Forgetting the Native American Genocide: over 55 million dead

by Raffaella Milandri©

In recent wartime events we have often heard the term ‘genocide’. Let us clarify the definition and, above all, ask ourselves why the Indigenous Holocaust of the Americas is not mentioned in the tragic list of genocides. 

The death count

For decades, the academic world has questioned the true estimate of what the arrival of Europeans in the Americas and the subsequent impact of domination cost in human lives. The recent conclusions of researchers at University College London, led by Alexander Koch, have been published in various academic articles and in an interview with Business Insider: ‘Between 1492 and 1600, 90% of the indigenous populations in the Americas died. This means that some 55 million people died from wars, violence and unprecedented pathogens such as smallpox, measles and influenza’.

To this estimate must be added the Native people who died between 1600 and 1900, thus already in the ‘regime’ of coexistence and domination of the Europeans and the new states they created, and here the assessment of various scholars ranges from a few hundred thousand to tens of millions of deaths. I quote here a sentence from 1775 by the Cherokee chief Tsi’ yu-gunsini or Dragging Canoe: ’Whole Indian nations have melted like snowballs in the sun before the advance of the white man. They have left only the name of our people (…). The extinction of the entire race will be proclaimed’.

In the second half of the 19th century, some factions of the US Congress advocated an outright physical extermination of the native peoples; the ‘friends’ of the Indians, such as Pratt of the Carlisle Industrial School, advocated a mainly cultural genocide. Carl Schurz, a former Commissioner of Indian Affairs, concluded that the native peoples had ‘this stark alternative: extermination or civilisation’. Henry Pancoast, a Philadelphia lawyer, advocated a similar policy in 1882. He stated: ‘We must either slaughter them or civilise them, and what we decide to do, we must do quickly. The work of civilisation involved, in effect, decisive action to make them forget their culture, language and origins and make them ‘white’.

Let us now focus on the United States. Professor David Michael Smith of the University of Houston, who reports on the studies of, among others, Russell Thornton and David Stannard, points out that non-native deaths have not stopped since 1900. ‘Native deaths that have occurred in the United States since 1900 due to the legacy of colonialism and contemporary institutionalised racism must be counted. The total number of Native deaths has been caused by wars, repression and racist violence, but also by harsh economic and health conditions. The paucity of statistical information on Indigenous births, deaths and mortality for much of the 20th century makes it impossible to accurately estimate the total number of excess deaths. An estimate of at least 200,000 total deaths attributable to the legacy of colonialism and institutionalised racism from 1900 onwards is very conservative’.

To realistically raise the figures, one only has to think of the forced sterilisation of Native American women, which ended (we hope) in the late 1970s, which I will tell you about in a future article. Or the Indian residential schools, which ended in the late 1990s, which I told you about in a previous article. All instruments of death created in the United States where, moreover, it started in the early days with smallpox-infected blankets and the famous ‘firewater’.

The question is: why is the word genocide not automatically associated with Native Americans? The answer is simple. Just as many media outlets carefully avoid disseminating information about the past and present conditions of Native Americans, all the more reason not to mention genocide, which clashes terribly with the ‘land of the free’. I would like to take this opportunity to thank L’Antidiplomatico for giving me the space in this column to talk about issues that are as burning as they are obvious.

The concept of genocide

The UN Genocide Convention is an international treaty that outlaws genocide and obliges States Parties to implement the implementation of this prohibition. Here is the content of Article II of the UN Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948.

‘In this Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, 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 that result in its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures to prevent births within the group;

e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’.

Read more: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide-convention.shtml

It is interesting to note that this Convention was adopted by the United Nations Center for Human Rights in 1948, but was only approved in the United States in 1988 by Ronald Reagan.

The charge of genocide would therefore not be a romantic cry from liberals and do-gooders. It fits perfectly with the situation of Native Americans.

Currently, the Convention Against Genocide has been signed by 153 states (the last one being Zambia in 2022) out of the 193 total UN members.

The Pope and genocide

As we have seen in one of the previous articles, the Pope travelled to Canada in late July 2022 to apologise to the indigenous communities over the state-organised massacre of Indian residential schools, in which the Catholic Church took part. Brittany Hobson of the Canadian Express asked the Pope at a press conference during the return flight:

‘’You know that the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has described the residential school system as cultural genocide, and this expression has been corrected simply to genocide. The people who heard your words of apology this past week lamented the fact that the term genocide was not used. Would you use this term and acknowledge that members of the Church participated in this genocide?’

Pope Francis: ‘It is true, I did not use the word because it did not occur to me, but I described the genocide and I asked for pardon, forgiveness for this work that was genocidal. For example, I condemned this as well: to take children away, to change the culture, to change the mind, to change traditions, to change a race, let’s say, a whole culture. Yes, it is a technical word – genocide – but I did not use it because it did not occur to me. But I described that it was true, yes, it was genocide, yes, quiet. You say that I said that yes, it was genocide. Thank you‘’.

And Pope Francis was true to his word, when the next day a Vatican News report came out: ‘Pope Francis: It was genocide against indigenous peoples’.

 Link: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2022-07/pope-francis-apostolic-journey-inflight-press-conference-canada.html

Published originally in Italian in The AntiDiplomatico, 10 April 2024

“Nativi” column by Raffaella Milandri

https://www.lantidiplomatico.it/news-nativi/53237/