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 refers to the first use of the term by Raphael Lemkin in reference to Nazi activities in occupied Europe. The term was first documented at the Nuremberg trials as a descriptive and not a legal term. Genocide usually refers to the destruction of a nation or ethnic group.

Indians meet Columbus. Ancient engraving.

The UN General Assembly adopted the term in 1946. Most people tend to associate mass killings of specific people with genocide. However, in 1994, the UN Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide describes genocide beyond the direct killing of people as the destruction and destruction of culture. Article II of the Convention lists five categories of activities that are directed against a particular national, ethnic, racial or religious group, which should be considered genocide.

The United States government has refused to ratify the UN genocide convention. And not smart. Many aspects of the genocide were implemented on the indigenous peoples of North America.

Let's turn to statistics. According to a study by the highly respected scholar Russell Thornton, about 15 million people lived in North America before the advent of Europeans. At the beginning of the 20th century, no more than 200 thousand of them remained. Such are the achievements of the freest society in the world! Let me give you a few facts.

Killed children, women and the elderly

In 1623, the British poisoned about 200 people of the Pahuatan tribe with wine and finished off another 50 with edged 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 Virginian frontier settlers, led by young bandit Daniel Greathouse, killed 21 Mingos. The murdered daughter of the leader was in her last pregnancy. She was tortured and gutted while she was alive. The scalp was taken both from her and from the fetus, which was cut out of her. On March 8, 1782, 96 baptized Indians were killed by an American militia from Pennsylvania during the American Revolutionary War.

At the opening of the 2010 Olympic Games, actors 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 massacred the Wiyot Indians, killing more than 200 women, children and the elderly with axes and knives. December 29, 1890 near Wounded Knee, South Dakota, there was a massacre of Lakota Indians by the US Army. The Indians gathered to hold their popular spirit dances. They were attacked and slaughtered about 300 people.

At the level of local municipalities paid rewards for the killed Indians. Shasta City in Northern California paid $5 per head of Indian in 1855. In a settlement near Marysville in 1859, a reward was issued from donated funds "for each 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 the scalps of the Indians." Two years later, the people of Honey Lake paid 25 cents for an Indian scalp.

It's a nightmare!

I gave only a small part of the facts. In the United States, their publication is subject to an unspoken ban. Well, it’s not good for such an advanced country to have such a lousy 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 smallpox blankets to the Indians was ubiquitous. And then, what a business! After all, one blanket that brings death could be sold many times.

Masses of colonial farmers who needed land rushed to the new lands. And the people who inhabited these lands were not needed at all. Whites seized lands and drove the Indians to the West, and those who did not want to leave their native places were brutally killed. Soon the indigenous people realized that if they want to save life and freedom, they will have to join the fight. Into a fight not for life, but for death, with a cruel and treacherous 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 life of peaceful hunters and farmers, were to become Warriors.

However, in this war, the Indians were initially doomed. And the point is not even that the whites possessed firearms and steel armor, not that they were united, and the Indian tribes were fragmented. Native Americans were not killed by bullets - they were killed by DISEASE. The colonialists brought in New World previously unknown diseases there: plague, smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, etc. The Indians had no immunity from them. So, for example, 80% of all Abenaki died of smallpox, without even engaging in battles with the whites. Some tribes of the disease mowed clean, and colonists came to the "liberated" lands in this way.

And yet the Indians did not give up and did not ask for mercy. They preferred to die in battle than to live as slaves. The Indian drama was coming to its climax. The first blow was taken by the Algonquian tribes living on the lands of modern New England. Beginning in 1630, English Protestant settlers methodically "cleared" the land from the Indians. At the same time, the Indian tribes were drawn into the Anglo-French rivalry: for example, the French made 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 most bloody dramas was the destruction of the Pequot tribe in 1637, who lived in Connecticut. This small tribe refused to acknowledge the sovereignty of the English crown. Then the English suddenly attacked the Pequots. Surrounding their settlement at night, they set fire to it, and then staged a terrible massacre, killing everyone indiscriminately. Over 600 people were killed in one night. After that, the British staged a real hunt for the surviving Pequots. Almost all of them were killed, and the few survivors were enslaved. Thus, the colonialists made it clear to all Indians what fate awaits all the rebellious.

There was also an endless massacre in the South: the English planters first tried to turn the Indians into slaves, but they refused to work on the plantations, escaped and raised uprisings. Then it was decided to completely kill them all, and to import slaves from Africa to the plantations. TO mid-seventeenth century, the colonialists essentially destroyed all the Indians who lived on the coast Atlantic Ocean. The survivors went to the West, but the colonialists, greedy for the land, rushed there too. As a result, the Indians realized that one by one they would be defeated and destroyed. As a result, in 1674, the Wampanoag, Narrangaset, Nipmuk, Pokamptuk, Abenaki tribes entered into an alliance and rallied around the great sachem Metakom. In 1675 they raised an uprising against the British. A stubborn war went on for a whole year, but 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. Metakom himself was treacherously murdered on August 12, 1676. The British sold his wife and children into slavery, and the leader's body was quartered and hung on a tree. The severed head of Metacom was impaled and put on display on a hill in Rhode Island, where it remained for more than twenty years. The Wampanoag and Narrangaset tribes were almost completely exterminated. The number of victims is evidenced by the fact that by the beginning of the war, 15,000 Indians lived in New England. And by the end of it, only 4,000 remained.

In 1680, the Indians became embroiled in a 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 expelled by the British. Expansion continued in the 18th century. It was led by both the British and the French. The first focused mainly on the "development" of North and South Carolina. Muscogee tribes living here were destroyed and expelled from their native lands. Violence and excesses of the colonialists caused a powerful uprising in 1711, launched by the Iroquois Tuscarora tribe. The Chikasawas soon joined them. The stubborn war went on for two years and ended with the massacre of the British over the vanquished. The Tuscarora tribe was almost completely destroyed.

The French at that 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 in early XVIII century, at the mouth of the Mississippi, the city of New Orleans was built, which became the base of the invaders. The Indians resisted valiantly, but the advantage was on the side of the Europeans. A particularly severe blow fell on the Natchez, who lived on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The Natchez, as mentioned above, were one of the most developed peoples of North America. They had a state headed by a deified monarch. Natchez monarchs refused to recognize themselves as vassals french king, as a result, starting from 1710, the French led a series of extermination wars against the Indians, ending by 1740 with the almost complete destruction of the Natchez. However, the French did not succeed in completely subjugating the Indians. But their most stubborn opponent was the Iroquois. The Iroquois League, which united five related tribes, was the main center of resistance to the colonialists. Since 1630, the French have repeatedly declared war on the League, but all their attempts to break the resistance of the Indians invariably failed.

Meanwhile, the British in 1733 began the colonization of Georgia, accompanied by the massacre of the peaceful Indian population. And in 1759 they started a war against the Cherokee, during which they savagely 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 leader of the Ottawa tribe, Pontiac. Pontiac vowed to stop white expansion. He managed to gather a large force, his military alliance included almost all the Algonquins who lived 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 draw 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, who suddenly made peace with the British and stopped supplying the Indians with firearms and ammunition, also played a role. As a result, the Algonquins were defeated, and Pontiac was forced to make peace. True, the British could not boast of victory either: the English king forbade the colonists to cross the Appalachian mountains. However, fearing the power of Pontiac, the British organized his assassination in 1769.

