Was there an Indian genocide in America? Indians, a brief history lesson The number of Indians killed in America
This is a rare case on Russian political television talk shows when my opponents do not remind me of how “the Americans slaughtered the Indians!” And these reminders are repeated regardless of what main topic we discuss in this or that program - either Syria or Ukraine, or corruption in Russia.
But the story of the Indians is much more complicated than my deeply indignant talk show opponents seem to think. Apparently, they judge the history of relations between colonists and Indians exclusively by old, glamorous and simplified - but very popular in the USSR - feature films like “Tecumzeh”, “Apache Gold”, “Sons of the Big Dipper” and “Chingachgook - the Great Serpent”. Almost all Russians remember well these films with handsome and universal favorites, handsome Dean Reed and Gojko Mitic in the leading roles.
Firstly, 170 years before the formation of the United States itself - when there were no “Americans” as such, strictly speaking - English, Dutch, Spanish and French settlers began to come to North America and conquer new lands there.
It was mainly the British and Dutch who conquered the eastern coast of America. The French are in the middle zone. The Spanish are the western parts. Indians lived in most of the territory of this America, and almost everywhere there were battles between them and representatives of different European countries.
And Russian settlers also conquered their rather large piece of New America - in Alaska. For 220 years Russian empire colonized Alaska - from 1648, when the first Russian expedition discovered Alaska, until 1867, when Russia sold it to the United States. The capital of this distant outpost of the Russian Empire was called Novo-Arkhangelsk, and the ruble was the monetary unit of this territory.
By the mid-19th century, the territory of “Russian Alaska” was home to approximately 800 Russian settlers and 60,000 natives, who consisted of three main ethnic groups: Indians, Eskimos and Aleuts.
And the natives, who lived for centuries on this land before Russian colonization, did not greet the “palefaces” from the Russian Empire any more warmly than the natives greeted other European colonizers throughout North America. We can safely assume that the natives in Alaska were not at all waiting for the Russian colonialists with bread and salt.
During these 220 years of Russian colonization of Alaska, there were periodic battles between the natives and the Russians. The toughest period was 1802-1805, when the Russian-Indian (or “Russian-Tlinka”) war was going on. During this conflict, Indians, Eskimos and other local residents rebelled and tried to drive the Russian colonizers off their land.
The question begs to be asked: How many unfortunate Indians and other natives did the Russians kill in Alaska?
There are no exact figures, but in one major uprising during this Russian-Indian War alone, more than 200 natives and about 50 Russians were killed, and two Russian fortresses were destroyed.
On this basis, it can be assumed that during the 220 years of colonization of Alaska, thousands of natives probably died in various battles with Russian settlers.
But at the same time, no one argues: these thousands of dead, of course, are a tiny percentage of how many Indians were killed by other Europeans in those parts of New America that are today part of the United States. Of course, the scale of Russian-Indian fighting was much smaller than in the main parts of North America, and the word “genocide” cannot in any way be applied to Russian settlers in Alaska. (In this regard, it is noteworthy how some yellow Russian sites rudely and meanly distorted my words. Read, for example, only one headline from one article).
But this does not change the essence of the matter. The fact remains: Russia, like other representatives of the European powers, also participated in the process of conquering America and, accordingly, in military conflicts with local residents.
The Russian conquest of part of California also did not come without civilian casualties. The expedition of Ivan Aleksandrovich Kuskov (1808-1809) ended in skirmishes with local Indians, which naturally resulted in deaths on both sides. The crew of the ship "St. Nikolai" under the command of Bulygin was almost completely destroyed by the Indians.
However, three years after Kuskov’s failed expedition, Russian explorers still managed to create their first fortress in California. "Fort Ross" was founded in 1812 on the west coast of America (near San Francisco), which existed until 1841.
At first, Russian settlers treated the Indians living in the area around Fort Ross more humanely than they treated the natives in Alaska. For their labor, the Russians paid the California Indians with flour, meat and clothing, but after some time the Russian settlers began to force the Indians to work under a scheme that was similar to the serfdom still in effect in the Russian Empire at that time.
And finally, at the beginning of the 19th century, Russian colonialists created the Elizabethan Fortress in Hawaii. And how many unfortunate Hawaiian natives died in the conquest of these lands? History is silent.
The obvious fact is that throughout the history of mankind, all great powers conquered new lands in a similar way. How, for example, did Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich - 50 years before the landing of the first European settlers on the east coast of America - expand the territory of the Russian Empire to the Volga region?
“Did you take Kazan? Did you take Astrakhan?”
And even worse than the capture of Astrakhan and Kazan - both in terms of territory covered and in the number of deaths - was Ermak’s conquest of Siberia.
