So, I’ve recently started hearing Dinesh D’Souza and Rush Limbaugh say some profound things about the alleged genocide of Native Americans by white people…They seem to be saying that it has either been greatly exaggerated or that it is a myth entirely and didn’t happen. This is hard for me to swallow after our years of being told that the United States was founded on ethnic cleansing through war, smallpox, and the Indian Removal Act of 1830. There was also some guy in Australia who denied their** genocide of indigenous people, simply known as “Aboriginals.” (And, yes, that is the pc term for those that don’t know). What do you dopers think?
I think you should stop listening to those two. They are not what you would call “reliable”
Yeah, that pretty much covers it.
Not just unrealiable. They make their livings by stirring up phony controversy.
Wait, Dinesh and Rush are analysts now? That seems a bit of a flossy title for those two.
All I can think of is that IIRC most deaths were due to disease, and the majority happened before most of them even saw a European. I don’t think people can be blamed for accidentally introducing a disease. And the “smallpox blankets” thing was overstated if not outright false, per Cecil. So yes, the things people are taught are often false, but Trail of Tears etc. aren’t disprovable nor are bright marks of history. Denying those is the sign of a whackjob. I’d have to see the specific claims, although I’m guessing it is not as far akin to Holocaust denial.
They’re amateurs in Glenn Beck World. Or Alex Jones.
Dinesh has more cred than Rush. But without specific quotes from either of them, how are we to judge the veracity of what they are saying? Obviously, Rush has a long history of ***ahem “stretching the truth”, but still, some quotes are needed for any meaningful discussion.
The smallpox thing, though, is subject to a certain amount of myth. AFAIK, the idea that Europeans deliberately infected Indians with smallpox by given them tainted blankets has been debunked. We still see that pop up on this MB from time to time.
However, there are certainly many instances of documented atrocities carried out by Europeans against Native Americans (and a few vice versa, although they sorta were here first…).
I think reports of European Americans intentionally killing Native Americans just because of who they were is overblown. They did not, for the most part, intend to wipe out most of the population with smallpox. In North America, much of the population reduction from disease had been accomplished before white settlers even reached the area.
White Americans were quite willing to take the resources that they wanted, by force or law if necessary. They weren’t generally too fond of Native Americans, and dealt harshly with them when they felt some offense had been committed. They at times waged open war against certain groups of Native Americans, but it was not generally war with the intent to kill all members of a group.
The actions most able to be described as a deliberate genocide are probably the attempts to “civilize” the savages, through the Indian Boarding Schools and such. Not an attempt to destroy a culture by killing the members of it, but by never letting the next generation learn it.
Cecil has an article about the “Smallpox blankets” thing. It seems likely that perhaps as many as 90% of the natives were taken out by disease, but the blanket thing was just the idle ramblings of one horrible man and were never put into use. Overall, I’m not aware of any active attempts to use disease to kill the Natives nor of any active genocidal practices. Forced marches were used and certainly did cause deaths, but unlike the Armenian genocide, I don’t think that was a goal. (Abraham Lincoln ordered/approved at least one forced march.)
It may well be that if the land had been fully occupied, that the whites would have started acting genocidally, but the waves of disease spread out before them, saving them from doing this. But I think it’s more likely that Europeans would have acted as they did in Africa and India, and co-opted the local governments. The plagues that the Europeans caused, instead, left the land almost uninhabited (compared to what it had been) and I think that the settlers didn’t feel like it made sense to grant the majority of the land to a people who could only populate 10% of it, due to their reduced numbers.
The Whites were actively evil, but more on the level of Mao Zedong than Hitler.
Well, yes. Here’s the thing- by and large the “genocide” vs the native Americans was not planned at any high level. Either it was accidental (such as the largest portion of accidentally introduced diseases) or the planning was on a rather small local scale.
It’s also unsure what the goal of the Cherokee Trail of Tears was at the highest level. Did Martin van Buren* mean* to kill 2-4000 Indians? Or was he just uncaring and corrupt? We know Hitlers goal was to kill the Jews. Did Van Buren mean to pacify and relocate the Cherokee and the deaths were a side-effect, unwanted but not of much concern?
I would second the request for an actual cited quotation. I cannot imagine either of those individuals being capable of saying anything profound (or even accurate), on any topic.
= = =
As to the claims: the notion that there has never been any genocidal action taken is rubbish.
Claims that all deaths were deliberate acts of genocide are clearly overstated, but there were certainly genocidal acts or actions that were effectively genocidal.
There are two serious claims regarding smallpox.
One is actual correspondence with General Amherst in which the suggestion was put forth to seed Indian villages of the Ohio Valley with smallpox-contaminated blankets. We know that subsequent to that exchange, smallpox did sweep through the Indian nations of the Ohio Valley. However, we have no subsequent letters detailing the action and there is the problem that smallpox was also travelling through the white settlements of the region at the same time. The Indians might easily have contracted the disease from simple trade even if no contaminated blankets were ever sent to the tribes. (And how does one transport contaminated blankets without endangering the people carrying the blankets unless one guarantees that everyone involved has already survived the disease; there is no record of any call for volunteers for such a duty, although it is also true that British troops were inoculated/variolated against smallpox at that time.)
The second claim is that the transmission of smallpox to the Plains Indians by the steamer St. Peter was deliberate. That plague wiped out over half of the several tribes in the region. However, that appears to have been simply bad luck. It was transmitted by crewmen aboard the steamer who certainly had not chosen to infect themselves, several of them dying. There were also serious efforts to inoculate some members of the Indians living at the forts past which the St. Peter steamed along with efforts to keep the Indians who came to trade from coming in contact with those who were sick within the forts. There was simply too much interaction among the whites and Indians to prevent its transmission.