In 1776, the North American colonies rebelled against the English king. I must say that both warring parties sought to involve the Indians in the fighting, promising them various benefits. They succeeded: the Indian tribes again found themselves on different front lines and killed each other. So, the Iroquois League supported the English king. As a result, immediately after the victory, the newly-minted American authorities unleashed new war. They conducted it extremely cruelly: they did not take prisoners. They burned to the ground all the captured villages, tortured and killed women, the elderly and children, destroyed all food supplies, dooming the Indians to starvation. As a result of many years of stubborn fighting, the resistance of the Indians was broken. In 1795, the Iroquois League (or rather, what was left of it) signed a surrender. Huge lands in the Great Lakes region passed under the control of the whites, and the surviving Indians were placed on reservations.

In 1803, the US government bought Louisiana from France. The French, desperate to conquer the freedom-loving Indian tribes and busy with wars in Europe, left it to the new masters. Of course, no one asked the Indians themselves about anything. Immediately after the purchase, masses of immigrants rushed to the West. They were eager to get free lands, and the indigenous population, as was already customary, was to be destroyed.

In 1810, the tribes of Ojibwe, Delaware, Shawnee, Miami, Ottawa and others united around the courageous leader of the Shawnee Tecumseh and his brother, the prophet Tenskwatawa. Tecumseh led the resistance to the colonialists north of the Ohio River, hatching the idea of ​​an independent Indian state. In 1811 the war began. In the stronghold of the rebels created by Tecumseh - the "City of the Prophet", warriors from many tribes of the Middle East and South of the USA flocked, 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 Tippecane by future US President General Harrison. But in 1812, Tecumseh supported part of a powerful confederacy of the Creek tribe living in Alabama, and the uprising received a 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 hitherto impregnable Fort Detroit without firing a shot, cunning forcing his garrison to capitulate. However, on October 5, 1813, the great Shawnee chief died in action 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 face to face with a superior enemy. Tecumseh's rebellion was put down. The Creek tribes held out until 1814, but were also defeated. The victors staged a terrible massacre, destroying several thousand civilians. After that, all the lands north of the Ohio River came under the control of the United States, the Indians were either driven off their lands or placed on reservations.

In 1818, the United States government bought 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 Seminoles were the most numerous among the tribes of Florida. Led by their leaders, they waged a stubborn war against the invaders for forty years and defeated them more than once. However, they failed to withstand the US Army. By 1858, almost all the Indians of Florida (several tens of thousands of people) were destroyed. Only about 500 Indians remained alive, whom the colonialists placed in reservations in the swamps.

And in 1830, under pressure from the planters, the US Congress decided to deport all the indigenous inhabitants 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, engaged in agriculture and various crafts, 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 to the west of the Mississippi, while all their real estate and almost all movable property was appropriated by the white colonialists. 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 reprisals from the victors.

The mass deportation of Indian tribes to the right bank of the Mississippi began. The white settlers who came to the inhabited places shamelessly robbed the unfortunate and committed all sorts of atrocities, remaining unpunished. By the late 1830s, there were almost no natives left east of the Mississippi; those who managed to avoid deportation were herded onto reservations.

In 1849, the United States defeated Mexico and took away its lands in the Southwest Rocky Mountains as well as California. At the same time, England was forced to cede Oregon to the USA. A stream of colonialists immediately rushed there. Indians were driven from the best lands and robbed of their property. As a result, in the same year, the tribes of the North-West (Tlingit, Wakashi, Tsimshians, Salish, etc.) declared war on the whites. For four long years, the territory of the modern states of Oregon and Washington was blazing fighting. The Indians fought courageously, but without firearms, they could not resist. Tens of thousands of Native Americans were killed, their villages burned. Many tribes of the Northwest were wiped out entirely, while others were left with a few hundred people who were evicted deep into Oregon to mountain reservations.

The fate of the Indians of California was very tragic. Already in 1848, gold was found there, as a result, a lot of adventurers and bandits who wanted to get rich rushed to the region. Gold lay on the 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 local residents massacred the Wiyot Indians, killing 60 men and more than 200 women, children and the elderly. Shasta City in Northern California paid $5 per head of an Indian in 1855; a settlement near Marysville in 1859 paid a bounty from donated funds "for every scalp or other convincing evidence" that an Indian had been killed. In 1863, Honey Lake County paid 25 cents for an Indian scalp. By the early 1870s, most of the California Indians had been wiped out or moved to the interior, desert parts of the state. The most stubborn resistance was offered to the white invaders by the modocs, led by the leader Kintpuash (“Captain Jack”), which lasted from 1871 to 1873. The uprising is over heroic defense by a handful of modoks of the mountain citadel of Lava Beds from the US Army and the capture of the leader Kintpuash, who was soon convicted by a white court and hanged as a criminal. After being exiled to "Indian Territory", out of 153 modocs who survived the 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 the Rocky Mountains open to "free colonization". All land was declared the property of a white settler who first came to these places. And what about the Indians - Navajos, Apaches, Comanches, Shoshone, Lakota - the original owners of the prairies and mountains? It was decided to put an end to them once and for all. In 1867, Congress passed the Reservation Indian Removal Act. From now on, all Indian tribes with one stroke of the pen lost their ancestral lands and had to live in reservations located in desert and mountainous areas remote from the water. Without the permission of the American authorities, not a single Indian would henceforth dare to leave his reservation.

It was a verdict. A verdict to all tribes without exception. The descendants of the first settlers who came to the New World back in the Stone Age, they became strangers, non-citizens in their native land. The Indian drama has come to its end. The Indians naturally refused to capitulate and prepared for war. The whites also had no doubt that the Indians would fight: the plans for the war were drawn up ahead of time. It was decided to break the Indians with hunger. 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. For 30 years, several MILLIONS of these animals have been destroyed. So, only in one Kansas in one 1878 about 50 thousand of these animals were destroyed. It was one of the largest ecocides on the planet.

The second way to strangle the rebellious was to poison the springs fresh water. 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, it took a lot of blood to shed. The Indians resisted courageously. Several times they smashed large detachments of the American army. The Battle of the Little Bighorn River in Montana in 1876 gained worldwide fame when a combined force of 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 the forts, cut railways, were skillful guerrilla war in the mountains. However, the forces were unequal. The colonizers stopped at nothing. With fire and sword, they "combed" the mountains and prairies, destroying the detachments of the recalcitrant. The whites were armed with multi-shot revolvers, rapid-fire rifles, and rifled artillery. In addition, the Indian tribes were never able to coordinate actions with each other, which the colonialists took advantage of. They smashed every nation one by one.

By 1868, the Shoshone were almost completely destroyed. In 1872, the Cheyenne ceased resistance, in 1879 the Comanches were finally defeated. 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 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 Lakota survivors were escorted to the reservations. The Indian Wars are over. There was no surrender - 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, children have fallen victim to a terrible human vice - GREED. They were killed simply because they lived on fertile lands, simply because they “sat” on gold deposits, simply because they refused to become slaves on plantations. The Indians fought bravely. They literally fought to the last drop of blood; dozens of tribes were simply wiped off the face of the earth. Those who, in spite of 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 in them, froze in winter and died of thirst in summer. In 1900, the American authorities officially announced the "closure of the frontier"; thus the fact was recognized that all the lands had already been captured. Nobody cared about the Indians. It seemed that they did not remain at all, that after a certain amount of time the miserable remnants of the once proud and powerful tribes would die, unable to endure the harsh conditions of imprisonment. But that did not happen. The Indians survived. Survived and reborn, no matter what. And in the second half of the 20th century, the banner of the struggle for Freedom was raised again. But that's a completely different story...

Hitler is a puppy compared to the "conquerors of America"

Hitler is a puppy compared to the "conquerors of America." What American Schools Don't Teach: As a result of the American Indian Holocaust, also known as the "Five Hundred Years' War" and "the longest Holocaust in human history," there were destroyed 95 out of 114 million native inhabitants of the current territories of the United States and Canada.