Of course, under Ivan Vasilyevich, the Russian Empire did not take all these vast territories peacefully. It’s not for nothing that the first king was nicknamed “The Terrible”!
So throughout history, each major power conquered new territory in its own way: both the European powers and the Russian Empire.
Unfortunately, this historical process did not end at all after the end of World War II - contrary to the “new world order” established by the UN, which declared the unacceptability of developing new territories by force. Since 1950, there have been more than 10 of these violations of the “new world order”, including the annexations of: Tibet by China, Goa by India, Western New Guinea and East Timor by Indonesia, and Western Sahara by Morocco.
And the most recent example is the annexation of Crimea by Russia. The great tradition of Ivan Vasilyevich and Catherine the Great continues...
The term Genocide comes from the Latin (genos - race, tribe, cide - murder) and literally means the destruction or extermination of an entire tribe or people. Oxford Dictionary in English defines genocide as "the deliberate and systematic extermination of ethnic or national groups", and cites the first use of the term by Raphael Lemkin in relation to Nazi actions in occupied Europe. The first documented use of the term was at the Nuremberg trials as a descriptive and not a legal term. Genocide generally refers to the destruction of a nation or ethnic group.
Indians meet Columbus. Ancient engraving.
The UN General Assembly adopted this term in 1946. Most people tend to associate the mass murder of specific people with genocide. However, the 1994 UN Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide describes genocide beyond the direct killing of people as destruction and destruction of culture. Article II of the Convention lists five categories of activities that are directed against a specific national, ethnic, racial or religious group that should be considered genocide.
The United States government has refused to ratify the UN genocide convention. And no wonder. Many aspects of genocide were carried out on the indigenous peoples of North America.
Let's turn to statistics. According to a study by the highly respected scientist Russell Thornton, about 15 million people lived in North America before the arrival of Europeans. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were no more than 200 thousand of them left. These are the successes of the freest society in the world! Let me give you a few facts offhand.
Children, women and old people were killed
In 1623, the British poisoned approximately 200 Powhatan people with wine and killed another 50 with bladed weapons. On the evening of May 26, 1637, English colonists under the command of John Underhill attacked a Pequot village and burned approximately 600 to 700 people alive. On April 30, 1774, the massacre took place at Yellow Creek near present-day Wellsville. A group of Virginia frontier settlers, led by the young bandit Daniel Greathouse, killed 21 people from the Mingo tribe. The murdered daughter of the leader was in the last stage of pregnancy. She was tortured and gutted while she was alive. The scalp was taken from both her and the fetus that was cut out of her. On March 8, 1782, 96 baptized Indians were killed by American militia from Pennsylvania during the American Revolutionary War.
At the opening of the 2010 Olympic Games, performers demonstrated the identity of the almost destroyed indigenous peoples of the continent
On February 26, 1860, on Indian Island, off the coast of Northern California, six local landowners and businessmen carried out a massacre of the Wiyot Indians, killing more than 200 women, children and elderly people with axes and knives. On December 29, 1890, a massacre of Lakota Indians by the U.S. Army occurred near Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The Indians gathered to perform their popular spirit dances. About 300 people were attacked and slaughtered.
At the local municipal level, rewards were paid for the killed Indians. The authorities of Shasta City in Northern California paid $5 per Indian head in 1855. At a settlement near Marysville in 1859, a reward was given out of funds donated by the public “for every scalp or other convincing evidence” that an Indian had been killed. In 1861, there were plans in Tehama County to create a fund "to pay for Indian scalps." Two years later, Honey Lake residents paid 25 cents for an Indian scalp.
This is a nightmare!
I have given only a small part of the facts. In the United States, there is an unspoken ban on their publication. Well, it’s not right for such an advanced country to have such a rotten history!
German ethnologist Gustav von Koenigswald reported that members of the anti-Indian militia “poisoned with strychnine drinking water village of Kaingang, causing the death of two thousand Indians of all ages." The sale of blankets contaminated with the smallpox virus to Indians was widespread. And then, what a business! After all, one blanket that brings death could be sold many times.
Masses of colonist farmers who needed land rushed to the new lands. And the people who inhabited these lands were not needed at all. The whites seized lands and expelled the Indians to the West, and those who did not want to leave their homes were brutally killed. The natives soon realized that if they wanted to preserve life and freedom, they would have to fight. In a struggle for life and death, with a cruel and insidious enemy who did not recognize any “noble laws”, who vilely attacked and destroyed everything that came in his way. The Indians, who before the arrival of the whites practically did not know wars and led the lives of peaceful hunters and farmers, were destined to become Warriors.
