reinforced the lethal impact of disease. There were military engagements directly between European and Indigenous nations, but many more saw European powers pitting one Indigenous nation against another or factions within nations, with European allies aiding one or both sides, as was the case in the colonization of the peoples of Ireland, Africa and Asia, and was also a factor in the Holocaust. Other killers cited by Denevan are overwork in mines, frequent outright butchery, malnutrition and starvation resulting from the breakdown of Indigenous trade networks, subsistence food production and loss of land, loss of will to live or reproduce (and thus suicide, abortion, and infanticide), and deportation and enslavement. xiii Anthropologist Henry Dobyns has pointed to the interruption of Indigenous peoples’ trade networks. When colonizing powers seized Indigenous trade routes, the ensuing acute shortages, including food products, weakened populations and forced them into dependency on the colonizers, with European manufactured goods replacing Indigenous ones. Dobyns has estimated that all Indigenous groups suffered serious food shortages one year in four. In these circumstances, the introduction and promotion of alcohol proved addictive and deadly, adding to the breakdown of social order and responsibility. xiv These realities render the myth of “lack of immunity,” including to alcohol, pernicious.

Historian Woodrow Wilson Borah focused on the broader arena of European colonization, which also brought severely reduced populations in the Pacific Islands, Australia, Western Central America, and West Africa. xv Sherburne Cook—associated with Borah in the revisionist Berkeley School, as it was called—studied the attempted destruction of the California Indians. Cook estimated 2,245 deaths among peoples in Northern California—the Wintu, Maidu, Miwak, Omo, Wappo, and Yokuts nations—in late eighteenth-century armed conflicts with the Spanish while some 5,000 died from disease and another 4,000 were relocated to missions. Among the same people in the second half of the nineteenth century, US armed forces killed 4,000, and disease killed another 6,000. Between 1852 and 1867, US citizens kidnapped 4,000 Indian children from these groups in California. Disruption of Indigenous social structures under these conditions and dire economic necessity forced many of the women into prostitution in goldfield camps, further wrecking what vestiges of family life remained in these matriarchal societies.

Historians and others who deny genocide emphasize population attrition by disease, weakening Indigenous peoples ability to resist. In doing so they refuse to accept that the colonization of America was genocidal by plan, not simply the tragic fate of populations lacking immunity to disease. If disease could have done the job, it is not clear why the United States found it necessary to carry out unrelenting wars against Indigenous communities in order to gain every inch of land they took from them—along with the prior period of British colonization, nearly three hundred years of eliminationist warfare.

In the case of the Jewish Holocaust, no one denies that more Jews died of starvation, overwork, and disease under Nazi incarceration than died in gas ovens or murdered by other means, yet the acts of creating and maintaining the conditions that led to those deaths clearly constitute genocide. And no one recites the terminal narrative associated with Native Americans, or Armenians, or Bosnian.

Not all of the acts iterated in the genocide convention are required to exist to constitute genocide; any one of them suffices. In cases of United States genocidal policies and actions, each of the five requirements can be seen.

First, Killing members of the group: The genocide convention does not specify that large numbers of people must be killed in order to constitute genocide, rather that members of the group are killed because they are members of the group. Assessing a situation in terms of preventing genocide, this kind of killing is a marker for intervention.

Second, Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group: such as starvation, the control of food supply and withholding food as punishment or as reward for compliance, for instance, in signing confiscatory treaties. As military historian John Grenier points out in his First Way of War :

For the first 200 years of our military heritage, then, Americans depended on arts of war that contemporary professional soldiers supposedly abhorred: razing and destroying enemy villages and fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlements for captives; intimidating and brutalizing enemy noncombatants; and assassinating enemy leaders. . . . In the frontier wars between 1607 and 1814, Americans forged two elements—unlimited war and irregular war—into their first way of war. xvii

Grenier argues that not only did this way of war continue throughout the 19th century in wars against the Indigenous nations, but continued in the 20th century and currently in counterinsurgent wars against peoples in Latin America, the Caribbean and Pacific, Southeast Asia, Middle and Western Asia and Africa.

Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part: Forced removal of all the Indigenous nations east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory during the Jackson administration was a calculated policy intent on destroying those peoples ties to their original lands, as well as declaring Native people who did not remove to no longer be Muskogee, Sauk, Kickapoo, Choctaw, destroying the existence of up to half of each nation removed. Mandatory boarding schools, Allotment and Termination—all official government policies--also fall under this category of the crime of genocide. The forced removal and four year incarceration of the Navajo people resulted in the death of half their population.

Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group: Famously, during the Termination Era, the US government administrated Indian Health Service made the top medical priority the sterilization of Indigenous women. In 1974, an independent study by one the few Native American physicians, Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri, Choctaw/Cherokee, found that one in four Native women had been sterilized without her consent. Pnkerton-Uri’s research indicated that the Indian Health Service had “singled out full-blooded Indian women for sterilization procedures.” At first denied by the Indian Health Service, two years later, a study by the U.S. General Accounting Office found that 4 of the 12 Indian Health Service regions sterilized 3,406 Native women without their permission between 1973 and 1976. The GAO found that 36 women under age 21 had been forcibly sterilized during this period despite a court-ordered moratorium on sterilizations of women younger than 21.

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group: Various governmental entities, mostly municipalities, counties, and states, routinely removed Native children from their families and put them up for adoption. In the Native resistance movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the demand to put a stop to the practice was codified in the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. However, the burden of enforcing the legislation lay with Tribal Government, but the legislation provided no financial resources for Native governments to establish infrastructure to retrieve children from the adoption industry, in which Indian babies were high in demand. Despite these barriers to enforcement, the worst abuses had been curbed over the following three decades. But, on June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling drafted by Justice Samuel Alito, used provisions of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) to say that a child, widely known as Baby Veronica, did not have to live with her biological Cherokee father. The high court’s decision paved the way for Matt and Melanie Capobianco, the adoptive parents, to ask the South Carolina Courts to have the child returned to them. The court gutted the purpose and intent of the Indian Child Welfare Act, missing the concept behind the ICWA, the protection of cultural resource and treasure that are Native children; it’s not about protecting so-called traditional or nuclear families. It’s about recognizing the prevalence of extended families and culture. xviii

So, why does the Genocide Convention matter? Native nations are still here and still vulnerable to genocidal policy. This isn’t just history that predates the 1948 Genocide Convention. But, the history is important and needs to be widely aired, included in public school texts and public service announcements. The Doctrine of Discovery is still law of the land. From the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, most of the non-European world was colonized under the Doctrine of Discovery, one of the first principles of international law Christian European monarchies promulgated to legitimize investigating, mapping, and claiming lands belonging to peoples outside Europe. It originated in a papal bull issued in 1455 that permitted the Portuguese monarchy to seize West Africa. Following Columbus’s infamous exploratory voyage in 1492, sponsored by the king and queen of the infant Spanish state, another papal bull extended similar permission to Spain. Disputes between the Portuguese and Spanish monarchies led to the papal-initiated Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which, besides dividing the globe equally between the two Iberian empires, clarified that only non-Christian lands fell under the discovery doctrine. xix This doctrine on which all European states relied thus originated with the arbitrary and unilateral establishment of the Iberian monarchies’ exclusive rights under Christian canon law to colonize foreign peoples, and this right was later seized by other European monarchical colonizing projects. The French Republic used this legalistic instrument for its nineteenth- and twentieth-century settler colonialist projects, as did the newly independent United States when it continued the colonization of North America begun by the British.

In 1792, not long after the US founding, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson claimed that the Doctrine of Discovery developed by European states was international law applicable to the new US government as well. In 1823 the US Supreme Court issued its decision in Johnson v. McIntosh. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Marshall held that the Doctrine of Discovery had been an established principle of European law and of English law in effect in Britain’s North American colonies and was also the law of the United States. The Court defined the exclusive property rights that a European country acquired by dint of discovery: “Discovery gave title to the government, by whose subjects, or by whose authority, it was made, against all other European governments, which title might be consummated by possession.” Therefore, European and Euro-American “discoverers” had gained real-property rights in the lands of Indigenous peoples by merely planting a flag. Indigenous rights were, in the Court’s words, “in no instance, entirely disregarded; but were necessarily, to a considerable extent, impaired.” The court further held that Indigenous “rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished.” Indigenous people could continue to live on the land, but title resided with the discovering power, the United States. The decision concluded that Native nations were “domestic, dependent nations.”

The Doctrine of Discovery is so taken for granted that it is rarely mentioned in historical or legal texts published in the Americas. The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples, which meets annually for two weeks, devoted its entire 2012 session to the doctrine. xx But few US citizens are aware of the precarity of the situation of Indigenous Peoples in the United States.

_______________

i Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, vol. 4 (December 2006), 387.

ii Gary Clayton Anderson, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime that Should Haunt America. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014.), 4.

iii “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Paris, 9 December 1948,” Audiovisual Library of International Law, http://untreaty.un.org/cod/avl/ha/cppcg/cppcg.html (accessed December 6, 2012). See also Josef L. Kunz, “The United Nations Convention on Genocide,” American Journal of International Law 43, no. 4 (October 1949) 738–46.

iv April 17, 1873, quoted in John F. Marszalek, Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order (New York: Free Press, 1992), 379.

v See Testimony of Pat McLaughlin, Chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux government, Fort Yates, North Dakota (May 8, 1976), at hearings of the American Indian Policy Review Commission, established by Congress in the Act of January 3, 1975.

vi See: Kenneth R. Philp, John Collier’s Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920-1954.

vii King quoted in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, The Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 156.

viii For a lucid discussion of neocolonialism in relation to American Indians and the reservation system, see Joseph Jorgensen, The Sun Dance Religion: Power for the Powerless (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 89–146.

ix There is continuous migration from reservations to cities and border towns and back to the reservations, so that half the Indian population at any time is away from the reservation. Generally, however, relocation is not permanent and resembles migratory labor more than permanent relocation. This conclusion is based on my personal observations and on unpublished studies of the Indigenous populations in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles.

x Walter R. Echo-Hawk, In the Courts of the Conqueror (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2010), 77–78.

xi Colin G. Calloway, review of Julian Granberry, The Americas That Might Have Been: Native American Social Systems through Time (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), Ethnohistory 54, no. 1 (Winter 2007), 196.

xii Benjamin Keen, “The White Legend Revisited,” Hispanic American Historical Review 51 (1971): 353.

xiii Denevan, “The Pristine Myth,” 4–5.

xiv Henry F. Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press in cooperation with the Newberry Library, 1983), 2. See also Dobyns, Native American Historical Demography , and Dobyns, “Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate,” Current Anthropology 7 (1966), 295–416, and “Reply,” 440–44.

xv Woodrow Wilson Borah, “America as Model: The Demographic Impact of European Expansion upon the Non-European World,” in Actas y Morías XXXV Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, México 1962 ,3 vols. (Mexico City: Editorial Libros de México, 1964), 381.

xvii John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 5, 10.

xviii http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/06/25/supreme-court-thwarts-icwa-intent-baby-veronica-case-150103

xix Robert J. Miller, “The International Law of Colonialism: A Comparative Analysis,” in “Symposium of International Law in Indigenous Affairs: The Doctrine of Discovery, the United Nations, and the Organization of Americans States,” special issue, Lewis and Clark Law Review 15, no. 4 (Winter 2011), 847–922. See also Vine Deloria Jr., Of Utmost Good Faith (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1971), 6–39; Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2008).

xx Eleventh Session, United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, http://social.un.org/index/IndigenousPeoples/UNPFIISessions/Eleventh.aspx (accessed October 3, 2013).

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When Native Americans Were Slaughtered in the Name of ‘Civilization’

By: Donald L. Fixico

Updated: July 11, 2023 | Original: March 2, 2018

A photographer's interpretation of James Fraser's classic sculpture, the 'End of the Trail,' circa 1915. (Credit: Underwood Archives/Getty Images)

On a cool May day in 1758 , a 10-year girl with red hair and freckles was caring for her neighbor’s children in rural western Pennsylvania. In a few moments, Mary Campbell’s life changed forever when Delaware Indians kidnapped her and absorbed her into their community for the next six years. She was among the first of some 200 known cases of white captives, many of whom became pawns in an ongoing power struggle that included European powers, American colonists and Indigenous peoples straining to maintain their population, their land and way of life.

While Mary was ultimately returned to her white family—and some evidence points to her having lived happily with her adopted Indian tribe—stories such as hers became a cautionary tale among white settlers, stoking fear of “savage” Indians and creating a paranoia that escalated into all-out Indian hating.

From the time Europeans arrived on American shores, the frontier—the edge territory between white man’s civilization and the untamed natural world—became a shared space of vast, clashing differences that led the U.S. government to authorize over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its Indigenous people. By the close of the Indian Wars in the late 19th century, fewer than 238,000 Indigenous people remained, a sharp decline from the estimated 5 million to 15 million living in North America when Columbus arrived in 1492.

The reasons for this racial genocide were multi-layered. Settlers, most of whom had been barred from inheriting property in Europe, arrived on American shores hungry for Indian land—and the abundant natural resources that came with it. Indians’ collusion with the British during the American Revolution and the War of 1812 exacerbated American hostility and suspicion toward them.

Even more fundamentally, Indigenous people were just too different: Their skin was dark. Their languages were foreign. And their world views and spiritual beliefs were beyond most white men’s comprehension. To settlers fearful that a loved one might become the next Mary Campbell, all this stoked racial hatred and paranoia, making it easy to paint Indigenous peoples as pagan savages who must be killed in the name of civilization and Christianity.

Below, some of the most aggressive acts of genocide taken against Indigenous Americans:

The Gnadenhutten Massacre

In 1782, a group of militiamen from Pennsylvania killed 96 Christianized Delaware Indians, illustrating the growing contempt for native people. Captain David Williamson ordered the converted Delawares, who had been blamed for attacks on white settlements, to go to the cooper shop two at a time, where militiamen beat them to death with wooden mallets and hatchets.

Ironically, the Delawares were the first Native Americans to capture a white settler and the first to sign a U.S.-Indian treaty four years earlier—one that set the precedent for 374 treaties over the next 100 years. Often employing the common phrase “peace and friendship,” 229 of these agreements led to tribal lands being ceded to a rapidly expanding United States. Many treaties negotiated U.S.-Indian trade relations, establishing a trading system to oust the British and their goods—especially the guns they put in Indian hands.

Battle of Tippecanoe

In the early 1800s, the rise of the charismatic Shawnee war leader, Tecumseh , and his brother, known as the Prophet, convinced Indians of various tribes that it was in their interest to stop tribal in-fighting and band together to protect their mutual interests. The decision by Indiana Territorial Governor (and later President) William Henry Harrison in 1811 to attack and burn Prophetstown, the Indian capital on the Tippecanoe River, while Tecumseh was away campaigning the Choctaws for more warriors, incited the Shawnee leader to attack again. This time he persuaded the British to fight alongside his warriors against the Americans. Tecumseh’s death and defeat at the Battle of the Thames in 1813 made the Ohio frontier “safe” for settlers—at least for a time.

The Creek War

In the South, the War of 1812 bled into the Mvskoke Creek War of 1813-1814, also known as the Red Stick War. An inter-tribal conflict among Creek Indian factions, the war also engaged U.S. militias, along with the British and Spanish, who backed the Indians to help keep Americans from encroaching on their interests.

Early Creek victories inspired General Andrew Jackson to retaliate with 2,500 men, mostly Tennessee militia, in early November 1814. To avenge the Creek-led massacre at Fort Mims, Jackson and his men slaughtered 186 Creeks at Tallushatchee. “We shot them like dogs!” said Davy Crockett .

In desperation, Mvskoke Creek women killed their children so they would not see the soldiers butcher them. As one woman started to kill her baby, the famed Indian fighter, Andrew Jackson, grabbed the child from the mother. Later, he delivered the Indian baby to his wife Rachel, for both of them to raise as their own.

Jackson went on to win the Red Stick War in a decisive battle at Horseshoe Bend. The subsequent treaty required the Creek to cede more than 21 million acres of land to the United States.

Forced Removal

One of the most bitterly debated issues on the floor of Congress was the Indian Removal Bill of 1830, pushed hard by then-President Andrew Jackson. Despite being assailed by many legislators as immoral, the bill finally passed in the Senate by nine votes, 29 to 17, and by an even smaller margin in the House. In Jackson’s thinking, more than three dozen eastern tribes stood in the way of what he saw as the settlers’ divinely ordained rights to clear the wilderness, build homes and grow cotton and other crops.

In his annual address to Congress in 1833, Jackson denounced Indians, stating, “They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and a superior race…they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere [before] long disappear.”

From 1830 to 1840, the U.S. army removed 60,000 Indians—Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee and others—from the East in exchange for new territory west of the Mississippi. Thousands died along the way of what became known as the “Trail of Tears.” And as whites pushed ever westward, the Indian-designated territory continued to shrink.

Execution of Dakota Sioux Indians in Mankato, Minnesota, 1862.

Mankato Executions

Annuities and provisions promised to Indians through government treaties were slow in being delivered, leaving Dakota Sioux people, who were restricted to reservation lands on the Minnesota frontier, starving and desperate. After a raid of nearby white farms for food turned into a deadly encounter, Dakotas continued raiding, leading to the Little Crow War of 1862, in which 490 settlers, mostly women and children, were killed. President Lincoln sent soldiers, who defeated the Dakota; and after a series of mass trials, more than 300 Dakota men were sentenced to death.

While Lincoln commuted most of the sentences, on the day after Christmas at Mankato, military officials hung 38 Dakotas at once—the largest mass execution in American history. More than 4,000 people gathered in the streets to watch, many bringing picnic baskets. The 38 were buried in a shallow grave along the Minnesota River, but physicians dug up most of the bodies to use as medical cadavers.

The Sand Creek Massacre

Indians fighting back to defend their people and protect their homelands provided ample justification for American forces to kill any Indians on the frontier, even peaceful ones. On November 29, 1864 , a former Methodist minister, John Chivington, led a surprise attack on peaceful Cheyennes and Arapahos on their reservation at Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado. His force consisted of 700 men, mainly volunteers in the First and Third Colorado Regiments. Plied with too much liquor the night before, Chivington and his men boasted that they were going to kill Indians. Once a missionary to Wyandot Indians in Kansas, Chivington declared, “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians!…I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heavens to kill Indians.”

That fateful cold morning, Chivington led his men against 200 Cheyennes and Arapahos. Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle had tied an American flag to his lodge pole as he was instructed, to indicate his village was at peace. When Chivington ordered the attack, Black Kettle tied a white flag beneath the American flag, calling to his people that the soldiers would not kill them. As many as 160 were massacred, mostly women and children.

Custer’s Campaigns

At this time, a war hero from the Civil War emerged in the West. George Armstrong Custer rode in front of his mostly Irish Seventh Cavalry to the Irish drinking tune, “Gary Owen.” Custer wanted fame, and killing Indians—especially peaceful ones who weren’t expecting to be attacked—represented opportunity.

On orders from General Philip Sheridan , Custer and his Seventh attacked the Cheyennes and their Arapaho allies on the western frontier of Indian Territory on November 29, 1868, near the Washita River. After slaughtering 103 warriors, plus women and children, Custer dispatched to Sheridan that “a great victory was won,” and described, “One, the Indians were asleep. Two, the women and children offered little resistance. Three, the Indians are bewildered by our change of policy.”

Custer later led the Seventh Cavalry on the northern Plains against the Lakota, Arapahos and Northern Cheyennes. He boasted, “The Seventh can handle anything it meets,” and “there are not enough Indians in the world to defeat the Seventh Cavalry.”

Expecting another great surprise victory, Custer attacked the largest gathering of warriors on the high plains on June 25, 1876 —near Montana’s Little Big Horn river. Custer’s death at the hands of Indians making their own last stand only intensified propaganda for military revenge to bring “peace” to the frontier.

Wounded Knee

Anti-Indian anger rose in the late 1880s as the Ghost Dance spiritual movement emerged, spreading to two dozen tribes across 16 states, and threatening efforts to culturally assimilate tribal peoples. Ghost Dance, which taught that Indians had been defeated and confined to reservations because they had angered the gods by abandoning their traditional customs, called for a rejection of the white man’s ways. In December 1890, several weeks after the famed Sioux Chief Sitting Bull was killed while being arrested, the U.S. Army’s Seventh Cavalry massacred 150 to 200 ghost dancers at Wounded Knee , South Dakota.

For their mass murder of disarmed Lakota, President Benjamin Harrison awarded about 20 soldiers the Medal of Honor.

Three years after Wounded Knee, Professor Frederick Jackson Turner announced at a small gathering of historians in Chicago that the “frontier had closed,” with his famous thesis arguing for American exceptionalism. James Earle Fraser’s famed sculpture “End of the Trail,” which debuted in 1915 at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, exemplified the idea of a broken, vanishing race. Ironically, just over 100 years later, the resilient American Indian population has survived into the 21st century and swelled to more than 5 million people.

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Reexamining the American Genocide Debate: Meaning, Historiography, and New Methods

Benjamin Madley is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He earned a Ph.D. in history at Yale University and was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College before coming to UCLA. A historian of the United States, Native America, and colonialism, he is the author of articles and book chapters addressing indigenous peoples and genocides in Africa, Australia, and North America, as well as Nazi mass murder in Europe. His first book, An American Genocide: The California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 , will be published by Yale University Press.

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Benjamin Madley, Reexamining the American Genocide Debate: Meaning, Historiography, and New Methods, The American Historical Review , Volume 120, Issue 1, February 2015, Pages 98–139, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/120.1.98

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N ative A mericans suffered a catastrophic demographic decline following sustained contact with Europeans. From a pre-contact population of perhaps 5,000,000 or more, the number of American Indians within the continental United States and its colonial antecedents fell to some 240,000 individuals by 1880–1900. The cataclysm thus ranks among the major long-term population disasters of world history. Some scholars assert that introduced diseases were the primary cause of this catastrophe, while others argue that colonialism, war, and diseases combined to wreak demographic devastation. 1

Academics continue to debate whether or not Native Americans—or any groups of them—suffered genocide during the conquest and colonization of the Americas. It is a question that should matter not just to scholars and Native Americans, but to all U.S. citizens. Although the political and administrative boundaries of the United States have been imposed upon indigenous peoples, they form a cohesive unit of historical analysis with real meaning and repercussions for scholars, American Indians, and non-Indians in both the past and present. While the stakes of the debate as it relates to Native Americans may echo those in other genocide debates, new methods of inquiry will help to move this particular debate forward. Examining statements of genocidal intent, massacres, state-sponsored body-part bounties, and mass death in government custody can provide scholars with a rubric for locating, evaluating, or ruling out possible instances of genocide. Detailed case studies are crucial to this approach. They can reframe the debate by focusing on the question of genocide for particular tribes rather than all Native Americans. Applying these methods to two specific cases—Connecticut's Pequot Indians and California's Yuki Indians—suggests how this approach might then be used to locate and define other cases of genocide within and beyond the Americas. 2

T he near-annihilation of North America's indigenous peoples remains a formative event in U.S. history. Along with wars, real estate transactions of often questionable validity, the making and breaking of treaties, forced removal, confinement to reservations, and the 1887 Dawes Allotment Act, which reduced federally recognized Native American landholdings by about 90,000,000 acres, the American Indian population cataclysm played a central role in the clearing of hundreds of millions of acres for colonization. These lands, in turn, provided the vast geography and the cornucopia of natural resources upon which the modern United States was built. Thus, how we explain the Native American population catastrophe informs how we understand the making of the U.S. and its colonial origins.

In 1622, the Mayflower passenger Robert Cushman wrote of America: “Our land is full … their land is empty. This then is a sufficient reason to prove our going thither to live lawful: their land is spacious and void, and they are few and do but run over the grass, as do also the foxes and wild beasts. They are not industrious, neither have [they] art, science, skill or faculty to use either the land or the commodities of it; but all spoils, rots, and is marred for want of manuring, gathering, ordering, etc.” Articulating the vacuum domicilium , or “empty domicile,” theory, which many would cite in attempting to justify their conquest and colonization of North America, Cushman claimed that American Indians did not inhabit their homelands fully enough, either in population density or in economic development, to justify their having legal ownership, particularly in so-called “empty” areas. Cushman was not alone in such thinking. 3 In 1516, the English lawyer Thomas More anticipated that colonists would, and preachers John Donne and John Cotton and even Pennsylvania proprietor William Penn later asserted that legally they could, seize “voyde and vacannt,” “abandoned” or unfilled, “vacant,” and “Waste, or unculted Country.” 4 The English philosopher and Carolina Colony secretary John Locke then contended in 1690 that colonists could obtain legal title to such Indian land with his “agricultural argument,” which suggested that agriculturally unimproved lands could be taken by those who improved them. 5 Meanwhile, “Old World” diseases such as diphtheria, influenza, malaria, measles, scarlet fever, smallpox, typhus, and whooping cough killed great numbers, diminishing many Native American populations while buttressing the specious vacuum domicilium theory in some Europeans' minds. Thus emerged the almost canonical trope of American Indian population decline as a natural disaster created by biological forces, and the expropriation of increasingly “empty” Native American lands as a just response to opportunities created by regrettable, but inevitable, natural devastation. 6

Disease did kill untold numbers of Native Americans, and scholars continue to explore the causes, dynamics, variability, and magnitude of disease-induced population losses. Yet the emphasis on disease as the prime agent of American Indian demographic decline tends to overshadow the equally undeniable role of violence in the population catastrophe and in the conquest of the United States. The determination of whether or not such violence constituted genocide requires a more careful examination of the role of human agency in this cataclysm and whether or not some colonizers committed what legal scholar William Schabas has called “the crime of crimes.” 7 It requires an exploration of the possibility of genocide in the foundations of U.S. history, or at least that of some regions. These are difficult issues. Nonetheless, the question of whether genocide occurred in the United States and its colonial antecedents should be on conference agendas, discussed in classrooms, debated in public forums, and pursued in scholarly journals because the stakes are so high for scholars, American Indians, and all U.S. citizens.