American Holocaust: D. Stannard (Oxford Press, 1992) - "over 100 million killed"

"Hitler's concept concentration camps, owes much to his study of English and the history of the United States. 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 native population of America, the red savages who cannot be captured and tamed - from hunger and in unequal battles.

Killing members of such a group;

Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of such a group;

Deliberately creating a group of such living conditions that are calculated for its physical destruction in whole or in part;

Measures designed to prevent childbearing among such a group;

Forced transfer of children from one human group to another.

United States Government refused Ratify the UN Convention on Genocide. And not smart. Many aspects of the genocide were implemented 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, a ban on religious rites, etc.

Before the arrival of Columbus, the lands now occupied by the 48 states of America were inhabited by over 12 million Human. Four centuries later the population was reduced up to 237 thousand, i.e. 95%. How? When Columbus returned in 1493 on 17 ships, he began to implement a policy of deportation into slavery and mass extermination people in the Caribbean. Within three years, five million people were killed. Fifty years later, the Spanish census recorded only 200,000 Indians! Las Casas, the principal historian of the Columbian era, cites numerous accounts of horrific acts perpetrated by Spanish colonists on indigenous peoples, including hanging en masse, burning scythes, butchering children and feeding them to dogs - the list of atrocities is impressive.

With the departure of Columbus, this policy did not stop. The European colonies, and subsequently the newly formed United States, continued a similar policy of conquest. Mass killings took place all over the country. Not only were the Indians massacred, slaughtering entire villages and scalping the captives, Europeans also took part biological weapons . British agents distributed blankets to the tribes that were deliberately contaminated with smallpox. Over one hundred thousand Mingo, Delaware, Shawnee and other tribes inhabiting the banks of the Ohio River were swept away by this disease. The US Army adopted this method and used it against plains tribals with equal success.

Forced eviction

In the shortest time after the American Revolution, the United States began to pursue a policy of eviction of the American Indians. According to the agreement of 1784, concluded in Forte Stansix, the Iroquois were required to cede land in western New York and Pennsylvania. Many of the Iroquois went to Canada, some took US citizenship, but the tribe quickly degenerated as a nation, losing most of their remaining land in recent decades eighteenth century. shawns, Delaware, ottawana and several other tribes, watching the fall of the Iroquois, formed their own confederation, calling themselves United States Ohio, and declared the river the border between their lands and the possessions of the settlers. The start of subsequent hostilities was only a matter of time.

"Indian boarding school" - cultural genocide

Forced assimilation

Europeans consider themselves carriers of high culture and the center of civilization. The colonial worldview divides reality into parts: good and evil, body and spirit, man and nature, the cultured European and the primitive savage. American Indians do not have such a dualism, their language expresses the unity of all things. God is not a transcendent Father, but the Great Spirit that feeds all this polytheism, belief in many gods and several levels of the divine. At the heart of most Native American beliefs was a deep conviction that some invisible force, a powerful spirit that permeates the entire universe, carries out the cycle of birth and death for all living things.

Schoolchildren are still taught that large areas of North America are uninhabited. But before the arrival of the Europeans Native American cities flourished here. IN Mexico City resided more population than in any city in Europe. People were healthy and full. The first Europeans were amazed. Agricultural products cultivated by indigenous peoples have won 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 extermination of the Indians as genocide. North American authorities do not want to admit that this was and still is a plan destruction of most of the indigenous population.

As in the case of the Jewish genocide, this plan would not have been so effective without the traitors of its own people. The policy of direct slaughter was transformed into destruction from within. Governments, armies, police, churches, corporations, doctors, judges and ordinary people have become cogs in this killing machine. . The complex campaigns of this genocide were designed by the most high levels authorities in the United States and Canada. This cover-up continues to this day.

The term " final decision was not invented by the Nazis. It was the manager of Indian affairs, Duncan Campbell Scott, Canada Adolf Eichmann, who in April 1910 was so concerned about the "Indian problem": " We recognize that Indian children are losing their natural resistance to disease in these cramped schools, and that they are dying at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this in itself is not a reason to change the policy of this department aimed at final decision our Indian problem ».

The European colonization of the Americas forever changed the life and culture of Native Americans. In the 15th-19th centuries, their settlements were devastated, the peoples were exterminated or enslaved. First group of American Indians encountered by Columbus, 250,000 Arawaks Haiti were enslaved. Only 500 survived 1550, and by 1650 a group completely extinct.

in the name of the Lord

Marlon Brando in his autobiography he devotes several pages to the genocide of the American Indians: “After their lands were taken from them, the survivors were rounded up on reservations, and the government sent missionaries to them, who tried to force the Indians to become Christians. After I became interested in American Indians, I found that many people don't even consider them human beings. And it's been that way from the very beginning."

Cotton Mater, lecturer at Harvard College, honorary doctor of the University of Glasgow, Puritan minister, prolific writer and essayist, known for his research on 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.

When once again the United States declares its desire to enlighten yet another people mired in savagery, lack of spirituality and totalitarianism, one should not forget that the United States itself thoroughly stink of carrion, the means they use can hardly be called civilized, and they hardly have goals that do not pursue their own gain.

Indian Genocide in America

OpeningAmerica. GenocideIndians.

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On this day, ... years ago

On August 13, 1946, a federal commission was established in the United States to study the living conditions of the Indians. There is still debate in America: can Indians be called victims of genocide?

American historian David Stannard argues: "Hitler is a puppy compared to the 'conquerors of America'. What is not taught in American schools: as a result of the Holocaust of the American Indians, also known as the" Five Hundred Years' War "and" the longest holocaust in the history of mankind, "were destroyed 95 of the 114 million natives in what is now the United States and Canada."

Moreover, this genocide was on the rise and purposefully. It was carried out by both the British colonialists and American settlers. Amazing unanimity!

In 1722, a declaration was made in Boston declaring war on the Indians. For a scalp of a native American, they gave from 15 to 100 pounds sterling. There is evidence that the colonialists also used biological weapons - they distributed blankets to the tribes that were deliberately infected with smallpox. Then this method was successfully used by the US Army. And the Indians were deliberately soldered.

Here I deliberately do not touch on the topic of Russian development of Siberia and Far East because it is not at all similar to American realities. But let me give you one interesting example. As you know, many indigenous peoples of Siberia and the North of Russia do not have an enzyme that breaks down alcohol in their bodies. They quickly become drunk and die. And how did the government of tsarist Russia, the "prison of peoples," as Custine first said, and then Lenin developed this idea, reacted to this? Say, let them sleep? No. An order was issued prohibiting the sale of alcohol east and north of Lake Baikal. It's so - a touch, but it explains a lot about the "prison".

And further. The Germans in the Baltic States could not get along and organize a normal dialogue with the local population, the British authorities and the colonists were also unable to build acceptable relations with the Indians. Only the politics of power, only fire and sword. If the Russians were even a little like them, then we would not have a single indigenous people left in Siberia. And there are more than forty of them living there today!

In 1825, the American authorities adopted the Doctrine of Discovery. That is, the right to land was received by the one of the colonists who "discovered" them. And the Indians on these lands, in fact, belonging to them, could only live, but were deprived of the right to own it. In 1830, the Indian Removal Act was passed, and in 1867, the Reservation Act.

And mass sterilization of Indian women of reproductive age was also actively used. Do you think it was a long time ago, the legends of antiquity deep? By no means! In the 1970s, American journalists unearthed that, for example, in the state of Oklahoma, sterilization was massive. Moreover, the federal government's Office of Population Affairs said that surgical sterilization is becoming an increasingly important method of birth control.

