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The Pot Dare Not Call the Kettle Black It would appear that the assertion by U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, of California, that, “The United States cannot act against genocide today, such as in Darfur, if it is not willing to condemn all genocide,” will not prevail. H.R. 106, proposed to recognize the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1923, was approved in committee: however, its passage by the full House is not expected. For how can the United States declare that genocide has occurred in other countries while failing to accept responsibility for the genocide of nearly 12 million American Indians here? In 1638, after English colonists in New England murdered around 600 Pequot men, women and children, surviving Pequots were forced to sign a treaty that attempted to bring about the end of their existence as a people. They were forbidden to return to their villages or to even call themselves Pequot. Many were enslaved by the colonists and others absorbed, against their wishes, into the Mohegan and Narragansett nations. This was only the first of the many “Indian Wars” that were to follow. In the 17th & 18th Centuries European immigrants from Spain, Portugal, England, France, the German states and the Netherlands poured into the Americas. Prior to their influx native inhabitants of the “New World” numbered close to 100 million – around 12 million in what is now the Continental United States. By the dawn of the 20th Century, though, the U.S. population of Native Americans had dwindled to less than a quarter of a million. European immigrants brought diseases with them, most notably smallpox, for which the Indians had no immunity. They also brought with them a voracious lust for territory. The native inhabitants were pushed off their lands, which were then settled by the “wonnux” (Pequot term for Europeans, literally – somebody coming), and as the immigration rushed westward, the Indians were pushed ahead of it. One instance of the removal of Native Americans to make room for white settlers is infamously known as the “Trail Of Tears” or in Cherokee, “Nunna Daul Tsuny – The Trail Where We Cried.” In 1837, at the urging of President Andrew Jackson, the U.S. Senate approved the removal of some 17,000 Cherokees from their home in Georgia. They were forced to travel 1,000 miles to a reservation in Oklahoma, and along the way, around 4,000 of them died. In the following years more and more American settlers went west, for land, for riches and for glory. In the process Indian men, women and children were raped, brutalized and murdered – their scalps, breasts and genitalia becoming grisly accoutrements for soldiers and Indian fighters. Native Americans were vilified, poisoned by the white man’s alcohol, decimated by his diseases and pushed into smaller and smaller corners of desolate wasteland. Food sources, such as the American bison, on which the plains Indians relied, were rapaciously depleted by greedy white hunters. And every one of some 350 treaties that the Indians were coerced into signing was later broken by the United States Government. The government then attempted to “save” Native Americans through compulsory acculturation. Modeled after the Carlisle Indian School, founded by U.S. Cavalry Captain Richard Henry Pratt, twenty-five Indian schools were established by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Along with other schools run by Christian missionaries, these off-reservation boarding schools attempted to “Americanize” Indian children (whose parents were forced or deceived into sending them) by denying them their religion, language and culture. Christianity, the English language and Euro-American mores were foisted upon them. In addition to the mental anguish that this brought about, there were numerous accounts of brutality on and sexual abuse of the children. Punishment for not assimilating or failure to follow harsh rules came in the form of beatings and many deaths were reported. On December 9, 1948, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was approved by the United Nations’ General Assembly. It went into effect on January 12, 1951, but wasn’t ratified by the United States until 1988 (and then only with the proviso that the U.S. be immune from prosecution for genocide without its own consent). Article II of the Convention reads as follows: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. The Convention came into being as a result of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. Writing from his cell at Spandau Prison in 1953 Albert Speer, Hitler's minister of war production wrote, "… Let me remind you only of the witch-hunts of the middle ages, the horrors of the French Revolution or the genocide of the American Indians … in such periods there are always only a very few who do not succumb. But when it is all over, everyone, horrified, asks, 'For heaven's sake, how could I?’” And I ask you, if what was done to Native Americans doesn’t constitute genocide, what does? Copyright © October 2007 Michael D. Kerrigan
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