army followed suit and used the same method on the Plains tribal populations with similar success.įor a brief periods after the American Revolution, the United States adopted a policy toward American Indians known as the “conquest” theory. Over 100 thousand died among the Mingo, Delaware, Shawnee and other Ohio River nations. British agents intentionally gave Tribes blankets that were intentionally contaminated with smallpox. Not only was the method of massacre used, other methods for “Indian Removal” and “clearing” included military slaughter of tribal villages, bounties on native scalps, and biological warfare. Massacres occurred across the land such as the Wounded Knee Massacre. This did not end with Columbus’ departure, the European colonies and the newly declared United States continued similar conquests. Fifty years later the Spanish census recorded only 200 living! Las Casas, the primary historian of the Columbian era, writes of numerous accounts of the horrendous acts that the Spanish colonists inflicted upon the indigenous people, which included hanging them en masse, roasting them on spits, hacking their children into pieces to be used as dog food, and the list continues. Within three years five million were dead. He began to implement slavery and mass-extermination of the Taino population of the Caribbean. How? When Columbus returned in 1493 he brought a force of 17 ships. Four centuries later, it had been reduced by 95% (237 thousand). The list of American genocidal policies includes: Mass-execution, Biological warfare, Forced Removal from homelands, Incarceration, Indoctrination of non-indigenous values, forced surgical sterilization of native women, Prevention of religious practices, just to name a few.īy mass-execution prior to the arrival of Columbus the land defined as the 48 contiguous states of America numbered in excess of 12 million. There are many facets of genocide which have been implemented upon indigenous peoples of North America. The United States Government has refused to ratify the U.N. Genocide or the deliberate extermination of one ethnic group by another is not new, for example in 1937 the Pequot Indians were exterminated by the Colonists when they burned their villages in Mystic, Connecticut, and then shot all the other people - including women and children - who tried to escape. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.Deliberately infliction on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of group.Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, describes genocide beyond outright murder of people as the destruction and extermination of culture.” Article II of the convention lists five categories of activity as genocidal when directed against a specific “national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” General Assembly adopted this term and defended it in 1946 as “….a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups.” Most people tend to associate genocide with wholesale slaughter of a specific people. “By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group.” Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, (1944) p.79. The Oxford English Dictionary defines genocide as “the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group” and cites the first usage of the term as R. The term Genocide derives from the Latin (genos=race, tribe cide=killing) and means literally the killing or murder of an entire tribe or people. Smallpox was instrumental in killing the American Indians GENOCIDE OF NATIVE AMERICANS: A SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW The biggest killers though were smallpox, measles, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, and scarlet fever. Native Americans have the highest mortality rate of any U.S. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination – by starvation and uneven combat – of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”
“Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history.
Stannard (Oxford Press, 1992) – “over 100 million killed” “ Columbus personally murdered half a million Natives” Genocide and Denying It: Why We Are Not Taught that the Natives of the United States and Canada were Exterminated Death Toll: 95,000,000 to 114,000,000Īmerican Holocaust: D.