If the conquest and colonization of some regions of the United States, if not the entire nation, involved deliberate attempts to annihilate Native American peoples, scholars will need to reevaluate current interpretive axioms and address new quandaries. Scholars could, for example, reexamine the assumption that indirect effects of colonization, such as the spread of disease, rather than deliberate actions, such as murder, were the leading cause of death in most or all encounters between newcomers and Native Americans. Exceptionalist interpretations of U.S. history—which suggest that the United States is fundamentally unlike other nations—may also lose validity as researchers compare genocides in the U.S. to other mass killings and place them within global comparative frameworks. Where scholars document a genocide, it will be necessary to evaluate what roles colonial, federal, state, and territorial governments played, as well as whether the event was part of a recurring regional or national pattern. Larger questions then follow. What tended to catalyze genocide? Who ordered and carried out the killing? Why do we not know more about these events? Did democracy drive mass murder? And, ultimately, was genocide central to the making of the contemporary United States? 8

Given its political, economic, psychological, and health ramifications, the genocide question is particularly urgent for the approximately 5,220,000 U.S. citizens of self-reported Native American ancestry. Should tribes press for official apologies, reparations, and control of land where genocidal events took place? Should tribes marshal evidence of genocide in cases involving tribal sovereignty and federal recognition? How should Native American communities commemorate mass murder while also emphasizing successful accommodation, resistance, survival, and cultural renewal? The psychological issues related to genocide are also fraught. What happens when a tribal member learns that she or he is a descendant of both perpetrators and victims? How might Native American people reconcile increased knowledge of genocide—sometimes at the hands of the United States—with their frequently intense patriotism? Finally, what role might acknowledgment of genocide have on the “intergenerational/historical trauma” in some Native American communities and that trauma's connection to present-day illnesses, substance abuse, domestic violence, and suicide? 9

The question of genocide in the history of the United States and its colonial antecedents also poses explosive political, economic, educational, and psychological questions for all U.S. citizens. Acknowledgment and reparations are central issues. Should elected government officials tender public apologies to Native Americans, as Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush did in the 1980s for the relocation and internment of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II? Reparations are an important subordinate issue. Should federal officials offer compensation to American Indians, along the lines of the more than $1.6 billion that Congress awarded to 82,210 of those Japanese Americans and their heirs? The question of commemoration is closely linked. Will non-Indian citizens support or tolerate the commemoration of mass murders committed by some of the nation's forefathers with the same kinds of monuments, museums, and state-legislated days of remembrance that today commemorate the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust? Will genocides against Native Americans join those systematic mass murders in school curricula and public discourse? 10

Steps have been taken toward federal acknowledgment of some wrongs done to Native Americans. In 1989 and 1990, Congress passed the National Museum of the American Indian Act and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which in combination mandate that federally funded institutions protect Native American gravesites and return human remains and objects taken from Native Americans under certain circumstances. In 2000, the head of the federal government's Bureau of Indian Affairs, Kevin Gover, publicly apologized for that organization's role in the lethal “removal of the southeastern tribal nations” and “the ethnic cleansing that befell the western tribes.” Gover, who is Comanche and Pawnee, also acknowledged “the cowardly killing of women and children” and “tragedy on a scale so ghastly that it cannot be dismissed as merely the inevitable consequence of the clash of competing ways of life.” 11 Four years later, six U.S. senators and a congresswoman introduced “A joint resolution to acknowledge a long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the United States Government regarding Indian tribes and offer an apology to all Native Peoples on behalf of the United States.” The resolution noted how “Native Peoples suffered and perished … during … forced removal … during bloody armed confrontation and massacres [and] on numerous reservations.” 12 After failing in 2004, 2005, and 2007, the resolution passed in a diluted form in 2009. This apology, signed by President Barack Obama that year, “recognizes … years of official depredations, ill-conceived policies, and the breaking of covenants by the Federal Government regarding Indian tribes.” It also “apologizes … to all Native Peoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by citizens of the United States.” It does not, however, address genocide. 13 Still, by coming close to the issue, the apology generated substantial resistance as well as support, because the implications were, and remain, profound. It is little wonder that most scholars have avoided the genocide question, or that it remains unresolved. However, the deadlocked American genocide debate is also to blame.

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Scholars soon began using this new tool. Lemkin planned chapters on “Genocide against the American Indians” and “The Indians in North America (in part)” for two genocide histories that he was working on, but he died in 1959 before he could complete either project. 15 In the 1960s and 1970s, informed by the rising awareness of the Holocaust and genocide, a few activists and scholars began using the term to describe historical violence against American Indians. President Reagan focused additional attention on genocide by endorsing the Genocide Convention in 1984. Three years later, anthropologist Russell Thornton published the first scholarly monograph addressing genocide in the continental United States as a whole. Thornton argued that genocide was one of several causes of Native American demographic decline, but that only in certain cases did it result in total extermination. 16 The following year, the United States ratified the Convention, with caveats. Meanwhile, the field of genocide studies was beginning to coalesce, and some of its foundational publications touched on questions of genocide in colonial New England and the nineteenth-century U.S. 17

The 1992 quincentenary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Western Hemisphere catalyzed new assertions that American Indians had suffered genocide. In his book American Holocaust , American studies scholar David Stannard argued: “From almost the instant of first human contact between Europe and the Americas firestorms of microbial pestilence and purposeful genocide began laying waste the American natives.” 18 Historian Richard White responded that while “Instances of what can only be called genocide did occur against particular Indian peoples … finding specific instances of genocide does not make the entirety of American Indian policy genocidal.” 19 Thornton then critiqued Stannard's work for focusing on genocide to the exclusion of the axiom that “Populations constantly change in size due to births and deaths (and migrations).” 20 Other scholars also began mentioning genocide against Native Americans while emphasizing different theses. For example, ethnic studies scholar Ward Churchill suggested that genocide began with the European invasion and continued into the post–Cold War era through “genocidal … Internal Colonialism.” 21

Twenty-first-century scholars have offered additional assertions that Native Americans suffered genocide. 22 Still, while histories of violence against American Indians abound, detailed case studies marshaling substantial evidence of both genocidal intent and specific genocidal acts to support the broad thesis of genocide in America remain few and far between. 23 Examples include Thornton's three brief case studies, Stannard's four short studies, and the eighty-eight pages of Blood and Soil that historian Ben Kiernan dedicated to instances of genocide in “Colonial North America, 1600–1776” and “Genocide in the United States.” 24

In opposition, other scholars have claimed that Native Americans rarely, or never, suffered genocide. In 1992, historian James Axtell called “‘genocide’ … inaccurate as a description of the vast majority of encounters between Europeans and Indians.” 25 In 1994, religious studies scholar Steven Katz deemed “the depopulation of the New World … largely an unintended tragedy.” 26 Five years later, historian Robert Utley asserted that using the term “genocide” in relation to American Indians “grossly falsifies history,” since “No more than a tiny portion of the white population of the United States, mainly in the West, ever advocated” the “intentional obliteration” of American Indians “by means of mass physical annihilation.” 27 In 2004, historian William Rubinstein insisted that “American policy towards the Indians … never actually encompassed genocide,” and historian Guenter Lewy agreed: “Genocide was never American policy, nor was it the result of policy.” 28 In 2014, historian Gary Anderson added that “Genocide did not occur in America,” but “ethnic cleansing” did. 29

Two factors have polarized the American genocide debate. First, not all participants agree on what genocide means. Second, most participants frame the debate in collective terms, rather than exploring the question on a tribe-by-tribe basis. This framing has emphasized that a verdict of genocide or not genocide be rendered for the continental United States as a whole (and sometimes all of the Americas) from first contact to the present. For the debate to move forward, both issues must be addressed.

The American genocide debate is in part the struggle to define a word. Most participants who stated a particular definition began with the Genocide Convention, but Stannard, Lewy, Thornton, Alfred Cave, and Kiernan are among the few who accepted it unmodified. Others disagreed over both who is protected and what crimes are genocidal. Churchill expanded the Convention's list of protected groups to include any “human group,” while also extending the list of genocidal acts to include physical, biological, and cultural genocide. 30 In contrast, Rubinstein narrowed the scope of genocidal acts—“Genocide might … be defined as the deliberate killing of most or all members of a collective group”—while excluding “ most ‘acts’ which are construed as genocide in international law,” beyond direct killing. 31 Axtell expanded the scope of protected groups to include any “group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator ,” but limited genocide to “one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group.” 32 Katz also expanded the range of protected groups, but insisted: “genocide applies only when there is an actualized intent … to physically destroy an entire group.” 33 Finally, Anderson defined genocide as “a concerted effort to kill large numbers of people or indeed to annihilate a given people” that “a legitimate government must plan, organize, and implement.” 34

Genocide is, however, more than an academic concept. It is a crime defined by an international legal treaty and subsequent case law. On December 9, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Genocide Convention and its definition “unanimously and without abstentions.” 35 It remains the only authoritative international legal definition. Moreover, unlike at least twenty-two alternative definitions proffered since 1959, it has teeth. To date, 146 nations have signed or are parties to the Genocide Convention. In addition, it is supported and further defined—as a legal instrument—by a growing body of international case law. The Convention thus provides a powerful, though imperfect, definition for investigating possible cases of genocide. 36

The second factor polarizing the American genocide debate arises from a focus on judging the entire history of the continental United States, and sometimes the whole Western Hemisphere, from 1492 to the present, as fundamentally genocidal or not genocidal. This is a case of lumping when splitting is in order. Contact between Native Americans and Europeans in the continental United States has spanned centuries, ranged over 2,959,000 square miles, and involved interactions among British, Dutch, French, Mexican, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Texan, Confederate, and U.S. regimes—all of which changed over time—and hundreds of American Indian peoples, themselves hardly homogeneous or static. Despite some exceptions, scholars on both sides of the debate have largely avoided in-depth analyses of particular regions in specific periods or during particular tribes' demographic declines. 37 This dearth of specific case studies, along with definitional differences, helps explain the dispute's abstract and unresolved nature.

It is difficult to argue meaningfully about genocide on a national level without either definitional agreement or robust local studies to support broad conclusions. Thornton blazed a trail by bringing brief tribal case studies into his argument. Stannard touched upon the role of both genocidal intent and genocidal actions, as did Churchill. More recently, Thornton noted, “Physical genocide seems more characteristic of years and decades than of centuries,” while Kiernan demonstrated the importance of regional studies, emphasizing genocidal intent, command structures, and genocidal massacres. 38 Still, as historian Dan Stone observed in 2008, “it is remarkable that, given the enormous historiography on the colonial period and frontier conflict [in North America], there is not more that directly addresses the question of genocide.” 39

D espite the pioneering work done by Thornton, Stannard, Kiernan, and others, there remains a need for additional detailed case studies to provide the data that will permit a more accurate and comprehensive assessment of genocide's occurrence and frequency in the history of the United States and its colonial antecedents. How might such studies be done? In-depth tribal and geographical case studies covering discrete time periods first require that markers be located indicating the possible occurrence of genocide. Annihilationist statements, massacres, state-sponsored body-part bounties, and mass death in government custody are four ways of locating, and ultimately defining, prima facie cases of genocide.

Some non-Indian policymakers articulated their intent to annihilate Native American peoples both before and after 1776. As early as 1622, Virginia Colony leaders responded to an Indian attack by planning “a sharp revenge … even to … the rooting them out for being longer a people vppon the face of the Earth.” 40 In 1711, Virginia's House of Burgesses advocated “exterpating all Indians without distinction of Friends or Enemys.” 41 Forty-four years later, the Massachusetts Bay Colony “require[d] his Majesty's Subjects of this Province to embrace all Opportunities of pursuing, captivating, killing and destroying all and every” Penobscot Indian. 42 During Pontiac's Uprising, Field Marshal Jeffery Amherst ordered a subordinate officer to “Try Every … Method, that can Serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race,” later adding, “I Wish to Hear of no Prisoners , should any of the Villains be met with in Arms.” 43 Thomas Jefferson considered intentional extermination and, as Kiernan observed, repeatedly wrote of the possibility. In 1780, for example—while governor of Virginia—Jefferson wrote to General George Rogers Clark of the Virginia Militia: “the Shawanese, Mingoes, Munsies, and the nearer Wiandots are troublesome thorns in our sides. However we must leave it to yourself to decide … If against these Indians, the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal.” 44 In 1787 and 1789, President George Washington's secretary of war, Henry Knox, considered expelling or destroying various American Indian tribes, and in 1790 he ordered General Joseph Harmar “to extirpate, utterly, if possible” resisting Shawnees and their allies in Ohio. 45

The idea of exterminating American Indians became increasingly common during the nineteenth century. Jefferson was perhaps the first sitting U.S. president to consider genocide when he wrote in 1807, “if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or is driven beyond the Mississippi,” adding: “In war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.” 46 In 1830, President Andrew Jackson went further, telling the U.S. Congress to overcome “melancholy reflections” resulting from driving Indians “to the tomb” with this cheerful thought: “true philanthropy reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one generation to make room for another.” 47 Americans listened. By 1856, the governor of Washington Territory, Isaac Stevens, could proclaim, to “deafening cheers” in the territorial House of Representatives, that “ war shall be prosecuted until the last hostile Indian is exterminated .” 48 The definition of “hostile Indian” might be debatable in this quotation, while exterminating such “hostile Indians” may here suggest war crimes—that is, violations of the laws of war—rather than genocide. Yet in other instances, leaders clearly meant to target all Indian people belonging to a particular tribe or nation. In 1862, General John Pope of the U.S. Army wrote to a subordinate officer: “It is my purpose utterly to exterminate the Sioux.” 49 Military and political leaders sometimes condoned such policies. In 1868, Representative James M. Cavanaugh of Montana declared in Congress, “I like an Indian better dead than living. I have never in my life seen a good Indian (and I have seen thousands) except when I have seen a dead Indian.” 50 Later that year, General Ulysses S. Grant, in the final weeks of his successful presidential campaign, warned: “the settlers and emigrants must be protected, even if the extermination of every Indian tribe [is] necessary.” 51 The following year, General Philip Sheridan reportedly proclaimed, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” 52 Less famously, in 1873 the head of the U.S. Army, General William T. Sherman, telegraphed subordinates that in attacking the Modocs, “You will be fully justified in their utter extermination.” 53 Even as late as 1886, Theodore Roosevelt announced, “I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” 54 The fact that Roosevelt—a man of intense political ambition—could joke about genocide suggests the acceptance of such ideas by many voters even late in the nineteenth century.

Of course, some documented exterminatory statements may have been no more than rhetoric. Still, words—especially those of political and military leaders—often lead to actions. Thus, the route from annihilationist language to exterminatory acts needs to be carefully delineated, since expressions of genocidal intent alone do not constitute genocide.

Massacres were often the physical manifestations of annihilationist statements. The study of massacres—defined here as predominantly one-sided intentional killings of five or more noncombatants or relatively poorly armed or disarmed combatants, often by surprise and with little or no quarter—can serve four functions in reexamining the American genocide debate. First, because they are one hallmark of genocide, the substantial number of known massacres suggests the need for a more thorough examination of the American genocide question. Second, the reporting of massacres often flags those regions or times when immigrants and their allies may have committed genocide against Native Americans. Third, the killings themselves can constitute genocide, or at least “genocidal massacres,” which sociologist Leo Kuper defined as “the annihilation of a section of a group—men, women and children, as for example in the wiping out of whole villages.” 55 Finally, the close study of patterns of repeated massacres can help researchers locate genocidal intent and uncover genocidal command structures.

John Barber, “The Moravian Indian Martyrs” (1850), from John W. Barber and Elizabeth G. Barber, Historical, Poetical and Pictorial American Scenes … to Which Is Added a Historical Sketch, of Each of the United States (New Haven, Conn., 1850), 77. Courtesy of the Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. In 1782, Pennsylvania militiamen bludgeoned to death and scalped at least ninety Christian Delaware Indians—the majority women and children—at Gnadenhütten, Ohio.

The accompanying map locates fifty-five reported massacres, each involving the killing of between twenty-six and one thousand Native Americans in what are now thirty-one states, from 1539 to 1890. (See the Appendix for a list of the sources on which the map is based.) It is in no way comprehensive. Detailed investigations of specific regions' and Native American nations' histories will likely reveal a greater density of massacres across both time and space than is represented on this map. Taken alone, “massacre on the scale of Sand Creek, Wounded Knee and Mystic” may be “demographically insignificant” to the overall American Indian population cataclysm, as White has suggested. 56 However, it is not obligatory to limit our search for the latter's causes to only one major factor. As scholars study massacre clusters and move toward calculating the total number of Native Americans massacred in American history, the cumulative demographic impact of these mass killings will be revealed as significant, even if they do not approach the number of deaths caused by disease.

This map locates fifty-five reported massacres of Native Americans in what are now thirty-one states between 1539 and 1890, but it is in no way comprehensive. The tribal names used here are those familiar to non-specialists; they are not necessarily the names used by American Indians to describe themselves. Map by Springer Cartographics LLC for Benjamin Madley. For the sources used to compile this map, see the Appendix.

State-sponsored body-part bounties—rewards officially paid for Native Americans' heads and scalps—are another manifestation of exterminationist intent and genocidal crimes that appear frequently in the history of the United States and its colonial antecedents. The act of mutilating enemies is not unusual in world history, and Native Americans sometimes scalped non-Indians, but an examination of bounty programs can serve five functions in reexamining the American genocide debate. First, they indicate sustained, institutionalized killing and its intentional support by authorities who provided both funding and legal impunity to bounty hunters. Second, these programs point to killing policies that deliberately abandoned traditional European rules of war, or jus in bello , when administrators offered bounties for the heads or scalps of civilians, women, and children, and because it was often difficult to distinguish between heads and scalps belonging to so-called enemy versus friendly Indians, or between “hostiles” and children or other blameless members of a targeted “enemy” group. Third, because bounty programs often involved considerable monetary sums, studying them can help scholars map genocidal command structures. Fourth, because administrators sometimes kept records of bounties paid or body parts collected, these bounty programs generated quantitative evidence of genocidal state-sponsored crimes. Finally, such programs had demographic impacts beyond the direct killing of individuals. By forcing Indians to evade bounty hunters, body-part bounties interfered with subsistence, housing, medical care, and reproduction, thus providing additional, less direct, evidence of genocide. 57 In sum, bounty programs may flag regions or times when governments or their agents institutionalized genocide against Native Americans.

Policymakers offered bounties for Native American heads or scalps in at least twenty-three states or their colonial, territorial, or Mexican antecedents. In 1637, during the Pequot War, Connecticut militiamen apparently instituted the first head bounty in what would become the United States. Four years later, the Dutch of New Amsterdam promised “Ten fathoms of Wampum for each head of the … Raritans, and 20 fathoms of Wampum for every head of the Indians who have most barbarously murdered our people on Staten Island .” 58 Officials frequently offered bounties for both Indian prisoners and heads. For example, in 1674 Virginia offered “three matchcoates for every prisoner … and one matchcoate for [every] head.” 59 Such dual bounty systems complicate the genocidal intent of these programs by suggesting that officials were more interested in taking prisoners than heads and scalps. Yet the small number of prisoners paid for under dual bounty programs, relative to the numbers of heads and scalps, may suggest that the effect was otherwise. As to intent, the tempo of head and scalp bounty offerings now accelerated. In 1675, during King Philip's War, Connecticut and Massachusetts offered “for ever[y] Head one Coat.” 60 Connecticut introduced the first specific scalp bounty, promising its Narragansett allies one coat for each Wampanoag “Head-skin” and twenty for King Philip's head. Narragansetts promptly delivered “about Eighteen Heads,” and Benjamin Church's company later brought King Philip's head to Plymouth for “their Præmium [of] Thirty Shilllings ,” receiving what may have been the first monetary body-part bounty. 61 Thirteen years later, French officials in Canada promised ten beaver pelts for each “Maquae” scalp taken along the upper Connecticut River (in New Hampshire and Vermont), and in 1689, Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut agreed to pay “eight pounds, per head, for every fighting Indian man.” 62 French officials now added another innovation: bounties for killing Native American women, in this case in upper New York. In 1694, Massachusetts seems to have offered the first bounties for the heads and scalps of American Indian children; in 1695 it specified £25 for women or children “under the age of fourteen years, that shall be killed.” 63 Head bounties now generally gave way to rewards for lighter, more portable scalps. 64 In 1697, Massachusetts offered bounties for the scalps of men, women, and “every child of the said enemy under the age of ten years.” 65

Scalp bounties proliferated during the eighteenth century, sometimes with devastating results. Between 1703 and 1704, for example, Massachusetts apparently paid for 208 Indian scalps. The colony then passed additional scalp bounties in 1706, 1709, and 1710, from 1722 to 1726, and in 1744, 1747, 1755, and 1756. Connecticut offered scalp bounties in 1704, and in 1746 targeted Indian women and children. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland instituted nine scalp bounty programs during the eighteenth century. In 1747 alone, New York paid for at least twenty-six Indian scalps. Colonies sometimes amassed substantial war chests. Maryland raised nearly £10,000 to fund Indian scalp and prisoner bounties between 1755 and 1757. Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia enacted ten head or scalp bounties, while French Louisiana administrators promised bounties in 1703 and 1723. French officials offered fifty écus for each Miami scalp brought to Fort Detroit in 1751, and the British promised scalp bounties in the Ohio River Valley in 1755. 66

During the nineteenth century, government scalp bounty programs spread south and west. In 1814, Illinois offered $50 “for the scalp of any Indian—man, woman, or child—who entered an American settlement with ‘murderous intent.’” 67 The United States apparently promised $200 for slain or captive enemies during Florida's Second Seminole War, while in 1835 and 1837, the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua, which then included parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, paid scalp bounties. The resulting death toll was sometimes substantial: in 1847, one bounty hunter serving Chihuahua estimated having taken 487 Apache scalps, some almost certainly from future U.S. territory. Minnesota and Montana then enacted four scalp bounties between 1863 and 1869. Southern Arizona counties probably offered the last government-sponsored American Indian scalp bounties within the United States, in 1885. 68

Spencer Phips, “A Proclamation” (Boston, November 3, 1755). Courtesy of the University of California, Los Angeles. Note the £20 bounty for the scalps of Penobscot children “under the Age of Twelve Years.”

Mass death in government custody can also be indicative of one or more of the five genocidal acts defined by the United Nations Genocide Convention: “Killing members of the group,” “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” “Deliberately inflicting 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,” and “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” Nineteenth-century removal and incarceration on federal reservations proved lethal to large numbers of Native Americans. More than 4,000 Choctaws died of hunger, exposure, accidents, and disease during and immediately after their deportation, under military guard, to Oklahoma in 1832 and 1833. Some 700 Creeks died while being marched from Alabama to Oklahoma in 1836. At least 3,500 others died of disease during the first year after they arrived. And perhaps 8,000 Cherokees “died as a more or less direct result of the Trail of Tears” before, during, and after 1838. 69

Despite substantial evidence pointing to the lethality of forced removal and confinement on reservations, such policies proliferated. Of some 1,300 Dakota people taken to Crow Creek in 1863, fewer than 1,000 survived to see their first winter there. In the Southwest, the “Long Walk” to New Mexico's Bosque Redondo Reservation and subsequent malnutrition and illness killed perhaps 2,000, if not more, Navajos between 1863 and 1868. 70 To the northwest, federal officials deported 153 Modocs from Oregon to Oklahoma in 1873. By 1881, more than a third had died from poor conditions and disease exacerbated by corruption. Inadequately fed, 94 Northern Cheyenne also incarcerated in Oklahoma died between 1876 and 1878, while in 1884, some 400 out of not more than 2,600 Piegans starved to death at Montana's Blackfoot Indian Agency. Between 1877 and 1881, some 180 out of 431 Nez Percés also died in federal captivity. Then, in 1886, the U.S. Army made 498 Chiricahua Apaches—including 399 women and children—prisoners of war. By 1894, 246 were dead. Births barely outnumbered additional deaths, and by 1913, only 261 Chiricahua Apache prisoners remained, after twenty-seven years of incarceration. Again and again, mass Native American death followed the imposition of federal custody. 71

G enocidal statements, massacres , official body-part bounties, and mass death in government custody are four ways of locating and defining prima facie cases of genocide. So how does this method operate in practice? Two American Indian genocides—one in seventeenth-century Connecticut, the other in nineteenth-century California—are illustrative of how these markers can be used to locate and define genocides in North America and beyond.

