UNGENOCIDE

"Sympathy for Native Americans and admiration for their cultures in no way requires a belief in European or American genocide."

As the years have gone by, I've found that many of the things I simply took for granted or had been told when I was young turned out to not be true at all. For example, it was a hard lesson to learn and I didn't care for it, but it is actually true that if you cut taxes, even if just on the rich, this not only increases government tax revenues, it actually helps the poor. I found out that while nuclear weapons are horrible, they aren't actually going to destroy the world. I found out that the Civil War wasn't a noble crusade by the North to free the slaves, but had far more complex legal and historical issues at hand.

I have lived among and around native American tribes all my life, there are reservations not far from where I live, when I was in Farmington New Mexico as a child my father used to do house calls to the Navajo tribes (who mysteriously learned to speak English when treated with dignity and respect) to fix their television sets. I go to church with some Native Americans, there's a major school for the local tribes in the town I live in. I know better than many the evils these people suffered at the hands of settlers and the US government. I know the inside story of much of the betrayal and lies the Native Americans suffered from the military and government of the United States.

How when land the reservations were set up on became useful or contained valuable materials, the government would move the tribes again. How permanent treaties made with tribes that were to last forever were abandoned within days sometimes. How the military systematically murdered entire families of tribes in retaliation for attacks. The list of misery, shame, and horror is quite long.

However, I also know the other side of it: how the local "peaceful" Northwestern tribes had slaves and at the potlach (which we get potluck from) captured members of each other's tribes that were made slaves were cooked and eaten to make peace. How the Sioux swept across the great plains and slaughtered to the last man entire nations of indians before white settlers even got there.

And I know now, as Michael Medved recently pointed out in a column, that the word "genocide" is false when applied to the treatment of Native Americans by the US government:

I've never denied that the 400 year history of American contact with the Indians includes many examples of white cruelty and viciousness --- just as the Native Americans frequently (indeed, regularly) dealt with the European newcomers with monstrous brutality and, indeed, savagery. In fact, reading the history of the relationship between British settlers and Native Americans its obvious that the blood-thirsty excesses of one group provoked blood thirsty excesses from the other, in a cycle that listed with scant interruption for several hundred years.
...
Colonial and, later, the American government, never endorsed or practiced a policy of Indian extermination; rather, the official leaders of white society tried to restrain some of their settlers and militias and paramilitary groups from unnecessary conflict and brutality.

Moreover, the real decimation of Indian populations had nothing to do with massacres or military actions, but rather stemmed from infectious diseases that white settlers brought with them at the time they first arrived in the New World.

Medved angerered quite a few people when he mentioned this on his radio program, and the comments at Town Hall where the article appeared continued the outrage and discussion:

I'm guessing Mr. Medved was dropped on his head several times as a child to be this stupid!

Do a little more research before you start spouting off about things you don't have a clue about.

YES, genocide was a government policy!
YES, the US government used "germ warfare". Purposely giving small-pox infected blankets to the Indians.
Starvation, murder, rape, cutting babies out of the womb, mutilation of bodies. It all happened, done by your founding hero's. Makes me sick just to think about it.

Mass murderers is what they are and is how they should be remembered! Yeah, the truth sucks, take a big bite and swallow.

Whites need to learn and accept the truth. You would all hang your heads in shame if you knew how your country was really founded.
-by redline


Being Jewish, I'm sure that Mr. Medved is familiar with the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide where Resolution 260 (III) A was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948.

It includes:

Article 2

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.

Now, perhaps these comments might have something of the law to go by, and you also Mr. Medved.
-by Yellowcrow


By this ridiculous definition, killing ONE member of a group is genocide, since the killer desired to destroy the group 'in part'. Granted, this allows any bunch of professional victims to claim they have been the objects of genocide, but it reduces the word to meaninglessness.
-by Tallil2long


There is nothing unique about the situation of Native Americans. Anyone who knows history knows that. Various tribes from Asia overran Europe during the Roman Empire. Before that Romans conquered half of the known world. Was Alexander the Great responsible for genocide? What about the struggle of Spaniards against the Moors? These are facts of life.
All of the posters here disagreeing with Michael base their disagreement on their opinions and wishful thinking. Get some facts to back up your positions. You are typical products of American universities. You idiots prove Dennis Prager’s opinion that one graduates college with less knowledge and common sense than before attending it.
It's always the white man's fault. Quit whining you little sissies. Your Native American forefathers are turning in their graves. Where is the pride that the Native Americans were supposed to have?
-by lokietek1


Another thing the new revisionists ignore and deny is that the tribes fought viciously among themselves.