However, in this war the Indians were doomed from the very beginning. And the point is not even that the whites had firearms and steel armor, not that they were united, and the Indian tribes were fragmented. It wasn't bullets that killed the Native Americans, it was DISEASES that killed them. Colonizers brought previously unknown diseases to the New World: plague, smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, etc. The Indians had no immunity from them. For example, 80% of all Abenaki died from smallpox without even fighting with the whites. Some tribes were mowed down by the disease, and colonists came to the lands “liberated” in this way.
And yet the Indians did not surrender and did not ask for mercy. They preferred to die in battle rather than live as slaves. The Indian drama was reaching its climax. The first to bear the blow were the Algonquin tribes, who lived on the lands of modern New England. Beginning in 1630, English Protestant settlers methodically “cleared” the land of Indians. At the same time, the Indian tribes were drawn into Anglo-French rivalry: for example, the French entered into alliances with the Hurons and Algonquins, and the British enlisted the support of the Iroquois League. As a result, the Europeans pitted the Indians against each other, and then finished off the winners.
One of the bloodiest dramas was the destruction of the Pequot tribe in 1637, who lived in Connecticut. This small tribe refused to recognize the supreme authority of the English crown over itself. Then the English suddenly attacked the Pequots. Having surrounded their settlement at night, they set it on fire, and then carried out a terrible massacre, killing everyone indiscriminately. Over 600 people were killed in one night. After this, the British staged a real hunt for the surviving Pequots. Almost all of them were killed, and the few who survived were enslaved. Thus, the colonialists made it clear to all Indians what fate awaited all the rebellious.
There was also endless massacre in the South: English planters first tried to turn the Indians into slaves, but they refused to work on the plantations, escaped and rebelled. Then it was decided to kill them all completely and import slaves from Africa to the plantations. By the middle of the 17th century, the colonialists essentially destroyed all the Indians living on the Atlantic coast. The survivors went to the West, but colonialists greedy for land also rushed there. As a result, the Indians realized that one by one they would be defeated and destroyed. As a result, in 1674, the Wampanoag, Narrangaset, Nipmuc, Pocamptuk, and Abenaki tribes entered into an alliance and rallied around the great sachem Metacom. In 1675 they rebelled against the British. A stubborn war was going on whole year, however, the Iroquois League came out on the side of the British, which predetermined the outcome of the war. The colonialists brutally dealt with the rebels. Metacom himself was treacherously killed on August 12, 1676. The British sold his wife and children into slavery, and the leader's body was quartered and hanged on a tree. Metacom's severed head was impaled and displayed on a hill in Rhode Island, where it remained for over twenty years. The Wampanoag and Narrangaset tribes were almost completely exterminated. The number of victims is indicated by the fact that at the beginning of the war there were 15 thousand Indians living in New England. And by the end of it, only 4 thousand remained.
In 1680, the Indians became embroiled in a decades-long war between England and France that raged until 1714. The British and French preferred to fight with the hands of the Indians; as a result of this fratricidal massacre, by the beginning of the 18th century there were practically no indigenous people left in New England. The survivors were driven out by the British. In the 18th century, expansion continued. It was led by both the British and the French. The first focused mainly on the “development” of North and South Carolina. The Muskogean tribes living here were destroyed and expelled from their native lands. The violence and outrages of the colonialists caused a powerful uprising in 1711, started by the Iroquois Tuscarora tribe. Soon the Chickasawas joined them. The stubborn war lasted for two years and ended with the bloody massacre of the vanquished by the British. The Tuscarora tribe was almost completely destroyed.
The French at this time conquered the so-called. Louisiana - vast lands from Ohio to Kansas and from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico. Back in 1681, they were declared the property of the French crown, and at the beginning of the 18th century, the city of New Orleans was built at the mouth of the Mississippi, which became a stronghold of the invaders. The Indians resisted valiantly, but the advantage was on the side of the Europeans. The Natchez, who lived on the Gulf Coast, suffered a particularly severe blow. The Natchez, as mentioned above, were one of the most developed peoples of North America. They had a state headed by a deified monarch. The Natchez monarchs refused to recognize themselves as vassals of the French king, and as a result, starting in 1710, the French waged a series of wars of extermination against the Indians, which ended by 1740 with the almost complete destruction of the Natchez. However, the French failed to completely subjugate the Indians. But their especially stubborn opponents were the Iroquois. The Iroquois League, which united five related tribes, was the main center of resistance to the colonialists. Beginning in 1630, the French repeatedly declared war on the League, but all their attempts to break the resistance of the Indians invariably failed.