More serious efforts at genocide are those such as the devastation of four (of six) Iroquois nations ordered by George Washington in 1779 in reprisal for Iroquois support for the British. The Sullivan expedition destroyed villages, crops, stored food, and farming implements, leaving the four tribes desolate in the face of the upcoming winter.
Similar campaigns were carried out against other Indian agricultural societies over the course of the next forty years in Alabama and Mississippi, Illinois and Indiana, Florida, and so on.
And, while it was not initiated as a deliberate effort of genocide–it started as simply one more effort to make money–the slaughter of the buffalo herds had the effect of genocide for the Pains Indians. When the hunts began, the bison were considered an inexhaustible resource, but long before the final herds were destroyed, many people recognized that it would have the effect of destroying the peoples who relied upon bison for their lives–with various people arguing to stop it or encouraging its continuance for that very reason.
I try not to have my opinions swayed by a random “some guy.”
“Some guy” said the Holocaust didn’t happen. “Some guy” said 9/11 was a US Government conspiracy. “Some guy” said Armstrong and Aldrin never landed on the moon. There’s always some guy spouting some nonsense.
Having just read Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America’s Independence, the Sullivan expedition was in reprisal for the Cherry Valley massacre. That was a pretty horrible occurrence, and the Iroquois** were* waging war vs the fledgling USA. The Sullivan expedition was no worse than any other 'scorched earth" campaign against a enemy. War* is* hell.
- four of the tribes or nations.
Actually, here is the link to Cecil’s article, since it’s been mentioned several times:
Cecil specifically discusses a letter exchange between Lord Jeffrey Amherst of Fort Pitt and a Col. Henry Bouquet, in which the two suggest infecting the local natives with smallpox blankets. Cecil concludes, based on the research of Peter d’Errico, that the two men were having a serious discussion about the blankets, that such blankets were in good supply at Fort Pitt, and that, by the following spring, smallpox was in good supply amongst the local natives.
I think we have to say, that at least in the Fort Pitt vicinity, it’s plausible.
I dunno if “give me your land” is genocidal. It’s dickish and wrong, but it’s not “I want you to die just because you’re you.” That’s different and way worse
It’s true that a lot of the deaths by diseases to which the Europeans were immune were not intentional (great swaths of New England were depopulated by the Great Plague, the occurrence of which in America was well-known in Europe. The Pilgrims were able to settle uncontested largely because a lot of the inhabitants – whole villages – had died. Cortez was aided in his Conquest of Mexico by Smallpox.
But the Europeans pushed relentlessly against the borders of Indian territory and certainly did not intend to yield. Read the history of Indian-European/American interactions and you find a collection of broken treaties. I’ve just finished reading Frank Waters’ Masked Gods, about the Indians of Four Corners, and the depredations against the Indians by the Spanish, Mexicans, and the US are heartbreaking. It was the same in the East. I wrote a historical article on a New Jersey Indian chief put on trial in 1727 over an altercation about land, and covered parallel cases. There was a great American hunger for land that inevitably lead to the native inhabitants being pushed out of the way over and over again, and even the vast territory set aside as a super-reservation – OKlahoma – was eventually taken from them and turned into an Anglo state.
This may not be direct genocide, but it certainly leads that way indirectly.
Genocide can be a very specific term, or be used loosely. The object of the Indian Relocation Act wasn’t to kill them but to open the land they occupied in the Southeast to White People. Nobody seems to know why the Government forced them to march cross country in the winter with no food, clothing, or shelter under the guns of an army that didn’t mind watching them die by the thousands. Just like Cheney’s great victory in Iraq that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, no American wanted to be bothered with the facts that scream out our guilt in great atrocities. Arguably taking a People’s land, religion, and language from the few who survive first contact with you is the classic definition of genocide.
And somebody brought up Mao and H, when it comes to being a madman and slaughtering tens of millions of people Mao made H look like an amateur. Just cause they didn’t teach you that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Genocide is indeed a tricky term. If someone went in and tried to kill everyone in Switzerland, could he say: Not genocide-- the Swiss are just Europeans and there are plenty of Europeans left.
Similarly, if the US army goes in and wipes out an entire band of Arapaho, could we say: Well, there are all sorts of other Indians left, so that isn’t genocide.
Maybe using that term just muddies the waters. Fact is, most Native Americans who were killed by the arrival of Europeans died of diseases brought over. And then many of those left were killed in various skirmishes, wars, forced relocations, etc. It’s a stain on American history right up there with Slavery. One of our darker moments, so whether it was genocide or not isn’t really helping out the discussion.
In a lot of cases, the problem was the authorities weren’t strong enough to apply the treaties they made on their own people/the settlers. Settlers here and there could stake a claim of land, clear it, and start farming and the authorities didn’t have the manpower to stop them.
Indeed, but Mao just didn’t care if his goals cost people their lives, which seems to have been how Americans treated the Natives. Outside of some political enemies, I don’t know that Mao had any intent to kill anyone, though certainly if you pissed him off, he was going to rain hell fire down on you and your supporters. Hitler, on the other hand, had select groups that he fully intended to eradicate. Stalin and Lenin may have done a good job of killing Russians, for example, and killed more of them than Hitler ever did. But Hitler’s entire goal was to kill 90% of all Russians - which would have far exceeded what the Communist leaders were able to do.