The Pequot Indians of Connecticut endured one of the earliest genocides in what would become the United States, an event now remembered as the Pequot War. Colonists' motives for attacking were complex, but their immediate casus belli was the July 20, 1636, killing of the English trader John Oldham by Narragansett Indians in waters near Block Island, off Rhode Island. Block Island's Narragansetts were not allied with the Pequots. Yet Massachusetts Bay Colony leaders responded by attacking both Block Island Narragansetts and Connecticut Pequots, who had previously “slain one Captaine Norton, and Captaine Stone, with seven more of their company.” 72 This expedition aimed to kill substantial numbers of American Indians.

On August 25, 1636, John Endicott's ninety-eight-man force sailed from Boston. “They had commission,” wrote Massachusetts Colony governor John Winthrop, “to put to death the men of Block Island, but to spare the women and children, and to bring them away [enslave them] and from thence to go to the Pequods to demand the murderers of Capt. Stone and other English [by Pequots], and one thousand fathom of wampum for damages, etc., and some of their children as hostages, which if they should refuse, they were to obtain it by force.” 73 At Block Island, Endicott's men failed to carry out these orders. According to one of his officers, Captain John Underhill, “the Indians being retired into Swamps, so as wee could not find them, wee burnt and spoyled both houses and corne in great abundance.” 74 Still, the expedition failed to kill many Narragansetts, take slaves, or acquire substantial loot.

Following orders, Endicott now sailed against the Pequots. Underhill recalled: “the Indians spying of us came running in multitudes along the water side, crying, what cheere Englishmen, what cheere, what doe you come for? They not thinking we intended warre went on cheerefully untill they come to Pequeat riuer.” Then they “cryed, what Englishman, what cheere, what cheere, are you hoggerie, will you cram us? That is, are you angry, will you kill us, and doe you come to fight.” Endicott demanded the killers' heads, and negotiations ensued. A Pequot “Ambassadour” explained that the Pequots had thought that Stone and company were Dutch, not English. The English rejected this explanation and issued an ultimatum: deliver the killers' heads or “wee will fight with you.” The Pequots continued to negotiate, and the English attacked. 75 Governor Winthrop later wrote, “The Naragansett men told us after, that thirteen of the Pequods were killed, and forty wounded,” and that Endicott's men burned sixty wigwams. 76 Thus began the Pequot War.

Pequots now besieged Connecticut's Fort Saybrook and “slew diverse Men.” 77 During the siege, Pequots—perhaps hoping to end the conflict—asked the fort's commander, Lion Gardiner, “have you fought ynough[?].” Some years later, Gardiner recollected that the Pequots then “asked if we did vse to kill women & childrē[n?]” His answer was ominous: “we said they should see yt heraftr,” to which some Pequots allegedly responded, “we will goe to conectecott and kill men women & children.” 78 Further Anglo-Pequot clashes followed, and by the end of April 1637, Pequots had killed “about Thirty ” colonists in all, while suffering an unknown number of casualties. 79

On May 1, Connecticut's General Court joined the conflict by declaring “offensiue warr” against the Pequots and mustering ninety men under Captain John Mason to attack. 80 Before they departed, a Hartford minister primed Mason's men for large-scale killing. At a Hartford church service, the minister exhorted them to “make their multitudes fall under your warlike weapons.” 81 “[A]bout five hundred Indians ,” including Mohegans under their leader Uncas and Narragansetts under Miantonomi, joined Mason. 82 At Fort Saybrook, Gardiner paid “15 yards of trading Cloath” to Mohegans for at least four Pequot heads. 83 This was perhaps the first head bounty in colonial U.S. history. The combined force, minus some Narragansetts who went home, now sailed toward the Pequots at Mystic, Connecticut, while Underhill moved to meet them. 84 Mason's plan was simple: “We had formerly concluded to destroy them by the Sword and save the Plunder.” 85 He intended a final solution to the Pequot problem.

Mason and Underhill attacked at dawn on May 26, 1637, and Mason soon announced, “WE MUST BURN THEM.” 86 As Mason torched the “West-side” of Mystic, Underhill “set fire on the South end with a traine of Powder, the fires of both meeting in the center of the Fort.” 87 Mason wrote that Mystic's inhabitants “ran as Men most dreadfully Amazed.” Then, “when the Fort was thoroughly Fired, Command was given, that all should fall off and surround the Fort .” 88 Pequots fired back but “were scorched and burnt … deprived of their armes [because] the fire burnt their very bowstrings.” Thus, “many were burnt in the Fort, both men, women, and children, others forced out, and came in troopes to the Indians , twentie, and thirtie at a time, which our soldiers received and entertained with the point of the sword; downe fell men, women, and children.” 89 The English could have taken scores of Pequots prisoner. Instead, they murdered them in keeping with Mason's plan to “destroy them by the Sword.”

How many Pequots were in Mystic that morning remains unclear, but few survived. According to Underhill, Indian eyewitnesses reported “about foure hundred soules in this Fort, and not above five of them escaped out of our hands.” 90 Other contemporary writers estimated 300 to 400 killed. 91 Mason wrote that the Mystic Pequots were “utterly Destroyed, to the Number of six or seven Hundred , as some of themselves confessed,” while “There were only seven taken Captive & about seven escaped .” 92 Supporting his assertion, Mason published a drawing of the fort (see Figure 3 ) containing ninety-eight lodges, and historian Alfred Cave, who authored the definitive Pequot War history, considered Mason's estimate of 600–700 dead “probably more accurate” than Underhill's estimate of about 400. 93 In contrast, colonists lost just “ two Slain outright, and about twenty Wounded .” 94

John Underhill, “The Figure of the Indians' Fort or Palizado in New England and the Manner of the Destroying It by Captayne Vnderhill and Captayne Mason,” from Underhill, Nevves from America; or, A New and Experimentall Discoverie of New England (London, 1638), preceding p. 1. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

The Mystic Massacre shocked many eyewitnesses, but some contemporary writers sought to justify it. According to Underhill, “Great and dolefull was the bloudy sight to the view of young soldiers that never had beene in Warre, to see so many soules lie gasping on the ground so thicke in some places, that you could hardly passe along.” Mason and Underhill's Indian allies “cried mach it , mach it ; that is, it is naught, it is naught, because it is too furious, and slaies too many men.” Underhill, too, was troubled, but wrote: “sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents.” 95 Mason was simply triumphant: “ Thus was God seen in the Mount, Crushing his proud Enemies and the Enemies of his People … burning them up in the Fire of his Wrath, and dunging the Ground with their Flesh: It was the LORD'S Doings, and it is marvelous in our Eyes! ” 96 Some political leaders and colonists also endorsed the atrocity. Twenty days after the massacre, Governor Winthrop wrote: “There was a day of thanksgiving kept in all the churches for the victory obtained against the Pequods.” 97 Plymouth Colony governor William Bradford later wrote that while “It was a fearfull sight to see them thus frying in ye fyer, and ye streams of blood quenching ye same, and horrible was ye stinck & sente ther of; but ye victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave the prays therof to God, who had wrought so wonderfuly for them.” 98 Underhill, Mason, Winthrop, and Bradford all endorsed the atrocity after the fact.

Had Mystic been an isolated event, it would have constituted a single “genocidal massacre.” However, it was only the beginning of a systematic state-sponsored killing campaign. Immediately following the massacre, some 300 Pequot warriors from nearby, enraged by the slaughter of their families and fellow Pequots, counterattacked. 99 According to Underhill, in “an houre [we] slew and wounded above a hundred Pequeats , all fighting men that charged us.” 100 As they marched to their boats, colonists and their Indian allies repeatedly shot Pequots and “fetch[ed] their Heads,” presumably to claim head bounties. 101 Seven Mohegans who had been with the Pequots told the English: “about an hundred Pequets were slaine or hurt, in the fight with the English at their returne from the Fort.” 102 The Pequot leader Sassacus, “with the remainder of this massacre [then] fled the Countrey,” and Massachusetts mobilized 120 militiamen under Captain Israel Stoughton to hunt down survivors. 103

A two-prong operation now began to “utterly roote them out,” according to one contemporary writer. 104 A joint expedition of colonists composed the first prong. Stoughton's force reached the mouth of Connecticut's Thames River in late June, took Pequot prisoners, and on July 5 executed at least twenty-two of them. 105 Forty Connecticut men under Mason then joined him. 106 On July 13 they killed six at New Haven before beheading two Indian leaders at Sachem's Head. 107 Farther down the coast, they surrounded Pequots and local Sasqua Indians in a swamp near Fairfield. After “the English slew but few,” at least 180 “ old Men, Women and Children ” surrendered, while others remained in the swamp. 108 Colonists then “killed fortie or fiftie besides those that they cut off in their retrait,” while “ sixty or seventy ” Pequots escaped. 109 In total, the killings of mid-May to mid-July 1637 took a cataclysmic toll on the Pequots. According to Underhill, Pequots were “slaine by the sword, to the number of fifteene hundred soules in the space of two moneths and lesse.” 110 Still, the killing continued. According to P. Vincent, writing in 1637, “Some other small parties of them were since destroyed.” 111 Montauk and Mohawk Indians constituted the second prong, killing at colonists' behest.

Head bounties encouraged the killing of Pequot survivors, sometimes by enlisting Indian participation with genocidal threats. The Pequot War was one of many instances in which a colonizing regime threatened Indians from one tribe into killing Indians from another. Three days after the Mystic Massacre, Gardiner met with Long Island's Montauk leader Wyandanch and warned him that if “you haue pequits with you … they might kill my men, … and So we may kill all you for ye pequits but if you will kill all the pequits yt come to you and send me thr heads,” then “you shall haue trade with vs.” Wyandanch later sent Gardiner a dozen Pequot heads, and Gardiner “paid … as I had promised.” Wyandanch then “kild … many of ye pequits and sent thr heds to” Gardiner, probably fearing that unless he continued this grisly trade, Englishmen would “come and kill vs all as they did ye pequits.” 112 Similar fears and rewards likely motivated other New England and New York Indians. In 1637, Mason reported, “The Pequots now became a Prey to all Indians . Happy were they that could bring in their Heads to the English : Of which there came almost daily to Winsor , or Hartford [Connecticut].” 113 That summer, Mohawks sent the heads and hands of perhaps forty or more Pequots, including Sassacus, to Hartford, for, as Gardiner explained, “they all fered vs.” 114 On August 5, Winthrop reported that Englishmen had brought to Boston “part of the skin and lock of hair of Sasacus” and of twenty-six others. On August 26, Winthrop recorded how “The Indians about sent in still many Pequods' heads and hands from Long Island and other places,” while on August 31, “The Naragansetts sent us the hands of three Pequods.” 115 By demonstrating that body-part bounties—which motivated some or all of this head, hand, and scalp collecting—could be an effective Indian-killing policy, colonists established a lethal, enduring tradition.

During the Pequot War, colonists and their allies killed an estimated “one quarter to two thirds” of all Pequots, while enslaving and intentionally scattering survivors. 116 Some colonial leaders sought total erasure. The September 1638 Treaty of Hartford banished Pequots from their homeland, gave 200 surviving Pequot men and their relatives to the Mohegans and Narragansetts, specified that Pequots “shall no more be called Pequots but Narragansetts and Mohegans,” and called for the beheading of any surviving Pequots who had killed or attempted to kill any English person. 117 Dispersal then continued.

Connecticut and Massachusetts colonists used slavery in an attempt to destroy the surviving Pequot community. Colonial authorities ultimately made perhaps 600 Pequots the chattels of their Indian enemies. At least 319 others became Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Plymouth colonists' property or were shipped overseas: at least one to Britain, seventeen to Caribbean bondage on Providence Isle, and eighty or more to slavery in Bermuda. Colonists thus sought to scatter and destroy the Pequot nation. 118

Defying genocidal intentions and policies, Pequots resisted and survived. In 2010, exactly 3,373 U.S. citizens identified themselves as Pequots. Today, many are members of Connecticut's Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation or the neighboring Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. 119

Twenty-first-century Pequots are not the only American Indians descended from genocide survivors. Northern California's Yuki Indians endured a similar ordeal. California's first civilian United States governor, Peter Burnett, set the stage in 1851 by declaring “[t]hat a war of extermination will continue to be waged … until the Indian race becomes extinct.” 120 One month later, state legislators allocated $500,000 to fund Indian-hunting state militia campaigns. In 1852, the U.S. Senate then refused to ratify the eighteen treaties that would have set aside approximately 7 percent of California as federal Indian reservation lands, thus leaving California Indians without explicit federal protection. 121 The first known massacre of Yuki people followed less than two years later.

On May 15, 1854, white explorers entered Round Valley, the heart of the Yuki homeland, and preemptively massacred as many as forty Yuki people. Colonization followed, diminishing traditional food sources and pushing some Yuki to eat whites' livestock. In response, whites once again began massacring Yuki. One man later testified that in 1856, “the Indians were killing stock, and the whites were killing Indians.” 122 Another explained: “for every beef that has been killed by them ten or fifteen Indians have been killed.” 123 Yet another testified that in 1856, “the first expedition by the whites against the Indians was made, and have continued ever since … we would kill, on an average, fifty or sixty Indians on a trip … frequently we would have to turn out two or three times a week.” 124 Such expeditions presumably killed hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of Yuki people.

Meanwhile, whites kidnapped Yuki women and children, taking advantage of laws that, between 1850 and 1863, allowed them to take and hold Indians—including children—for years at a time. By 1856, one Indian agent wrote of Yuki “squaws and children taken away by white men,” and of Yuki men who “said they would all work at anything I wanted them to, if only I would protect their squaws and children.” In 1857, another agent reported from Round Valley: “the Indians … have very few children—most of them doubtless having been stolen and sold.” 125

That year the Yuki resisted by killing whites for the first time, and whites responded with continued killing. In October 1857, Indian agent Thomas Henley warned that killing would “continue until the force of the whites is sufficient to overwhelm the Indians and exterminate them or drive them from the Reservation.” Henley asked for federal troops to protect the Yuki, but as with others who echoed such requests, his appeal fell on deaf ears. 126 Whites killed twenty-seven Yuki during the first ten months of 1858, while 1860 depositions underscored some killers' genocidal intent. 127 According to one man, the livestock manager H. L. Hall “commenced killing all the Indians [he and his colleagues] could find in the mountains … I heard Mr. Hall say that he did not want any man to go with him to hunt Indians, who would not kill all he could find, because a knit would make a louse.” 128 Army lieutenant Edward Dillon added that Hall “well nigh depopulated a country, which but a short time since swarmed with Indians.” 129 Hall himself explained how, in one instance, “all the squaws were killed because they refused to go further. We took one boy into the valley, and the infants were put out of their misery, and a girl ten years of age was killed for stubbornness.” 130 Finally, a Long Valley man testified that he and his comrades had “killed one hundred and fifty or two hundred Indians.” 131

The destruction of Yuki people intensified that winter. Special Treasury Agent J. Ross Browne reported that in Round Valley, “during the winter of 1858–'59, more than a hundred and fifty peaceable Indians, including women and children, were cruelly slaughtered by the whites.” Browne explained, “Armed parties went into the rancherias in open day, when no evil was apprehended, and shot the Indians down—weak, harmless, and defenseless as they were—without distinction of age or sex; shot down women with sucking babes at their breasts; killed or crippled the naked children that were running about.” 132

Despite the U.S. Army troops stationed in the valley, the killing continued because commanders had ordered regulars there not to confront or arrest whites. In April 1859, an informant told how “in the vicinity of Round Valley … within the past three weeks, from three to four hundred bucks, squaws and children have been killed.” 133 Two weeks later, Major Edward Johnson reported: “the whites have waged a relentless war of extermination against the Yukas [and] have ruthlessly massacred men, women, and children,” estimating “some six hundred … killed within the last year.” 134 That summer, the killing became even more organized.

On July 11, 1859, Walter Jarboe recruited sixteen men to hunt surviving Yuki. By August 21, Major Johnson reported that Jarboe had killed at least sixty-four Yuki people, explaining, “I believe it to be the Settled determination of many of the inhabitants to exterminate the Indians.” 135 That same day, Johnson also warned California governor John Weller of Jarboe's indiscriminate killings. Nevertheless, on September 6, Weller enrolled Jarboe's men as a volunteer state militia company to kill or take into custody Yuki beyond the Round Valley Reservation. 136

Jarboe's Eel River Rangers thus continued their campaign, now with state sponsorship. On October 18, Agent Browne warned the U.S. commissioner of Indian affairs that Jarboe “has been engaged for some months past in a cruel and relentless pursuit of the Indians in this vicinity, slaughtering miscellaneously all with whom he comes in contact, without regard to age or sex.” 137 Newspapers reported massacres committed by Jarboe's men: twenty-five Indians killed in late September, twenty in October, thirty on December 9, and another thirty on December 13. 138 A declaration of genocidal intent made Jarboe's intentions clear. In a December 3 report to Governor Weller, Jarboe emphasized: “however cruel it may be … nothing short of extermination will suffice to rid the Country of them [the Yuki].” 139 Still, the governor failed to stop him.

Weller finally dissolved Jarboe's company almost two months later, on January 24, 1860. Jarboe then reported that from September 20, 1859, to January 24, 1860, “I fought them 23 times, killed 283 Warriors, the number of wounded was not known, took 292 prisoners, sent them to the Reservation.” 140 Given reports that Jarboe's company routinely murdered noncombatants, this was almost certainly an underestimate. According to a January 22 newspaper report, “In seventy days they had fifteen battles with the red men; killed more than four hundred of them; took six hundred of them prisoners, and had only three of their own number wounded and one killed.” 141 Another newspaper declared Jarboe's campaign a “deliberate, cowardly, brutal massacre of defenseless men, women, and children,” while some state legislators denounced it as “a slaughter of beings … who make no resistance, and make no attacks.” 142 Scalp bounties did not play a role in this genocide, but in April 1860, California legislators voted to pay Jarboe, his men, and their suppliers $9,347.39 for “the expedition against the Indians in the county of Mendocino.” 143

J. Ross Browne, “Protecting the Settlers.” From Browne, “The Coast Rangers: A Chronicle of Events in California,” part II: “The Indian Reservation,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine 23, no. 135 (August 1861): 313. Courtesy of the Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. This image accompanied an article by Browne in which he described the killing of Yuki people at Round Valley, California.

Federal officials incarcerated most of the remaining Yuki at the Round Valley Reservation, with lethal results. Forced labor had already taken many lives. One man testified that during the winter of 1856–1857, “about three hundred died on the reservation, from the effects of packing them through the mountains in snow and mud … they were worked naked, with the exception of [minimal clothing and] usually packed fifty pounds.” 144 Conditions on the reservation deteriorated following Jarboe's campaign.

Institutionalized malnutrition led to starvation conditions. In 1860, Round Valley Reservation Indians were given just 480 to 910 calories' worth of food per day, or sometimes more, in the form of potatoes, while those who did not work received no food. In 1862, rations plunged further. In October, a newspaper reported that Round Valley Indians “in starving condition” were leaving “in the hope of escaping death by starvation.” 145 That December a reservation employee testified, “ There is nothing for them to eat .” 146 Captain George, a local chief, also claimed to have “nothing to eat,” and Captain C. D. Douglas reported daily rations of just 160 to 390 calories. 147

Kidnappings also continued. In 1860, one local man explained, “among these hostile tribes which we attacked, we found no children, and I believe there has been a practice of abducting the children [for] profit.” 148 In 1862, an Indian agent added that Round Valley's “white men … at every opportunity make merchandise of [Indian] children and wives of their squaws.” 149 Such abductions destroyed Yuki families while undercutting demographic recovery.

Vigilantes, meanwhile, continued killing Yuki on and off the reservation. In July 1861, Superintending Agent George Hanson protested that Round Valley Reservation Indians were “being hunted down like wild beasts and killed.” 150 The killing subsided in 1862, but after a white man was killed in 1863, soldiers and volunteers killed ten Yuki before lynching five others. 151 This seems to have been the last mass killing of Yuki people. However, between 1854 and 1864, the Yuki population had declined by 90 percent or more. 152 Although pushed to the brink of oblivion, Yuki people survived, and today some are members of California's Round Valley Indian Tribes.

T he P equot and Y uki cases demonstrate the utility of documenting genocidal statements, massacres, body-part bounties, and mass death in government custody to identify, locate, and define cases of genocide in Native American history and beyond. In both genocides, policymakers and perpetrators expressed “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Massacres, body-part bounties, and mass death in government custody provide additional evidence of genocidal intent, as well as evidence of genocidal acts including “Killing,” “Causing serious bodily or mental harm,” and “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Containment in dangerous conditions and dispersal through kidnapping and slavery may constitute “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” Finally, kidnapping and slavery involved “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” Studying the planning, execution, and aftermath of specific genocidal crimes can also reveal who ordered them, carried them out, and rewarded them, rather than lumping all architects, commanders, perpetrators, and accomplices together. This approach points the way toward an effective methodology with which to evaluate the question of genocide at any time and place in history.

The case study as a unit of analysis allows for the examination of whether or not a particular “national, ethnical, racial or religious group” suffered genocide. There may be questions about genocide that can be resolved only by analyzing crimes against multiple American Indian tribes, but for the purposes of resolving the American genocide debate, locating and documenting evidence for individual tribal histories avoids problems associated with considering all Native Americans together. Crucially, it moves away from misleading colonial constructs of race to focus on particular tribes. Case studies are also often more practical, specific, and useful to contemporary American Indian nations than lumping all Indians—across several centuries and millions of square miles—together. For example, studying tribes as nations—in discrete case studies—clarifies how regimes committed genocide even when other Native Americans did some of the killing. Case studies also provide an avenue for locating and delineating the specific genocidal crimes suffered by different tribes at different times at the hands of different perpetrators. Detailed case study analyses are an important new direction in genocide studies—a field often dominated by theoretical debates—offering a powerful tool with which to understand genocide and combat its denial around the world.

The case study method is not limited to locating and defining instances of genocide in the United States and its colonial antecedents. These methods can also be applied in other geographies where genocides may have occurred, such as Africa, Asia, Latin America, and beyond. They may be particularly useful in helping to move other national genocide debates forward. Indeed, detailed case studies examining genocide in Queensland, Tasmania, and Victoria have helped to advance the ongoing Australian genocide debate. 153

In those times and places where intended destruction, massacre, state-sponsored body-part bounties, and mass death in government custody appear, it makes sense to investigate the possibility of genocide. This involves refocusing the American genocide debate from a macro analysis to investigations of history at the tribal level. Each Native American population decline requires careful, detailed examination, not limited to the seventeenth-century Pequot or the nineteenth-century Yuki cases. Questions of genocidal intent, actions, and consequences must be meticulously investigated in each case. In the absence of robust case studies, general statements about whether or not “all” or “most” Native American tribes suffered genocide, even if germane, are difficult to substantiate. Moreover, the stakes are too high to limit our studies to such an all-or-nothing approach. The claim that not every American Indian tribe suffered genocide should not be allowed to block debate and further research into the question of genocide in U.S. history. Careful analyses of specific regions and tribes will provide the crucial building blocks upon which later meta-analyses can be built. By examining each case in detail, scholars will dignify its particularities and ultimately help create a clearer, more vivid mosaic of varied Native American experiences, and of U.S. history as a whole.

The “Old World” pathogens that non-Indians carried in their blood, mucus, saliva, and semen killed untold numbers of American Indians, but the ideas in their heads, coupled with the weapons in their hands, also led to mass violence, and in some cases genocide. It is not surprising that scholars have written so little about this topic. The violence that Native Americans suffered during America's conquest is painful to contemplate, and cannot be reversed. Yet rather than distancing ourselves from this traumatic history, we need to move closer to it.

