Yeah, another way for an ethnic group to be wiped out is to intermarry to the extent that they basically no longer exist apart from the “invaders”.
Perhaps the Ainu in Japan would fall into that category.
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I acknowledge your point about outside interference, but I think there’s another aspect to this too. People anywhere have a tendancy to revise history and therefore not everyone is going to define genocide the same way. For example, the United States government might categorize a mass killing in Armenia as genocide, but they would be more reluctant to call what happened to the American Indians a genocide because it casts them in a negative light. Sometimes there has to be an outside view on these things to get the best perspective. Disagree with me if you want, that’s just how I see it.
Thanks for all the responses. I was mainly curious about situations when one group explicitly says “let’s kill all the ___”, not so much genocides as a side effect of disease, land acquisition, or enslavement. So for example, Jews in WW2 count because the Germans just wanted to get rid of them, but Native Americans don’t because the US government never actually said to kill all Native Americans.
With regard to Tasmania, did the British say “let’s kill all the aborigines”, or did they say “let’s take all the land and don’t worry if you have to kill some aborigines to do it”? It wasn’t clear to me from the stuff I read.
There is a “Carib Territory” on the island of Dominica in the Carribean, with a voting population of approximately 2,000. When I visited it, I was told this is the “last” community of Caribs in existence, but I hear that sort of thing all the time and wouldn’t be surprised at all if there are other, smaller communities of people of Carib descent in other places.
Some people assert that at the current rate of population decline, the Montagnards of Laos and Vietnam will be extinct by the year 2019. This decline is being cheerfully helped along by the Vietnamese government. I seriously doubt they will be exterminated entirely (and the calculation on that page is incorrect). Usually (in my experience) a community declines to the point where it drops off the oppressor’s radar and then it can struggle along as a small but distinct community for hundreds of years or more.
I don’t know how you feel about political extinction, but a sad thing happened last year. The Chinook Tribe of Washington was one of the tribes which assisted Lewis and Clark in their expedition across the future United States. Despite this, the tribal leadership was not officially recognized by the federal government. Descendants of the Tribe applied for federal recognition about ten years ago and received an approval by the Clinton Administration. The Bush Administration pulled that decision, sat on it for eighteen months then reversed it in July, 2002. In a tragic turn of events, tribal representatives were in Washington, DC as guests of President Bush to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition when the final negative decision was handed down by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The negative decision prevents the Chinooks from dealing directly with the federal government and makes them politically irrelevant.
As an aside, Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum wrote a twisted editorial in the aftermath of the massacre at Wounded Knee, which suggested, “[h]aving wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.” Scary, huh?
Sofa, I did not know about the “Carib Territory” on Dominica, and stand corrected, at least partially. Academic/political/legal definitions and debates aside, if this group self-identifies as the last remnant of the pre-Columbian Caribs, who am I to argue?
Know of any surviving Taino groups?
A bit of both. A large part of the process was due to introduced diseases, land dispossession and unorganised massacres. However, the Government organised the so called “Black Wars” in the early 1800s and paid bounties for the killing of aborigines (4 pounds for an adult and 2 pounds for a child). cite
Just as an addendum to my post above, the island that some Tasmanian aboriginals were relocated to was Flinders Island