" it must be acknowledged that the deliberate spread of disease, the decimation of the mighty bison herds, the use of the poison alcohol to destroy mind and body, and the cowardly killing of women and children made for tragedy on a scale so ghastly that it cannot be dismissed as merely the inevitable consequence of the clash of competing ways of life" (Gover).
Of course it was the result of numerous policies motivated by greed, racism and an imbalance of power and technology. It was for exploitation and resource extraction, for the taking of land with no higher moral purpose than self-enrichment and profit.
Gover would go on to admit the Bureau of Indian Affairs' participation in the forced relocation and indoctrination of native children through the boarding school system.
Category 5
The practice of taking Native American children from their tribes for the purpose of converting them to "Christian" non-Indian U.S. citizens at state-sponsored boarding schools breached the fifth category defined in the Convention against Genocide. This practice showed the clear intent of the dominant white society and institutions to wipe away all native culture, language, religion and customs - in short to destroy the native civilizations entirely. Indian children were terrorized and tortured for noncompliance and for speaking their native tongues. The federal Bureau of Indian Affairs was responsible for the Indian boarding school system as a whole.
Worst of all, the Bureau of Indian Affairs committed these acts against the children entrusted to its boarding schools, brutalizing them emotionally, psychologically, physically, and spiritually (Gover).
The Carlisle Pennsylvania Indian school was notoriously zealous in its explicit policies to rid Indian children of their native heritage:
"Let all that is Indian within you die! ... You cannot become truly American citizens, industrious, intelligent, cultured, civilized until the INDIAN within you is DEAD. -Reverend A. J. Lippincott, Carlisle commencement address" (Adams).
Recent research has focused on these boarding schools, and on their effects upon the many thousands of native children processed through them. From the children's perspective, these schools were torturous mind-control facilities and totalitarian psychological warfare operations aimed at forcing them to abandon their families, tribes and cultures:
"Speak English. Forget the language of your grandparents. It is dead. Forget their teachings. They are ignorant and unGodly. " Indians are not clean. " You will never amount to anything. " Don't cry. Crying never solved anything. Write home once every month. In English. Tell your mother that you are doing very well " Forget the language of your grandparents. It is dead. We forbid you to speak it. If you are heard speaking it you will kneel on a navy bean for one hour. Don't cry. Crying never solved anything. We will ask if you have learned your lesson. You will answer. In English. Spare the rod and spoil the child. We will not spare the rod (LeGarde Grover)."
Conclusions
It would be difficult to argue that Native Americans, who once freely roamed the continent unmolested, experienced anything other than outright genocide. Some historians have tried to obfuscate and to ignore the obvious evidence of the deliberate destruction of numerous indigenous societies. These apologetics do not persuade. The truth is a dark and painful past that should be taught for what it is, and as truthfully as possible regardless of present day biases and expectations of the dominant American culture.
Category 4 of the Genocide Convention was also touched upon and documented much later in the twentieth century. Sterilization of native women was exposed in the 1970s and was the subject of a 1976 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. This report was criticized for only looking at a small part of the system, but it still concluded that more than 3,000 Indian women of childbearing age had undergone sterilization at government run health facilities, often without informed consent. Native activists and groups such as Women of All Red Nations (WARN) disputed the limited scope of the GAO study, and they have estimated sterilization rates as high as "80 percent on some reservations (Smith)."
Although the technical term genocide did not exist during the period of conquest, the net result was the same. Numerous native societies were decimated and these atrocities were justified with flimsy rationales of alleged white Christian superiority and morality. With profound hubris, these perpetrators claimed moral superiority even as the forced displacement, land theft, death marches and policies of murder and extermination were carried out across North America.
Natives were demonized, slandered and libeled with the intent of presenting them as sub-human and deserving of eradication. This white on red racism was extensive, profound and clearly aimed at portraying all Indians, of every tribe, of both sexes, and of every age as part of a different and inferior species. Demonizing the target population is a fundamental component in all genocides. Today, even the celebrated Mark Twain could be legitimately accused of "hate speech."
This deliberate extermination of native peoples throughout the Americas was not just genocide, but perhaps the greatest example of it in all of human history. So says historian David Stannard in this excerpt from his book, American Holocaust-
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