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Subject: "American Indians were not the Victims of
Genocide"--AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE
Fall 2004
Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?
http://hnn.us/articles/7302.html
By Guenter Lewy
COMMENTARY MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE
Guenter Lewy, who for many years taught political
science at the University
of Massachusetts, has been a contributor to Commentary since
1964. His books
include The Catholic Church & Nazi Germany, Religion &
Revolution, America in
Vietnam, and The Cause that Failed: Communism in American
Political Life.
START:
On September 21, the National Museum of the American
Indian will open its
doors. In an interview early this year, the museum's founding
director, W.
Richard West, declared that the new institution would not shy
away from such
difficult subjects as the effort to eradicate American Indian
culture in the 19th and
20th centuries. It is a safe bet that someone will also,
inevitably, raise
the issue of genocide.
The story of the encounter between European settlers
and America's native
population does not make for pleasant reading. Among early
accounts, perhaps the
most famous is Helen Hunt Jackson's A Century of Dishonor (1888),
a doleful
recitation of forced removals, killings, and callous disregard.
Jackson's book,
which clearly captured some essential elements of what happened,
also set a
pattern of exaggeration and one-sided indictment that has
persisted to this day.
Thus, according to Ward Churchill, a professor of
ethnic studies at the
University of Colorado, the reduction of the North American
Indian population from
an estimated 12 million in 1500 to barely 237,000 in 1900
represents a "vast
genocide . . . , the most sustained on record." By the end
of the 19th century,
writes David E. Stannard, a historian at the University of
Hawaii, native
Americans had undergone the "worst human holocaust the world
had ever witnessed,
roaring across two continents non-stop for four centuries and
consuming the
lives of countless tens of millions of people." In the
judgment of Lenore A.
Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr., "there can be no more
monumental example of
sustained genocide -- certainly none involving a 'race' of people
as broad and complex as
this -- anywhere in the annals of human history."
The sweeping charge of genocide against the Indians
became especially popular
during the Vietnam war, when historians opposed to that conflict
began
drawing parallels between our actions in Southeast Asia and
earlier examples of a
supposedly ingrained American viciousness toward non-white
peoples. The
historian Richard Drinnon, referring to the troops under the
command of the Indian
scout Kit Carson, called them "forerunners of the Burning
Fifth Marines" who set
fire to Vietnamese villages, while in The American Indian: The
First Victim
(1972), Jay David urged contemporary readers to recall how
America's
civilization had originated in "theft and murder" and
"efforts toward . . . genocide."
Further accusations of genocide marked the run-up to
the 1992 quincentenary
of the landing of Columbus. The National Council of Churches
adopted a
resolution branding this event "an invasion" that
resulted in the "slavery and
genocide of native people." In a widely read book, The
Conquest of Paradise (1990),
Kirkpatrick Sale charged the English and their American
successors with
pursuing a policy of extermination that had continued unabated
for four centuries.
Later works have followed suit. In the 1999 Encyclopedia of
Genocide, edited by
the scholar Israel Charny, an article by Ward Churchill argues
that
extermination was the "express objective" of the U.S.
government. To the Cambodia expert
Ben Kiernan, similarly, genocide is the "only appropriate
way" to describe
how white settlers treated the Indians. And so forth.
That American Indians suffered horribly is
indisputable. But whether their
suffering amounted to a "holocaust," or to genocide, is
another matter.
II
It is a firmly established fact that a mere 250,000
native Americans were
still alive in the territory of the United States at the end of
the 19th century.
Still in scholarly contention, however, is the number of Indians
alive at the
time of first contact with Europeans. Some students of the
subject speak of
an inflated "numbers game"; others charge that the size
of the aboriginal
population has been deliberately minimized in order to make the
decline seem less
severe than it was.
The disparity in estimates is enormous. In 1928, the
ethnologist James Mooney
proposed a total count of 1,152,950 Indians in all tribal areas
north of
Mexico at the time of the European arrival. By 1987, in American
Indian Holocaust
and Survival, Russell Thornton was giving a figure of well over 5
million,
nearly five times as high as Mooney's, while Lenore Stiffarm and
Phil Lane, Jr.
suggested a total of 12 million. That figure rested in turn on
the work of the
anthropologist Henry Dobyns, who in 1983 had estimated the
aboriginal
population of North America as a whole at 18 million and of the
present territory of
the United States at about 10 million.