Meanwhile, the British began colonizing Georgia in 1733, accompanied by the massacre of the peaceful Indian population. And in 1759 they started a war against the Cherokees, during which they barbarously killed several hundred civilians and forced the Indians to move to the West. The steady advance of the British led to the fact that in 1763 the Algonquian tribes rallied around the great chief of the Ottawa tribe, Pontiac. Pontiac vowed to stop white expansion. He managed to gather large forces; his military alliance included almost all the Algonquins living in the Northeast. By 1765, he had defeated almost all the British garrisons in the Great Lakes region, with the exception of the well-fortified Fort Detroit, which was besieged by the rebels. The Indians were close to victory, but the British managed to drag the Iroquois into the war on their side, presenting the matter in such a way that if Pontiac won, he would start a war with the League. The betrayal of Pontiac’s “allies”, the French, also played a role, who suddenly made peace with the British and stopped supplying the Indians with firearms and ammunition. As a result, the Algonquins were defeated, and Pontiac was forced to make peace. True, the British could not boast of victory: the English king forbade the colonists to cross the Appalachian mountains. However, fearing the power of Pontiac, the British organized his murder in 1769.
In 1776, the North American colonies rebelled against the English king. It must be said that both warring parties sought to attract Indians to the fighting, promising them various benefits. They succeeded: the Indian tribes again found themselves on different front lines and killed each other. Thus, the Iroquois League supported the English king. As a result, immediately after the victory, the newly-minted American authorities started a new war. They conducted it extremely cruelly: they did not take prisoners. They burned down all the captured villages, tortured and killed women, old people and children, destroyed all food supplies, dooming the Indians to starvation. As a result of many years of stubborn fighting, the Indian resistance was broken. In 1795, the Iroquois League (or rather, what was left of it) signed a surrender. Vast lands in the Great Lakes region came under white control, and the surviving Indians were confined to reservations.
In 1803, the US government purchased Louisiana from France. The French, despairing of conquering the freedom-loving Indian tribes and busy with wars in Europe, left it to the new masters to do this. Of course, no one asked the Indians themselves anything. Immediately after the purchase, masses of immigrants rushed to the West. They longed to receive free lands, and the indigenous population, as was already the custom, was subject to destruction.
In 1810, the Ojibwe, Delaware, Shawnee, Miami, Ottawa and other tribes united around the courageous Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his brother, the prophet Tenskwatawa. Tecumseh led the resistance to the colonialists north of the Ohio River, hatching the idea of creating an independent Indian state. In 1811 the war began. Warriors from many tribes in the Middle East and South of the United States flocked to the rebel stronghold created by Tecumseh, the “City of the Prophet,” who agreed to take part in the uprising. The war was very stubborn, but the numerical and technical superiority of the whites played a role. Tecumseh's main military forces were defeated on November 7, 1811 at the Battle of Tippecanoe by future US President General Harrison. But in 1812, Tecumseh was supported by part of the powerful Creek confederacy living in Alabama, and the rebellion received new impetus. In June 1812, the United States declared war on the British Empire, and Tecumseh and his supporters joined the British army. With only 400 of his warriors, he captured the hitherto impregnable Fort Detroit without firing a single shot, forcing its garrison to capitulate by military cunning. However, on October 5, 1813, the great Shawnee chief died in battle while fighting for the British with the rank of brigadier general. The betrayal of the whites again played its fatal role - at the decisive moment of the Battle of Downville, the English soldiers shamefully fled from the battlefield and Tecumseh’s warriors were left alone with a superior enemy. Tecumseh's rebellion was crushed. The Creek tribes held out until 1814, but were also defeated. The winners carried out a terrible massacre, killing several thousand civilians. After this, all lands north of the Ohio River came under US control, and the Indians were either driven off their lands or placed on reservations.
In 1818, the US Government purchased Florida from Spain. Planters rushed to the newly acquired state, who began to unceremoniously seize ancestral Indian lands and destroy the indigenous population who refused to work for the slave owners. The most numerous of the Florida tribes were the Seminoles. Led by their leaders, they waged a stubborn war against the invaders for forty years and defeated them more than once. However, they were unable to withstand the US Army. By 1858, virtually all of Florida's Indians (several tens of thousands of people) were exterminated. Only about 500 Indians survived, whom the colonialists placed on reservations in the swamps.
And in 1830, under pressure from the planters, the US Congress decided to deport all indigenous residents of the Southeastern United States. By this time, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek tribes had reached a high level of development. They built their cities, practiced agriculture and various crafts, and opened schools and hospitals. The constitutions they adopted were much more democratic than the US Constitution. The whites themselves called the Indians of the Southeast "civilized people." However, in 1830, they were all forcibly deported from their places west of the Mississippi, while all their real and almost all personal property was appropriated by white colonizers. The Indians were essentially settled in the bare steppe, without giving them any means of subsistence; as a result, about a third of the members of these tribes died from hunger and deprivation associated with deportation.