This is all reminiscent of the racial politics of Nazi Germany. There, too, gradually and at the legislative level, non-Aryans were made people of the tenth grade, they were put outside the Aryan laws. The scalps, however, were not removed. But there were concentration camps and gas furnaces.

Speaking of concentration camps. The American writer and historian John Toland, in his book Adolf Hitler, writes: "Hitler's concept of concentration camps owes much to his study of the English language and the history of the United States. He admired the camps ... for Indians in the Wild West, and often in his inner circle praised the effectiveness of the destruction of the indigenous population of America."

Of course, in the US, most experts and political scientists with indignation and trembling in their voices dispute the claims of Stannard and Toland (well, how unnecessary analogies begin). It is said, in particular, that Stannard does not have any statistics, and that he does not distinguish between violent death and death as a result of the disease (this is about contaminated blankets, or what?). Rudolph Rummel, professor at the University of Hawaii, estimates that during the entire period of European colonization, not 95 million Indians became victims of genocide, but only from 2 to 15 million.

However, Rummel's conclusions are also scolded. Why? Because "orthodox" American historians and through and through the democratic public, on the one hand, do not deny that Europeans and settlers brought death, repression and suffering to the indigenous population of America. But, on the other hand, they stubbornly dispute that it was genocide.

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There is a very common myth that the sharp decline in the number of Indians, after the arrival of Europeans in America, was the result of a planned genocide. At the same time, the US government is also accused of genocide.

The most interesting thing is that it is American authors who blame the US government most loudly, which is not surprising. Now in politically correct America, self-flagellation has become the norm, and it is considered bad form to justify the policy of the state.

Nevertheless, there is an opposite point of view about what happened to the Indians. For example, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Guenter Lewy, back in 2007 wrote an article titled "Were American Indians Victims of Genocide?" (Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?), the translation of which I want to bring to your attention.

On September 21, the National Museum of the American Indian will open its doors. In an interview earlier this year, the museum's founder and director, W. Richard West, said the new organization would not shy away from such a difficult topic as efforts to eradicate Native American culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is safe to say that someone will inevitably raise the issue of genocide.

The story of an encounter between European settlers and the Native Americans is not a pleasant read. Among the early publications, perhaps the best known is Helen Hunt Jackson's "The Age of Infamy" (1888), a melancholy account of forced displacement, murder, and total neglect. Jackson's book, which clearly captures some important elements of what happened, also set a pattern of exaggeration and one-sided accusation that persists to this day.

Thus, according to Ward Churchill, Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, the decline in the North American Indian population from 12 million in 1500 to almost 237,000 in 1900 represents "an enormous genocide... the most continuous on record." By the end of the 19th century, writes David E. Stannard, a historian at the University of Hawaii, Native Americans were subjected to "the worst human Holocaust the world has ever seen." According to A. Lenore Steefarm and Phil Lane, Jr., "there could be no more monumental example of sustained genocide, anywhere in the human record."

Indiscriminate accusations of Indian genocide became especially popular during Vietnam War when historians opposed to it began to draw parallels between our actions in South-East Asia and earlier examples of supposedly ingrained American malice towards non-white peoples. Historian Richard Drinnon, describing the actions of the troops under the command of Kit Carson, called them "the forerunner of the Burning Fifth marines that set fire to Vietnamese villages, while in American Indians: The First Victim (1972), Jay David urged modern readers to remember how American civilization initiated "theft and murder" and "efforts to... genocide".

Further allegations of genocide were noted ahead of the 500th anniversary of the landing of Columbus in 1992. The National Council of Churches passed a resolution calling the event an "invasion" that resulted in "enslavement and genocide of the indigenous people." In Conquering Paradise (1990), Kirkpatrick Sale accuses the British and their American successors of pursuing a policy of extermination that has not abated for four centuries. More recent work has followed suit. In 1999, Encyclopedia of Genocide, edited by scholar Israel Charney, articles by Ward Churchill claim that extermination was a "clear goal" of the US government. Cambodia expert Ben Keijerman has also argued that genocide is "the only appropriate way" to describe how the white settlers treated the Indians. And so on.

It is a firmly established fact that 250,000 Native Americans were still alive in the United States at the end of the 19th century. Nevertheless, the number of Indians who lived at the time of the first contact with Europeans is still under scientific debate. Some students of the subject speak of inflating it with a "numbers game", others accuse that the size of the native population was deliberately kept to a minimum in order to make the fall seem less severe than it was.

The difference in ratings is huge. In 1928, ethnographer James Mooney suggested a total of 1,152,950 Indians in all tribes in the area north of Mexico City at the time of European arrival. By 1987, in American Indians: The Holocaust and Survival, Russell Thornton gave a figure of over 5 million, almost five times that of Mooney, while Lenore Steefarm and Phil Lane Jr. suggested a total of 12 million. This figure, in turn, remained in the work of the anthropologist Henry Dobyns, who in 1983 estimated the indigenous population of all of North America as a whole at 18 million, and about 10 million in the United States.

Despite the striking differences in numbers, one thing is clear: there is ample evidence that the arrival of the white man caused a sharp decline in the number of Native Americans. However, even if the highest figures are taken, they do not by themselves prove that a genocide took place.

To deal with this problem properly, we must begin with the most important cause of the catastrophic decline in the number of Indians, namely, the spread of infectious diseases to which they had no immunity. This phenomenon, known to scientists as the "virgin-soil epidemic", was the norm in North America.

The most deadly pathogen brought by the Europeans was smallpox, which sometimes incapacitated so many adults at once that death from starvation and malnutrition was as common as death from disease, and in some cases entire tribes died out. Other killers are measles, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhoid, bubonic plague, cholera, and scarlet fever. Although syphilis was clearly native to parts of the Western Hemisphere, it too was probably introduced to North America by Europeans.

There is no significant disagreement about all this. The most heinous enemy of Native Americans is not the white man and his weapons, concludes Alfred Crosby, but "the invisible killers whom these people have brought in blood and breath." It is believed that 75 to 90 percent of all Indian deaths are from these killers.

For some, however, this in itself warrants the use of the term "genocide". David Stannard, for example, argues that just as Jews who died of starvation and disease in the ghettos are counted among the victims of the Holocaust, among the Indians who died of imported diseases, "there were as many victims of the Euro-American genocide as there were those who were burned, stabbed to death, shot or given to hungry dogs to eat." As an example of actual genocide, Stannard points to the Franciscan missions in California as the "furnace of death".

But here we are in highly contested territory. It is true that in crowded places, with poor ventilation and poor sanitation, the missions encouraged the spread of disease. But it is clearly not true that, like the Nazis, the missionaries were indifferent to the welfare of the new converts. No matter how difficult the conditions in which the Indians worked in compulsory labor, often with inadequate food and medical care, and corporal punishment, their experience was no comparison with the fate of the Jews in the ghetto. The missionaries had little understanding of the causes of sickness, and there was little they could do medically for them. In contrast, the Nazis knew exactly what was happening in the ghetto and quite deliberately deprived the prisoners of food and medicine, in contrast to Stannard's "death furnaces".

The big picture also doesn't fit with Stannard's idea of ​​illness as a "genocidal war." True, the forced relocation of Indian tribes was often accompanied by great hardship and cruel treatment; The migration of the Cherokee tribe from their homeland to the territory west of the Mississippi in 1838 claimed the lives of thousands of people and went down in history as the "Trail of Tears". But the greatest loss of lives occurred long before this time, and sometimes only after minimal contact with European traders. True, some colonists later welcomed the high mortality among the Indians, considering it as a sign of divine providence, which, however, does not change the basic fact that the Europeans did not enter the new world in order to infect the natives with deadly diseases.