From one perspective, these differences, however
startling, may seem beside
the point: there is ample evidence, after all, that the arrival
of the white
man triggered a drastic reduction in the number of native
Americans.
Nevertheless, even if the higher figures are credited, they alone
do not prove the
occurrence of genocide.
To address this issue properly we must begin with the
most important reason
for the Indians' catastrophic decline -- namely, the spread of
highly contagious
diseases to which they had no immunity. This phenomenon is known
by scholars
as a "virgin-soil epidemic"; in North America, it was
the norm.
The most lethal of the pathogens introduced by the
Europeans was smallpox,
which sometimes incapacitated so many adults at once that deaths
from hunger and
starvation ran as high as deaths from disease; in several cases,
entire
tribes were rendered extinct. Other killers included measles,
influenza, whooping
cough, diphtheria, typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, and scarlet
fever. Although
syphilis was apparently native to parts of the Western
hemisphere, it, too,
was probably introduced into North America by Europeans.
About all this there is no essential disagreement. The
most hideous enemy of
native Americans was not the white man and his weaponry,
concludes Alfred
Crosby, "but the invisible killers which those men brought
in their blood and
breath." It is thought that between 75 to 90 percent of all
Indian deaths resulted
from these killers.
To some, however, this is enough in itself to warrant
the term genocide.
David Stannard, for instance, states that just as Jews who died
of disease and
starvation in the ghettos are counted among the victims of the
Holocaust, Indians
who died of introduced diseases "were as much the victims of
the
Euro-American genocidal war as were those burned or stabbed or
hacked or shot to death, or
devoured by hungry dogs." As an example of actual genocidal
conditions,
Stannard points to Franciscan missions in California as
"furnaces of death."
But right away we are in highly debatable territory.
It is true that the
cramped quarters of the missions, with their poor ventilation and
bad sanitation,
encouraged the spread of disease. But it is demonstrably untrue
that, like the
Nazis, the missionaries were unconcerned with the welfare of
their native
converts. No matter how difficult the conditions under which the
Indians
labored -- obligatory work, often inadequate food and medical
care, corporal
punishment -- their experience bore no comparison with the fate
of the Jews in the ghettos.
The missionaries had a poor understanding of the causes of the
diseases that
afflicted their charges, and medically there was little they
could do for them.
By contrast, the Nazis knew exactly what was happening in the
ghettos, and
quite deliberately deprived the inmates of both food and
medicine; unlike in
Stannard's "furnaces of death," the deaths that
occurred there were meant to occur.
The larger picture also does not conform to Stannard's
idea of disease as an
expression of "genocidal war." True, the forced
relocations of Indian tribes
were often accompanied by great hardship and harsh treatment; the
removal of
the Cherokee from their homelands to territories west of the
Mississippi in 1838
took the lives of thousands and has entered history as the Trail
of Tears.
But the largest loss of life occurred well before this time, and
sometimes after
only minimal contact with European traders. True, too, some
colonists later
welcomed the high mortality among Indians, seeing it as a sign of
divine
providence; that, however, does not alter the basic fact that
Europeans did not come
to the New World in order to infect the natives with deadly
diseases.
Or did they? Ward Churchill, taking the argument a
step further than
Stannard, asserts that there was nothing unwitting or
unintentional about the way the
great bulk of North America's native population disappeared:
"it was precisely
malice, not nature, that did the deed." In brief, the
Europeans were engaged
in biological warfare.
Unfortunately for this thesis, we know of but a single
instance of such
warfare, and the documentary evidence is inconclusive. In 1763, a
particularly
serious uprising threatened the British garrisons west of the
Allegheny mountains.
Worried about his limited resources, and disgusted by what he saw
as the
Indians' treacherous and savage modes of warfare, Sir Jeffrey
Amherst,
commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, wrote as
follows to Colonel Henry
Bouquet at Fort Pitt: "You will do well to try to inoculate
the Indians [with
smallpox] by means of blankets, as well as to try every other
method, that can
serve to extirpate this execrable race."