Such blatant violence could not go unavenged. In 1832, the Sauk and Fox Indian tribes took up arms against the invaders. They were led by the 67-year-old leader Black Hawk. Only a year later, with great difficulty, the Whites managed to defeat the rebels. The defeat of the Indians caused new repressions on the part of the victors.
Mass deportation of Indian tribes to the right bank of the Mississippi began. The white settlers who came to their habitable places shamelessly robbed the unfortunate people and committed all sorts of atrocities, remaining unpunished. By the late 1830s, there were almost no Native people left east of the Mississippi; those who managed to avoid deportation were forced onto reservations.
In 1849, the United States defeated Mexico and took away its lands in the Rocky Mountain Southwest and California. At the same time, England was forced to cede Oregon to the United States. A stream of colonialists immediately rushed there. The Indians were driven from the best lands and their property was plundered. As a result, in the same year, the tribes of the North-West (Tlingit, Wakashi, Tsimshian, Salish, etc.) declared war on the whites. For four long years, the territory of the modern states of Oregon and Washington burned fighting. The Indians fought bravely, but lacking firearms, they could not resist. Tens of thousands of Native Americans were killed and their villages burned. Many Northwest tribes were wiped out entirely, while others were left with a few hundred people who were driven deep into Oregon to mountain reservations.
The fate of the California Indians was very tragic. Already in 1848, gold was found there; as a result, a lot of adventurers and bandits rushed to the region who wanted to get rich. Gold lay on Indian lands, and therefore the tribes of peaceful hunters and gatherers were doomed. On February 26, 1860, on Indian Island, off the coast of northern California, six locals massacred the Wiyot Indians, killing 60 men and more than 200 women, children and elders. The authorities of Shasta City in Northern California paid $5 per head of an Indian in 1855, and the settlement near Marysville in 1859 paid a reward from funds donated by the population “for every scalp or other convincing proof” that an Indian had been killed. In 1863, Honey Lake County paid 25 cents per Indian scalp. By the early 1870s, most of the California Indians had been exterminated or removed to the interior, desert parts of the state. The most stubborn resistance was provided to the white invaders by the Modocs, led by the leader Kintpuash (“Captain Jack”), which lasted from 1871 to 1873. The rebellion ended with the heroic defense of the Lava Beds mountain stronghold by a handful of Modocs against the US Army and the capture of Chief Kintpuash, who was soon convicted by a white court and hanged as a criminal. After being exiled to Indian Territory, of the 153 survivors of the Modoc War by 1909, only 51 remained alive.
After the end of the American Civil War, in 1865 the American government declared the lands of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains open to “free colonization.” All land was declared the property of the white settler who first came to these places. What about the Indians - Navajo, Apache, Comanche, Shoshone, Lakota - the original owners of the prairies and mountains? It was decided to end them once and for all. In 1867, Congress passed the Indian Reservation Act. From now on, all Indian tribes, with one stroke of the pen, lost their ancestral lands and had to live on reservations located in desert and mountainous areas remote from water. Without the permission of the American authorities, no Indian henceforth dared to leave their reservation.
It was a sentence. Sentence to all tribes without exception. Descendants of the first settlers who came to the New World back in the Stone Age, they became strangers, NOT citizens in their native land. The Indian drama has reached its climax. The Indians, naturally, refused to capitulate and prepared for war. The whites also had no doubt that the Indians would fight: plans for the war were drawn up ahead of time. It was decided to starve the Indians. In this regard, American soldiers launched a real hunt for bison, which served as the main source of food for the inhabitants of the Great Plains. Over the course of 30 years, several MILLIONS of these animals were destroyed. So, in Kansas alone in 1878, about 50 thousand of these animals were destroyed. It was one of the largest ecocides on the planet.
The second way to suffocate the disobedient was to poison fresh water sources. The Americans poisoned the waters of rivers and lakes with strychnine on a truly industrial scale. This caused the death of several tens of thousands of Indians. However, in order to break the freedom-loving inhabitants of the prairies, a lot of blood had to be shed. The Indians resisted courageously. Several times they defeated large detachments of the American army. The Battle of the Little Bighorn River in Montana gained worldwide fame in 1876, when the combined forces of the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians destroyed an entire detachment of American cavalry led by General Custer. And there were many such examples! The Indians stormed forts, cut railroads, and waged skillful guerrilla warfare in the mountains. However, the forces were unequal. The colonialists stopped at nothing. With fire and sword they “combed” the mountains and prairies, destroying the recalcitrant troops. The whites were armed with multi-shot revolvers, rapid-fire rifles, and rifled artillery. In addition, the Indian tribes were never able to coordinate their actions with each other, which the colonialists took advantage of. They crushed each nation one by one.
