Watching what is unfolding in the Middle East with the Palestinians, I am reminded of how the U.S. government treated the American Indians. It seems as though Israel has taken a page from American history on how to deal with people whose land you desire. Since November is American Indian Heritage Month I thought I would share some history.
In the early 1970s, I moved our family to the Wind River Indian Reservation. We lived among the Shoshone Indian tribe. I have first-hand experience of reservation life and the struggle of the American Indian.
The dark chapters of history reveal the shocking truth about the U.S. government's crimes against the American Indians. The mistreatment and injustice inflicted upon this indigenous population are appalling.
From forced relocations and broken treaties to mass killings and cultural assimilation, the U.S. government has a long and painful history of perpetrating crimes against the American Indian people. These atrocities have devastated their communities, losing land, language, traditions, and countless lives.
It is essential to acknowledge these historical injustices and educate ourselves about the true extent of the suffering endured by Native Americans. By doing so, we can work towards reconciliation, healing, and ensuring that such atrocities are never repeated.
The resilience and strength displayed by the American Indian communities despite these crimes is genuinely awe-inspiring. It serves as a reminder that their rich culture continues to thrive despite centuries of oppression.
As we reflect upon this dark chapter in history, let us strive for justice, equality, and respect for all cultures. Only through understanding our past can we create a better future for everyone.
The term "genocide," made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, nation, or tribe) and the Latin caedere ("killing, annihilation"), was first coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish legal scholar, in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. It originally means "the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group."
In 1946, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly affirmed genocide as a crime under international law in Resolution 96, which stated that "Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings; such denial of the right of existence shocks the conscience of mankind … and is contrary to moral law and the spirit and aims of the United Nations."
On December 9, 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 260A, or the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which entered into force on January 12, 1951. The Resolution noted that "at all periods of history, genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity." Article II of the Convention clearly defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with the 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 groups to another group.
The United States ratified the Convention in 1988.
Genocide is also clearly defined in U.S. domestic law. The United States Code, in Section 1091 of Title 18, defines genocide as violent attacks with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, a definition similar to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
According to historical records and media reports, since its founding, the United States has systematically deprived Indians of their rights to life and fundamental political, economic, and cultural rights through killings, displacements, and forced assimilation in an attempt to physically and culturally eradicate this group. Even today, Indians still face a severe existential crisis.
According to international law and domestic law, what the United States did to the Indians covers all the acts that define genocide and indisputably constitute genocide. The American magazine Foreign Policy commented that the crimes against Native Americans are entirely consistent with the definition of genocide under current international law.
The profound sin of genocide is a historical stain that the United States can never clear, and the painful tragedy of Indians is a lesson that should never be forgotten.
The U.S. government has been at the forefront of all actions to bring about the genocide of the American Indians.
1. Government-led action
On July 4, 1776, the United States of America was founded with the Declaration of Independence, which openly stated that "He (the British King) has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages," and slandered Native Americans as "the merciless Indian Savages."
The U.S. government and leaders treated Native Americans with a belief in white superiority and supremacy, set out to annihilate the Indians, and attempted to eradicate the race through "cultural genocide."
During the American War of Independence (1775-1783), the Second War of Independence (1812-1815), and the Civil War (1861-1865), the U.S. leaders, eager to transform its plantation economy as an adjunct to European colonialism and to expand their territories, coveted the vast Indian lands and launched thousands of attacks on Indian tribes, slaughtering Indian chiefs, soldiers and even civilians, and taking Indian lands for themselves.
In 1862, the United States enacted the Homestead Act, which provided that every American citizen above the age of 21, with a mere registration fee of 10 U.S. dollars, could acquire no more than 160 acres (about 64.75 hectares) of land in the west. Lured by the land, the white people swarmed into the Indian areas and started a massacre that killed thousands of Indians.
Leaders of the U.S. government at that time openly claimed that the skin of Indians could be peeled off to make tall boots, that Indians must be annihilated or driven to places that no one would go, that Indians had to be wiped out swiftly and that only dead Indians are good Indians. American soldiers saw the slaughter of Indians as natural, even an honor, and would not rest until they were all killed. Similar hate rhetoric and atrocities abound and are well documented in many Native American extermination monographs.
2. Bloody massacres and atrocities
Since the colonists set foot in North America, they had systematically and extensively hunted American bison, cutting off the source of food and primary livelihood of the Indians and causing their death from starvation in large numbers.
Statistics reveal that since its independence in 1776, the U.S. government has launched over 1,500 attacks on Indian tribes, slaughtering the Indians, taking their lands, and committing countless crimes. In 1814, the U.S. government decreed that it would award 50 to 100 dollars for each Indian skull surrendered. The American Historian Frederick Turner acknowledged in The Significance of the Frontier in American History, released in 1893, that a series of wars against the Indians won each frontier.