Bouquet clearly approved of Amherst's suggestion, but
whether he himself
carried it out is uncertain. On or around June 24, two traders at
Fort Pitt did
give blankets and a handkerchief from the fort's quarantined
hospital to two
visiting Delaware Indians, and one of the traders noted in his
journal: "I hope
it will have the desired effect." Smallpox was already
present among the tribes
of Ohio; at some point after this episode, there was another
outbreak in
which hundreds died.
A second, even less substantiated instance of alleged
biological warfare
concerns an incident that occurred on June 20, 1837. On that day,
Churchill
writes, the U.S. Army began to dispense "'trade blankets' to
Mandans and other
Indians gathered at Fort Clark on the Missouri River in
present-day North Dakota."
He continues: Far from being trade goods, the blankets had been
taken from a
military infirmary in St. Louis quarantined for smallpox, and
brought upriver
aboard the steamboat St. Peter's. When the first Indians showed
symptoms of the
disease on July 14, the post surgeon advised those camped near
the post to
scatter and seek "sanctuary" in the villages of healthy
relatives.
In this way the disease was spread, the Mandans were
"virtually
exterminated," and other tribes suffered similarly
devastating losses. Citing a figure of
"100,000 or more fatalities" caused by the U.S. Army in
the 1836-40 smallpox
pandemic (elsewhere he speaks of a toll "several times that
number"), Churchill
refers the reader to Thornton's American Indian Holocaust and
Survival.
Supporting Churchill here are Stiffarm and Lane, who
write that "the
distribution of smallpox- infected blankets by the U.S. Army to
Mandans at Fort Clark
. . . was the causative factor in the pandemic of 1836-40."
In evidence, they
cite the journal of a contemporary at Fort Clark, Francis A.
Chardon.
But Chardon's journal manifestly does not suggest that
the U.S. Army
distributed infected blankets, instead blaming the epidemic on
the inadvertent spread
of disease by a ship's passenger. And as for the "100,000
fatalities," not
only does Thornton fail to allege such obviously absurd numbers,
but he too
points to infected passengers on the steamboat St. Peter's as the
cause. Another
scholar, drawing on newly discovered source material, has also
refuted the idea
of a conspiracy to harm the Indians.
Similarly at odds with any such idea is the effort of
the United States
government at this time to vaccinate the native population.
Smallpox vaccination,a
procedure developed by the English country doctor Edward Jenner
in 1796, was
first ordered in 1801 by President Jefferson; the program
continued in force
for three decades, though its implementation was slowed both by
the resistance
of the Indians, who suspected a trick, and by lack of interest on
the part of
some officials. Still, as Thornton writes: "Vaccination of
American Indians did
eventually succeed in reducing mortality from smallpox."
To sum up, European settlers came to the New World for
a variety of reasons,
but the thought of infecting the Indians with deadly pathogens
was not one of
them. As for the charge that the U.S. government should itself be
held
responsible for the demographic disaster that overtook the
American-Indian
population, it is unsupported by evidence or legitimate argument.
The United States did
not wage biological warfare against the Indians; neither can the
large number
of deaths as a result of disease be considered the result of a
genocidal
design.
III
Still, even if up to 90 percent of the reduction in
Indian population was the
result of disease, that leaves a sizable death toll caused by
mistreatment
and violence. Should some or all of these deaths be considered
instances of
genocide?
We may examine representative incidents by following
the geographic route of
European settlement, beginning in the New England colonies.
There, at first,
the Puritans did not regard the Indians they encountered as
natural enemies,
but rather as potential friends and converts. But their
Christianizing efforts
showed little success, and their experience with the natives
gradually yielded
a more hostile view. The Pequot tribe in particular, with its
reputation for
cruelty and ruthlessness, was feared not only by the colonists
but by most
other Indians in New England. In the warfare that eventually
ensued, caused in
part by intertribal rivalries, the Narragansett Indians became
actively engaged
on the Puritan side.
Hostilities opened in late 1636 after the murder of
several colonists. When
the Pequots refused to comply with the demands of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony
for the surrender of the guilty and other forms of
indemnification, a punitive
expedition was led against them by John Endecott, the first
resident governor
of the colony; although it ended inconclusively, 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, tied to a stake in sight of the
fort, was
tortured for three days, expiring after his captors flayed his
skin with the help of
hot timbers and cut off his fingers and toes. Another prisoner
was roasted
alive.