Ward Churchill went further than Stannard, arguing that there was nothing unwitting or unintentional about the disappearance of the bulk of the native population of North America. "It was malice, not nature, that did the work." In short, the Europeans were engaged in biological warfare.

Unfortunately, for this thesis, we do not know of a single example of such a war, and the documentary evidence is inconclusive. In 1763, a particularly serious uprising threatened the English garrison. west of the mountains Allegheny. Worried about his limited resources, and disgusted by what he saw with what cunning and savage methods the Indians waged wars, Sir Geoffrey Amherst, Commander British troops in North America, wrote to Colonel Henry Bouquet at Fort Pitt, "You will do so to try to inoculate the Indians [with smallpox] by means of blankets, and also to try any other method that can help to eradicate this abominable race."

Bouquet clearly approved of Amherst's proposal, but whether he carried it out remains unknown. Around June 24, two Fort Pitt traders did give blankets and a handkerchief from the Fort Hospital Quarantine to two visiting Delaware Indians, and one trader noted in his diary, "I hope this will have the desired effect." Smallpox was already present among the Ohio tribes, and at some point after this episode, there was another outbreak that killed hundreds of people.

A second, even less substantiated, example of alleged biological warfare concerns an incident that occurred on June 20, 1837. On that day, Churchill writes, "the US Army began distributing blankets to the Mandans and other Indians who had gathered at Fort Clark on the Missouri River in present-day North Dakota." He continues: Away from the trade in goods, the blankets were taken from the smallpox quarantine of the military infirmary in St. Louis, and brought upriver aboard the steamboat St. Peter. When the first Indians showed symptoms of illness on July 14, the surgeon advised them to camp near the post office to disperse and seek "refuge" in the villages of healthy relatives.

As a result, the disease spread and the Mandan were "virtually annihilated", other tribes also suffered heavy losses. Referring to the figure of "100,000 or more" who died from the U.S. army-caused smallpox pandemic of 1836-40 (elsewhere he says that the victims were "several times more"), Churchill refers the reader to Thornton's book "The Indian Holocaust and survival".

Churchill was also supported by Stiffarm and Lane, who write that "the distribution of smallpox-infected blankets by the US Army among the Mandans at Fort Clark ... was a causative factor in the pandemic of 1836-40." As proof they cite a contemporary journal at Fort Clark, Francis A. Chardon.

But Chardon magazine does not explicitly suggest that the US Army was distributing infected blankets, but blames the accidental spread of the disease epidemic to passengers on a passenger ship. As for the "100,000 dead", Thornton not only fails to confirm such apparently absurd figures, but he also points to the infected passengers on the St. Peter's steamship as the reason. Another scholar, relying on newly discovered source material, also disproved the idea of ​​a conspiracy to harm the Indians.

Likewise, any such idea is countered by the desire of the United States government at the time to vaccinate the Indians. Smallpox vaccination, a procedure developed by the English country doctor Edward Jenner in 1796, was first ordered by President Jefferson in 1801. The program continued for three decades, although its implementation was slowed down both by the resistance of the Indians, who suspected it was a stunt, and by the lack of interest on the part of some officials. Yet, as Thornton writes, "Vaccination of the American Indians ultimately reduced the death rate from smallpox substantially."

So the European settlers came to the New World for various reasons, but none of them had any intention of infecting the Indians with deadly pathogens. As for the accusations of the US government that it is responsible for the demographic disaster that has befallen the American Indian population, they are not supported by any evidence or legitimate arguments. The United States did not wage biological warfare against the Indians, and the large number of deaths due to diseases cannot be considered the result of a planned genocide.

However, even if up to 90 percent of the decline in the Indian population was the result of disease, significant mortality was due to abuse and violence. But can all or at least some of these deaths be considered genocide?

We can study characteristic incidents by following the geographical route of European settlers from the New England colonies. There, in the first place, the Puritans did not regard the Indians they encountered as natural enemies, but rather as friends and potential converts. But their Christianization efforts were not successful, and their relations with the natives gradually became more and more hostile. In particular, the Pequot tribe, with their reputation for cruelty and ruthlessness, was feared not so much by the colonists as by other Indians in New England. In a war caused in part by tribal rivalry that eventually ensued, the Narragansett Indians actively participated on the side of the Puritans.

Hostilities began in late 1636 after several colonists were killed. When the Pequots refused to comply with Massachusetts Bay Colony demands for handovers and other forms of compensation, the colony's first governor, John Endecot, ordered a punitive operation against them. This operation ended in vain. The Pequots retaliated by attacking any settler they could find. Fort Saybrook on the Connecticut River was besieged, and members of the garrison who ventured outside were ambushed and killed. One captured trader was tied to a post in full view of the fort and tortured for three days. His captors skinned him with a hot tree and cut off his fingers and toes. Another prisoner was roasted alive.

Torture of prisoners was indeed a common practice for most Indian tribes, and was deeply rooted in Indian culture. Appreciating courage above all, the Indians had little sympathy for those who surrendered or were captured. Prisoners who could not stand the hardships of traveling through the desert were usually killed on the spot. Among those Indians or Europeans who were taken back to the village, some of them could be taken to replace the dead warriors, the rest were subjected to ritual torture in order to humiliate them and thus avenge the losses in the tribe. Thereafter, the Indians often consumed the body or parts of it as ceremonial food and proudly displayed scalps and fingers as trophies of victory.

Although the colonists themselves resorted to torture to extract confessions, the brutality of these practices reinforced the belief that the locals were savages who deserved no mercy. This revulsion explains at least part of the ferocity of the Battle of Fort Mystic in May 1637, when a troop under John Mason and militiamen from Saybrook were surprised to find half of the Pequot tribe encamped next to Mystic River.

The colonists intended to kill the warriors "with their own weapons", as Mason said, that is, to plunder the villages and capture women and children. But this plan didn't work. About 150 Pequot warriors arrived at the fort during the night, and when the surprise attack began, they came out of their tents to fight. Fearing the numerical superiority of the Indians, the English attackers set fire to the fortified villages and retreated behind the palisade. There they formed a circle and shot anyone who tried to escape. In the second cordon formed by the Narragansett Indians, they slaughtered the few who managed to get through the English line. When the battle was over, the Pequots had lost several hundred men, about 300 of them women and children. Twenty Narragansett warriors were also killed.

Some historians accuse the Puritans of genocide, that is, carrying out a deliberate plan to destroy the Pequots. The evidence refutes this. The use of fire as a means of warfare was not unusual for either Europeans or Indians, and any modern study emphasizes that the burning of the fortress was an act of self-defense, and not part of a pre-planned massacre. Moreover, in the later stages of the war with the Pequot, the colonists spared women, children, and the elderly, which also contradicts the idea of ​​genocidal intent.

The second famous example of the colonial period is King Philip's War (1675-76). This conflict, at a cost proportional to the most costly of all american wars, claimed the lives of one in sixteen men of military age in the colonies; big number women and children who were also captured. Fifty-two of the 90 New England cities were attacked, seventeen were razed to the ground, and 25 were sacked. Losses among the Indians were even higher, many of those who were captured were executed or sold into slavery abroad.

The war was merciless on both sides. From the outset, the colonial council in Boston declared that "no one will be killed or wounded who is ready to surrender." But these rules were soon abandoned on the grounds that the Indians themselves did not adhere to either the laws of war or the laws of nature, hiding behind trees, stones and bushes, and not engaging in "civilized" open battle. Similarly, the atrocities committed by the Indians when they ambushed English troops or seized dwellings with women and children were the reason for the desire for retribution.