By 1868, the Shoshone were almost completely destroyed. In 1872, the Cheyenne stopped resisting, and in 1879 the Comanches were finally defeated. The Apaches fought with the fury of the doomed until 1885. The Sioux held out the longest - until the beginning of 1890. But in the end, they too were crushed. The denouement of the drama came on December 29, 1890, near Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, when American soldiers from the 7th Cavalry Regiment shot more than 300 people from the Lakota people who had gathered for the ritual festival of the Dance of the Spirits and were therefore unprepared for resistance. The surviving Lakota were escorted to the reservation. The Indian Wars are over. There was no capitulation - there was simply no one else to fight.
Scientists still cannot determine exactly how many indigenous people of North America died during the beginning of white colonization. They died from swords and arquebuses, from rifles and cannons, from hunger and cold during various deportations. The most modest figures are 1 million, although in reality it is much more. Millions of men, women, and children have found themselves victims of a terrible human vice - GREED. They were killed simply because they lived on fertile lands, simply because they “sat” on gold mines, simply because they refused to become slaves on plantations. The Indians fought bravely. They fought literally to the last drop of blood; dozens of tribes were simply wiped off the face of the earth. Those who, despite everything, survived, were destined for the sad fate of the inhabitants of the reservations. The reservations were, in fact, self-governing concentration camps: tens of thousands of Indians died of hunger there, froze in the winter and died of thirst in the summer. In 1900, American authorities officially announced the “closure of the frontier”; thus the fact was recognized that all the lands had already been captured. Nobody thought about the Indians. It seemed that there were none left at all, that after a certain amount of time the pitiful remnants of the once proud and powerful tribes would die, unable to bear the harsh conditions of captivity. But that did not happen. The Indians survived. They survived and were reborn, no matter what. And in the 2nd half of the 20th century they again raised the banner of the struggle for Freedom. But that's a completely different story...
The Indians (the indigenous population of America) were exterminated almost completely by all sorts of prairie conquerors and other criminals, whom the United States and Canada still consider national heroes. And it becomes very sad for the courageous aborigines of North America, whose murder is hushed up on ethnic grounds. Everyone knows about the Holocaust, the genocide of the Jews, but about the Indians... Somehow the democratic public passed by. This is exactly genocide. People were killed just because they were Indians! For more than half a century after the discovery of America, the local population was not considered people at all. That is, they were naturally mistaken for animals. Based on the fact that Indians are not mentioned in the Bible. So, it’s as if they don’t exist.
Hitler is a puppy compared to the “conquerors of America”: as a result of the American Indian Holocaust, also known as the “Five Hundred Years’ War,” 95 of the 114 million indigenous inhabitants of what is now the United States and Canada were exterminated.
Hitler's concept of concentration camps owes much to his study of the English language and United States history. He admired the camps for the Boers in South Africa and for the Indians in the Wild West, and often in his inner circle praised the effectiveness of the destruction of the indigenous population of America, the red savages who could not be captured and tamed - from hunger and in unequal battles.
The term Genocide comes from the Latin (genos - race, tribe, cide - murder) and literally means the destruction or extermination of an entire tribe or people. The Oxford English Dictionary defines genocide as "the deliberate and systematic extermination of ethnic or national groups", and cites the first use of the term in Raphael Lemkin in relation to Nazi actions in occupied Europe.
The United States government has refused to ratify the UN genocide convention. And no wonder. Many aspects of genocide were carried out on the indigenous peoples of North America.
The list of American genocidal policies includes: mass extermination, biological warfare, forced eviction from their homes, imprisonment, the introduction of values other than indigenous ones, forced surgical sterilization of local women, bans on religious ceremonies, etc.
Final decision
The "Final Solution" of the North American Indian problem became the model for the subsequent Jewish Holocaust and South African apartheid.
But why is the biggest Holocaust hidden from the public? Is it because it went on for so long that it became a habit? It is significant that information about this Holocaust is deliberately excluded from the knowledge base and consciousness of residents of North America and around the world.
Schoolchildren are still taught that large areas of North America are uninhabited. But before the arrival of Europeans, American Indian cities flourished here. Mexico City had more people than any city in Europe. People were healthy and well-fed. The first Europeans were amazed. Agricultural products cultivated by indigenous peoples have gained international recognition.
The Holocaust of North American Indians is worse than apartheid in South Africa and the genocide of Jews during World War II. Where are the monuments? Where are memorial ceremonies held?
Unlike post-war Germany, North America refuses to recognize the destruction of Indians as genocide. North American authorities do not want to admit that this was and remains a systemic plan to exterminate most of the indigenous population.