The torture of prisoners was indeed routine practice
for most Indian tribes,
and was deeply ingrained in Indian culture. Valuing bravery above
all things,
the Indians had little sympathy for those who surrendered or were
captured.
Prisoners. unable to withstand the rigor of wilderness travel
were usually
killed on the spot. Among those -- Indian or European -- taken
back to the village, some
would be adopted to replace slain warriors, the rest subjected to
a ritual of
torture designed to humiliate them and exact atonement for the
tribe's
losses. Afterward the Indians often consumed the body or parts of
it in a ceremonial
meal, and proudly displayed scalps and fingers as trophies of
victory.
Despite the colonists' own resort to torture in order
to extract confessions,
the cruelty of these practices strengthened the belief that the
natives were
savages who deserved no quarter. This revulsion accounts at least
in part for
the ferocity of the battle of Fort Mystic in May 1637, when a
force commanded
by John Mason and assisted by militiamen from Saybrook surprised
about half of
the Pequot tribe encamped near the Mystic River.
The intention of the colonists had been to kill the
warriors "with their
Swords," as Mason put it, to plunder the village, and to
capture the women and
children. But the plan did not work out. About 150 Pequot
warriors had arrived in
the fort the night before, and when the surprise attack began
they emerged
from their tents to fight. Fearing the Indians' numerical
strength, the English
attackers set fire to the fortified village and retreated outside
the
palisades. There they formed a circle and shot down anyone
seeking to escape; a second
cordon of NarragansettIndians cut down the few who managed to get
through the
English line. When the battle was over, the Pequots had suffered
several
hundred dead, perhaps as many as 300 of these being women and
children. Twenty
Narragansett warriors also fell.
A number of recent historians have charged the
Puritans with genocide: that
is, with having carried out a premeditated plan to exterminate
the Pequots. The
evidence belies this. The use of fire as a weapon of war was not
unusual for
either Europeans or Indians, and every contemporary account
stresses that the
burning of the fort was an act of self-protection, not part of a
pre-planned
massacre. In later stages of the Pequot war, moreover, the
colonists spared
women, children, and the elderly, further contradicting the idea
of genocidal
intention.
A second famous example from the colonial period is
King Philip's War
(1675-76). This conflict, proportionately the costliest of all
American wars, took
the life of one in every sixteen men of military age in the
colonies; large
numbers of women and children also perished or were carried into
captivity.
Fifty-two of New England's 90 towns were attacked, seventeen were
razed to the
ground, and 25 were pillaged. Casualties among the Indians were
even higher, with
many of those captured being executed or sold into slavery
abroad.
The war was also merciless, on both sides. At its
outset, a colonial council
in Boston had declared "that none be Killed or Wounded that
are Willing to
surrender themselves into Custody." But these rules were
soon abandoned on the
grounds that the Indians themselves, failing to adhere either to
the laws of war
or to the law of nature, would "skulk" behind trees,
rocks, and bushes rather
than appear openly to do "civilized" battle. Similarly
creating a desire for
retribution were the cruelties perpetrated by Indians when
ambushing English
troops or overrunning strongholds housing women and children.
Before long, both colonists and Indians were
dismembering corpses and
displaying 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 squaws and three Indian children; all were
found guilty
and two were executed.)
The hatred kindled by King Philip's War became even
more pronounced in 1689
when strong Indian tribes allied themselves with the French
against the
British. In 1694, the General Court of Massachusetts ordered all
friendly Indians
confined to a small area. A bounty was then offered for the
killing or capture of
hostile Indians, and scalps were accepted as proof of a kill. In
1704, this
was amended in the direction of "Christian practice" by
means of a scale of
rewards graduated by age and sex; bounty was proscribed in the
case of children
under the age of ten, subsequently raised to twelve (sixteen in
Connecticut,
fifteen in New Jersey). Here, too, genocidal intent was far from
evident; the
practices were justified on grounds of self-preservation and
revenge, and in
reprisal for the extensive scalping carried out by Indians.
IV
We turn now to the American frontier. In Pennsylvania,
where the white
population had doubled between 1740 and 1760, the pressure on
Indian lands increased
formidably; in 1754, encouraged by French agents, Indian warriors
struck,
starting a long and bloody conflict known as the French and
Indian War or the
Seven Years' War. By 1763, according to one estimate, about 2,000
whites had been
killed or vanished into captivity. Stories of real, exaggerated,
and
imaginary atrocities spread by word of mouth, in narratives of
imprisonment,and by
means of provincial newspapers. Some British officers gave orders
that captured
Indians be given no quarter, and even after the end of formal
hostilities,
feelings continued to run so high that murderers of Indians, like
the infamous
Paxton Boys, were applauded rather than arrested.