Soon, both the colonists and the Indians began to dismember the corpses and expose body parts and heads on poles. (Nevertheless, Indians could not be killed with impunity. In the summer of 1676, four men were tried in Boston for the brutal murder of three Indian women and three Indian children. They were all found guilty and two of them were executed.)

The hatred ignited by King Philip's war became even more pronounced in 1689 when strong Indian tribes allied with the French against the British. In 1694, the Massachusetts General Court allocated a small territory to all friendly Indians. For killing or capturing hostile Indians, they were then offered a generous reward, and scalps were accepted as evidence of the murder. In 1704 an amendment was made in the direction of "Christian practice" with a scale of rewards according to age and sex. The award was banned for children under the age of ten, subsequently increased to twelve (sixteen in Connecticut, fifteen in New Jersey). Here, too, the intention of genocide was far from clear. The practices were justified on grounds of self-preservation and revenge, and in retaliation for the widespread "scalping" practiced by the Indians.

Let's move on to the American frontier. In Pennsylvania, where the white population doubled between 1740 and 1760, pressure on Indian lands increased significantly. In 1754, spurred on by French agents, Indian warriors began a long and bloody conflict known as the French and Indian War or the Seven Years' War. By 1763, it is estimated that about 2,000 whites were killed or taken prisoner. Stories of real, exaggerated, and imaginary atrocities spread by word of mouth, in stories, and through provincial newspapers. Some British officers ordered no leniency towards captured Indians, and even after the formal end of hostilities, feelings continued to run so strongly that Indian killers like the infamous Paxton Boys were applauded rather than arrested.

As the United States expanded westward, such conflicts multiplied. This continued until 1784. As one British traveler said, “White Americans have the most vicious antipathy for the whole race of Indians, and nothing is more common than to hear them talk about the eradication of Indians completely from the face of the Earth, men, women and children.”

The settlers, when expanding the borders, treated the Indians with contempt, often robbed and killed them. In 1782, the militia, who were chasing Indians who had killed a woman and a child, killed more than 90 peaceful Moravian Delawares. Although federal and state officials tried to bring these killers to justice, their efforts, writes historian Francis Pruha, "did not fit with the particular mentality of the frontiers, who hated the Indians and on whom the decision of local courts depended."

But that, too, is only part of the story. The view that the Indian problem could only be solved by force was vigorously opposed by a number of federal commissioners who, beginning in 1832, headed the Bureau of Indian Affairs and directed a network of agents and sub-agents in this area. Many Americans on the East Coast, too, openly criticized the crude ways of the frontiersmen. Pity for the disappearing Indians, together with a sense of remorse, led to a revival of the 18th century concept of the noble savage. American Natives have been romanticized in historiography, art, and literature. In particular, James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Longfellow.

On western border such views were of course perceived as sentimentality. The perception of the Indians as noble savages, as the cynics noted, was directly proportional to the geographical distance from them. Instead, the settlers complained vigorously that the regular army was unable to respond more aggressively to the Indian threat. The large-scale Sioux rebellion in Minnesota in 1862, in which the Indians killed, raped, plundered, left behind an atmosphere of fear and anger that spread throughout the West.

In Colorado, the situation was especially tense. The Cheyenne and Arapah Indians, who had a legitimate grudge against the encroachment of white settlers, also fought for the pleasure, the desire for prey, and the prestige that comes from success. The land route to the East was particularly vulnerable. At some point in 1864, Denver was cut off from all supplies, and there were several slaughterhouses with families on outlying ranches. In one horrific case, all the victims were scalped, the throats of two children were slit, and the mother's body was torn open and her entrails were pulled over her face.

In September 1864, the Reverend William Crawford wrote of the attitude of the white population of Colorado: "There is only one sentiment as to the final decision which must be taken with regard to the Indians: Let them be destroyed, men, women and children. Of course," he added - "I myself do not hold such views." The Rocky Mountain News, which at first distinguished between friendly and hostile Indians, also began advocating the extermination of this depraved, cruel, ungrateful race. While the regular army fought the Civil War in the South, the western settlers depended on the protection of their volunteer regiments, many of which were woefully lacking in discipline. It was local volunteers who massacred Sand Creek, Colorado on November 29, 1864. Formed in August, the regiment was made up of miners and cowboys who were weary of ranching and itching for battle. Their commander, the Reverend John Milton Shivington, a politician and ardent hater of the Indians, called for war without mercy, even against children. He liked to say - "Nits make lice." This was followed by rampant violence. During a surprise attack on large Indian camps, from 70 to 250 Indians were killed, most of them women and children. The regiment lost eight dead and 40 wounded.

News of the Sand Creek massacre sparked protests in the East and led to several inquiries in Congress. Although some interrogators appear to have been biased against Shivington, no one disputes that he gave orders to leave no one alive, or that his soldiers were involved in mass scalping and other mutilations.

The sad story continued in California. In the area that became the 31st state in 1850, the Indian population was once estimated between 150,000 and 250,000. By the end of the 19th century, that number had dropped to 15,000. As elsewhere, illness was the single most important factor, although the state also saw an unusually high number of targeted killings.

The discovery of gold in 1848 led to a fundamental change in Indian-White relations. While earlier Mexican farmers used the Indians as labor force and provided them with minimal protection, the new immigrants, mostly young single men, showed hostility towards the Indians from the very beginning of the invasion of the Indian lands and often freely killed anyone who was in their way. An American officer wrote to his sister in 1860: "There never was such a vile type of people in the world as those who gathered about these mines."

This was true of gold miners and was often true of newcomer farmers. By the early 1850s, whites in California outnumbered Indians by about two to one, and many Indians were gradually forced to move to the least fertile parts of the territory and their numbers began to decline rapidly. Many suffered from hunger, while others, desperate for food, began stealing and killing animals. Indian women who made a living as prostitutes to support their families contributed to the demographic decline by removing themselves from the reproductive cycle. As a solution to the growing problem, the federal government sought to settle Indians on reservations, but this was opposed by both the Indians themselves and white farmers who feared losing their labor force. Meanwhile, clashes multiplied.

One of the most brutal wars, between white settlers and Yuki Indians in the Round Valley of Mendocino County, lasted several years and was fought with great brutality. Although Governor John B. Weller warned against a non-electoral campaign against the Indians. "Our operations against the Indians," he wrote to the commander of the volunteers in 1859, "should be limited strictly against those known to have been involved in the murder and destruction of the property of our citizens ... and not under any circumstances against women and children" but his words had little effect. By 1864, the number of Yuca Indians had dropped from about 5,000 to 300.

The Humboldt Bay region, northwest of Round Valley, has been the scene of even greater clashes. Here, too, the Indians stole and killed cattle, and the militia responded. A secret alliance formed in the city of Eureka carried out a particularly heinous massacre in February 1860, surprisingly attacking Indians sleeping in their homes and killing about sixty, mostly with tomahawks. During the same morning hours, whites attacked two other Indian ranches, with the same deadly results. In all, about 300 Indians were killed in one day, at least half of them women and children.

Then there was outrage and remorse. "White settlers", writes the historian only 20 years later, "received a great provocation .... But no one was hurt, there were no robberies or cruelties that could justify the brutal murder of innocent women and children." This was also the opinion of the majority of the inhabitants of Eureka, where the grand jury condemned the massacre, and in cities such as San Francisco, such killings were repeatedly criticized. But the atrocities continued. In the 1870s, as one historian summed up the situation in California, "only the remnants of the indigenous population were still alive, and those who had survived in the maelstrom of the previous quarter century were dislocated, demoralized, and pathetic."