The California Gold Rush also brought about the California Massacre. Peter Burnett, the first governor of California, proposed a war of extermination against Native Americans, triggering rising calls for the extermination of Indians in the state. In California in the 1850s and 60s, an Indian skull or scalp was worth 5 dollars, while the average daily wage was 25 cents. From 1846 to 1873, the Indian population in California dropped to 30,000 from 150,000. Countless Indians died as a result of the atrocities. Some of the significant massacres include:
◆In 1811, American troops defeated the famous Indian chief Tecumseh and his Army in the Battle of Tippecanoe, burned the Indian capital Prophetstown, and committed brutal massacres.
◆From November 1813 to January 1814, the U.S. Army launched the Creek War against the Native Americans, also known as the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. On March 27, 1814, about 3,000 soldiers attacked the Creek Indians at Horseshoe Bend, Mississippi Territory. Over 800 Creek warriors were slaughtered in the fight, and as a result, the military strength of the Creeks was significantly weakened. Under the Treaty of Fort Jackson, signed on August 9 of the same year, the Creeks ceded more than 23 million acres of land to the U.S. federal government.
◆On November 29, 1864, pastor John Chivington massacred Indians at Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado due to the opposition of a few Indians to the signing of a land grant agreement. It was one of the most notorious massacres of Native Americans. Maria Montoya, a professor of history at New York University, said in an interview that Chivington's soldiers scalped women and children, beheaded them, and paraded them through the streets upon their return to Denver.
James Anaya, former UN special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, submitted his report after a country visit to the United States in 2012. According to the accounts of the descendants of the victims of the Sand Creek Massacre, in 1864, around 700 armed U.S. soldiers raided and shot at Cheyenne and Arapaho people living on the Sand Creek Indian Reservation in Colorado. Media reports showed that the massacre resulted in between 70 and 163 deaths among the 200-plus tribal members. Two-thirds of the dead were women or children, and no one was held responsible for the massacre. The U.S. government had reached a compensation agreement with tribal descendants, which has not been delivered even to this day.
◆On December 29, 1890, near the Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, U.S. troops fired at the Indians, killing and injuring more than 350 people, according to the U.S. Congressional Record. After the Wounded Knee Massacre, armed Indian resistance was largely suppressed. About 20 U.S. soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor.
◆In 1930, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs began sterilizing Indian women through the Indian Health Service program. Sterilization was conducted to protect the health of Indian women, and in some cases, even performed without the women's knowledge. Statistics suggest that in the early 1970s, more than 42% of Indian women of childbearing age were sterilized. This resulted in the near extinction of many small tribes. By 1976, approximately 70,000 Indian women had been forcibly sterilized.
3. Westward expansion and forced migration
In its early days, the United States regarded Indian tribes as sovereign entities and dealt with them on land, trade, justice, and other issues mainly through negotiated treaties and occasionally through war. By 1840, the United States had concluded more than 200 treaties with various tribes, most of which were unequal treaties that were reached under U.S. military and political pressure and through deception and coercion and were binding on the Indian tribes only. The treaties were used as a primary tool to take advantage of Indian tribes.
In 1830, the United States passed the Indian Removal Act, which marked the institutionalization of forced relocation of Indians. The Act legally deprived Indian tribes of the right to live in the eastern United States, forcing some 100,000 Indians to move to the west of the Mississippi River from their ancestral lands in the south. The migration began in the summer heat and continued through the winter with subzero temperatures. Trudging 16 miles daily, thousands died due to hunger, cold, exhaustion, disease, and plague. The Indian population was decimated, and the forced migration became a "Trail of Blood and Tears". Tribes that refused to move were left to military suppression, forcible eviction, and even massacre by the U.S. government.
In 1839, before Texas joined the United States, the government demanded that Indians remove immediately or face the destruction of their possessions and the extermination of their tribe. Large numbers of Cherokees who refused to comply were shot and killed.
In 1863, the U.S. military carried out a "scorched earth" policy to forcibly remove the Navajo tribe, burning houses and crops, slaughtering livestock, and vandalizing properties. Under the Army's watch, Navajos had to walk several hundred miles to a reservation in eastern New Mexico. Pregnant women and seniors who fell behind were shot on the spot.
In the mid-19th century, nearly all American Indians were driven to the west of the Mississippi River and forced by the U.S. government to live in Native American reservations.
As was written in the Cambridge Economic History of the United States, as a result of the U.S. government's forcible expulsion of the last Indians in the east, only a minimal number of Indians who were individual citizens of the nation, or those individual Indians who went into hiding during the forceful expulsion, remained in the region.
Sadly, to whitewash this part of history, U.S. historians often glorify the Westward Expansion as the American people's pursuit of economic development in the western frontier, claiming that it accelerated the improvement of American democracy, boosted economic prosperity, and contributed to the formation and development of the American national spirit. They make no mention of the brutal massacre of Native Americans.