As the United States expanded westward, such conflicts
multiplied. So far had
things progressed by 1784 that, according to one British
traveler, "white
Americans have the most rancorous antipathy to the whole race of
Indians; and
nothing is more common than to hear them talk of extirpating them
totally from
the face of the earth, men, women, and children."
Settlers on the expanding frontier treated the Indians
with contempt, often
robbing and killing them at will. In 1782, a militia pursuing an
Indian war
party that had slain a woman and a child massacred more than 90
peaceful Moravian
Delawares. Although federal and state officials tried to bring
such killers
to justice, their efforts, writes the historian Francis Prucha,
"were no match
for the singular Indian-hating mentality of the frontiersmen,
upon whom
depended conviction in the local courts."
But that, too, is only part of the story. The view
that the Indian problem
could be solved by force alone came under vigorous challenge from
a number of
federal commissioners who from 1832 on headed the Bureau of
Indian Affairs and
supervised the network of agents and subagents in the field. Many
Americans on
the eastern seaboard, too, openly criticized the rough ways of
the frontier.
Pity for the vanishing Indian, together with a sense of remorse,
led to a
revival of the 18th-century concept of the noble savage.
America's native
inhabitants were romanticized in historiography, art, and
literature, notably by James
Fenimore Cooper in his Leatherstocking Tales and Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow in
his long poem, The Song of Hiawatha.
On the western frontier itself, such views were of
course dismissed as rank
sentimentality; the perceived nobility of the savages, observed
cynics, was
directly proportional to one's geographic distance from them.
Instead, settlers
vigorously complained that the regular army was failing to meet
the Indian
threat more aggressively. A large-scale uprising of the Sioux in
Minnesota in
1862, in which Indian war parties killed, raped, and pillaged all
over the
countryside, left in its wake a climate of fear and anger
that spread over the entire
West.
Colorado was especially tense. Cheyenne and Arapahoe
Indians, who had
legitimate grievances against the encroaching white settlers,
also fought for the
sheer joy of combat, the desire for booty, and the prestige that
accrued from
success. The overland route to the East was particularly
vulnerable: at one point
in 1864, Denver was cut off from all supplies, and there were
several
butcheries of entire families at outlying ranches. In one
gruesome case, all of the
victims were scalped, the throats of the two children were cut,
and the
mother's body was ripped open and her entrails pulled over her
face.
Writing in September 1864, the Reverend William
Crawford reported on the
attitude of the white population of Colorado: "There is but
one sentiment in
regard to the final disposition which shall be made of the
Indians: ‘Let them be
exterminated -- men, women, and children together.'" Of
course, he added, "I do
not myself share in such views." The Rocky Mountain News,
which at first had
distinguished between friendly and hostile Indians, likewise
began to advocate
extermination of this "dissolute, vagabondish, brutal, and
ungrateful race."
With the regular army off fighting the Civil War in the South,
the western
settlers depended for their protection on volunteer regiments,
many lamentably
deficient in discipline. It was a local force of such volunteers
that committed
the massacre of Sand Creek, Colorado on November 29, 1864. Formed
in August, the
regiment was made up of miners down on their luck, cowpokes tired
of
ranching, and others itching for battle. Its commander, the
Reverend John Milton
Chivington, a politician and ardent Indian-hater, had urged war
without mercy, even
against children. "Nits make lice," he was fond of
saying. The ensuing orgy
of violence in the course of a surprise attack on a large Indian
encampment
left between 70 and 250 Indians dead, the majority women and
children. The
regiment suffered eight killed and 40 wounded.
News of the Sand Creek massacre sparked an outcry in
the East and led to
several congressional inquiries. Although some of the
investigators appear to have
been biased against Chivington, there was no disputing that he
had issued
orders not to give quarter, or that his soldiers had engaged in
massive scalping
and other mutilations.