Finally we come to the wars on the Great Plains. After the end of the Civil War, large waves of white migrants, arriving simultaneously from the east and west, squeezed the Indians between them. In response, the Indians attacked vulnerable white outposts; their "acts of diabolical cruelty," said one of the officers, who "have no parallel in savage warfare." The trails to the west were at a similar risk: in December 1866, an army detachment of 80 men was ambushed on the Bozeman Trail, and all the soldiers were killed.

To force the natives to obey, Generals Sherman and Sheridan, who for two decades after civil war commanded the fighting units of the army fighting the Indians on the plains, employing the same strategy which they had used with success in their march through Georgia and into the Shenandoah Valley. Unable to defeat the Indians on the open prairie, they pursued them to winter camps where the cold and snow limited their mobility. There, they destroyed homes and food supplies, a tactic that inevitably resulted in the deaths of women and children.

Genocide? These actions were almost certainly in accordance with the laws of war adopted at the time. The principles of limited warfare and non-military immunity were codified in Francis Lieber's Order No. 100, issued to the army on April 24, 1863 [referring to the so-called "Lieber Code". In 1863, an American military lawyer, Francis Lieber, at the request of President Abraham Lincoln, wrote "Instructions for the command of the armies of the United States on the battlefields", on the basis of which this order No. 100 was issued. (note mine)]. But in the villages, fighting Indians who refused to surrender were considered legitimate war targets. In any case, it never happened to exterminate the Plains Indians, despite the heated remarks on the subject, outraged by Sherman, and despite Sheridan's famously poignant remark that "the only good Indian I ever saw was dead". Although Sheridan did not mean that all Indians should be shot on the spot, but that none of the fighting Indians on the plains could be trusted, his words, as historian James Axtell rightly noted, did "more harm to Indian-white relations than any Number of Sand Creeks or Wounded Knees

Here, by the way, another myth is refuted. I specifically highlighted Sheridan's phrase about the dead Indian. The fact is that it was subsequently distorted and it turned into a well-known phrase - "a good Indian is a dead Indian". Agree that this is not the same thing. Levi goes on to write:

As for the last of the mentioned collisions, it took place on December 29, 1890, at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. By this time, the US 7th Cavalry had gained a reputation for aggressiveness, especially after its surprise attack in 1868 on Cheyenne Indians in a village on the Washita River in Kansas, where about 100 Indians were killed by General George Custer's men.

However, Washita's battle, though one-sided, was not a massacre: the wounded warriors were treated first. health care, as well as 53 women and children who were hiding in their houses, survived the attack and were taken prisoner. There were no unarmed innocents among the Cheyenne, as their leader Black Kettle admitted, that they were conducting regular raids in Kansas, which he was powerless to stop.

The clash at the Wounded Knee, 22 years later, must be seen in the context of the Ghost Dance religion, a messianic movement which, since 1889, caused great unrest among the Indians in the area and which was interpreted by the whites as a general call to war. While the Sioux camp was searching for weapons, several young men created an incident by opening fire on the soldiers surrounding the camp. The soldiers, furious at what they considered an act of betrayal by the Indians, returned fire. The army's losses were 25 killed and 39 wounded, mostly as a result of friendly fire. Over 300 Indians died.

Wounded Knee has been called "perhaps the most famous Indian genocide in North America". But, as Robert Utley concluded in a careful analysis, it is better to describe it as "a lamentable, tragic event of war," a bloodbath that neither side wanted. In a situation where women and children were mixed with men, it was inevitable that some of them would be killed. But several groups of women and children were actually released from the camp, and the wounded Indian soldiers were also rescued and taken to the hospital. There may have been a few deliberate killings of civilians, but in general, as established by the commission of inquiry created by order of President Harrison, officers and soldiers made every effort to avoid killing women and children.

On January 15, 1891, the last Sioux surrendered. Apart from a few isolated skirmishes, the American Indian War was over.

The Genocide Convention was approved by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948 and entered into force on 12 January 1951. After a long delay, it was ratified by the United States in 1986. Since genocide is now a technical term in international criminal law, the definitions established by the Convention were adopted prima-facie, and it is by using this definition that we must assess the applicability of the concept of genocide to the events we are considering.

According to article II of the Convention, the crime of genocide consists of a series of acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such”. Virtually all legal scholars accept the central meaning of this formulation. During the course of the convention's work, some argued for a clear description of the reason or motive for the destruction of the group. In the end, instead of listing such motives, the problem was solved by adding the words "as such", i.e. the motive or reason for destruction must be the end of the existence of the group as a national, ethnic, racial or religious entity. Evidence of such a motive, according to one legal scholar, "would be an integral part of the proof of a plan for genocide, and hence the intent of genocide."

The decisive role of intentionality in the Genocide Convention is that, in accordance with its terms, the huge number of Indian deaths from epidemics cannot be considered genocide. Deadly diseases were not deliberately introduced, and Europeans cannot be blamed for their ignorance of what medical science would discover only a few centuries later. In addition, military actions that led to the death of civilians, like the battle of Washita, cannot be considered acts of genocide, since the killing of innocent people was not the goal, and the soldiers were not sent to destroy the Indians as a certain group of people. On the other hand, some massacres in California, where both criminals and their supporters openly admitted that they wanted to destroy the Indians as ethnic community may indeed be considered, under the terms of the Convention, as genocidal intent.

However, when talking about the destruction of a group "in whole or in part", the convention does not address the question of what percentage of the group must be affected in order to qualify as genocide. As a guide, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia suggested "a fairly significant number, in relation to the overall group as a whole", adding that actual or attempted destruction must also refer to "the defendant's actual ability to destroy a group in a certain geographical area within his area of ​​control , and not in relation to the entire population of this group in a broader geographical sense. If this principle is accepted, atrocities such as the Sand Creek massacre, limited to one group in a particular locality can also be seen as an act of genocide.

Of course, it is far from easy to apply a legal concept developed in the middle of the 20th century to events that took place many decades, if not hundreds of years, ago. Our knowledge of many of these cases is incomplete. In addition, the perpetrators are long dead and therefore cannot be tried in court, where the most important factual details could be established and the relevant legal principles could be clarified.

Applying the standards of today's events to the past raises other questions, legal and moral. Although history has no statute of limitations, our legal system rejects the idea of ​​retroactive effect (laws ex post facto). Morally, even if we accept the idea of ​​universal principles transcending specific cultures and eras, we must be careful in condemning, say, the conduct of wars during the American colonial period, which for the most part corresponded to the prevailing notions of good and evil.

The real task is, in the context of a particular situation, to find out the options for its presentation. Given the circumstances and moral standards of the time, did the people whose behavior we judge have the choice to act differently? This approach will lead us to be more lenient with the New England Puritans who fought for their survival than with the prospectors and volunteer militias in California who often killed Indian men, women and children for no other reason than to satisfy their appetite for gold. and earth. The former also fought their Indian adversaries in an era that cared little for humane standards of warfare, while the latter committed their atrocities in the face of fierce condemnation not only by self-styled humanists in the far east, but by many of their fellow citizens in California.

Finally, even if some episodes can be considered genocide, that is, the desire for genocide, they certainly do not justify the condemnation of the entire society. Guilt is personal, and for good reason the Genocide Convention provides that only "persons" can be charged with a crime, perhaps even excluding legal proceedings against the government. Equally significant is the fact that a massacre such as Sand Creek was undertaken by volunteers from the local militia and was not an expression of official US policy. No unit of the regular US Army has ever been involved in such atrocities. In most cases, concludes Robert Utley, "the army fired on civilians by accident, not purposefully." As far as society as a whole, even if some elements within the white population, mostly in the West, have occasionally advocated extermination, no US government official has ever seriously proposed it. Genocide was never an American policy or the result of a policy.

