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By Terry Orr
The fourth Friday of each September is set aside to
celebrate Native Americans. Last year we
focus on some of the background of Native Americans, their Tribes, and a few of
the more prominent people. This year’s
article is more about some of the injustices they have had to endure over the
past 500 years.
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A curious mind can be dangerous at times and yet others
leading to enlightenment. There has been
one question on my mind this month – “How many Native Americans were killed by the US
government?”
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Estimates:
Two studies have been conducted that attempt to number
the natives killed by the United States. The first of these was sponsored by
the United States government, and while official does not stand up to scrutiny
and is therefore discounted (generally); this estimate shows between 1 million
to 4 million killed. The second study was not sponsored by the US Government
but was done from independent researchers. This study estimated populations and
population reductions using later census data. Two figures are given, both low
and high, at: between 10 million and 114 million Indians as a direct result of
US actions. Please note that Nazi Holocaust estimates are between 6 and 11
million; thereby making the Nazi Holocaust the 2nd largest mass murder of a
class of people in history.
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REF:
American Holocaust: D. Stannard (Oxford Press, 1992) -
"over 100 million killed" "[Christopher] Columbus personally
murdered half a million Natives"
For four hundred years--from the first
Spanish assaults against the Arawak people of Hispaniola in the 1490s to the
U.S. Army's massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in the 1890s--the
indigenous inhabitants of North and South America endured an unending firestorm
of violence. During that time the native population of the Western Hemisphere
declined by as many as 100 million people. Indeed, as historian David E.
Stannard argues in this stunning new book, the European and white American
destruction of the native peoples of the Americas was the most massive act of
genocide in the history of the world.
Stannard begins with a portrait of the
enormous richness and diversity of life in the Americas prior to Columbus's
fateful voyage in 1492. He then follows the path of genocide from the Indies to
Mexico and Central and South America, then north to Florida, Virginia, and New
England, and finally out across the Great Plains and Southwest to California
and the North Pacific Coast. Stannard reveals that wherever Europeans or white
Americans went, the native people were caught between imported plagues and
barbarous atrocities, typically resulting in the annihilation of 95 percent of
their populations. What kind of people, he asks, do such horrendous things to
others? His highly provocative answer: Christians. Digging deeply into ancient
European and Christian attitudes toward sex, race, and war, he finds the
cultural ground well prepared by the end of the Middle Ages for the
centuries-long genocide campaign that Europeans and their descendants
launched--and in places continue to wage--against the New World's original
inhabitants. Advancing a thesis that is sure to create much controversy,
Stannard contends that the perpetrators of the American Holocaust drew on the
same ideological wellspring as did the later architects of the Nazi Holocaust.
It is an ideology that remains dangerously alive today, he adds, and one that
in recent years has surfaced in American justifications for large-scale
military intervention in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
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God, Greed and Genocide: The Holocaust Through the
Centuries: Grenke (New Academia Publishing 2006)
What are the similarities between the mass
extermination of idolaters in the Old Testament, the burning of witches in the
Middle Ages, the extermination of native Americans, the mass killing of the
Armenians at the hand of the Turks, the Holo- caust of the European Jews, and
the communist eradication of the enemies of the people both in the Soviet Union
and Cambodia? Are these to be seen as unique cases, or as the result of a
recognizable pattern. The author provides insight into these questions, basing
his argument on the latest sources. He maintains that the study of the dynamics
that lead to mass destruction may provide a better understanding of the
holocaust as a recurrent phenomenon.
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Holocaust: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies:
Cesarani, (Routledge 2004)
Since the end of the 1980s the field of
Holocaust studies has burgeoned, diversified, and experienced a series of
important controversies. Drawing on the best research of the past sixty years,
this collection brings together the most significant secondary literature on
the Nazi persecution and mass murder of the Jews. Care is taken to set the work
in a context of historical breadth and depth.
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So on this day of recognition of the
Native Americans Day and in preparation of the Native American Heritage Month
in November – please take some time and do a little research and get a better
understanding of these great people.
Thank you! [from last year’s article]
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References and Links:
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