The sorry tale continues in California. The area that
in 1850 became admitted
to the Union as the 31st state had once held an Indian population
estimated
at anywhere between 150,000 and 250,000. By the end of the 19th
century, the
number had dropped to 15,000. As elsewhere, disease was the
single most
important factor, although the state also witnessed an unusually
large number of
deliberate killings.
The discovery of gold in 1848 brought about a
fundamental change in
Indian-white relations. Whereas formerly Mexican ranchers had
both exploited the
Indians and provided them with a minimum of protection, the new
immigrants, mostly
young single males, exhibited animosity from the start,
trespassing on Indian
lands and often freely killing any who were in their way. An
American officer
wrote to his sister in 1860: "There never was a viler sort
of men in the world
than is congregated about these mines."
What was true of miners was often true as well of
newly arrived farmers. By
the early 1850's, whites in California outnumbered Indians by
about two to one,
and the lot of the natives, gradually forced into the least
fertile parts of
the territory, began to deteriorate rapidly. Many succumbed to
starvation;
others, desperate for food, went on the attack, stealing and
killing livestock.
Indian women who prostituted themselves to feed 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 confine
the Indians to reservations, but this was opposed both by the
Indians themselves
and by white ranchers fearing the loss of labor. Meanwhile,
clashes
multiplied.
One of the most violent, between white settlers and
Yuki Indians in the Round
Valley of Mendocino County, lasted for several years and was
waged with great
ferocity. Although Governor John B. Weller cautioned against an
indiscriminate campaign -- "[Y]our operations against the
Indians," he wrote to the commander
of a volunteer force in 1859, "must be confined strictly to
those who are
known to have been engaged in killing the stock and destroying
the property of our
citizens . . . and the women and children under all circumstances
must be
spared" -- his words had little effect. By 1864 the number
of Yukis had declined
from about 5,000 to 300.
The Humboldt Bay region, just northwest of the Round
Valley, was the scene of
still more collisions. Here too Indians stole and killed cattle,
and militia
companies retaliated. A secret league, formed in the town of
Eureka,
perpetrated a particularly hideous massacre in February 1860,
surprising Indians
sleeping in their houses and killing about sixty, mostly by
hatchet. During the same
morning hours, whites attacked two other Indian rancherias, with
the
samedeadly results. In all, nearly 300 Indians were killed on one
day, at least half
of them women and children.
Once again there was outrage and remorse. "The
white settlers," wrote a
historian only 20 years later, "had received great
provocation. . . . But nothing
they had suffered, no depredations the savages had committed,
could justify the
cruel slaughter of innocent women and children." This had
also been the
opinion of a majority of the people of Eureka, where a grand jury
condemned the
massacre, while in cities like San Francisco all such killings
repeatedly drew
strong criticism. But atrocities continued: by the 1870's, as one
historian has
summarized the situation in California, "only remnants of
the aboriginal
populations were still alive, and those who had survived the
maelstrom of the
preceding quarter-century were dislocated, demoralized, and
impoverished."
Lastly we come to the wars on the Great Plains.
Following the end of the
Civil War, large waves of white migrants, arriving simultaneously
from East and
West, squeezed the Plains Indians between them. In response, the
Indians
attacked vulnerable white outposts; their "acts of devilish
cruelty," reported one
officer on the scene, had "no parallel in savage
warfare." The trails west were
in similar peril: in December 1866, an army detachment of 80 men
was lured
into an ambush on the Bozeman Trail, and all of the soldiers were
killed.
To force the natives into submission, Generals Sherman
and Sheridan, who for
two decades after the Civil War commanded the Indian-fighting
army units on
the Plains, applied the same strategy they had used so
successfully in their
marches across Georgia and in the Shenandoah Valley. Unable to
defeat the Indians
on the open prairie, they pursued them to their winter camps,
where numbing
cold and heavy snows limited their mobility. There they destroyed
the lodges
and stores of food, a tactic that inevitably resulted in the
deaths of women and
children.
Genocide? These actions were almost certainly in
conformity with the laws of
war accepted at the time. The principles of limited war and of
noncombatant
immunity had been codified in Francis Lieber's General Order No.