The term "Final Solution" was not coined by the Nazis. It was the Indian Affairs Manager, Duncan Campbell Scott, of Adolf Eichmann's Canada, who in April 1910 was so concerned about the "Indian problem":
“We recognize that Indian children lose their natural resistance to disease in these cramped schools, and that they die at much higher rates than in their villages. But this in itself is not a basis for changing the policy of this department aimed at the final solution of our Indian problem."
European colonization of the Americas changed Native American life and culture forever. In the 15th-19th centuries, their settlements were destroyed, the peoples were exterminated or enslaved.
IN THE NAME OF THE LORD
Marlon Brando devotes several pages to the genocide of the American Indians in his autobiography:
“After their lands were taken from them, the survivors were herded onto reservations and the government sent missionaries to try to force the Indians to become Christians. After I became interested in American Indians, I discovered that many people did not even consider them to be human beings. And it was like that from the very beginning.
Cotton Mather, a lecturer at Harvard College, an honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow, a Puritan minister, a prolific writer and publicist, famous for his studies of the Salem Witches, compared the Indians to the children of Satan and considered it God's will to kill pagan savages who stood in the way of Christianity.
In 1864, an American army colonel named John Shevinton, shooting at another Indian village with howitzers, said that Indian children should not be pitied, because a louse grows from a nit. He told his officers: “I have come to kill Indians, and I consider it a right and an honorable duty. And every means under God's heaven must be used to kill the Indians."
Soldiers cut off the vulvas of Indian women and stretched them over the pommel of their saddles, and made pouches from the skin of the scrotum and breasts of Indian women, and then displayed these trophies along with the severed noses, ears and scalps of murdered Indians at the Denver Opera House. Enlightened, cultured and devout civilizers, what else is there to say?
When the United States once again declares its desire to enlighten another people mired in savagery, lack of spirituality and totalitarianism, we should not forget that the United States itself thoroughly stinks of carrion, the means it uses can hardly be called civilized, and they hardly have goals that do not pursue their own profit.
Indians in the USA today are on the verge of extinction! And these are not empty words! The number of this once numerous people has declined catastrophically since the beginning of the migration of Europeans to America. What's the matter? Why did a people who had their own developed civilization and inhabited vast territories reach such a state?
The main “credit” for this belongs to white settlers. In Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking America, there was practically no oppression and destruction of Indians. Colonizers and indigenous people coexisted peacefully here and their mixing took place. As a result of this, new nationalities gradually formed: Brazilians, Argentines, Mexicans, etc.
However, in the part of the North American continent that was colonized by Great Britain and on which the United States was subsequently formed, things were different. Here the policy of genocide of Indians was immediately adopted. Here is a map of the Indian tribes that inhabited the territory of the modern United States before the arrival of Europeans:
The settlers needed new lands, so the indigenous population was either expelled and forcibly resettled in less habitable areas, or simply exterminated. There are many bloody pages in the history of the United States concerning the mass extermination of the Indian population.
Particularly cruel and tragic are: the massacre near Yellow Creek (April 30, 1774), the execution of Indians at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), the Sand Creek massacre (November 29, 1864) and a number of other cases of destruction of indigenous population. At the same time, the genocide of Indians in the United States was often carried out with the knowledge of the authorities and even with the help of regular armed forces. In this photo, US Army soldiers pose next to a grave containing the bodies of Indians they shot.
For this operation, which killed more than 300 Indian civilians, some of the soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest military award in the United States.
It is perhaps impossible to establish the total number of Indians exterminated in the United States. However, a number of historians and Native American organizations claim that several million indigenous people died from the Indian genocide in the United States, which amounted to more than half of their total number.
It should be noted that the extermination of Indians in the United States was carried out not only by direct force, but also by indirect methods. For example, the large-scale extermination of bison proclaimed by the American government in the 19th century led to the almost complete destruction of these animals. This hit the Indians hard, for whom bison meat was the main food product. Many indigenous people died from the famine, which was provoked by the Americans.
Another very effective way extermination of Indians in the USA - humanitarian aid that was sent to Indian reservations by the “humane” American government. Previously, food products and things included in humanitarian cargo were infected with pathogens of various diseases. After such “gifts,” entire reservations died out.
Here is a map of Indian reservations at modern territory USA.
Compare it with the map of Indian settlement before the arrival of Europeans, which is given at the beginning of the article. Do you feel the difference?
Native Americans lost their history, their lands, their culture, but their destruction is a topic least discussed in secular history.
Only a source with a biased approach will name the exact figure of the Indian population before the arrival of Columbus and its remainder after the first contacts with Europeans. More or less serious work offers several options. But the discrepancies in the assessments of historians and ethnographers are enormous.