Possible cases of genocide are worth investigating for many reasons, but three stand out. Decency demands that even long after the deaths of the victims, we preserve the truth of what befell them, so that their memory can be honored and the repetition of similar crimes deterred. Justice demands that even long after the perpetrators have vanished, we document the crimes that they and their advocates have too often concealed, denied, or suppressed. Finally, historical veracity demands that we carefully examine the Native American demographic catastrophe, in all its varied aspects and causes, in order to better understand formative events in both Native American and United States history.

Massacre Map Sources

These massacre statistics are in many cases contested. Accurately counting bodies in the aftermath of a massacre is often difficult due to a host of factors. Killing fields may be substantial in area. Victims' bodies may be carried away by rivers, sink in bodies of water, or be consumed and scattered by animals. Perpetrators may incinerate, bury, or otherwise conceal corpses. Survivors may cremate or inter their loved ones and community members. Death toll estimates may also be intentionally misleading. Given the varying implications of massacre body counts in different contexts, perpetrators, bystanders, and survivors may minimize, exaggerate, or obfuscate the numbers killed. As a result of these many factors, primary sources often disagree on massacre death tolls, as do later analyses. The following sources report both the lowest and highest reasonable death toll for each massacre on the map.

For Acoma, see Captain Velasco to the Viceroy, March 22, 1601, in George P. Hammond and Agapito Rey, eds., Don Juan de Oñate: Colonizer of New Mexico, 1595–1628 , 2 vols. (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1953), 2: 614–615; and Alonso Sanchez to Rodrigo del Rio, February 28, 1599, ibid., 1: 427.

For Antelope Creek, see “Proceedings of a Board of Officers … January 21, 1879, Special Orders, No. 8,” summarized in Peter John Powell, People of the Sacred Mountain: A History of the Northern Cheyenne Chiefs and Warrior Societies, 1830–1879 , 2 vols. (San Francisco, 1981), 2: 1396.

For Arenal, see court questions in “Testimony of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado on the Management of the Expedition, September 3, 1544,” in George P. Hammond and Agapito Rey, eds. and trans., Narratives of the Coronado Expedition, 1540–1542 (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1940), 319–336, here 335; and Pedro de Castañeda, “Narrative of the Expedition to Cíbola … by Pedro de Castañeda of Náxera,” ibid., 191–283, here 226–227.

For Bad Axe, see Patrick J. Jung, The Black Hawk War of 1832 (Norman, Okla., 2007), 172; and General Henry Atkinson in Cecil Eby, “That Disgraceful Affair”: The Black Hawk War (New York, 1973), 257–258.

For Bear River, see Colonel P. Edw. Connor to Colonel R. C. Drum, February 6, 1863, in United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies , 4 series, 130 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1880–1901), series 1, vol. 50, pt. I, 185–187, here 187; and Edward Price to Friend James, September 14, 1863, Pajaro Times (Watsonville, Calif.), October 17, 1863, 1.

For Big Hole, see Jerome A. Greene, Nez Perce Summer, 1877: The U.S. Army and the Nee-Me-Poo Crisis (Helena, Mont., 2000), 374; and “The Fight at Big Hole,” New York Times , September 29, 1889, 11.

For Bloody Island, see N. Lyon, Brevet Captain, to Major E. R. S. Canby, May 22, 1850, in “Message from the President of the United States … at the Commencement of the Second Session of the Thirty-First Congress,” S. Ex. Doc. 1, pt. 2, 31st Cong., 2nd Sess., 1850, 82; and Edwin Allen Sherman, “Sherman Was There: The Recollections of Major Edwin A. Sherman (continued),” California Historical Society Quarterly 24, no. 1 (1945): 47–72, here 54.

For Blue Water Creek, see R. Eli Paul, Blue Water Creek and the First Sioux War, 1854–1856 (Norman, Okla., 2004), 106.

For Bridge Gulch, see Franklin Buck to Marcy Bradley, June 9, 1852, Franklin Buck Papers, 1846–1853, Box 1, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.; and Fred Stacer in the Golden Era (San Francisco), November 15, 1879, 3.

For Camp Grant, see Chip Coldwell-Chanthaphonh, Massacre at Camp Grant: Forgetting and Remembering Apache History (Tucson, Ariz., 2007), 89.

For Canyon de Chelly, see Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Narbona to Governor Fernando Chacón, January 24, 1805, in Frank McNitt, Navajo Wars: Military Campaigns, Slave Raids, and Reprisals (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1972), 431.

For Chama River, see H. H. Bancroft, The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft , 39 vols., vol. 17: History of Arizona and New Mexico, 1530–1888 (San Francisco, 1889), 249.

For Clear Lake, see William H. Davis, Sixty Years in California: A History of Events and Life in California (San Francisco, 1889), 342; and Statement of Juan Bojorges, in Robert F. Heizer, ed., Collected Documents on the Causes and Events in the Bloody Island Massacre of 1850 (Berkeley, Calif., 1973), 67–70.

For Cokadjal, see Lyon to Canby, May 22, 1850, 82.

For Colorado River, see correspondent, Sacramento Daily Union , October 20, 1866, 2.

For Fort Fox, see R. David Edmunds and Joseph L. Peyser, The Fox Wars: The Mesquakie Challenge to New France (Norman, Okla., 1993), 156.

For Galveston Island, see David La Vere, The Texas Indians (College Station, Tex., 2004), 178.

For Gnadenhütten, see John Heckewelder, A Narrative of the Mission of the United Brethren among the Delaware and Mohegan Indians … to the Close of the Year 1808 (Philadelphia, 1820), 320–321; and David Zeisberger, April 7, 1782, entry in Eugene F. Bliss, ed. and trans., Diary of David Zeisberger, a Moravian Missionary among the Indians of Ohio , 2 vols. (Cincinnati, 1885), 1: 85.

For Goose Creek, see Samuel Eveleigh to Boone and Berresford, July 19, 1715, quoted in Chapman J. Milling, Red Carolinians (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1940), 144–145; and Francis Le Jau to John Chamberlain(?), August 22, 1715, in Francis Le Jau and Frank J. Klingberg, eds., The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 1706–1717 (Berkeley, Calif., 1956), 160–163, here 161.

For Great Swamp, see Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975), 312 n. 43.

For Green River, see Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 295; and James Pierson Beckwourth, The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, Mountaineer, Scout, and Pioneer, and Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians , ed. T. D. Bonner (New York, 1856), 137.

For Guano Valley, see B. A. Farmer to J. K. Luttrell, March 2, 1866, Sacramento Daily Union , March 12, 1866, 2; and Smoke Creek, Nevada, correspondent, March 4, 1866, Sacramento Daily Union , March 14, 1866, 2.

For Hillabee, see James White, Brig. Gen., to John Cocke, Major-General, November 24, 1813, Weekly Register (Baltimore), December 25, 1813, 282–283, here 283; and Major General John Cocke to General [Andrew Jackson], November 27, 1813, Andrew Jackson Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 1–2, here 1.

For Humboldt Bay, see Sheriff Van Ness summarized and J. A. Lord quoted in Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), February 28, 1860, 2.

For the Humboldt River, see Zenas Leonard, Narrative of the Adventures of Zenas Leonard … of the Rocky Mountains (Clearfield, Pa., 1839), 37–38.

For Little Robe Creek, see John S. Ford, Captain Commanding Texas Frontier, to H. R. Runnels, Governor of Texas, May 22, 1858, in “Protection of the Frontier of Texas,” H. Ex. Doc. 27, 35th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1850, 20.

For Lost River, see Benjamin Madley, “California and Oregon's Modoc Indians: How Indigenous Resistance Camouflages Genocide in Colonial Histories,” in Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, and Alexander Laban Hinton, eds., Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America (Durham, N.C., 2014), 95–130, here 103.

For Mankato, see Daily Review (Mankato, Minn.), December 26, 1896, 1–2.

For Marias River, see E. M. Baker, Major, to Brevet Major J. T. McGinniss, February 18, 1870, in “Piegan Indians,” H. Ex. Doc. 269, 41st Cong., 2nd Sess., 1870, 16–17; and “Statement of Mr. A. B. Hamilton, January 16, 1915,” 1–2, here 1, MF53, Claims of the Heirs of Chief Heavy Runner for Reimbursement of Losses, SB287, Heavy Runner Records, 1914–1921, Montana Historical Society Archives, Helena.

For Matagorda, see J. W. Wilbarger, Indian Depredations in Texas (1888; repr., Austin, Tex., 1890), 210.

For Moth Island, see Hubert H. Bancroft and Salvador Vallejo to M. G. Vallejo, March 13, 1843, summarized in Bancroft, The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft , vol. 21: History of California , vol. IV: 1840–1845 (San Francisco, 1886), 362–363 and 362 n. 28; M. G. Vallejo to Comandante of Sonoma, April 1, 1843, in S. F. Cook, “The Conflict between the California Indian and White Civilization: II,” Ibero-Americana 22 (1943): 1–55, here 9.

For Mystic, see John Underhill, Nevves from America; or, A New and Experimentall Discoverie of New England (London, 1638), 39; and John Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War: Especially of the Memorable Taking of Their Fort at Mistick in Connecticut in 1637 (Boston, 1736), 10.

For Napituca, see “Fidalgo” of Elvas, in James Alexander Robertson, ed. and trans., True Relation of the Hardships Suffered by Governor Fernando de Soto … by a Gentleman of Elvas , 2 vols. (1557; repr., DeLand, Fla., 1933), 2: 63; and Jerald T. Milanich, Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe (1995; repr., Gainesville, Fla., 1998), 133.

For Nickajack and Running Water, see James Ore to Governor Blount, September 24, 1794, in Ramsey, The Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century , 616–617, here 616; and Edward Albright, Early History of Middle Tennessee (Nashville, Tenn., 1909), 196.

For Nilco, see “Fidalgo” of Elvas, in Robertson, True Relation of the Hardships Suffered by Governor Fernando de Soto , 2: 221–223.

For Nombre de Dios, see Verner W. Crane, The Southern Frontier, 1670–1732 (Durham, N.C., 1929), 250; and Steven J. Oatis, A Colonial Complex: South Carolina's Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War, 1680–1730 (Lincoln, Neb., 2004), 284.

For Norridgewock, see Samuel Penhallow, The History of the Wars of New-England, with the Eastern Indians (Boston, 1726), 106.

For Owens Lake, see Cadmium, January 8, 1865, Daily Alta California , January 22, 1865, 1; and J. W. A. Wright in the San Francisco Daily Evening Post , November 22, 1879, 2.

For Pavonia, see John Fiske, The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America , 2 vols. (Boston, 1899), 1: 185; and David deVries quoted in Jennings, The Invasion of America , 164–165.

For Penateka, see Wilbarger, Indian Depredations in Texas , 183–185; and J. H. Moore paraphrased in T. R. Fehrenbach, Comanches: The Destruction of a People (New York, 1974), 348.

For Peskeompskut, see Robert Bardwell and William Drew summarized in George Madison Bodge, Soldiers in King Philip's War … With an Appendix (Leominster, Mass., 1896), 247; and “contemporary writers” summarized ibid., 246.

For Potomac, see Virginia Company Court Minutes, November 12, 1623, in Susan Myra Kingsbury, The Records of the Virginia Company of London , 4 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1906), 2: 477–481, here 478; and Robert Bennett to Edward Bennett, June 9, 1623, in Kingsbury, The Records of the Virginia Company of London , 4 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1935), 4: 220–222, here 221–222.

For Poundridge, see E. B. O'Callaghan, History of New Netherland; or, New York under the Dutch , 2 vols. (New York, 1846), 1: 301.

For Prospect Bluff, see Lt. Col. D. L. Clinch to Col. R. Butler, August 2, 1816, Army and Navy Chronicle , February 25, 1836, 114–115, here 115; J. Loomis to Commodore Daniel T. Patterson, August 13, 1816, in “Letter from the Secretary of the Navy … Relating to the Destruction of the Negro Fort … in the Month of July, 1816,” H. Ex. Doc. 119, 15th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1819, 15–17; and “Extract of a Letter to a Gentleman in Charleston, Dated Camp Crawford, August 4 [1816],” Connecticut Courant (Hartford), September 10, 1816, 3.

For San Saba, see Kelly F. Himmel, The Conquest of the Karankawas and the Tonkawas, 1821–1859 (College Station, Tex., 1999), 26.

For Sand Creek, see Elliot West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence, Kans., 1998), 305; and eyewitness estimates in Stan Hoig, The Sand Creek Massacre (Norman, Okla., 1961), 183, 186–187.

For Santa Fe, see Don Diego de Vargas Zapata et al., December 29, 1693, in John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge, eds., To the Royal Crown Restored: The Journals of don Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1692–94 (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1995), 533.

For Spanish Fork Canyon, see Geo. S. Evans, Colonel, to Lieut. W. L. Ustick, April 17, 1863, in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion , series 1, vol. 50, pt. I, 205–208, here 207–208.

For Spanish Peaks, see Pedro Fermín de Mendinueta quoted and summarized in Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, Conn., 2008), 78.

For Spruce Swamp, see John Tallcot to Honrd Gent, July 4, 1676, in J. Hammond Trumbull, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, from 1665 to 1678 , 15 vols. (Hartford, Conn., 1852), 2: 458–459, here 458.

For Stanislaus, see José Maria Amador, “Memorias sobre la historia de California,” in S. F. Cook, “Expeditions to the Interior of California Central Valley, 1820–1840,” Anthropological Records of the University of California 20, no. 5 (1962): 151–214, here 197–198.

For Tuckasejah, see J. G. M. Ramsey, The Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century: Comprising Its Settlement … to 1800 (Charleston, S.C., 1853), 268–269.

For Washita, see Little Robe, Minimic, Grey Eyes, and Red Moon in Jerome A. Greene, Washita: The U.S. Army and the Southern Cheyennes, 1867–1869 (Norman, Okla., 2004), 136; and Ben Clark quoted in Stan Hoig, The Battle of the Washita: The Sheridan-Custer Indian Campaign of 1867–69 (Garden City, N.Y., 1976), 200–201.

For White Stone Hill, see Alf. Sully, Brigadier-General, to Maj. J. F. Meline, September 11, 1863, in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion , series 1, vol. 22, pt. I, 555–561, here 559; and Doane Robinson, A History of the Dakota or Sioux Indians from Their Earliest Traditions … to … Abandonment of the Old Tribal Life (Aberdeen, S.Dak., 1904), 328.

For Wounded Knee, see Richard E. Jensen, “Big Foot's Followers at Wounded Knee,” Nebraska History 71, no. 4 (1990), 194–212, here 198; and Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee (Cambridge, 2004), 345.

I am grateful to William Bauer, Colin Calloway, John Demos, John Faragher, Albert Hurtado, Paul Kelton, Ben Kiernan, Timothy Macholz, William Marotti, Preston S. McBride, Edward Melillo, Jeffrey Ostler, Christopher Parsons, Peter Stacey, Russell Thornton, and the American Historical Review 's editors and anonymous reviewers for their help with this essay.

1 Estimates of the pre-contact Native American population in North America and in what would become the continental United States vary dramatically and remain contested. The following are some influential estimates. In 1841, the artist George Catlin estimated 16,000,000; and in 1860 the missionary Emmanuel Domenech estimated 16,000,000 to 17,000,000 in North America, not including Mexico, “two centuries ago.” In 1928 and 1939, anthropologists James Mooney and Alfred Kroeber estimated 1,152,950 and 1,025,950 respectively for the native population north of Mexico. Estimates then trended upward. In 1976, anthropologist Douglas H. Ubelaker estimated 1,850,011 for the continental United States. In 1983, anthropologist Henry Dobyns estimated “approximately 18 million Native Americans living north of civilized Mesoamerica in the early years of the sixteenth century.” Four years later, demographer Russell Thornton estimated “5+ million” in “the conterminous United States,” and in 1992 geographer William Denevan estimated 3,790,000 in North America, excluding Mexico and Central America. Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians , 2 vols. (London, 1841), 1: 6; Domenech, Seven Years' Residence in the Great Deserts of North America , 2 vols. (London, 1860), 1: 429; Mooney, The Aboriginal Population of America North of Mexico (Washington, D.C., 1928), 33; Kroeber, Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America (Berkeley, Calif., 1939), 131; Ubelaker, “Prehistoric New World Population Size: Historical Review and Current Appraisal of North American Estimates,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 45, no. 3 (1976): 661–665, here table 2, 664; Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville, Tenn., 1983), 42; Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 (Norman, Okla., 1987), 32, 60; Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 , 2nd ed. (Madison, Wis., 1992), xxviii. The Indian Office reported 243,299 American Indians in 1887, while the Census Bureau reported 237,196 in 1900. United States Department of the Interior, Annual Reports of the Department of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1900: Indian Affairs—Report of the Commissioner and Appendixes (Washington, D.C., 1900), 48; United States Bureau of the Census, Indian Population in the United States and Alaska, 1910 (Washington, D.C., 1915), 10. According to Thornton, “the single most important factor in American Indian population decline was an increased death rate due to diseases introduced from the Eastern Hemisphere”; American Indian Holocaust and Survival , 44. Epidemiologist and microbiologist Francis L. Black wrote, “Approximately 56 million people died as a result of European exploration in the New World [and] most died of introduced diseases.” Black, “Why Did They Die?” Science 258 (December 11, 1992): 1739–1740, here 1739. For additional scholarship on the causes, dynamics, and impact of introduced diseases on Native Americans see footnote 7.

2 Thornton noted this debate in “Native American Demographic and Tribal Survival into the Twenty-First Century,” American Studies 46, no. 3–4 (2005): 23–38, here 31.

3 R. C., “Reasons and Considerations Touching the Lawfulness of Removing out of England into the Parts of America [1622],” in John Demos, ed., Remarkable Providences, 1600–1760 (New York, 1972), 25–31, here 28.

4 Thomas More, A Fruteful, and Pleasaunt Worke … Called Vtopia , trans. Raphe Robynson (1516; repr., London, 1551), 73; John Donne, “A Sermon Preached to the Honourable Company of the Virginian Plantation,” November 13, 1622, in George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, eds., The Sermons of John Donne , 10 vols. (Berkeley, Calif., 1953–1962), 4: 274; John Cotton, “Gods Promise to His Plantations” (London, 1630), in The Old South Leaflets: Twelfth Series ([Boston], 1894), no. 6, 6; William Penn, A Brief Account of the Province of Pennsylvania, Lately Granted … to William Penn and His Heirs and Assigns (London, 1681), 1.

5 James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge, 1993), 169. David Armitage called this the “agriculturalist argument” in “John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government ,” Political Theory 32, no. 5 (2004): 602–627, here 618. Locke asserted that whatsoever a man “removes out of the State [of] Nature” and “hath mixed his Labour with,” he “thereby makes it his Property.” He then proposed an expansive definition of wasteland available for expropriation: “if either the Grass of his Inclosure rotted on the Ground, or the Fruit of his planting perished without gathering, and laying up, this part of the Earth, notwithstanding his Inclosure, was still to be looked on as Waste, and might be the Possession of any other.” Locke specified: “several Nations of the Americans … are rich in Land, and … yet for want of improving it by labour, have not 1/100 part of the Conveniencies we enjoy.” John Locke, Two Treatises of Government: In the Former, the False Principles and Foundation of Sir Robert Filmer, and His Followers Are Detected and Overthrown (1690; repr., London, 1698), 185, 194, 196, emphasis in the original. Locke's views of property and colonialism are contested. For recent discussion, see Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government .”

6 Bubonic plague and cholera probably arrived later.

7 For scholarship on the causes, dynamics, variability, and demographic impact of Native American death due to introduced diseases, see Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd series, 33, no. 2 (1976): 289–299; William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York, 1977), 199–216; Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned ; Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival ; David E. Stannard, “Disease and Infertility: A New Look at the Demographic Collapse of Native Populations in the Wake of Western Contact,” Journal of American Studies 24, no. 3 (1990): 325–350; Douglas H. Ubelaker, “Patterns of Demographic Change in the Americas,” Human Biology 64, no. 3 (1992): 361–379; Dean R. Snow, “Microchronology and Demographic Evidence Relating to the Size of Pre-Columbian North American Indian Populations,” Science 268 (June 16, 1995): 1601–1604; Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York, 1997); David S. Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,” William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd series, 60, no. 4 (2003): 703–742; Jones, Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); Paul Kelton, Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492–1715 (Lincoln, Neb., 2007). For one study of how disease has been used to limit the discussion of violence, see Kelton, Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation's Fight against Smallpox, 1518–1824 (Norman, Okla., forthcoming 2015), chap. 4. Quotation from William Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes (New York, 2002), 212.

8 Some works addressing U.S. exceptionalism include Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York, 1996); Siobhán McEvoy-Levy, American Exceptionalism and US Foreign Policy: Public Diplomacy at the End of the Cold War (New York, 2001); Jonathan A. Glickstein, American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety: Wages, Competition, and Degraded Labor in the Antebellum United States (Charlottesville, Va., 2002). Sociologist Michael Mann posited a relationship between democracy and ethnic cleansing in The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (New York, 2005).

9 The 2010 census reported 5,220,579 people as being Native American or part Native American. See Karen R. Humes, Nicholas A. Jones, and Roberto R. Ramirez, “Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin: 2010,” March 2011, www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-02.pdf ; Eduardo Duran, Judith Firehammer, and John Gonzalez, “Liberation Psychology as the Path toward Healing Cultural Soul Wounds,” Journal of Counseling & Development 86, no. 3 (2008): 288–295, here 292. For more on intergenerational trauma, see Yael Danieli, ed., International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma (New York, 1998). In 2007, several hundred Indian and non-Indian participants at the 37th Annual United Indian Health Services Annual Board and Staff Meeting for northwestern California discussed the connection between the historical trauma resulting from genocide and contemporary Native American health issues.

10 Eric K. Yamamoto and Liann Ebesugawa, “Report on Redress: The Japanese American Internment,” in Pablo de Greiff, ed., The Handbook of Reparations (New York, 2006), 257–283, here 257–258, 269–270, 274.

11 Kevin Gover, “Remarks of Kevin Gover, Assistant Secretary-Indian Affairs: Address to Tribal Leaders,” Journal of American Indian Education 39, no. 2 (2000): 4–6, here 4–5.

12 To Acknowledge a Long History of Official Depredations and Ill-Conceived Policies by the United States Government Regarding Indian Tribes and Offer an Apology to All Native Peoples on Behalf of the United States , S.J. Res. 37, 108th Cong., 2nd Sess., 2004, and H.J. Res. 98, 108th Cong., 2nd Sess., 2004.

13 To Acknowledge a Long History of Official Depredations and Ill-Conceived Policies by the United States Government Regarding Indian Tribes and Offer an Apology to All Native Peoples on Behalf of the United States , S.J. Res. 15, 109th Cong., 1st Sess., 2005; H.J. Res. 3, 109th Cong., 1st Sess., 2005; S.J. Res. 4, 110th Cong., 1st Sess., 2007; H.J. Res. 3, 110th Cong., 1st Sess., 2007; Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2010, H.R. 3326, 111th Cong., 1st Sess., 2009.

14 Raphaël Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, D.C., 1944), xi–xii, chap. 9; Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 9 December 1948 , United Nations—Treaty Series, vol. 78: No. 1021, 280. The Nullem crimen sine lege concept (no crime without law) bars the prosecution of genocide perpetrators for crimes committed before their nation became a party to the UN Genocide Convention.

15 Michael A. McDonnell and A. Dirk Moses, “Raphael Lemkin as Historian of Genocide in the Americas,” Journal of Genocide Research 7, no. 4 (2005): 501–529, here 502; “Deaths,” New York Times , August 31, 1959, 21. For more on Lemkin's unpublished writing about Native Americans and genocide, see John Docker, “Are Settler-Colonies Inherently Genocidal? Re-reading Lemkin,” in A. Dirk Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York, 2008), 81–101.

16 SS officer Adolf Eichmann's 1961 trial—in combination with the film Judgment at Nuremberg and political scientist Raul Hilberg's book The Destruction of the European Jews —introduced the Holocaust to many in the United States. Holocaust-related art, literature, media, and scholarship then proliferated. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston, 1999), 133; Judgment at Nuremberg , dir. Stanley Kramer (Roxlom Films, 1961); Lawrence Baron, “The First Wave of American ‘Holocaust’ Films, 1945–1959,” American Historical Review 115, no. 1 (February 2010): 90–114, here 90; Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1961). In 1966, the Cree Indian folk singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie sang “of the genocide basic to this country's birth.” Academics William Sturtevant and Samuel Stanley wrote about genocide in “the Eastern States” two years later, and in the 1970s Native American activists adopted the term. By 1979, ethnic studies scholar Jack Norton argued that according to the Genocide Convention, certain northwestern California Indians suffered genocide under U.S. rule. Five years later, in the English translation of The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other , Tzvetan Todorov asserted: “the sixteenth century perpetrated the greatest genocide in human history.” Buffy Sainte-Marie, “My Country 'Tis of Thy People You're Dying,” on Little Wheel Spin and Spin (LP record, Vanguard, 1966). Political scientist Adam Jones kindly pointed this out to me. William C. Sturtevant and Samuel Stanley, “Indian Communities in the Eastern States,” The Indian Historian 1, no. 3 (1968): 15–19, here 17; Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (New York, 1983), 415, 429, 478; Jack Norton, Genocide in Northwestern California: When Our Worlds Cried (San Francisco, 1979); Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other , trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1984), 5. For 1960s and 1970s histories addressing violence against American Indians, see, for example, Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (Berkeley, Calif., 1961); Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York, 1970); Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975). For Ronald Reagan and the Genocide Convention, see Bernard Gwertzman, “Reagan Will Submit 1948 Genocide Pact for Senate Approval,” New York Times , September 6, 1984, A1, A9; Lawrence J. LeBlanc, The United States and the Genocide Convention (Durham, N.C., 1991), 142; Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival , xvi, 44.