100, issued for
the Union Army on April 24, 1863. But the villages of warring
Indians who
refused to surrender were considered legitimate military
objectives. In any
event, there was never any order to exterminate the Plains
Indians, despite heated
pronouncements on the subject by the outraged Sherman and despite
Sheridan's
famous quip that "the only good Indians I ever saw were
dead." Although
Sheridan did not mean that all Indians should be shot on sight,
but rather that none
of the warring Indians on the Plains could be trusted, his words,
as the
historian James Axtell rightly suggests, did "more to harm
straight thinking about
Indian-white relations than any number of Sand Creeks or Wounded
Knees."
As for that last-named encounter, it took place on
December 29, 1890 on the
Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. By this time, the 7th
Regiment of U.S.
Cavalry had compiled a reputation for aggressiveness,
particularly in the wake
of its surprise assault in 1868 on a Cheyenne village on the
Washita river in
Kansas, where about 100 Indians were killed by General George
Custer's men.
Still, the battle of Washita, although one-sided, had
not been a massacre:
wounded warriors were given first aid, and 53 women and children
who had hidden
in their lodges survived the assault and were taken prisoner. Nor
were the
Cheyennes unarmed innocents; as their chief Black Kettle
acknowledged, they had
been conducting regular raids into Kansas that he was powerless
to stop.
The encounter at Wounded Knee, 22 years later, must be
seen in the context of
the Ghost Dance religion, a messianic movement that since 1889
had caused
great excitement among Indians in the area and that was
interpreted by whites as
a general call to war. While an encampment of Sioux was being
searched for
arms, a few young men created an incident; the soldiers, furious
at what they
considered an act of Indian treachery, fought back furiously as
guns surrounding
the encampment opened fire with deadly effect. The Army's
casualties were 25
killed and 39 wounded, mostly as a result of friendly fire. More
than 300
Indians died.
Wounded Knee has been called "perhaps the
best-known genocide of North
American Indians." But, as Robert Utley has concluded in a
careful analysis, it is
better described as "a regrettable, tragic accident of
war," a bloodbath that
neither side intended. In a situation where women and children
were mixed with
men, it was inevitable that some of the former would be killed.
But several
groups of women and children were in fact allowed out of the
encampment, and
wounded Indian warriors, too, were spared and taken to a
hospital. There may have
been a few deliberate killings of noncombatants, but on the
whole, as a court
of inquiry ordered by President Harrison established, the
officers and
soldiers of the unit made supreme efforts to avoid killing women
and children.
On January 15, 1891, the last Sioux warriors
surrendered. Apart from isolated
clashes, America's Indian wars had ended.
V
The Genocide Convention was approved by the General
Assembly of the United
Nations on December 9, 1948 and came into force on January 12,
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 definition
established by
the convention has assumed prima-facie authority, and it is with
this
definition that we should begin in assessing the applicability of
the concept of
genocide to the events we have been 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, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such"
(emphases added).
Practically all legal scholars accept the centrality of this
clause. During the
deliberations over the convention, some argued for a clear
specification of the
reasons, or motives, for the destruction of a group. In the end,
instead of a
list of such motives, the issue was resolved by adding the words
"as such" -- i.e.,
the motive or reason for the destruction must be the ending of
the group as a
national, ethnic, racial, or religious entity. Evidence of such a
motive, as
one legal scholar put it, "will constitute an integral part
of the proof of a
genocidal plan, and therefore of genocidal intent."
The crucial role played by intentionality in the
Genocide Convention means
that under its terms the huge number of Indian deaths from
epidemics cannot be
considered genocide. The lethal diseases were introduced
inadvertently, and the
Europeans cannot be blamed for their ignorance of what medical
science would
discover only centuries later. Similarly, military engagements
that led to the
death of noncombatants, like the battle of the Washita, cannot be
seen as
genocidal acts, for the loss of innocent life was not intended
and the soldiers
did not aim at the destruction of the Indians as a defined group.
By contrast,
some of the massacres in California, where both the perpetrators
and their
supporters openly acknowledged a desire to destroy the Indians as
an ethnic
entity, might indeed be regarded under the terms of the
convention as exhibiting
genocidal intent.
Even as it outlaws the destruction of a group "in
whole or in part," the
convention does not address the question of what percentage of a
group must be
affected in order to qualify as genocide. As a benchmark, the
prosecutor of the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has
suggested "a
reasonably significant number, relative to the total of the group
as a whole,"
adding that the actual or attempted destruction should also
relate to "the
factual opportunity of the accused to destroy a group in a
specific geographic area
within the sphere of his control, and not in relation to the
entire population
of the group in a wider geographic sense." If this principle
were adopted, an
atrocity like the Sand Creek massacre, limited to one group in a
specific
single locality, might also be considered 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 taking place many decades if
not hundreds of
years earlier. Our knowledge of many of these occurrences is
incomplete.