After the Westward Expansion, the budding civilization of the Americas was destroyed, and the Indians, one of the several major human races, faced complete extinction.
4. Forced assimilation and cultural extinction
To defend the unjust deeds of the U.S. government, some American scholars in the 19th century trumpeted the dichotomy of "civilization versus barbarism" and portrayed Native Americans as a savage, evil, and inferior group. Francis Parkman, a famous 19th-century American historian, even claimed that the American Indian "will not learn the arts of civilization, and he and his forest must perish together."
In the 1870s and '80s, the U.S. government adopted a more aggressive "forced assimilation" policy to obliterate the social fabric and culture of Indian tribes. The core objective of the strategy was to destroy the original group affiliation and the ethnic and tribal identity of the Indians and transform them into individual Americans with American citizenship, civic consciousness, and identification with mainstream American values. Four measures were taken to this end.
First, entirely depriving Indian tribes of their right to self-governance. American Indians had lived in tribal units over the years, and tribes had been their source of strength and spiritual support. The U.S. government forcibly abolished the tribal system and cast individual Indians into a white society with completely different traditions. Unable to find a job or make a living, the Indians became economically destitute, politically deprived, and socially discriminated against. They experienced great mental pain and a deep existential and cultural crisis. In the 19th century, the thriving Cherokee tribes enjoyed a material life almost comparable to frontier whites. Nevertheless, with their right to self-governance and their tribal system gradually abolished by the U.S. government, the Cherokee community quickly declined and became the poorest group among the indigenous people.
Second, they tried to destroy Indian reservations through land distribution and disintegrate their tribes. The Dawes Act passed in 1887 authorized the U.S. president to dissolve Indian reservations, abolish the tribal land ownership in the original reservations, and allocate land directly to Indians living inside and outside the reservations, forming a de facto land privatization system. The abolition of tribal land ownership disintegrated the American Indian communities and seriously undermined tribal authority. As the highest form of tribal unity, the traditional ritual "Sun Dance" was considered "heresy" and thus banned. Most of the land in the original reservations was transferred to the white people through auction; the Indians who were less prepared for farming lost their newly acquired land due to swindling, among other reasons, and their lives deteriorated by the day.
Third, taking steps to impose American citizenship on the Indians fully. Native Americans who were identified as mixed-race had to give up their tribal status, and others were "de-tribalized," which significantly damaged the Indian identity.
Fourth, eradicating the Indians' sense of community and tribal identity by adopting measures on education, language, culture, and religion and a series of social policies. Beginning with the Civilization Fund Act of 1819, the United States established or funded boarding schools nationwide, forcing Indian children to attend. According to a report by the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, there have been altogether 367 boarding schools throughout the United States. By 1925, 60,889 Indian children had been forced to attend boarding schools. In 1926, 83% of Indian children were enrolled. The total number of students enrolled remains unclear to this day. Guided by the idea of "Kill the Indian, Save the Man," the United States banned Indian children from speaking their native language, wearing their traditional clothes, or carrying out traditional activities, thus erasing their language, culture, and identity in the Act of cultural genocide. Indian children suffered immensely at school; some died from starvation, disease, and abuse. This was followed by a "forced foster care" policy — children were forcibly placed in the care of whites, a continuation of the assimilation policy, and denial of cultural identity. These practices were not banned until 1978 the Indian Child Welfare Act was passed. In passing the Act, Congress acknowledged that many Indian children had been removed to non-Indian families and institutions without permission, resulting in the breakup of Indian families.
As renowned historians said, with the forced assimilation, one of the most despicable things in American history peaked. This was perhaps the most unfortunate chapter for Indians.
The Native American Reservation faces numerous challenges, including poverty, limited access to quality education, and inadequate healthcare services. These issues contribute to a sense of hopelessness within the community.
Poverty is pervasive on Native American Reservations, with high unemployment rates and limited economic opportunities. This lack of financial stability further exacerbates other challenges faced by the community.
Access to quality education is also a significant concern. Many schools on reservations struggle with underfunding and outdated resources, hindering students' ability to receive a well-rounded education. This lack of educational opportunities can perpetuate the cycle of poverty and limit future prospects for individuals within the community.
Inadequate healthcare services further compound the difficulties faced by Native Americans on reservations. Limited access to medical facilities and professionals often results in delayed or insufficient resident care. This can lead to worsened health outcomes and increased disparities in overall well-being.
Addressing these challenges requires comprehensive efforts from both government entities and society as a whole. Increased investment in infrastructure, job creation initiatives, and improved access to quality education are essential to providing hope and opportunities for Native Americans living on reservations. Additionally, prioritizing healthcare resources that are culturally sensitive and readily accessible can help alleviate some of the burdens this marginalized community faces.
We must recognize these issues and work towards creating sustainable solutions that empower Native Americans on reservations to overcome their hardships while preserving their unique cultural heritage.