17 LeBlanc, The United States and the Genocide Convention , 145, Appendix D. In 1986, scholars founded the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies and from the first issue included articles addressing genocide and Native Americans. Historian Frank Chalk's and sociologist Kurt Jonassohn's 1990 edited collection The History and Sociology of Genocide included essays on Native Americans in colonial New England and in the nineteenth-century U.S. while arguing that Indians suffered genocide, primarily through famine, massacres, and “criminal neglect.” That same year, sociologist Helen Fein touched on “Genocide in North America.” Seena B. Kohl, “Ethnocide and Ethnogenesis: A Case Study of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw, a Genocide Avoided,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1, no. 1 (1986): 91–100; Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, “Indians of the Americas, 1492–1789,” in Chalk and Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven, Conn., 1990), 173–180; Chalk and Jonassohn, “Indians of the United States in the Nineteenth Century,” ibid., 195–203, see 203 for assertion of genocide against American Indians described above; Fein, “Contextual and Comparative Studies II: Other Genocides,” Current Sociology 38, no. 1 (1990): 79–91, here 80–82.

18 David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York, 1992), xii, emphasis in the original.

19 Richard White, “Morality and Mortality,” New Republic , January 18, 1993, 33–35, here 35, emphasis in the original.

20 Russell Thornton, review of Stannard, American Holocaust , Journal of American History 80, no. 4 (1994): 1428.

21 Women's and gender studies scholar M. Annette Jaimes mentioned “genocidal examples” of “the U.S. destruction of its indigenous population,” while scholars Lenore A. Stiffarm and Phil Lane Jr. proclaimed, “Surely, there can be no more monumental example of sustained genocide—certainly none involving a ‘race’ of people as broad and complex as this—anywhere in the annals of human history.” Jaimes, “Introduction: Sand Creek: The Morning After,” in Jaimes, ed., The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance (Boston, 1992), 1–12, here 3; Stiffarm with Lane, “The Demography of Native North America: A Question of American Indian Survival,” ibid., 23–53, here 37; Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco, 1997), 97, 159, 289–290.

22 English and Native American studies professor Elizabeth Cook-Lynn wrote about “Anti-Indianism and Genocide” in 2001. Four years later, media and cultural studies scholar Andrea Smith wrote of “the more than 500 years of genocide that Native peoples have faced,” while historian Mark Levene discussed examples of “the Anglo-American drive to rapid state-building and genocide.” In 2008, historian Alfred A. Cave argued, “While examples of state-sponsored extermination of indigenous populations can be found in the records of every colonial power in the Americas, they were … not the rule and were aimed not at all Indians but at a limited number of specific tribal groups.” In 2010, historian Gregory D. Smithers addressed the importance of racial thinking in North American genocides, while in 2011 historian Brenden Rensink summarized “the state of Native American genocide studies.” Cook-Lynn, Anti-Indianism in Modern America: A Voice from Tatekeya's Earth (Urbana, Ill., 2001), 185; Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 5; Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State , 2 vols. (London, 2005), 2: 84; Cave, “Genocide in the Americas,” in Dan Stone, ed., The Historiography of Genocide (New York, 2008), 273–295, here 276, 279–288; Smithers, “Rethinking Genocide in North America,” in Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford, 2010), 322–341; Rensink, “Genocide of Native Americans: Historical Facts and Historiographic Debates,” in Samuel Totten and Robert K. Hitchcock, eds., Genocide of Indigenous Peoples: A Critical Bibliographic Review (New Brunswick, N.J., 2011), 15–36, here 16.

23 Some twenty-first-century histories addressing violence against Native Americans include Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Gary Clayton Anderson, The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820–1875 (Norman, Okla., 2005); Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, Mass., 2006); Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (New York, 2008); Peter Rhoads Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York, 2008); Alfred A. Cave, Lethal Encounters: Englishmen and Indians in Colonial Virginia (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2011).

24 Thornton briefly addressed the Yana, Yuki, and Tolowa genocides in American Holocaust and Survival , 109–113, 200–208; Stannard touched on the Pequot War, King Philip's War, the Cherokee, and California Indians in American Holocaust , 111–117, 121–124, 134–146; Ben Kiernan addressed “Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” “The Pequot War,” “King Philip's War,” “Extermination and Genocidal Massacres in the Eighteenth Century,” “War, Expansion, and Genocidal Massacres,” “the Trail of Tears,” “Extermination in Texas,” “Genocide in California,” and “Genocidal Massacres on the Great Plains” in Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, Conn., 2007), chaps. 6 and 8. For my own case studies see Benjamin Madley, “California's Yuki Indians: Defining Genocide in Native American History,” Western Historical Quarterly 39, no. 3 (2008): 303–332; Madley, “When ‘The World was Turned Upside Down’: California and Oregon's Tolowa Indian Genocide, 1851–1856,” in Adam Jones, ed., New Directions in Genocide Research (New York, 2012), 170–196; Madley, “The Genocide of California's Yana Indians,” in Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons, eds., Centuries of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts , 4th ed. (New York, 2012), 16–53; Madley, “California and Oregon's Modoc Indians: How Indigenous Resistance Camouflages Genocide in Colonial Histories,” in Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, and Alexander Laban Hinton, eds., Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America (Durham, N.C., 2014), 95–130.

25 James Axtell, Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America (New York, 1992), 261.

26 Steven T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context: The Holocaust and Mass Death before the Modern Age , 2 vols. (New York, 1994), 1: 20, emphasis in the original.

27 Robert M. Utley, “Total War on the American Indian Frontier,” in Manfred F. Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster, eds., Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871–1914 (Cambridge, 1999), 399–414, here 401, 399. Utley did concede that “In one sense the concept of genocide is relevant: cultural genocide” (400), by which he meant assimilation policies. Yet his argument ignored the genocidal crimes, as specified by the Genocide Convention, that some argue took place during the United States' attempt to assimilate American Indians.

28 William D. Rubinstein, Genocide: A History (Harlow, 2004), 53; Guenter Lewy, “Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?,” Commentary 118, no. 2 (2004): 55–63, here 63.

29 Gary Clayton Anderson, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America (Norman, Okla., 2014), 13, 7.

30 Stannard, American Holocaust , 281; Lewy, “Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?,” 61; Thornton, “Native American Demographic and Tribal Survival into the Twenty-First Century,” 31–32; Cave, “Genocide in the Americas,” 275; Kiernan, Blood and Soil , 11; Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide , 431–433.

31 Rubinstein, Genocide , 2, 3, emphasis in the original.

32 Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn quoted in Axtell, Beyond 1492 , 261, emphasis in the original.

33 Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context , 127, 128, emphasis in the original.

34 Anderson, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian , 13.

35 LeBlanc, The United States and the Genocide Convention , 1.

36 Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction , 2nd ed. (New York, 2010), 16–20. The participants are listed at United Nations Treaty Collection, http://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=UNTSONLINE&tabid=2&mtdsg_no=IV-1&chapter=4&lang=en#Participants . Since 1993, the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda have tried genocide cases using the Genocide Convention. The International Criminal Court at The Hague, established in 2002, is empowered to try genocide suspects using the Genocide Convention, as embedded in the Rome Statutes. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (also known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal) began its first trial in 2009 and also uses the Genocide Convention. Some national courts have also found their citizens guilty of genocide. For example, in 2013, a Guatemalan tribunal found that nation's former president, Efraín Ríos Montt, guilty of genocide, although a court later repealed this ruling. Elisabeth Malkin, “Former Leader of Guatemala Is Guilty of Genocide against Mayan Group,” New York Times , May 11, 2013, A6; Malkin, “Guatemala's Highest Court Overturns Genocide Conviction of Former Dictator,” New York Times , May 21, 2013, A6.

37 Some exceptions include Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival , 109–113, 200–208; Stannard, American Holocaust , 111–117, 121–124, 134–146; and Kiernan, Blood and Soil , chaps. 6 and 8.

38 Thornton, “Native American Demographic and Tribal Survival into the Twenty-First Century,” 32.

39 Dan Stone, “Introduction,” in Stone, Historiography of Genocide , 1–6, here 3.

40 Susan Myra Kingsbury, ed., The Records of The Virginia Company of London , 4 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1906), 3: 683.

41 R. A. Brock, ed., The Official Letters of Alexander Spotswood, Lieutenant-Governor of the Colony of Virginia, 1710–1722: Now First Printed from the Manuscript in the Collections of the Virginia Historical Society , 2 vols. (Richmond, Va., 1882), 1: 134.

42 Spencer Phips, “A Proclamation” (Boston, November 3, 1755), 1.

43 Amherst, memorandum, May 4, 1763, in Sylvester K. Stevens and Donald H. Kent, eds., The Papers of Col. Henry Bouquet , 18 vols. (Harrisburg, Pa., 1940), 2: 161; Amherst to Bouquet, June 29, 1763, ibid., 204, emphasis in the original. Ben Kiernan generously provided the first quotation.

44 Jefferson quoted in Kiernan, Blood and Soil , 318–323, 328–329.

45 Knox quoted in Roscoe R. Hill, ed., Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789 , 34 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1936), 32: 330; Knox quoted in Walter Lowrie and Matthew St. Clair Clarke, eds., American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States, from the First Session of the First to the Third Session of the Thirteenth Congress, Inclusive, Commencing March 3, 1789, and Ending March 3, 1815 , 38 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1832), 4: 13, 97.

46 Jefferson quoted in Kiernan, Blood and Soil , 328.

47 Jackson quoted in James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897 , 10 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1896), 2: 521.

48 Editor and Isaac Stevens in “Arrival of Gov. Stevens,” Pioneer and Democrat (Olympia), January 25, 1856, 2, emphasis in the original.

49 Jno. Pope, Major-General, to Col. H. H. Sibley, September 28, 1862, in United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies , 4 series, 130 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1880–1901), series 1, vol. 13, 686.

50 Cavanaugh quoted in F. and J. Rives and George A. Bailey, The Congressional Globe: Containing the Debates and Proceedings of the Second Session, Fortieth Congress (Washington, D.C., 1868), 2638. Preston McBride kindly provided this quotation.

51 Grant paraphrased in “The Indian Peace Commissioners–Political Matters–Business Prospects,” New York Times , October 16, 1868, 1.

52 Sheridan quoted in Edward S. Ellis, The History of Our Country from the Discovery of America to the Present Time , 8 vols. (Indianapolis, 1900), 6: 1483.

53 W. T. Sherman, General, to Gen. Schofield, April 12, 1873, in Daily Alta California (San Francisco), April 14, 1873, 1.

54 Roosevelt quoted in Hermann Hagedorn, Roosevelt in the Bad Lands (Boston, 1921), 355.

55 Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn., 1981), 10.

56 White, “Morality and Mortality,” 35.

57 Discussing Spanish colonialism in Latin America, demographer Massimo Livi Bacci observed that violence and brutality worsened the indigenous demographic crisis caused by colonialism. Bacci, Conquest: The Destruction of the American Indios , trans. Carl Ipsen (Malden, Mass., 2008), 74.

58 For Connecticut in 1637, see Lion Gardiner, A History of the Pequot War … in the Year 1638 (Cincinnati, 1860), 21–22. For the Dutch in 1641, see “Ordinance of the Director and Council of New Netherland, Offering a Reward for the Heads of Raritan Indians, Passed 4 July, 1641,” in E. B. O'Callaghan, comp. and trans., Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 1638–1674 (Albany, N.Y., 1868), 28–29, emphasis in the original.

59 For Virginia in 1674, see “An Act for the Safeguard and Defence of the Country against the Indians,” in William Waller Hening, The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619 , 13 vols. (New York, 1823), 2: 331–333, here 332.

60 For Connecticut and Massachusetts in 1675, see “Articles, Covenants and Agreements Had, Made and Concluded by … the Six Present Sachems of the Whole Narhaganset Country … and the Govenours of the Said Massachusets, and Connecticut …,” in W. Hubbard, The Present State of New-England (London, 1677), 21–23, here 21–22. Connecticut and Massachusetts simultaneously offered two coats for every prisoner.

61 N. S., The Present State of New-England, with Respect to the Indian War (London, 1676), 9; T. C., Entertaining Passages Relating to Philip's War Which Began in the Month of June, 1675 (Boston, 1716), 45, emphasis in the original. Connecticut simultaneously offered two coats for every prisoner and forty for King Philip alive. See N. S., The Present State of New-England, with Respect to the Indian War , 9.

62 For French officials in 1688, see “Examination of Magsigpen, an Indian,” in John Romeyn Brodhead, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York , 15 vols. (Albany, N.Y., 1853), 3: 561–562. For Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut in 1689, see “By the Commissioners of the Colonies of the Massachusetts, Plymouth and Connecticut, for Managing the Present War against the Common Enemy,” in James Sullivan, The History of the District of Maine (Boston, 1795), 412–413.

63 For French bounty, see Louis XIV to M. de Frontenac and M. de Champigny, May 8, 1694, in E. B. O'Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York , 15 vols. (Albany, N.Y., 1855), 9: 573. For Massachusetts in 1694 and 1695, see “An Act for Encouraging the Prosecution of the Indian Enemy & Rebels, and Preserving Such as Are Friends,” in The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay , 21 vols. (Boston, 1869), 1: 175–176, here 176; “An Act for the Continuation of Several Acts Therein Mentioned, That Are Near Expiring,” ibid., 210–211, here 211. In 1694 and 1695, Massachusetts offered equal monetary rewards for dead victims and living prisoners.

64 For the origins of scalping, see James Axtell and William C. Sturtevant, “The Unkindest Cut, or Who Invented Scalping?,” William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd series, 37, no. 3 (1980): 451–472. For more on “scalping in America and similar war customs,” see Georg Friederici, Skalpieren und ähnliche Kriegsgebräuche in Amerika (Braunschweig, 1906).

65 For Massachusetts in 1697, see “An Act for Encouragement of the Prosecution of the Indian Enemy and Rebels,” in The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay , 1: 292–293, here 292.

66 For Massachusetts in 1703–1704, see William Douglass, A Summary, Historical and Political, of the First Planting … and Present State of the British Settlements in North-America (London, 1760), 556–557. For Massachusetts in 1706–1710, see “An Act to Encourage the Prosecution of the Indian Enemy and Rebels,” in The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay , 1: 594–595, here 594; “An Act for Reviving and Further Continuing of Several Temporary Acts, Which, by Their Respective Limitations, Are Near Determining and Expiring,” ibid., 639–640, here 640; and “An Act for Reviving and Further Continuing of Several Temporary Acts, Which by Their Respective Limitations, Are Near Determining and Expiring,” ibid., 657–658, here 658. For Massachusetts in 1722–1726, see “An Act to Encourage the Prosecution of the Indian Enemy and Rebels,” in The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay , 21 vols. (Boston, 1874), 2: 258–259; and “List of the Public Acts,” ibid., 1123–1160, here 1132. For Massachusetts in 1744 and 1747, see “[Act of] October 25, 1744,” in The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay , 21 vols. (Boston, 1878), 3: 218; and “[Act of] April 23, 1747,” ibid., 342. For Massachusetts in 1755 and 1756, see “Action of House against Penobscots,” in James Phinney Baxter, ed., The Documentary History of the State of Maine , 24 vols. (Portland, Maine, 1916), 24: 62; “Proclamation S. Phips,” ibid., 62–64; and “In House of Represent', June 10, 1756,” ibid., 64–65. For Connecticut in 1704 and 1746, see Charles J. Hoadly, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, from August, 1689, to May, 1706 (Hartford, Conn., 1868), 464; and “An Act for the More Effectual Carrying on the War and Defending of the Frontiers,” in Hoadly, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, from May, 1744, to November, 1750, Inclusive (Hartford, Conn., 1876), 227–229, here 227–228. For New York, see “An Act for Giving a Reward for Such Scalps … to the Indians,” in The Colonial Laws of New York from the Year 1664 to the Revolution , 5 vols. (Albany, N.Y., 1894), 3: 540–542, here 540; and Colonel Johnson to Governor Clinton, May 7, 1747, in O'Callaghan, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (1855), 6: 360–363, here 360–361. For New Jersey, see “At a Meeting of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs the 22d Day of January 1745–6,” in Collections of the New Jersey Historical Society , 27 vols. (Newark, N.J., 1852), 4: 305–306; and Jonathan Belcher, “A Proclamation,” in William Nelson, ed., Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New Jersey , 33 vols. (Patterson, N.J., 1898), 20: 39–41, here 40. For Pennsylvania, see “At a Council Held in the State House, Saturday the 10th April, 1756,” in Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania , 17 vols. (Harrisburg, Pa., 1851), 7: 78–83, here 78; “Orders and Instructions of Gov. M. to Capt. Isaac Wayne, Dated at Reading, Jan ry , 1756,” in Samuel Hazard, Pennsylvania Archives , 2 series, 19 vols. (Philadelphia, 1853), series 2, vol. 2, 542–543, here 543; and “At a Council Held at Philadelphia [in] 1764,” in Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania , 17 vols. (Harrisburg, Pa., 1852), 9: 188–190, here 189. For Maryland, see Dan Wolstenhohue and I. Ridout to Horatio Sharpe, Esq, Lieutenant Governor and Commander in Chief of the Province of Maryland, May 25, 1757, in William Hand Browne, Archives of Maryland , 864 vols. (Baltimore, 1888), 6: 557–563, here 559; Sharpe to Baltimore, May 29, 1757, in Browne, Archives of Maryland , 864 vols. (Baltimore, 1890), 9: 5–7, here 6; “Assembly Proceedings, June 23–July 8, 1755,” in J. Hall Pleasants, ed., Archives of Maryland , 864 vols. (Baltimore, 1935), 52: 172–215, here 177; “An Act for His Majesty's Service, and Further Defence and Security of This Province, ” ibid., 650–656, here 651–653; and “Assembly Proceedings, November 1–December 20, 1765, ” in J. Hall Pleasants, ed., Archives of Maryland , 864 vols. (Baltimore, 1942), 59: 41–261, here 65. For twenty-six scalps in New York, see “A Receipt,” in Alexander C. Flick, ed., The Papers of Sir William Johnson , 14 vols. (Albany, N.Y., 1939), 9: 8; and “An Account of Expenses with Receipt,” ibid., 15–31, here 22–25, 30. For Virginia, see “Minutes of the Virginia Governor's Council,” October 24, 1711, in Colonial and State Records of North Carolina , 26 vols. (Raleigh, 1886), 1: 815; “An Act for Preventing and Repelling the Hostile Incursions of the Indians, at Enmity with the Inhabitants of This Colony,” in William Waller Hening, The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia , 13 vols. (Richmond, Va., 1819), 6: 550–552, here 551; “An Act to Amend an Act, Intituled, An Act for Preventing and Repelling the Hostile Incursions of the Indians, at Enmity with the Inhabitants of This Colony,” ibid., 564–565, here 564; “An Act for the More Effectual Preventing and Repelling the Hostile Incursions of the Indians at Enmity with the Inhabitants of This Colony,” in Hening, The Statutes at Large , 13 vols. (Richmond, Va., 1820), 7: 121–123, here 122; and “An Act for Augmenting the Forces in the Pay of This Colony to Two Thousand Men; and for Other Purposes Therein Mentioned,” ibid., 163–169, here 165. For North Carolina, see “An Act for appointing a Militia,” in Walter Clark, ed., The State Records of North Carolina , 30 vols. (Goldsboro, N.C., 1904), 23: 596–601, here 601; and “An Act for the Encouragement of the Militia and Volunteers Employed in Prosecuting the Present Indian War,” in Clark, The State Records of North Carolina , 30 vols. (Goldsboro, N.C., 1905), 24: 15. For South Carolina, see Steven J. Oatis, A Colonial Complex: South Carolina's Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War, 1680–1730 (Lincoln, Neb., 2004), 146; and “An Act to Impower … the Governor … and Also to Provide a Fund for Defraying the Charges Arising Thereby,” in Thomas Cooper, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina , 10 vols. (Columbia, S.C., 1838), 3: 23–30, here 24. For Georgia, see “At a Council Held in the Council Chamber at Savannah on … 9th February 1760,” in Allen D. Candler, ed., The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia , 39 vols. (Atlanta, 1907), 8: 248. For French bounties, see Jean-François Lozier, “Lever des chevelures en Nouvelle-France: La politique française du paiement des scalps,” Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française 56, no. 4 (2003): 513–542, here 522–523, 527–528. For the Ohio River Valley, see Captain Robert Orme, “Orders at the Camp on the West Side of the Great Meadows, June the 25th,” journal entry of June 25, 1755, in Winthrop Sargent, The History of an Expedition against Fort Du Quesne, in 1755: Under Major-General Edward Braddock, Generalissimo of H.B.M. Forces in America (Philadelphia, 1855), 343–344, here 343.

67 John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven, Conn., 1986), 32.

68 For the Second Seminole War in Florida, see Nathaniel West, The Ancestry, Life, and Times of Hon. Henry Hastings Sibley, LL.D . (Saint Paul, Minn., 1889), 333 n. 2. For Florida, Sonora, and Chihuahua, see Friederici, Skalpieren und ähnliche Kriegsgebräuche in Amerika , 56. For 487 scalps, see Ralph A. Smith, “The Bounty Wars of the West and Mexico,” Great Plains Journal 28 (1989): 102–121, here 105. For Minnesota, see Oscar Malmros, Adjutant General, “GENERAL ORDERS NO. 41 [July 4, 1863],” in Executive Documents of the State of Minnesota, for the Year 1863 (Saint Paul, Minn., 1864), 192–193, here 192; “GENERAL ORDERS NO. 44 [July 20, 1863],” ibid., 195–196, here 196; and “GENERAL ORDERS NO. 60 [September 22, 1863],” ibid., 198. For Montana, see George W. Manypenny, Our Indian Wards (Cincinnati, 1880), 272. For Arizona in 1885, see “Money for Indian Scalps,” New York Times , October 12, 1885, 1.

69 Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Long Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (New York, 1993), 81, 87; Grant Foreman, ed., A Traveler in Indian Territory: The Journal of Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Late Major-General in the United States Army (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1930), 120; Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival , 118.

70 J. P. Williamson in Stephen R. Riggs, Mary and I: Forty Years with the Sioux (Chicago, 1880), 197; John Upton Terrell, The Navajos: The Past and Present of a Great People (New York, 1970), 192.

71 H. C. Hasbrouck to Samuel Breck, November 5, 1873, in “Message from the President of the United States, Transmitting Copies of the Correspondence and Papers Relative to the War with the Modoc Indians in Southern Oregon and Northern California, during the Years 1872 and 1873,” H. Ex. Doc. 122, 43rd Cong., 1st Sess., 1874, 102; Albert L. Hurtado, “The Modocs and the Jones Family Indian Ring: Quaker Administration of the Quapaw Agency, 1873–1879,” in Robert E. Smith, ed., Oklahoma's Forgotten Indians (Oklahoma City, 1981), 86–107; “Table of Statistics Relating to Population, Education, & c., by Tribes and Their Respective Agencies,” in United States Office of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1881 (Washington, D.C., 1881), 272–291, here 278; Donald J. Berthrong, The Cheyenne and Arapaho Ordeal: Reservation and Agency Life in the Indian Territory, 1875–1907 (Norman, Okla., 1976), 37; “Responsibility for Starvation among the Piegans,” open letter from C. C. Painter to E. John Ellis, December 24, 1884, in The Action of Congress in Regard to the Piegan Indians of Montana (Philadelphia, 1885), 10–13, here 12; General N. A. Miles to President R. B. Hayes, January 19, 1881, in Mark H. Brown, The Flight of the Nez Perce (New York, 1967), 429; Lieutenant Guy Howard to Adjutant-General, U.S. Army, December 23, 1889, in “Message from the President of the United States, Transmitting a Letter of the Secretary of War and Reports Touching the Apache Indians at Governor's Island,” S. Ex. Doc. 35, 51st Cong., 1st Sess., 1890, 9; H. Henrietta Stockel, Survival of the Spirit: Chiricahua Apaches in Captivity (Reno, Nev., 1993), 176; “Release of Apache Prisoners of War,” in Reports of the Department of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1913 , H. Doc. 1009, vol. 2, 63rd Cong., 2nd Sess., 1914, 36. The off-reservation U.S. Indian boarding school system, initiated in 1879, constituted another form of federal removal and incarceration that may have been genocidal. Some guardians sent young people voluntarily. However, federal agents used coercion and force, sometimes supported by legislation, to take many others, some as young as five years old, to schools that were often far from students' families and communities. Frequently barred from returning home for years, many students tried to escape, but many died. The total number of students who died as a result of attending these schools remains unknown. Overviews of the boarding schools include Michael C. Coleman, American Indian Children at School, 1850–1930 (Jackson, Miss., 1993); David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence, Kans., 1995); Margaret L. Archuleta, Brenda J. Child, and K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1879–2000 (Phoenix, Ariz., 2000); Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln, Neb., 1998); Clifford E. Trafzer, Jean A. Keller, and Lorene Sisquoc, eds., Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences (Lincoln, Neb., 2006).