Moreover, the malefactors, long since dead, cannot be tried in a
court of law,
where it would be possible to establish crucial factual details
and to clarify
relevant legal principles.
Applying today's standards to events of the past
raises still other
questions, legal and moral alike. While history has no statute of
limitations, our
legal system rejects the idea of retroactivity (ex post facto
laws). Morally, even
if we accept the idea of universal principles transcending
particular
cultures and periods, we must exercise caution in condemning,
say, the conduct of war
during America's colonial period, which for the most part
conformed to
thenprevailing notions of right and wrong. To understand all is
hardly to forgive
all, but historical judgment, as the scholar Gordon Leff has
correctly stressed,
"must always be contextual: it is no more reprehensible for
an age to have
lacked our values thanto have lacked forks."
The real task, then, is to ascertain the context of a
specific situation and
the options it presented. Given circumstances, and the moral
standards of the
day, did the people on whose conduct we are sitting in judgment
have a choice
to act differently? Such an approach would lead us to greater
indulgence
toward the Puritans of New England, who fought for their
survival, than toward the
miners and volunteer militias of California who often slaughtered
Indian men,
women, and children for no other reason than to satisfy their
appetite for
gold and land. The former, in addition, battled their Indian
adversaries in an
age that had little concern for humane standards of warfare,
while the latter
committed their atrocities in the face of vehement denunciation
not only by
self-styled humanitarians in the faraway East but by many of
their fellow citizens
in California.
Finally, even if some episodes can be considered
genocidal -- that is, tending
toward genocide -- they certainly do not justify condemning an
entire society.
Guilt is personal, and for good reason the Genocide Convention
provides that only
"persons" can be charged with the crime, probably even
ruling out legal
proceedings against governments. No less significant is that a
massacre like Sand
Creek was undertaken by a local volunteer militia and was not the
expression of
official U.S. policy. No regular U.S. Army unit was ever
implicated in a
similar atrocity. In the majority of actions, concludes Robert
Utley, "the Army
shot noncombatants incidentally and accidentally, not
purposefully." As for the
larger society, even if some elements in the white population,
mainly in the
West, at times advocated extermination, no official of the U.S.
government ever
seriously proposed it. Genocide was never American policy, nor
was it the
result of policy.
The violent collision between whites and America's
native population was
probably unavoidable. Between 1600 and 1850, a dramatic surge in
population led to
massive waves of emigration from Europe, and many of the millions
who arrived
in the New World gradually pushed westward into America's
seemingly unlimited
space. No doubt, the 19th-century idea of America's
"manifest destiny" was in
part a rationalization for acquisitiveness, but the resulting
dispossession
of the Indians was as unstoppable as other great population
movements of the
past. The U.S. government could not have prevented the westward
movement even if
it had wanted to.
In the end, the sad fate of America's Indians
represents not a crime but a
tragedy, involving an irreconcilable collision of cultures and
values. Despite
the efforts of well-meaning people in both camps, there existed
no good
solution to this clash. The Indians were not prepared to give up
the nomadic life of
the hunter for the sedentary life of the farmer. The new
Americans, convinced
of their cultural and racial superiority, were unwilling to grant
the original
inhabitants of the continent the vast preserve of land required
by the
Indians' way of life. The consequence was a conflict in which
there were few heroes,
but which was far from a simple tale of hapless victims and
merciless
aggressors. To fling the charge of genocide at an entire society
serves neither the
interests of the Indians nor those of history.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Comments (62)
http://hnn.us/board.php?id=7302
+++++++
Professor F. Littell has said: "You can't discuss
the truth of the holocaust.
That is a distortion of the concept of free speech. The United
States should
emulate Germany, which outlaws such exercises."
--Mind-boggling! Don't you
think?
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v11/v11p365_Bennett.html
+++++++
Peace is patriotic!
Michael Santomauro
Editorial Director
253 West 72nd street #1711
New York, NY 10023
http://www.tadp.org
Available for Talk-Radio interviews 24hours 212-787-7891
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