Violent clashes between whites and native Americans were probably inevitable. Between 1600 and 1850, a dramatic increase in population led to massive waves of emigration from Europe, and the many millions who arrived in the New World gradually moved west into the seemingly unlimited expanse of America. There is no doubt that America's 19th century idea, "Manifest Destiny", was partly a rationalization of gain, but the resulting Indian migration was unstoppable, like other great migrations of the past. The US government could not prevent the westward movement even if it wanted to.

In the end, the sad fate of the Indians of America is not a crime, but a tragedy involving irreconcilable clashes of cultures and values. Despite the efforts of well-meaning people in both camps, there was no good solution to this clash. The Indians were not ready to change the nomadic lifestyle of hunters for the sedentary lifestyle of a farmer. The new Americans were convinced of their cultural and racial superiority, unwilling to provide the indigenous inhabitants of the continent with a huge reserve of land required by the way of life of the Indians. The consequence of this was a conflict in which there were several heroes, but which was far from a simple story about an unfortunate victim and a merciless aggressor. It is not in the interest of the Indians or history to charge the whole society with genocide.

In conclusion, I want to debunk another myth that Levy did not specifically say anything about. This myth lies in the fact that whites allegedly deliberately killed bison in order to deprive the Indians of their livelihood, since hunting for bison was their main occupation and source of food.

Indeed, after the arrival of the whites, the number of bison began to decline sharply, but there were several reasons for this. Many works have been written on this topic. For example, in Time magazine, written in 2007, which says the following about this problem:

Sometimes you have to eat an animal to save it. This paradox may bother vegetarians. Take bison for example: 500 years ago, perhaps 30 million of these huge mammals inhabited North America. By the end of the 1800s, several causes - natural climate change and their mass killings - reduced the bison population to about 1,000. And yet today, North America is home to an estimated 450,000 bison, the kind of recovery that has a lot to do with the development of our appetite for them.

USDA-inspected slaughterhouses will kill about 50,000 bison for human consumption this year. In 2000, that figure was just 17,674. Although bison consumption remains negligible compared to beef, Americans eat 90,000 cattle daily. Bison is by far the fastest growing sector in the meat business. We love bison because it's much less fatty than beef, but still satisfying red meat lovers. (Marketing studies show that men, in particular, are more fond of bison, which Americans have long called buffaloes, although as a zoological species they are bison, not buffaloes.) All the way up to Ted's Montana Grill (named after one of its founders, Ted Turner, former vice chairman of Time's predecessor, Time Warner Inc), has largely defined itself through its bison offering, which includes burgers that taste stronger than The chain plans to open its 48th restaurant next month, this time in Naperville, Illinois.

How could all this be good news for the King of the American Plains? And now that we've resurrected the bison as a species, can we figure out how to make sure we don't do it again - to kill them intelligently and humanely?

In order to answer these questions, we must first correct a misunderstanding, namely that the alleged 19th century white man's greed for skins and the actual policy of genocide against Native Americans led to the destruction of tens of millions of bison. This is wrong. Bison expert Dale Lott demonstrates in his well-known natural history American Bison (2002) that bison populations often declined dramatically in pre-industrial times when dry air currents moved south into the plains. In 1841, before William Cody (the most famous of several people known as "Buffalo Bill") was even born, a cold winter left a layer of ice over the Wyoming prairie so hard that even the largest bison could not break through to the grass. Millions of bison died and the species never returned to the grasslands of the state.

But climate change on their own was not enough to destroy 30 million bison. People play a big role. By 1700, the Indians began to hunt on horseback, which allowed them to kill prey much more effectively than approaching on foot, as had been the case for the previous 9,000 years. Thanks to steam locomotives, transportation of bison skins became cheaper, and in 1870 tanners learned how to make useful skins from them. Demand grew and the new "Sharps buffalo rifle" [Christian Sharp - the designer who in 1848 developed a gun that was widely used for hunting buffalo and which was called the "Sharps buffalo rifle" (note mine)] allowed hunters to meet this demand. The last significant buffalo hunt ended in 1883, after which there was almost nothing left.

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 insulting for the courageous natives of North America, whose murder nationality hushed up. Everyone knows about the Holocaust, the genocide of the Jews, but about the Indians... The democratic community somehow passed by. This is exactly genocide. People were killed just because they were Indians! More than half a century after the discovery of America, the local population was not considered human at all. That is, they naturally took them for animals. Based on the fact that the Indians are not mentioned in the Bible. So it's like they don't exist.

Hitler is a puppy compared to the "conquerors of America": as a result of the Holocaust of the American Indians, also known as the "Five Hundred Years' War", 95 of the 114 million indigenous people of the current territories of the United States and Canada were destroyed.
Hitler's concept of concentration camps owes much to his study of the English language and the history of the United States.
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 native population of America, the red savages who cannot 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 an ethnic or national group", and refers to the first use of the term by Raphael Lemkin in reference to Nazi activities in occupied Europe.

The United States government has refused to ratify the UN genocide convention. And not smart. Many aspects of the genocide were implemented 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, a ban on religious rites, etc.

FINAL DECISION.

The "Final Solution" to 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 has been going on for so long that it has become a habit? It is significant that information about this Holocaust is deliberately excluded from the knowledge base and consciousness of the inhabitants of North America and the whole 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. The people were healthy and well fed. The first Europeans were amazed. Agricultural products cultivated by indigenous peoples have won 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 extermination of the Indians as genocide. The North American authorities do not want to admit that this was and remains a systemic plan to exterminate the majority of the indigenous population.

The term "Final Solution" was not coined by the Nazis. It was the Administrator of Indian Affairs, Duncan Campbell Scott, Canada of Adolf Eichmann, who, in April 1910, was so concerned about the "Indian problem":
“We recognize that Indian children are losing their natural resistance to disease in these cramped schools, and that they are dying at a much higher rate than in their villages. But that in itself is not grounds for changing the policy of this department, aimed at the final solution of our Indian problem.

The European colonization of the Americas forever changed the life and culture of Native Americans. In the 15th-19th centuries, their settlements were devastated, the peoples were exterminated or enslaved.

IN THE NAME OF THE LORD.

Marlon Brando in his autobiography devotes several pages to the genocide of the American Indians:
"After their lands were taken from them, the survivors were rounded up on reservations, and the government sent missionaries to them, who tried to get the Indians to become Christians. After I became interested in American Indians, I found that many people they don't even consider them human beings. And that's how it's been since the beginning."

Cotton Mather, lecturer at Harvard College, Honorary Doctor of the University of Glasgow, Puritan minister, prolific writer and publicist, known for his research on 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 another Indian village from howitzers, said that Indian children should not be spared, because lice grow out of nits. He told his officers: “I have come to kill Indians, and I consider it a right and an honorable duty. And it is necessary to use any means under the sky of God to kill the Indians.”

The soldiers cut off the vulvas of Indian women and pulled them over the pommel of saddles, and made pouches from the skin of the scrotum and breasts of Indian women, and then displayed these trophies along with the cut off noses, ears and scalps of the slain Indians at the Denver Opera House. Enlightened, cultured and devout civilizers, what more can I say?

When once again the United States declares its desire to enlighten yet another people mired in savagery, lack of spirituality and totalitarianism, one should not forget that the United States itself thoroughly stink of carrion, the means they use can hardly be called civilized, and they hardly have goals that do not pursue their own gain.