72 John Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal, “History of New England,” 1630–1649 , ed. James Kendall Hosmer, 2 vols. (New York, 1908), 1: 83 n. 1, 183–184; John Underhill, Nevves from America; or, A New and Experimentall Discoverie of New England (London, 1638), 2, 9. Scholarship on the Pequot War as genocide includes Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Minneapolis, 1980), 34–55; Chalk and Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide , 180; Michael Freeman, “Puritans and Pequots: The Question of Genocide,” New England Quarterly 68, no. 2 (1995): 278–293; Kiernan, Blood and Soil , 227–235. According to Mason, Pequots did not kill these men. See John Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War: Especially of the Memorable Taking of Their Fort at Mistick in Connecticut in 1637 (Boston, 1736), viii–x.

73 Entry of August 25, 1636, in Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal , 1: 186. Drinnon labeled these orders “explicitly genocidal”; Facing West , 34. Underhill claimed that there were 100 men plus officers in the expedition; Nevves from America , 3. Mason wrote of 120 men; A Brief History of the Pequot War , ix.

74 Underhill, Nevves from America , 7, emphasis in the original.

75 Ibid., 9–15.

76 Entry of August 24, 1636, entry inserted after September 23, 1636, and entry of October 21, 1636, in Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal , 1: 189–190, 194. Underhill recollected that after killing “numbers” of Pequots and “having burnt and spoyled what we could light on, wee imbarqued”; Nevves from America , 15.

77 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , ix.

78 Lion Gardiner [here Gardener], Relation of the Pequot Warres: Written in 1660 by Lieutenant Lion Gardener and Now First Printed from the Original Manuscript with an Historical Introduction , ed. W. N. Chattin Carlton (Hartford, Conn., 1901), 15. ( Note: At the time this book was published, the family name had not yet been standardized as Gardiner.)

79 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , x, emphasis in the original.

80 J. Hammond Trumbull, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, Prior to the Union with New Haven Colony, May, 1665 (Hartford, Conn., 1850), 9. Underhill claimed that 100 men set out; Nevves from America , 23.

81 Edward Johnson quoted in J. Franklin Jameson, ed., Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence, 1628–1651 (New York, 1910), 166.

82 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 5, emphasis in the original.

83 Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot Warres , 20. As many as seven Pequots died in this incident. Underhill, Nevves from America , 24–25; P. Vincent, A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England, between the English, and the Salvages: With the Present State of Things There (London, 1637), 8–9; Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 1.

84 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 5–6; Underhill, Nevves from America , 36–37.

85 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 8.

86 Entry of May 25, 1637, in Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal , 1: 220; Underhill, Nevves from America , 37; Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 8, capitalization as in the original.

87 Underhill, Nevves from America , 39. See also Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 8.

88 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 8, emphasis in the original.

89 Underhill, Nevves from America , 39, emphasis in the original. According to Mason, “Others of the Stoutest issued forth, as we did guess, to the Number of Forty , who perished by the Sword”; A Brief History of the Pequot War , 9, emphasis in the original.

90 Underhill, Nevves from America , 39.

91 Gardiner, not an eyewitness, estimated 300 killed; Relation of the Pequot Warres , 20, 30. Winthrop, also not an eyewitness, wrote of 302 slain; entry of May 25, 1637, in Winthrop's Journal , 1: 220. Vincent, whose narrative may or may not have been that of an eyewitness, estimated “betwixt three and foure hundred … killed”; A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England , 12. Plymouth Colony governor William Bradford, not an eyewitness, estimated “about 400” killed; Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation , ed. Charles Deane (Boston, 1856), 357.

92 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 10, emphasis in the original.

93 Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst, Mass., 1996), 151.

94 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 10, emphasis in the original. See also Underhill, Nevves from America , 39. Vincent suggested that one of the two men may have been killed by friendly fire; A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England , 12.

95 Underhill, Nevves from America , 39–40, 43, 40, emphasis in the original.

96 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 14, emphasis and capitalization as in the original.

97 Entry of June 15, 1637, in Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal , 1: 222. On October 12, 1637, Winthrop recorded another day of celebration: “A day of thanksgiving [was again] kept in all the churches for our victories against the Pequods” (1: 238).

98 Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation , 357.

99 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 11; Underhill, Nevves from America , 42.

100 Underhill, Nevves from America , 42, emphasis in the original.

101 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 11–12. See also Vincent, A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England , 12.

102 Seven Mohegans summarized in Vincent, A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England , 15.

103 Ibid.; Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 14.

104 Vincent, A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England , 15.

105 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 14; entry of July 5, 1637, in Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal , 1: 224–225. Vincent reported twenty-three slain; A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England , 16. William Hubbard claimed thirty killed; Hubbard, A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-England, from the First Planting Thereof in the Year 1607, to This Present Year, 1677 (Boston, 1677), 128.

106 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 15; Vincent wrote of “200 English” in this campaign; A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England , 15.

107 Entry of July 13, 1637, in Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal , 1: 226.

108 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 15–17; Vincent, A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England , 16, emphasis in the original.

109 Vincent, A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England , 16; Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 17. Mason wrote, “We afterwards searched the Swamp , & found but few Slain ”; ibid., emphasis in the original.

110 Underhill, Nevves from America , 2.

111 Vincent, A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England , 16.

112 Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot Warres , 21, 22; Wyandanch quotation from 24.

113 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 17, emphasis in the original.

114 Vincent, A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England , 16–17; Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot Warres , 21. It is not clear if someone paid the Mohawks for these Pequot heads and hands.

115 Entries of August 5, 26, and 31, 1637, in Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal , 1: 229, 231.

116 Freeman, “Puritans and Pequots,” 289.

117 John Haynes, Roger Ludlow, Edward Hopkins, Miantonomo, and Uncas, “Articles of Agreement between the English in Connecticutt and the Indian Sachems,” September 21, 1638, 1–2, Connecticut State Library, Hartford, http://cslib.cdmhost.com/cdm/ref/collection/p128501coll11/id/3860 .

118 The Treaty of Hartford specified: “200 Pequots living that are Men besides Squaws and Papooses The English do give unto Miantimone and the Narragansetts to make up the Number of Eighty with the Eleaven they have already and to the Poquin his Number.” Ibid., 2. For dispersal beyond New England, see Michael L. Fickes, “‘They Could Not Endure That Yoke’: The Captivity of Pequot Women and Children after the War of 1637,” New England Quarterly 73, no. 1 (2000): 58–81, here 61; entry of July 5, 1637, in Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal , 1: 224–225, here 225; entry of July 6, 1637, ibid., 225–226, here 225; entry of July 12, 1637, ibid., 226; entry of July 13, 1637, ibid., 226–228, here 227–228; James E. Smith, Slavery in Bermuda (New York, 1976), 25. Kiernan observed, “English policy was clear: the Pequot ethnic group had to disappear. The survivors were to be made unable to reproduce themselves as a community”; Blood and Soil , 233.

119 United States Census Bureau, American Fact Finder , 2010, “Pequot tribal grouping alone or in any combination,” http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml .

120 Scholarship designating the Yuki catastrophe as genocide includes Gary E. Garrett, “The Destruction of the Indian in Mendocino County, 1856–1860” (M.A. thesis, Sacramento State College, 1969); Virginia P. Miller, Ukomno'm: The Yuki Indians of Northern California (Socorro, N.Mex., 1979); Lynwood Carranco and Estle Beard, Genocide and Vendetta: The Round Valley Wars of Northern California (Norman, Okla., 1981); Madley, “California's Yuki Indians.” The Burnett quote is from Journals of the Legislature of the State of California, at Its Second Session: Held at the City of San Jose, Commencing on the Sixth Day of January, and Ending on the First Day of May, 1851 ([San Jose], 1851), 15.

121 The Statutes of California, Passed at the Second Session of the Legislature, Begun on the Sixth Day of January, 1851, and Ended on the First Day of May, 1851, at the City of San Jose (San Jose, 1851), 520–521; George E. Anderson and Robert F. Heizer, “Treaty-Making by the Federal Government in California, 1851–1852,” in George E. Anderson, W. H. Ellison, and Robert F. Heizer, eds., Treaty Making and Treaty Rejection by the Federal Government in California, 1850–1852 (Socorro, N.Mex., 1978), 1–36, here 26; W. H. Ellison, “Rejection of California Indian Treaties: A Study in Local Influence on National Policy,” ibid., 50–70, here 62.

122 Frank Asbill and Argle Shawley, The Last of the West (New York, 1975), 18–19; Lyman L. Palmer, History of Mendocino County, California, Comprising Its Geography, Geology, Topography, Climatography, Springs and Timber (San Francisco, 1880), 459, 595, 596; Benjamin Arthur deposition, February 28, 1860, in California Legislature, Special Joint Committee on the Mendocino War, Majority and Minority Reports of the Special Joint Committee on the Mendocino War (Sacramento, 1860) [hereafter MMR ], 51.

123 John W. Burgess deposition, February 28, 1860, in MMR , 24.

124 Dryden Lacock deposition, February 25, 1860, ibid., 49. According to the Indian War Papers , Lacock testified, “we could kill, on an average, 15 or 20 Indians on a trip.” See Lacock deposition in Military Department, Adjutant General, Indian War Papers, folder F3753: 441, California State Archives, Sacramento [hereafter IWP ].

125 According to California's 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, children could, with the consent of “friends” or “parents,” be held and worked without pay until age fifteen for females or age eighteen for males. “[A]ny white person” could also visit a jail and pay “said fine and costs” for any “Indian … convicted of an offence … punishable by fine.” Indian convicts then worked to pay off the fines their employer had paid on their behalf. Meanwhile, the act empowered whites to arrest Indian adults “found loitering and strolling about, or frequenting public places where liquors are sold, begging, or leading an immoral or profligate course of life.” When a court received a “complaint” along these lines, the act required court officers to capture and then lease “such vagrant within twenty-four hours to the best bidder.” Successful bidders could then legally hold and work convicts for up to four months without compensation. In 1860, legislators expanded the 1850 act. First, they legalized the “indenture” of “any Indian or Indians, whether children or grown persons,” including “prisoners of war” and “any vagrant Indian” as “apprentices, to trades, husbandry, or other employments.” Second, legislators gave judges the power to “bind” and apprentice Indian minors without the consent of their parents or guardians. Third, they allowed white employers to retain Indians indentured as minors beyond their attainment of majority age. Thus, boys under fourteen could be indentured until they turned twenty-five, and girls under fourteen until twenty-one. Fourth, teenagers indentured “over fourteen and under twenty years of age, if males,” could be held “until they attain[ed] the age of thirty years; if females, until they attain[ed] the age of twenty-five years.” Finally, Indians over age twenty could be indentured for a fixed term of ten years. The Statutes of California, Passed at the First Session of the Legislature (San Jose, 1850), 408–410; The Statutes of California, Passed at the Eleventh Session of the Legislature, 1860: Begun Monday, the Second Day of January, and Ended on Monday, the Thirteenth Day of April (Sacramento, 1860), 196–197. Quotations from Simmon Storms to Tho. Henley, June 20, 1856, Letters Received, Records of the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824–1881, National Archives, Record Group 75.4, General Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Microfilm Publication M234 [hereafter M234], reel 35: 475, 474; Vincent Geiger to Tho. Henley, September 24, 1857, ibid., reel 35: 1281.

126 Geiger to Henley, September 24, 1857; Thos. Henley to J. Denver, October 27, 1857, M234, reel 35: 1328.

127 Isaac W. Shanon deposition, February 28, 1860, in MMR , 72; Thos. Henley to Chas. Mix, June 19, 1858, M234, reel 36: 814–815; S. Storms to T. Henley, November 23, 1858, ibid., 987.

128 William T. Scott deposition, March 2, 1860, in MMR , 22; H. L. Hall deposition, February 26, 1860, ibid., 42.

129 Dillon quoted in Robert F. Heizer, The Destruction of California Indians (1974; repr., Lincoln, Neb., 1993), 296.

130 Hall deposition, in MMR , 42.

131 Jackson Farley deposition, February 26, 1860, ibid., 74.

132 J. Ross Browne, “The Coast Rangers: A Chronicle of Events in California,” part II: “The Indian Reservation,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine 23, no. 135 (August 1861): 306–316, here 312. This may have been an underestimate. In January 1859, one newspaper announced “The slaughter of one hundred and seventy Indians , in the locality of Round Valley, since November last.” Daily Alta California , January 20, 1859, 2, emphasis in the original.

133 Edward Dillon deposition, February 27, 1860, in MMR , 59–60; informant paraphrased in Petaluma Journal , reprinted in Daily Alta California , April 16, 1859, 1.

134 Johnson quoted in A. G. Tassin, “Chronicles of Camp Wright, Part I,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 10, no. 55 (1887): 24–32, here 27.

135 Sacramento Daily Union , January 16, 1860, 2; Edward Johnson to W. Mackall, IWP , F3753: 378.

136 Letter summarized in Garrett, “The Destruction of the Indian in Mendocino County,” 66; William B. Secrest, When the Great Spirit Died: The Destruction of the California Indians, 1850–1860 (Sanger, Calif., 2003), 300.

137 J. Ross Browne to A. Greenwood, October 18, 1859, M234, reel 37: 69.

138 A Stock Raiser, October 1, 1859, in Sonoma County Journal (Petaluma, Calif.), October 7, 1859, 2; W. S. Jarboe, October 16, 1859, in Santa Rosa Democrat , reprinted in Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), November 7, 1859, 2; Santa Rosa Democrat , December 20, 1859, reprinted in Daily Alta California , January 1, 1860, 1; “A Member of Jarboe's Company” summarized in Santa Rosa Democrat , December 20, 1859, reprinted in Daily Alta California , January 1, 1860, 1.

139 W. Jarboe to John Weller, December 3, 1859, IWP , F3753: 401.

140 W. Jarboe to John Downey, February 18, 1860, ibid., 432.

141 Daily Alta California , January 22, 1860, 1.

142 San Francisco Evening Bulletin , February 24, 1860, 2, in MMR , 6.

143 Statutes of California, Passed at the Eleventh Session of the Legislature, 1860 , 173.

144 Arthur deposition in MMR , 51.

145 William J. Hildreth deposition, February 24, 1860, in MMR , 33; George Rees deposition, February 27, 1860, ibid., 17; Red Bluff (Calif.) Beacon , October 9, 1862, 2. The calories came from “six or seven ears of corn.” A medium ear of cooked corn contains approximately 80–130 calories. Audrey H. Ensminger, et al., Foods and Nutrition Encyclopedia , 2nd revised ed., 2 vols. (Boca Raton, Fla., 1993), 1: 489.

146 J. M. Robinson testimony, December 18, 1862, in Mendocino Herald, Martial Law in Round Valley, Mendocino Co., California, the Causes Which Led to That Measure, the Evidence, as Brought Out by a Court of Investigation Ordered by Brig. Gen. G. Wright, Commanding U.S. Forces on the Pacific (Ukiah City, Calif., 1863), 12, emphasis in the original.

147 Captain George summarized in D. H. Dohrman testimony, December 19, 1862, ibid., 17. According to C. D. Douglas, daily rations consisted of “two to three ears of corn to each Indian.” Douglas in Frank H. Baumgardner III, Killing for Land in Early California: Indian Blood at Round Valley, 1856–1863 (New York, 2005), 242.

148 William Frazier deposition, February 22, 1860, in MMR , 15.

149 Geo. M. Hanson to Wm. P. Dole, October 10, 1862, in United States Office of Indian Affairs, Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, for the Year 1862 (Washington, D.C., 1863), 311.

150 Geo. M. Hanson to William P. Dole, July 14, 1861, in United States Office of Indian Affairs, Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Accompanying the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, for the Year 1861 (Washington, D.C., 1861), 150.

151 Rena Lynn, The Story of the Stolen Valley (Willits, Calif., 1977), 19.

152 In 1854 there were some 6,000 to 20,000 Yuki people. By 1864, reservation officials counted just 300 at Round Valley. S. F. Cook, “The Aboriginal Population of the North Coast of California,” University of California Anthropological Records 16, no. 3 (1956): 81–129, here 108, 127; Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival , 203; Tassin, “Chronicles of Camp Wright, Part I,” 25; Elijah Potter, “Elijah Renshaw Potter Reminiscences,” Bancroft Manuscript C-D 5136: 2, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, Calif.; Austin Wiley in United States Office of Indian Affairs, Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the Year 1864 (Washington, D.C., 1865), 119.

153 Some genocide case studies addressing Queensland, Tasmania, and Victoria include Raymond Evans, “‘Plenty Shoot ’Em': The Destruction of Aboriginal Societies along the Queensland Frontier,” in A. Dirk Moses, ed., Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York, 2004), 150–173; Raymond Evans, A History of Queensland (Melbourne, 2007), especially 52–56, 92–98, 135–138; Lyndall Ryan, “Abduction and Multiple Killings of Aborigines in Tasmania, 1804–1835,” Yale Genocide Studies Program Working Paper no. 35 (2007), 1–26; James Boyce, Van Diemen's Land (Melbourne, 2008), especially chap. 14 and the appendix, “Towards Genocide: Government Policy on the Aborigines, 1827–38”; Benjamin Madley, “From Terror to Genocide: Britain's Tasmanian Penal Colony and Australia's History Wars,” Journal of British Studies 47, no. 1 (2008): 77–106; Lyndall Ryan, “Settler Massacres on the Port Philip Frontier, 1836–1851,” Journal of Australian Studies 34, no. 3 (2010): 257–273.

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Physical and Cultural Genocide Policy Toward Native Americans Essay

The aboriginal inhabitants suffered greatly due to the European colonization of North America. Their way of life was irreversibly altered in a short amount of time. Various circumstances contributed to the changes, including land loss, sickness, enforcement of laws that contradicted their culture, and much more. However, physical and cultural genocide aimed at seizing Indigenous lands and suppressing resistance and assimilation policy for civilizing the new European peoples made the Native Americans revolt even more furiously.

The government of the United States felt that for its prosperity and safety, it needed to eliminate all the Native Americans from its territory. The US government also pursued a physical elimination policy to extinguish indigenous Americans and create space for commercial interests and settlers. For example, the geographical factor played a role in the settlers’ expansion. Native Americans controlled vast swaths of profitable farmland with rich floodplains and grasslands, which were perceived as desired lands by the whites 1 . Later, the administration introduced a cultural assimilation policy to reduce the chances of warfare. As such, President Chester A. Arthur’ presented his policy regarding the Native Americans, in which he proposed to civilize them to stop the ever-emerging bloodshed 2 . Thus, the US government pursued a two-pronged policy of physical and cultural genocide toward Native Americans to acquire their lands and, later, to suppress their resistance.

Americans perceived Euro-American culture as superior to Native American culture from the early days of their independence from Britain. For example, Thomas Morton, an early colonist in North America, in his passages on the Native Americans, referred to them as savages. Moreover, he believed that they had some resemblance to the devil 3 . Such a view indicates that Euro-Americans perceived the Indigenous people as strange, foreign, and separate from what was known about cultures. Later, even while Native Americans served as crucial trading partners, scouts, and allies against foreign countries, American settlers and government officials frequently labeled them savages 4 . This rhetoric might have resulted in the opinion that the assimilation of American Indians was crucial even though other ethnic minorities were segregated. The US government planned to civilize the Native Americans and gravitate them toward white American culture.

Nevertheless, the Native Americans were left angry, traumatized, and resentful, and their cultures were destroyed. The physical and cultural genocide of the Native Americans imposed by the US government was met with solid resistance in various forms, such as armed conflict, civil disobedience, and peaceful protests. For instance, a portion of the Nez Percé tribe from the Pacific Northwest opposed being relocated to a reservation and tried to escape to Canada but was chased, assaulted, and ordered to return by the US Cavalry 5 . Chief Joseph, the head of the tribe, expressed his belief that Native Americans should change and move further despite his defeat. Moreover, the Indigenous population resisted forced assimilation in schools, specifically when force was used to suppress their religious beliefs 6 . Thus, violence toward Native Americans made resistance a necessity and a moral obligation.

To conclude, the US government’s two-pronged policy of physical and cultural genocide was performed first to gain access to spaces that geographically aid in farming and then to suppress the Native Americans’ partisans. Further, the idea of the assimilation of Indian Americans might be partially caused by the American settlers’ perception of the lack of civilization among the tribes. Nevertheless, the native people of America fought against US troops and the government aiming to exterminate them and their culture.

Bennett, Ethan, Michelle Cassidy, Jonathan Grandage, Gregg Lightfoot, Jose Juan Perez Melendez, Jessica Moore, Nick Roland, et al. “ Manifest Destiny ” In The American Yawp , edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright. Stanford, SA: Stanford University Press, 2018. Web.
The American Yawp Reader. “ Chester A. Arthur on American Indian Policy (1881). ” The American Yawp Reader . Web.
The American Yawp Reader. “ Thomas Morton Reflects on Indians in New England, 1637. ” The American Yawp Reader . Web.
Clark, Justin, Adam Costanzo, Stephanie Gamble, Dale Kretz, Julie Richter, Bryan Rindfleisch, Angela Riotto, et al. “ The Early Republic. ” In The American Yawp , edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright. Stanford, SA: Stanford University Press, 2018. Web.
The American Yawp Reader. “ Chief Joseph on Indian Affairs (1877, 1879). ” The American Yawp Reader . Web.
Brand, Lauren, Carole Butcher, Josh Garrett-Davis, Tracey Hanshew, Lindsay Stallones Marshall, Nick Roland, David Schley, et al. “ Conquering the West. ” In The American Yawp, edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright. Stanford, SA: Stanford University Press, 2018. Web.
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IvyPanda. (2023, November 23). Physical and Cultural Genocide Policy Toward Native Americans. https://ivypanda.com/essays/physical-and-cultural-genocide-policy-toward-native-americans/

"Physical and Cultural Genocide Policy Toward Native Americans." IvyPanda , 23 Nov. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/physical-and-cultural-genocide-policy-toward-native-americans/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Physical and Cultural Genocide Policy Toward Native Americans'. 23 November.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Physical and Cultural Genocide Policy Toward Native Americans." November 23, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/physical-and-cultural-genocide-policy-toward-native-americans/.

1. IvyPanda . "Physical and Cultural Genocide Policy Toward Native Americans." November 23, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/physical-and-cultural-genocide-policy-toward-native-americans/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Physical and Cultural Genocide Policy Toward Native Americans." November 23, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/physical-and-cultural-genocide-policy-toward-native-americans/.

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The Intent Was Genocide

July 2, 2020 issue

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Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas

Illustration of a massacre of Sauks and Mesquakies crossing the Mississippi River by a cannon on US steamship Warrior, 1857

Library of Congress

‘The Battle of Bad Axe’; illustration by Henry Lewis, 1857. In Surviving Genocide, Jeffrey Ostler writes, ‘Toward the end of the 1832 Black Hawk War, a cannon aboard the US steamship Warrior fired on Sauks and Mesquakies trying to escape US troops by crossing the Mississippi River. What the image shows is clearly a massacre, but in an especially striking example of colonial evasion, the caption refers to the event as a battle.’

At the close of the introduction to Surviving Genocide , his intense and well-researched overview of American Indian land losses, population declines, and personal miseries from the years leading to the republic’s birth through the wholesale tribal removals of Andrew Jackson’s presidency, the University of Oregon historian Jeffrey Ostler doubts whether the federal government will ever “establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to honestly assess the United States’ impact on Native nations and propose meaningful remedies, including land return, for deep historical injustices.” Yet the most productive way to plow through his catalog of the unrelenting horrors and tragedies visited upon American Indians from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River is to imagine it as an early draft of the first volume of just such a report, a mammoth affidavit that, once completed, will cry out for that overdue reckoning.