According to Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, the decline in the number of North American Indians from an estimated 12 million (1500) to barely 237,000 (1900). Such data expresses “multiple genocide.”
University of Hawaii historian David Stannard writes: “By the end of the 19th century, Native Americans were subjected to the worst holocaust the world had ever seen, raging across two continents continuously for four centuries, destroying the lives of tens of millions of people.”
The population of North America before first contact with Europeans is the subject of active debate. Some estimates of the original population of the United States and Canada ranged from 2 to 12 million. Over the subsequent time, their number decreased to the already mentioned 237 thousand.
The number of Indians remaining by the beginning of the 20th century is almost the same for all researchers. But it is difficult to calculate how many of the indigenous population decreased at an incredible rate under the influence of the “pilgrims.” The exact number of Indians killed could damage the image of the United States. Therefore, officials do their best to suppress attempts to introduce the term “genocide” into American history.
Researcher Peter Montague believes that early on Europeans dominated the 100 million native people across the Americas.
Inaccuracies and huge differences in estimates of the American population before the European invasion allow us to play with the numbers. Some complain that the number of Indians in many sources is deliberately reduced so that its reduction does not seem so severe.
In world history, the most famous genocide is Hitler's genocide of the Jews. There is almost no talk about the destruction of the Indians, who suffered much greater losses. But it is interesting that American history in relation to the Indians showed not only blatant cruelty and inhumanity, but also became a role model for the Hitler regime. The idea of concentration camps was not Hitler's "original idea". Biographer John Toland wrote that Hitler was to some extent inspired by the Indian reservation system.
“Regarding the idea of concentration camps, he owed much of his research to the history of England and America. He was fascinated by the camps in South Africa for Boer prisoners and in the wild west for Indians. Hitler often praised to his associates the effectiveness of American destruction through starvation and unequal battles with the red savages, who could not be tamed by captivity.”
Of course, recognizing these facts is not in the interests of the United States. American patriotism teaches its citizens and others that America is a great and free country. But you can't be the greatest nation in the world when you're accused of genocide. Especially if your country's politics were the inspiration in planning one of the most devastating genocides.
The indigenous population after the arrival of Columbus declined significantly over the following decades. Some were killed directly by Europeans, others were killed indirectly through exposure to diseases to which the Indians had no immunity. Epidemics and diseases did claim many Indian lives, but to justify mass extermination on this basis alone is to ignore the well-documented American policy of extermination.
Christopher Columbus has been considered a real hero since 1792; there is a holiday named after him. But, unfortunately, this historical character has a dark side. Peter Montague, author of a thematic work on the navigator, writes that Columbus described the Arawaks (the indigenous people of the Caribbean islands) as timid, awkward, free and generous. And he rewarded them with death and slavery. On his second expedition, Columbus took on the title of “Admiral of the Ocean-Sea” and continued to unleash a reign of terror never seen before. By the time he completed it, eight million Arawaks (almost the entire indigenous population of Haiti) had been exterminated by torture, murder, forced labor, starvation, disease and despair.
All the following centuries, the power of the New World, through its actions, only confirmed how the indigenous population hindered them. History has left illustrative examples of destruction.
In 1763, Geoffrey Amherst, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in North America, wrote to Fort Pitt: “You will do well to try to poison the Indians with smallpox, by means of blankets, as well as if you try any other method of exterminating the loathsome race.” In June of that year, two Delaware Indians visiting the port were given blankets and scarves from the quarantine hospital. One of their sellers wrote in the magazine: “I hope this will have an epidemiological effect.” Prior to this, the technique of contaminated items was attempted among tribes in Ohio. Hundreds of people died. Huge human losses from these measures continued into the next century. From 1836 to 1840, 100,000 Indians were killed through Fort Clark.
Raids on Indian camps were also actively practiced. In February 1860, a vile night attack took the lives of 300 indigenous inhabitants of the Round Valley in one day. The tragedy at Wounded Knee is considered the most symbolic. A regiment of American soldiers had the task of disarming the Indians in their camp, but in the process a chaotic shot was heard, which the regiment perceived as a call to battle. The unarmed Indians could not withstand the gunfire. The results of the massacre are captured in horrific photographs taken three days later - the frozen corpses of men, women and children. The bodies found were buried in a mass grave. American troops posed for photos in front of the burial site, and 20 soldiers later received the Medal of Honor for the massacre.
Despite the obvious losses and lack of humane treatment of Indians throughout history, current politicians still disagree with the word “genocide”, offering stupid arguments. Republican Senator Ellen Roberts considered that this term could only be used in relation to a people completely exterminated. These people are driven by blind patriotism. Their ancestors used the Indians as live targets for target practice. But, of course, American society is unable to admit such shameful facts of history.