Ostler makes an ambitious case that there was a more or less continuous campaign of brutal conquest, diplomatic duplicity, and near genocide, but he does not ground it on a few cherry-picked highlights in the long history of relations between Euro-Americans and Native Americans, as the freelance author Ronald Wright did with his Iroquois and Cherokee examples in Stolen Continents: The “New World” Through Indian Eyes Since 1492 (1992). Instead his magisterial perspective in this volume takes in the vast trans-Appalachian region with all its tribes and subtribes; the continent’s trans-Mississippi West will be similarly covered in volume 2.

Ostler’s swift-paced yet meticulous coverage of the wars and diasporas, great and small, and attendant fluctuations in native populations has been assembled as if he intends it to be his academic generation’s manifesto, one that argues, as expressed in the upbraiding title of a recent anthology, Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians (2015). That collection of essays offered native-centered investigations into the history of Indian slavery, native literacy, maps in historical textbooks, native women during the colonial period, civil rights activism, the significance of Indians to narratives of modernity, and post–World War II urban migrations. No longer, insist its contributors, can American history books minimize, marginalize, or rest upon entertaining sidebars wherever American Indians—in all their tribal, personal, temporal, and circumstantial diversity—were implicated, which is the case in even such recent works as Jill Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the United States (2018) and David McCullough’s The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West (2019).

Ostler’s contribution to Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians , which addressed critical omissions in writings about the Plains Indian wars, gave little hint that he was piecing together this grand synthesis. But Juliana Barr’s opening chapter to that collection laid out the geopolitical premise of Surviving Genocide :

At the time of European invasion, there was no part of North America that was not claimed and ruled by sovereign Indian regimes. The Europeans whose descendants would create the United States did not come to an unsettled wilderness; they grafted their colonies and settlements onto long-existent Indian homelands that constituted the entire continent.

To back up this foundational claim, the first of Ostler’s many useful maps depicts a jigsaw puzzle of dozens of separate tribal territories nestling against one another in 1760, from the Atlantic seaboard to the eastern parts of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, with hardly any space between them. By the end of his account, most of these native nations have been decimated and displaced, year by painful year, as a result of warfare, famine, disease, diplomatic pressure, coercive land turnovers, and sheer exhaustion. This does not mean that Indians did not put up a fight; indeed, Pontiac’s multitribal rebellion of the 1760s is one of the more riveting episodes of Ostler’s chronicle, even if it proved incapable of stemming the settler tide.

Ostler’s historical-ideological premise is heavily influenced by two relatively new subfields in American Indian history. One is settler colonialism studies, an approach that was first elaborated about twenty years ago by the Australian historian Patrick Wolfe. The second is genocide studies, which historians such as Benjamin Madley, who applied the 1948 United Nations genocide criteria to the “California Indian Catastrophe” of 1846–1873, have found increasingly relevant to characterizing the fate of their native subjects. * Today the term “settler colonialism” has become the shorthand explanation across American campuses, especially within ethnic and American studies programs, whenever and wherever indigenous residents—Japanese Ainus, First Peoples of Australia, Canadian First Nations, or Native Americans—were reduced by famine and disease, murdered in encounters famous and obscure, or forcibly or faux-legally evicted from traditional homelands.

As if impatient with wordy exegeses, Ostler defers here to the historian Lorenzo Veracini’s definition of the term: in classic seventeenth-century colonialism, explains Veracini in his Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (2010), “the colonizer says to the colonized, ‘You, work for me.’ By contrast, in settler colonialism [of the Australian and American kind], the colonizer says, ‘You go away.’” Rather than being conscripted by colonizers to exploit local resources—precious metals, fur-bearing animals, timber-rich forests, grazing or agricultural acreage—the resident natives are removed to make room for another workforce, whether imported slaves or incoming settlers. The UCLA historian Kelly Lytle Hernández explains this process in City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (2017):

Settlers invade in order to stay and reproduce while working in order to remove, dominate and, ultimately, replace the Indigenous populations. In the words of historian Patrick Wolfe, settler societies are premised on the “elimination of the native.”

Ostler’s approach is not the first time that the discipline of American history, specifically the history of the American West, has been dramatically updated. By the 1980s the genial acceptance of Frederick Jackson Turner’s so-called Frontier Thesis of 1893 had withered. Contrary to its title, Turner’s argument was less a formal thesis than a triumphalist diagnosis of the distinctive American character, claiming that it had been fundamentally marked by early Anglo-European confrontations with the rough-and-ready and westward-shifting frontier, which bequeathed to the country, in the historian Patricia Nelson Limerick’s words, “an ever-expanding zone of freedom, opportunity, and democracy.” But as deeper historical self-awareness during the 1960s and 1970s revealed, Turner’s hyperpatriotic analysis conveniently ignored—as Limerick went on to stress in Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West (2000)—glaring examples of illegal appropriation of natural resources, impositions of colonial dominance, and, particularly, “processes of collaboration, intermarriage, and syncretism” that “reshaped the lives of native people”—referring to all those American Indian nations apparently unworthy of mention in Turner’s formulation.

To correct the record and fill in these ignored stories, Limerick and the so-called New Western Historians, whose counterperspectives she often spoke for, replaced the geographical definition of “frontier” with the more critical concept of “conquest.” Younger scholars and their students began unearthing the experiences of Indians, Hispanics, and women, and factored the global economy and even the West’s climatic challenges into accounts of rapacious capitalism, environmental desecration, global slavery, political skullduggery, intervals of relative amity, and Indian resistance; they also made realistic assessments of the limits of progress in a region as ecologically challenging and ethnically complex as the American West.

Some of the current Young Turks like Ostler, however, who are building on Wolfe’s work, have leveled accusations of the ultimate crime: the genocide of American Indians, whether intended or inadvertent. In the obvious absence of evidence for any overt Final Solution conspiracy, Ostler attempts to substantiate a narrative of relatively consistent “genocidal” intent, whether hushed or occasionally explicit, over time. His attempt is but the latest and most comprehensive of those enormous syntheses on Indian–white relations in North America that appear every quarter-century or so as American scholars feel the still-unsatisfied need to make sense of the devastating encounters that by 1900 left a little over 237,000 Indians alive in the United States out of the estimated 12–15 million from over three hundred native nations that existed in North America in 1492.

Before fast-forwarding into his central narrative, Ostler dispenses with simplistic explanations for Indian depopulation, especially disease. “Recent scholarship,” he writes, “has shown that virgin soil epidemics did not occur everywhere and that Native populations did not inevitably crash as a result of contact.” While smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, and other illnesses certainly caused huge loss of life,

it was often less because Native bodies lacked immunity than because European colonialism disrupted Native communities and damaged their resources, making them more vulnerable to pathogens.

As a Canadian counterpart to Ostler’s work, James Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Indigenous Life (2019), makes similarly clear, it was most often the destruction of primary food resources that left Indians so susceptible to infections. To famine and malnutrition were then added enslavement, incessant forced removals, and constant social stress, which desperately weakened bodies and enabled pathogens to thrive.

Ostler introduces his narrative strategy with a spotlight on the Little Tennessee River in mid-1776. Representatives from half a dozen resistant tribes gathered in the old Cherokee capital of Chota to discuss thwarting the colonial aggressors. To one Shawnee tribal orator the threat from these “Virginians,” as they were collectively known, was ominous. The thirteen colonies had made it “plain, there was an intention to extirpate them.” Ostler unearthed this quote, we learn in footnotes, from the colonial records of North Carolina; otherwise it comes with no name, no other context.

With that warning from the eve of American independence, Ostler harkens back to the early 1700s. Tribes were already abandoning homelands; over the previous century the Delaware had been reduced from an estimated 10,000 to 3,000. “Their experience,” writes Ostler, “led them to conclude that the English colonists ‘wanted to get rid of them and deliberately infected them by selling them matchcoats that had been exposed to smallpox germs,’” an accusation that he dug out of The Jesuit Relations , the chronicle of the Jesuit mission in France’s North American colonies. In 1754, at the start of the Seven Years’ War, Delaware tribal leaders were explicitly warning that the “ French and English intend to kill all the Indians .” So begins Ostler’s litany of genocide-fearing statements from Indians that regularly appear, like courtroom exhibits, throughout his narrative.

The first quotes from the Anglo-European side come eight years later. A British superintendent of Indian affairs reported that the western Indians were fearful “that we should hem them in and in the end extirpate them.” The following year a British colonel suggested trying “Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race.” That is also when a Moravian missionary serving a colony of Christian Indians reported that frontiersmen had adopted the “doctrine…that the Indians were the Canaanites, who by God’s commandment were to be destroyed.”

Hardly five years go by in Ostler’s fast-moving précis of every significant Indian–white flashpoint—whether violent or diplomatic—without a quote from such back-and-forth insights into motivations and suspicions: Indians expressing rising fears about white Americans’ true motives; Americans hiding less and less their intentions behind the diplomatic legalese through which they threaten, bribe, and persuade Indians to get out of their way. Ostler interrupts this ongoing dialogue of sorts with sketches of bloodshed and suffering that become a numbing vindication of the poet Jim Harrison’s observation: “the true sound of history, this metal striking bone.”

The highest officials in the land echoed and supported settlers’ desires for wholesale Indian removal or worse. While the famous Ottawa rebel leader Pontiac hoped that the Proclamation of 1763, which forbade settlement west of the Appalachians, would resolve the need for a permanent boundary between and Indian and white domains, George Washington privately regarded it as “a temporary expedient to quiet the Minds of the Indians.” After the mobilized tribes of the Ohio and Illinois river valleys continued to resist white aggression, Thomas Jefferson urged “their extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes or Illinois river,” a view he repeated over the next thirty years. Watching some drunken Indian refugees in western Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin mused in his autobiography, “And, indeed, if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means.”

Edward S. Curtis/Library of Congress

Red Dog, also known as Shunka Luta, circa 1907

By the book’s second part, all pretense of nation-to-nation negotiations is gone. During the 1830s the elimination of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes from the southeastern states reached and remained atop the national agenda. The tribal removal policies, aggressively promoted by President Jackson, a diehard Indian antagonist, represented the apotheosis of genocidal intent. Even as Ostler’s citations of the ups and downs of Indian demographic statistics show that, in reality, natives seized every moment of surcease from white pressures to “adapt to changing conditions and rebuild their populations,” US policymakers argued that they “were vanishing and needed to be moved to ‘save’ them from total extinction.”

Whether because of local pressure, increased instability due to famine or warfare, or treaties whose fine print demanded land cessation, tribes became accustomed to incessant pressure to pack up and go. The Osage averaged a hundred miles westward every ten years after 1750; the Delaware were “broken up and removed six times,” their Chief Journeycake recalled. Dispossession and forced migration became the first pan-Indian experience. “I think you had better put the Indians on wheels,” a Sioux named Red Dog later told white treaty commissioners. “Then you can run them about whenever you wish.”

Ostler’s compendium of evidence reveals an unspoken truth that will extend from sea to shining sea: the United States was built upon many localized or regional determinations that amounted, in his view, to one insistent and continuous imperative. For the new republic and its pioneering settlers to thrive, the aboriginal citizenries had to be displaced, removed, extirpated, eliminated, exterminated. If Indians were characterized as less than human—as pests, parasites, or marauding animals—their eradication could be turned into a practical, mandatory, and virtuous cleansing. What is remarkable is how long it has taken historians like Ostler to perceive and document this insidious pattern.

With the stakes for credibility so high, every scrap of historical information—and Ostler’s paraphrases based on them—should contribute to making such grave charges as incontrovertible as possible. Relying on quotes of private intention and confidential predictions may seem insufficient, but in the accumulation they establish the permissive climate that easily led to Indian community harassment, native land takeovers, forced tribal removals, and outright killings. And Ostler is not the first historian to find such sources convincing. A half-century ago, in his introduction to a reissue of the Apache freedom fighter Geronimo’s autobiography, the historian Frederick Turner (not related to Frederick Jackson Turner) cited William Tecumseh Sherman’s declaration that his troops must confront the enemy Sioux “even to their extermination, men, women, and children” and General Philip Sheridan’s statement that “the only good Indians I know are dead” in support of his conclusion:

such statements make clearer than reams of official documents could what the real operating procedure was to be in the Plains campaigns. It was to be extermination, pure and simple, for the cause was holy, the provocations many, and the army almighty.

Ostler’s litany of ominous quotes, bloody outrages, and abrupt demographic declines, his close attention to the tragic fates of small tribes and subtribes, and his piling up of misery upon misery, empty stomach upon empty stomach, and social stress beyond imagining, vibrate with moral outrage. Together they forcefully make his case: during the formative years of our republic and beyond, there was a mounting, merciless, uncoordinated but aggressively consistent crusade to eliminate the native residents of the United States from their homelands by any means necessary—and those homelands were everywhere.

For many of us, I suspect, who have researched and taught Indian–white relations most of our lives, Surviving Genocide sets a bar from which subsequent scholarship and teaching cannot retreat. One awaits volume 2 with a mixture of dread for the approaching bloodshed and human suffering that Ostler will undoubtedly expose and humble amazement at the spiritual fortitude and social stamina that have sustained Native Americans through all this.

July 2, 2020

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17 The Extinction of History: How Genocide is a “Look the Other Way Affair” in the U.S.

How Genocide is a “Look the Other Way Affair” in the U.S.

James Murphy

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Murphy tackles history, colonization, and (the lack of) education in this essay. In it, Murphy asserts the importance of being aware of the United States’ history of genocide towards Indigenous peoples. This essay examines historical documents and takes into account multiple perspectives. One of the notable aspects about this essay is Murphy’s decision to include historical events that spans across various geographies in the Americas to illustrate the prevalence of colonization and genocide. Murphy engages in close reading at the level of the word to reveal how these documents expose the writers’ intentions and understandings of the Indigenous peoples they encounter. In this critique of US colonization, Murphy provides a number of calls to action that educators and the public can follow.

ENGLWRIT 112: College Writing

Day Month Year

The Extinction of History: How Genocide is a “Look the Other Way Affair” in the U.S.

The education system in the United States fails to address the seriousness and widespread genocide perpetuated by European colonists and later American citizens. It is important that children engaged in primary and secondary school education are made aware of the United States history of genocide and cruelty towards indigenous peoples so that we can begin to mature as a nation.

In Alysa Landry’s essay entitled, “All Indians are Dead? At Least That’s What Most Schools Teach Children,” she discusses the lack of studies focused on Native Americans in k-12 schools today. For instance, Landry goes on to cite: “In half of the states no individual natives or specific tribes are mentioned.” This example is disturbing because it emphasizes The United States willingness to ignore Native American history.

Perhaps more telling though is the kind of history being taught to children. According to Landry, “A staggering 87 percent of references to American Indians in all 50 states’ academic standards portray them in a pre-1900 context,” with very few references to treaties and land rights (Landry). Furthermore, “All of the states are teaching that there were civil ways to end problems and that the Indian problem was dealt with nicely,” with “Washington being the only state to use the word genocide in relation to Natives” (Landry).

This kind of skewed history in which genocide and the history of Native Americans is consistently brushed under the rug is however not entirely the fault of our education system. For instance, “ninety percent of all manuscripts written about Native people are authored by non-Native writers” (Landry). History is often written by the victors and so the lack of accounts from a Native perspective is not in the least bit surprising. By this token, I am somewhat sympathetic towards all the teachers and professors out there trying to penetrate the dirty waters of a history largely polluted by white perspectives.

Many of the documents written by European and American perspectives however paint a revealing and disturbing picture of how Europeans viewed Native Americans and in particular how they were treated. Historian Howard Zinn discusses how Columbus is often treated as a figure of heroic adventure in primary and secondary school textbooks as opposed to the ruthless oligarch he truly was. Zinn illuminates Columbus’s true motives by explaining how he convinced the king and queen of Spain to finance his expedition to the then undiscovered region of the Americas in search of gold. When Columbus encountered the Arawak tribe of the Bahamas, he wrote in his journal explaining that:

They brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned. . . They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They would make fine servants . . . with fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want. (Zinn)

The words “subjugate” and “servant” are crucial here in exposing Columbus’s true motives because they allow the reader to understand him as a figure that saw the indigenous peoples of the Bahamas not as human beings but as tools that he could exploit in his conquest for gold. When barely any gold could be found Columbus had to pay dividends to the Spanish crown in some way so he, “rounded up 1,500 Arawak men, women, and children,” before picking the “500 best specimens to load unto ships. Out of these 500 200 died en route” (Zinn). These massive deaths meant nothing to Columbus and his men, who frequently inflicted horrific acts of cruel violence unto the Arawak people. Las Casas, a priest on Columbus’s expedition and a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty writes that, “The Spaniards thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades” (Zinn).

Another example of the cruel treatment of Native Americans comes in the form of a letter written by United States brigadier general John E. Wood in which he states that if the Cherokee do not move to a territory west of the Mississippi and relinquish their lands to the U.S. government, they “will be hunted up and dragged from,” their “lurking places and hurried to the west” (Wood). By using such words as “hunted” and “dragged,” Wood paints the Cherokee as nothing more than animals to be hunted for sport and mercilessly tortured if they do not give up the lands that they have resided in for centuries to white settlers. Wood ends his letter by describing how if the Cherokees comply with the government’s request and move west of the Mississippi, they will be provided with “rations, blankets and clothing to be furnished to the poor and destitute of your people” (Wood). In other words, the only way Cherokee could receive any kind of government aid was if they gave up the lands that they had known their entire lives, in turn sacrificing their entire history and culture associated with their lands to be owned and exploited by white settlers. The Cherokee’s refusal to remove themselves from their lands eventually resulted in the Trail of Tears in which thousands of Cherokees were placed in “temporary stockades,” forced to leave their home as captives (Garrison). On this journey an estimated “4,000 to 5,000 Cherokees…died” (Garrison).

This kind of cruelty exposes the very worst qualities of humanity and the sickening truth behind a figure often celebrated in the United States. Educators throughout the United States seem content to ignore this cruelty, to bury the worst aspects of America’s history under the rug and continue teaching as if these tragedies never occurred. Native American history Professor Gregory D. Smithers posits several reasons as to why this may be:

We live in an age of social and political polarization, an era in which some of our leaders demand a “pro-American” history curriculum for K–12 students. Ours is also a time when violence is all too commonplace in our communities, and when serious intellectual debate over historical symbols causes deep anxieties everywhere from the op-ed pages of our newspapers to college classrooms. (Smithers)

While it is understandable that politicians and educators may fear that teaching about Native American genocide may stoke the flames of division in a modern age of polarization, this lack of knowledge “imperils rather than strengthens American democracy” (Smithers). Isn’t one of the key values of The United States freedom of speech and freedom of thought? How free is the thinking of America’s citizens if it is being manipulated and transformed to be “pro-American”? If our history lessons are dictated by lack of honest discussions regarding genocide and other Native American tragedies, students may bring “deep-seated cultural assumptions, clichés, and racial preconceptions about Native American people,” perpetuated by Hollywood films “with them when they arrive at university” (Smithers).

As a nation, a healthy response would be to come to terms with the truth of what happened. This response includes making the displacement and genocide of Native Americans a core part of the curriculum we teach our children. In order to properly apologize for the mass genocide and displacement of Native American peoples perpetuated by the United States government and early European settlers, we need to recognize that the progeny of the people we harmed still live among us today. Thus I believe is also important that we create a fund in which we pay reparations to Native Americans for the crimes we have committed similar to the “Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future Fund,” implemented in Germany in 1999 that compensated individuals used as “forced labor and slave labor by private companies during the Nazi era” (Weyeneth 18). Only after completely responding in these ways may we ask for their forgiveness and have a chance to create a peaceful end to this horrible story.

Works Cited

Garrison, Tim A. “Cherokee Removal.” New Georgia Encyclopedia . 06 June 2017, https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/cherokee-removal . Accessed 31 Mar. 2018.

Landry, Alysa. “All Indians Are Dead? At Least That’s What Most Schools Teach Children.” Indian Country Media Network , 17 Nov. 2014, https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/all-indians-are-dead-at-least-thats-what-most-schools-teach-children . Accessed 18 Mar. 2018.

Smithers, Gregory D. “Teaching Native American History in a Polarized Age.” The American Historian , 11 Nov. 2015, https://tah.oah.org/content/teaching-native-american-history-in-a-polarized-age/ . Accessed 18 Mar. 2018.

Weyeneth, Robert R. “The Power of Apology and the Process of Historical Reconciliation.” The Public Historian , vol. 23, no. 3, Aug. 2001, pp. 9-38, https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2001.23.2.9 . Accessed 6 Apr. 2018.

Wool, John E. “An 1837 message from Brigadier General John E. Wool to the Cherokee Nation warning them of the consequences of resisting removal.” 1837. TS. Digital Public Library of America , https://dp.la/primary-source-sets/cherokee-removal-and-the-trail-of-tears/sources/1511 . Accessed 29 Mar. 2018.

Zinn, Howard. “The Real Christopher Columbus.” Jacobin , 12 Oct. 2015, www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/the-real-christopher-columbus/ . Accessed 20 Mar. 2018.

UMass Amherst Writing Program Student Writing Anthology by James Murphy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Trail of Tears: The Greatest Genocide in American History

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The Trail of Tears and American Genocide

Written by Maeve McGuire

Long before the “Trail of Tears” occurred, Native Americans were forcibly removed from their land in the name of conquest and American Manifest Destiny, or the belief that white settlers had the right to expand and occupy all territory in the Western hemisphere. This belief of conquest was ingrained in American culture, rearing its ugly head time and time again in American history. But the Trail of Tears was one of the most jarring incidents of Native American genocide, and not only left thousands of Native Americans dead, but destroyed vibrant culture.

The Trail of Tears began in the early 1830s, where the sociopolitical climate of the United States fostered western expansion as a right of any white American citizen. There are multiple reasons for this expansion, but it was chiefly justified by the concept of Manifest Destiny. President Andrew Jackson was a large proponent of this notion. Jackson was viewed by many as a national hero because of his military feats, most notably against numerous Native American tribes. Elected president in 1829, he declared to Congress his intention of removing Native Americans from their land, particularly in the American south. Jackson told Congress that the removal "should be voluntary, for it would be as cruel as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers, and seek a home in a distant land”. Jackson wanted to subdue Native Americans through his address in Congress, creating a false sense of security that he would only unravel a couple of months later. He always intended to remove Native Americans from their land, as he was a staunch believer in Manifest Destiny. Numerous tribes were removed forcibly the following year, and often violently, from their land. This removal was an intentional act to destroy Native Americans’ lives and customs. The US federal government directed intentional violence against Native Americans, forcing thousands to relocate from their ancestral lands. Removal from their land represented a sheer loss of Native American culture as well, with so much of their beliefs and their tradition tied to the land. The Trail of Tears was a genocide for these very reasons, as it was a systematic removal of Native Americans and destruction of their culture. The 1830 “Indian Removal Act”, which Jackson lobbied and pushed through the Senate, passed and was used as a justification for the sheer brutality that the federal government inflicted upon Native Americans. It is important to note that the Indian Removal Act did not have a provision “authorizing the seizure of land that Indians declined to cede by treaty” (Cave 1333), yet Jackson went over the heads of the legislative branch and ordered the removal of all Native Americans from eastern lands. This was a flat out “abuse of presidential power” (Cave 1332). Federal troops were deployed to enforce the removal, and the President threatened to use force against those who would not willingly leave.

As a result of President Jackson’s executive action, as many as “100,000 American Indians were removed from eastern homelands” (Thornton 289), with many dying as a result. One of the most jarring examples of how deadly this forcible removal was the Cherokees’ dramatic population shift. According to research done by the Duke University Press, “more than 10,000 additional Cherokees would have been alive during the period 1835 to 1840 had Cherokee removal not occurred” (Thornton 298). The Cherokee nation originated in the southeastern part of what is now the United States, on land which has been very valuable and highly contested since European colonization. This land was so valuable because it was fertile and made excellent farmland, as well as being rich with minerals. In Georgia specifically, it was said that there was gold on Cherokee land, making it highly valued by white settlers. But white Georgians could not legally extract this gold, as the land was clearly agreed upon, under the 1785 Treaty of Hopewell, to be Cherokee land. However, the political climate changed with the election of Jackson, thereby causing conflict in the area under the Indian Removal Act. As a result, white Georgians began to illegally settle in Cherokee territory, spurring on the Cherokees to legally challenge the Indian Removal Act. The Cherokees, trying to assert their right to their land based on the Treaty of Hopewell, brought their case to the US Supreme Court in 1828, in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia . The court subsequently ruled that the Cherokees “did not have legal standing due to their status as a ‘domestic, dependent nation.’” Therefore they could not be incorporated into the United States’ legal system. A year after the ruling, another US Supreme Court case, entitled Worcester v. Georgia, ruled that Georgia could not encroach into Cherokee territory as per the treaty’s design. Jackson completely ignored this, abused his power, and ordered the removal of Native Americans anyway, with the Cherokee nation bearing the brunt of it. This was targeted genocide, motivated by the fact that the land the Cherokee occupied was so valuable, and that the Cherokee actively resisted the Removal Act. It is important to note that Cherokee resistance contributed to the “removal debate [and] […] dialogue built around sovereignty, state’s rights, and constitutional authority” (Bowes 75). Jackson clearly wanted Cherokee land for white expansionism, and the Cherokees’ petitioning of the court put a target on their back.

Many Cherokees were forced out of Georgia “at gunpoint” (Bowes 72). But the removal process was not quick whatsoever, and there is said to have been “thousands of Cherokees [dying] during the round-up and months spent in stockades awaiting removal” (Thornton 292), in addition to the thousands killed by the journey and its aftermath. The systematic removal was also delayed because of the amount of disease that Cherokees, as well as other Native American tribes, faced, as a result of germ warfare. It was so severe that the Cherokee National Council asked General Scott, a US General under Jackson’s orders, to allow the Cherokees to “remove themselves in the fall, after the sickly season had ended” (Thornton 291). Germ warfare was a common tactic used against Native American by white settlers in the United States, and contributed to heavy Native American losses. The exposure to disease during this time is in no doubt contributed to the harsh conditions that Native Americans were subjected to by settler governments. After being rounded up, Native Americans did not receive adequate provisions, and were placed in poorly kept stockades. The journey itself left thousands exposed to the harsh conditions, and no doubt many died because of the exposure and lack of provisions. If someone survived these harsh conditions, they still “face[d] disease and/or starvation in the new homelands” (Thornton 291). The journey took months, and Native Americans were left without food or transportation. Many died on the journey because they lacked these basic items, further highlighting the brutality of the American government. Once Native Americans reached their destination, they had to quickly provide and shelter themselves for the upcoming winter, but since the land allocated to them lacked rich natural resources, starvation and death were common. Besides facing this crisis, the diseases that were passed onto them at the start of the journey continued to plague Native populations when they settled, resulting in a staggering death toll.

Although the exact number of Native Americans that died during the Trail of Tears is hotly contested, it is assumed to be between 4,000 to 10,000 deaths, with the latter half of the spectrum being more realistic. Besides the sheer loss of life, many aspects of Native American culture were forever lost, as so many died and those left were far from home. The removal did not just remove the physical person, but it removed “livelihood and language, […] security and self-esteem,[…] religion and respect” (Lyons 8). The removal was systematic, and contributed to the large loss of life of Native Americans. The Trail of Tears constitutes a genocide because it was deliberate in its removal, targeted a specific population, and led to the death of thousands of Native Americans. But the brutality of the Trail of Tears is not an isolated case of violence against Native Americans in the US; rather, the Trail of Tears is a representative case of the violence faced by Native Americans since white colonization began in the fifteenth century. Sources:

Bens, Jonas “‘Domestic Dependent Nations’ and Indigenous Identity: Cherokee Nation v. Georgia.” The Indigenous Paradox: Rights, Sovereignty, and Culture in the Americas , University of Pennsylvania Press, PHILADELPHIA, 2020, pp. 51–69. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv16t6dx7.7. Accessed 7 Nov. 2020.

Bowes, John P. “American Indian Removal beyond the Removal Act.” Native American and Indigenous Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2014, pp. 65–87. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/natiindistudj.1.1.0065. Accessed 7 Nov. 2020.

Cave, Alfred A. “Abuse of Power: Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act of 1830.” The Historian , vol. 65, no. 6, 2003, pp. 1330–1353. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24452618. Accessed 7 Nov. 2020.

Lyons, Scott Richard. X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent . NED - New edition ed., University of Minnesota Press, 2010. JSTOR , www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttt4rt. Accessed 7 Nov. 2020.

Richardson, James D. A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents , 10 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1896-99). The Online Books Page , https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/metabook?id=mppresidents. Accessed 7 Nov. 2020.

Thornton, Russell. “Cherokee Population Losses during the Trail of Tears: A New Perspective and a New Estimate.” Ethnohistory , vol. 31, no. 4, 1984, pp. 289–300. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/482714. Accessed 7 Nov. 2020.

Maeve McGuire

Recommended for you, the mesopotamian marshes: a case study of an ecology in peril, indigenous matrilineality: resisting annihilation through arts and spirituality, “refusal to vanish”: an intersectional examination of cultural healing in indigenous contemporary art.

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The Genocide of the Native Americans, Essay Example

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It is virtually impossible to touch the topic of genocide without referencing the Holocaust. This Communistic country acted in a cruel and inhumane manner, costing millions their lives. However, these unfathomable practices took place on American soil as well. It was American people who were acting with the same inhumanity that would lead to Native American extinction. An important part of history is to understand how the Native Americans were exploited and essential eliminate as an entire culture. The racism and twisted governmental law played a key role in the discrimination, mistreatment, and genocide of the Native Americans.

The United States has consistently constricted a corrupt form of legalism as a way of establishing empire and control. The law has been used to subvert the Native Americans by tracing the federal Indian law (Churchill 241). The law was used to promote injustice and economic inequality between Native Americans and European Americans. According to Churchill, there is a devastating account of stealing land and the genocide of the Native Americans dating back to the earliest days of the Republic. Racism mixed with greed for the Land owned by the Native Americans caused the separation of thirteen small British colonies from England.

“Legally speaking,” quotes Churchill from one such document, “so long as a tribe exists and remains in possession of its lands, its title and possession are sovereign and exclusive.” (Churchill 250) In 1832 the natives Indians were classified as subordinates to the United States, showing the inequality prior to the genocide even beginning. When they fought to protect their land, the whites claimed it as aggression giving them more grounds to fight the Natives. Taking the rights of the Indian’s left them little grounds to legally fight back to protect themselves and their land. This type of action in U.S. government history shows the devastating actions towards indigenous people.

A contributing factor to the genocide of the Native Americans took place over the struggle for land. The Orlquois fought to reclaim their land in upstate New York and the Lakota refusal to sell the Black Hills. Ward attributes that Hitler modeled the United States treatment of Indians as a model for his genocide methods. As a result in 1946 the Indian Commission Act was passed to provide the Indians rights which allowed them to sue for lost lands due to duress, fraud, and unconscionable consideration which they were entitled to. For the whites, it was not only about the land, but the excessive money available on the land through mining, oil, so on. By eliminating the Native Americans it allows for alternative ownership and a large amount of money to earn.

An important part in understanding the history of Native Americans is understanding the points during and after the European contact. (Rubertone 430) The article addresses essential complexities of identity construction in American, post European contact. European studies have created items viewed as “traditional” in the acculturative changes that happened in native societies resulting from their contact with the Europeans. From this principle, it has been considered the replacement of historic-period Native American artifacts, aiding in the study of the evolutionary change. By adding a number of descriptive artifacts they are able to develop a better measurement for acculturation profiles in the Native American culture. This is more important than simply adding an additional dimension highlighting cultural differences. It can shed a light on the events that took place and the practices of that particular tribe.

Understanding the subsequent developments also aids in determining who was affected by it. The Native Americans were affected by the global development active by European expansion. This study of historical archaeology creates evidence of the silence and exposes the distortion of the experience in North American. These findings represent the native people’s experiences in activism, persistence and complicated social interactions. This plays a crucial role in remember as well as producing knowledge about the past Native American experiences.

The demographic overview of North American Indian history addresses the details of the holocaust, which even today, white Americans tend to dismiss as an unfortunate concomitant of manifest destiny. European Americans of North America led to the sharp decline in the number or better stated the entire tribe. Thorton describes how the holocaust contributed to diseases, genocide and warfare, relocation and removal, and massive destruction to aboriginal ways of life (Thorton 213). The injustice and genocide of the Native Americans was led by greed and inhumanity. The failure to see these tribes as equals aided in the removal and genocide of the Native Americans. Removing these tribes made it easier for the whites to maintain power, ownership, and control.

There are also sociocultural factors that are beneficial in understanding the suicide phenomena and creating preventive strategies. Defining suicide in an integrative approach, which calls for coordinated and concrete, multidisciplinary approaches to prevention of suicide (Leo 24). Culture does have an influence on suicide rates. Suicide seems to escalate during major economic fluctuations, such as the white’s attacks on the Native American population. Instead of fighting back or accepting the torture, individuals choose to end their existence as a way to escape. Economic changes and war has a higher suicide outcome on the males. This is another factor to consider in the overall termination of the Native Americans. The very nature of these events in many countries, if they intentionally inflicted, could act as a suicide strategy.

The whites categorized the Native Americans as non-humans or lesser beings. This is not the only race that they denoted as below them, but unlike the other lesser-beings, the Native Americans fought back. Yee analyses how Americans have perpetuated inaccurate attitudes and images concerning the Chinese that propose the functioning of socio-psychological anomalies and prevent the growth of healthy human relations (Yee 102). Mark Twain recorded the following observation of the Americans views towards the Chinese race. “They are a harmless race when white men either let them alone or treat them no worse than dogs; in fact, they are almost entirely harmless anyhow, for they seldom think of resenting the vilest insults or the cruelest injuries.” (Yee 102) David Yee addressed the narrow stereotype perceptions of Chinese Americans. This aids in the understanding of the underlying prejudices to Native Americans as far as meaningful identity is concerned.

The relationship between the Indians and the whites had never been equal in any manner. In fact, the public policies in place encouraged that gap in racial equality. Legter’s book establishes a distinct connected between American genocide and the events after the wake of the Holocaust. Genocide has a vast amount of aspects and interpretations. Slavery was associated with an aspect of genocide. The American slaves were deprived of human rights and their own ethnic affiliation; however that was not deemed classifiable as genocide. It is when the slaves are numerically impacted and the survival of the race is endangered, that can be determined to be genocide. When the Native Americans were attacked, at time the entire tribe was eliminated.

There is an importance of gapping the whites to other races, including the American Indians, and the practice of genocide. It is a safe assumption that there has never been a calculated plan for the extermination of Native Americans to even compare it with that of Hitler’s plan. However under the provisions of the Genocide Convention, the practices of the United States show participation in Native American genocide. James Axtrell records in Virginia and New England the practice of genocide against the Pequot’s and other Native American groups. In 1711, the Virginia House of Burgesses funded, “the extirpating all Indians without distinction of Friends or Enemies.” These murderous intents typically justified their killing with scripture. These Native Americans were expected to restructure, the purpose being to destroy the Native society in its entirety. This left the white American’s to covet the land and act in a lawless capacity. Inevitably, this greed led to an excessive loss of Indian life. The United State government turned a blind eye and failed to honor their role as sworn in the treaty to protect.

In the 19 th Century, the Native Americans fought back in the Indian war. This massacre aided in the extinctions of the Indian race in its entirety. Aiding in the overall belief that genocidal practices exterminated the Indians was the white’s practice of kidnapping Indian children to strip them of their native roots. They would educate them to be white, and to associate with that population, not the Native American ways. This disassociation ended the potential for repopulation within that tribe. This act was completely seen as legal. The United States government failed to protect, and turned a blind eye to their own involvement in the extinction of Native Americans. There was a wide collection of violence especially genocide and mass killing. The author presents the origin of the concept through introduction of new concepts and comparison with other approaches ( Staub 270).

The social problems faced by Native Americans resulted from racial policy discourse. The two societies emerged, and the inequality of these societies was visibly apparent. This article provides valuable information is assessing the injustices resulting from apparent invisibility of American Indians in racial policy issues (Russell 325). The Native Americans failed to get involved with the development of racial policies, which was predominately sponsored by Black Americans. Their rights have been diminished for so long without any sort of government consideration, the Native Americans failed to desire to participate in creating racial policies.

The racism and twisted governmental law played a key role in the discrimination, mistreatment, and genocide of the Native Americans. There are many factors and theories attributed to the overall mistreatment of an entire race. During that time, greed sponsored by governmental support led to an excessive loss of life. White-Americans exploited Indians, took their children and their land for personal gain. Native American genocide can be directly pinpointed to the white Americans and the U.S. government’s failure to see them as equal humans. This horrific practice has been referenced to be what Hitler modeled the Holocaust after. The racial policies and discourse resulted in the genocide of the Native American people.

Works Cited

Churchill, Winston. Perversions of Justice: Indigenous Peoples and Anglo-American Law . New York: City Lights Publishers, 2003.

Leo, De Diego. Struggling Against Suicide. The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention. 23.1 (2002): 23-31.

Rubertone, Patricia. “The history of archeology of Native Americans.” Annual Review of Anthropology 29.3 (2000): 425-446.

Russell, Stephen. Seeking justice: critical perspective of native people: The invisibility of American Indians in racial policy discourse. The Georgetown Public Policy Review. 4 Geo. Public Pol’y Rev. 129. (1999)

Staub, Ervin. Genocide and Mass Killing: Origins, Prevention, Healing and Reconciliation. Political Psychology , 21 (2000): 367–382.

Thorton, Rosalind. American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492: Civilization of the American Indian . Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.

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Experiences of Indigenous Peoples in North America and the Middle East: A Part of Genocide Awareness Week

Tue, Apr 16 2024, 12:30 - 2:30pm

Join the Center for Middle Eastern Studies for "Experiences of Indigenous Peoples in North America and the Middle East: A Part of Genocide Awareness Week."

Dr. Leo K. Killsback, J.D. Candidate, James E. Rogers College of Law: "Lessons in Genocide: the American Indian Experience and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples"

Leo K. Killsback (Northern Cheyenne) is an award-winning scholar and author of Indigenous political theory, sovereignty, history, and culture.

The history of Native America is rarely told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples, and yet the commonly accepted narrative is that the colonization of Native America was simply a clash between primitive tribal aboriginals and advanced civilized nations of Europe. I intend to offer Indigenous perspectives of the colonization of Native America, relying on the development of international law, treaty rights, and human rights. The story of the colonization of Native America should not be accepted as the inevitable demise of Indigenous Nations, but should be understood as the failure of spiritual maturity and a lesson for humanity.

Esther Elia, Post-MFA Graduate: "Incantation Bowls and the Pathway to Trans-Indigenous Exchange"

Esther Elia (she/her) is from Turlock, California. She received a BFA in Illustration from California College of the Arts, and a Masters of Fine Arts in Painting/Drawing from the University of New Mexico. Her art practice focuses on the Assyrian experience in diaspora, and uses painting and sculpture to explore themes of creating homeland and culture as a currently stateless nation.

The talk will outline how research into Assyrian Incantation bowls resulted in the projects "The Assyrian Prayer Bowl Archive" and "Native Soil." The latter was a community arts initiative that brought Native American potters from the Southwest to the Assyrian village of Bebedeh (Northern Iraq) to hold clay workshops in June 2023.

Dr. Mariam Georgis, Assistant Professor of Global Indigeneity: "Traversing Disciplinary Boundaries, Globalizing Indignities: Visibilizing Assyrians in the Present"

Mariam Georgis is Assistant Professor of Global Indigeneity in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at Simon Fraser University.

The author's work spans the disciplinary boundaries of political science, Middle East studies, Indigenous studies, and their subfields. Broadly situated within critical theoretical bodies of knowledge, she focuses on an Indigenous nation in what is today known as Iraq. Her work is grounded within particular and fragmented locations that blur various lines and multiple layers of coloniality. This article offers a critical reflection of the invisibility in working on Indigeneity in southwest Asia within the structural imperatives of the academy.

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Pakistan and Saudi Arabia call for a cease-fire in Gaza, saying efforts so far are insufficient

In this photo released by Prime Minister Office, visiting Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan, seventh left, meets with Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, center, in Islamabad, Pakistan, Tuesday, April 16, 2024. Saudi Arabia's foreign minister led a high-level delegation on a two-day visit to Pakistan, which is seeking help in overcoming one of its worst economic crises. (Prime Minister Office via AP)

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Pakistan and Saudi Arabia on Tuesday called for an immediate cease-fire and uninterrupted delivery of humanitarian aid in Gaza.

Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan, on a visit to Islamabad, said that international efforts toward a cease-fire between Israel and the militant group Hamas have been “wholly insufficient.”

“We are now actively discussing the potential for famine in Gaza, and it means people are starving to death because humanitarian assistance is not getting to them,” he said. “This is an unacceptable situation.”

Without directly mentioning an Iranian attack on Israel over the weekend, he said “we are already in an unstable region, and the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is already inflaming the region. We do not need more conflict in our region, we do not need more confrontation in our region, so it is our position that the de-escalation must be everybody’s priority.”

Tensions in the region have ramped up since the start of the latest Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7, when Hamas and Islamic Jihad, two militant groups backed by Iran, carried out a devastating cross-border attack that killed 1,200 people in Israel and kidnapped 250 others. Israel responded with an offensive in Gaza that has caused widespread devastation and killed over 33,800 people, according to local health officials .

Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar described the killings in Gaza as “genocide” and said that the “world’s conscience must wake up” and there should be “an immediate and unconditional cease-fire” with aid flowing into the territory.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif earlier met with Prince Faisal and called for closer cooperation with Saudi Arabia to help his cash-strapped nation with investment, a government statement said.

Sharif last week met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, one of Pakistan’s closest allies and a leading supplier of oil to Islamabad. According to Pakistani officials, Prince Mohammed had assured Pakistan that Saudi Arabia would invest $5 billion in Pakistan.

In July, Saudi Arabia deposited $2 billion into Pakistan’s central bank to boost its foreign exchange reserves.

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The Native American Genocide And Its Legacy Of Oppression Today
Revealing the history of genocide against California’s Native Americans
Native American Genocide
Revealing the history of genocide against California’s Native Americans
An American Genocide
Native America and the Question of Genocide

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COMMENTS

Genocide and American Indian History
This essay begins with the premise that the issue of genocide in American Indian history is far too complex to yield a simple yes-or-no answer. The relevant history, after all, is a long one (more than five hundred years) involving hundreds of indigenous nations and several European and neo-European empires and imperial nation-states.
Yes, Native Americans Were the Victims of Genocide
This paper, written under the title, "U.S. Settler-Colonialism and Genocide Policies," was delivered at the Organization of American Historians 2015 Annual Meeting in St. Louis, MO on April 18 ...
When Native Americans Were Slaughtered in the Name of ...
On a cool May day in 1758, a 10-year girl with red hair and freckles was caring for her neighbor's children in rural western Pennsylvania. In a few moments, Mary Campbell's life changed ...
Native American genocide in the United States
The destruction of Native American peoples, cultures, and languages of has been characterized as a form of genocide.The question of whether this event constitutes genocide is debated amongst scholars. [dubious - discuss] Debates are ongoing over whether the entire process, or specific periods and local occurrences, meet the legal definition of genocide.
Reexamining the American Genocide Debate: Meaning, Historiography, and
Historian Frank Chalk's and sociologist Kurt Jonassohn's 1990 edited collection The History and Sociology of Genocide included essays on Native Americans in colonial New England and in the nineteenth-century U.S. while arguing that Indians suffered genocide, primarily through famine, massacres, and "criminal neglect." That same year ...
PDF The Lasting Impact of Genocide in America: Historical Trauma Among
and stages, it is difficult to deny that Native Americans experienced genocide. The sheer population loss alone is more than enough evidence; most scholars agree that there was a 95 percent decrease in the population of Native Americans in North America between the arrival of Columbus in 1492 and the end of the 19th century (Plous 2002).
Genocide Policy Toward Native Americans
Physical and Cultural Genocide Policy Toward Native Americans Essay. The aboriginal inhabitants suffered greatly due to the European colonization of North America. Their way of life was irreversibly altered in a short amount of time. Various circumstances contributed to the changes, including land loss, sickness, enforcement of laws that ...
Genocide of Native Americans: Historical Facts and Historiographic Debates
Rensink, Brenden, "Genocide of Native Americans: Historical Facts and Historiographic Debates" (2011). Dissertations, Theses, & Student Research, Department of History. 34. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the History, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion ...
The Intent Was Genocide
July 2, 2020 issue. Reviewed: Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas. by Jeffrey Ostler. Yale University Press, 533 pp., $37.50. Library of Congress. 'The Battle of Bad Axe'; illustration by Henry Lewis, 1857. In Surviving Genocide, Jeffrey Ostler writes, 'Toward the end of ...
Episodes from the Genocide of the Native Americans: A Review Essay
Paul R. Bartrop, ''Episodes from the Genocide of the Native Americans: A Review Essay''. Genocide Studies and Prevention 2, 2 (August 2007): 183-190. 2007 Genocide Studies and Prevention. doi: 10.3138/gsp/006. expansion in North America saw attempts at clearing the land of indigenous populations; of forcibly assimilating these ...
Revealing the history of genocide against California's Native Americans
The book, recently released in paperback, meticulously narrates the systematic and brutal campaigns of slaughter and enslavement during which California's indigenous population plunged from as many as 150,000 people to around 30,000. This is a rarely examined part of California's history that was "hidden in plain sight," as Madley said.
The Extinction of History: How Genocide is a "Look the Other ...
One of the notable aspects about this essay is Murphy's decision to include historical events that spans across various geographies in the Americas to illustrate the prevalence of colonization and genocide. ... While it is understandable that politicians and educators may fear that teaching about Native American genocide may stoke the flames ...
Native American Genocide Essay
By the 1800s, 95 percent of the Native Americans have been killed and this genocide had taken the length of 100 years. In 1830, a year after Andrew Jackson was elected president in 1829 the United States Congress had passed the Indian Removal Act. The act had ordered the Native Americans to be relocated in the west.
Genocide of Indigenous peoples
The genocide of Indigenous peoples, colonial genocide, or settler genocide is the intentional elimination of Indigenous peoples as a part of the process of colonialism.. According to certain genocide experts, including Raphael Lemkin - the individual who coined the modern concept of genocide - colonization is intrinsically genocidal. Other scholars view genocide as associated with but ...
Trail of Tears: the Greatest Genocide in American History: [Essay
The Trail of Tears is one of the biggest genocides of all time and is widely overlooked in American history. In order to understand the situation Native Americans were put through, it is important to know the events that led up to this horrific time in our nation's history. There is an English saying that goes "those who do not know their ...
Essay On Native American Genocide
Essay On Native American Genocide. 551 Words 3 Pages. Whether or not the death of Native Americans was a product of genocide has been a widely debated topic. The argument could be for or against the label of "genocide". However, based off of the definition of "genocide", textbook readings, and articles I have read I believe there is ...
Native American Genocide essay
The genocide began with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492 and continued until the late 19th century, resulting in the deaths of millions of Native Americans. One of the primary methods used to carry out the genocide was through forced relocation.
Native American Genocide Essays
Essay On Native American Genocide. The American government's treatment of Native Americans in the 19th century should be considered genocide. Genocide is the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation. And what American governments were doing is literary killing innocent Native ...
Denial of genocides of Indigenous peoples
According to a survey conducted between 2016 and 2018, "36% of Americans almost certainly believe that the United States is guilty of committing genocide against Native Americans." Indigenous author Michelle A. Stanley writes that "Indigenous genocide is largely denied, erased, relegated to the distant past, or presented as inevitable".
The Trail of Tears and American Genocide
The Trail of Tears was a genocide for these very reasons, as it was a systematic removal of Native Americans and destruction of their culture. The 1830 "Indian Removal Act", which Jackson lobbied and pushed through the Senate, passed and was used as a justification for the sheer brutality that the federal government inflicted upon Native ...
The Genocide of the Native Americans, Essay Example
Thorton describes how the holocaust contributed to diseases, genocide and warfare, relocation and removal, and massive destruction to aboriginal ways of life (Thorton 213). The injustice and genocide of the Native Americans was led by greed and inhumanity. The failure to see these tribes as equals aided in the removal and genocide of the Native ...
Essay On Native American Genocide
Essay On Native American Genocide. The American government's treatment of Native Americans in the 19th century should be considered genocide. Genocide is the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation. And what American governments were doing is literary killing innocent Native ...
Experiences of Indigenous Peoples in North America and the Middle East
Dr. Leo K. Killsback, J.D. Candidate, James E. Rogers College of Law: "Lessons in Genocide: the American Indian Experience and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples" Leo K. Killsback (Northern Cheyenne) is an award-winning scholar and author of Indigenous political theory, sovereignty, history, and culture.
Essay On Native American Genocide
Genocide requires that death is planned and enacted by one group onto another with the sole intent of annihilating that group. Although the murders of the Native Americans were barbaric, it was war and slavery that caused them, not genocide. The death of thousands of Native Americans is 75-95% based in the …show more content…
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia call for a cease-fire in Gaza, saying efforts
Pakistan's Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar described the killings in Gaza as "genocide" and said that the "world's conscience must wake up" and there should be "an immediate and ...