Lewis & Clark, who never would have survived their expedition if not for the help of Indians, document a village near the Missouri River where the expedition stayed the first winter. The tribe begged them to stay on in the spring because another tribe was threatening them. Lewis and Clark left to explore the west and on their return trip found that the village had been razed, its inhabitants slaughtered.

Steven LaBlanc's excellent book, Constant Battles, Why we fight provides excellent evidence of pre-Columbian warfare in N. America and among primitive tribes in Africa and S.America.

Sadly, our forebears were even more prone to bloodshed than we contemporary humans.
-by FLightr4Right


"Whites need to learn and accept the truth."

Reds have issues they should address, too.

Oh, wait, don't like Native Americans being referred to as 'reds'? Smacks of racism? So does your use of 'whites'.

This is illustrative of the real problem I often find among Native activists: they sell themselves as perpetually-innocent victims, pretending that they themselves are pure as the driven snow.

I know some persons of Creek descent who continually play the victim card, talking about how the mean old whites took their lands and damaged their culture. When I asked them how they felt about their own ancestors raiding, killing, kidnapping and selling into English slavery their neighbors of the Guale, Yamassee and Timucua peoples, they just got mad. Called it (an extremely well-documented historical fact) a lie by the whites. The Creeks DESTROYED many of the cultures of the old Southeast, but take no blame.

But you know what? The Native peoples were just human beings. Like the Europeans, but without the technology and societal organization that would have allowed them to wreak more havoc on their environment and their neighbors. When those things were available to them... well, look up the Beaver Wars, in which larger Native polities happily exterminated smaller ones in order to rape more lands for furs to trade.

Every people needs to be honest about the wrongs done to them, and by them.
-by Tallil2long


The way I see it the American Indians are exacting redress for past grievances by building Casinos and separating the ignorant grandsons of the white eyes from their money.
As far as revenge goes; I give it an eight.
-by Lazlo


so now medved is a historian. lol

andrew jackson removed the cherokee from florida and the southeast despite a supreme court ruling not to do so.

thousands of cherokees died on the way.

all tribes were forced onto reservations which were little more than internment camps.
-by religiouslib


Lord Jeffrey Amherst was commanding general of British forces in North America during the final battles of the so-called French & Indian war (1754-1763). He won victories against the French to acquire Canada for England and helped make England the world's chief colonizer at the conclusion of the Seven Years War among the colonial powers (1756-1763).
Colonel Henry Bouquet to General Amherst, dated 13 July 1763, [262k] suggests in a postscript the distribution of blankets to "inocculate the Indians";
Amherst to Bouquet, dated 16 July 1763, [128k] approves this plan in a postscript and suggests as well as "to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race." (This postcript spans two pages.)
These letters also discuss the use of dogs to hunt the Indians, the so-called "Spaniard's Method," which Amherst approves in principle, but says he cannot implement because there are not enough dogs. In a letter dated 26 July 1763, Bouquet acknowledges Amherst's approval [125k] and writes, "all your Directions will be observed."

Historian Francis Parkman, in his book The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War after the Conquest of Canada [Boston: Little, Brown, 1886] refers to a postscript in an earlier letter from Amherst to Bouquet wondering whether smallpox could not be spread among the Indians:

Could it not be contrived to send the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes of Indians? We must on this occasion use every stratagem in our power to reduce them. [Vol. II, p. 39 (6th edition)]
I have not found this letter, but there is a letter from Bouquet to Amherst, dated 23 June 1763, [189k] three weeks before the discussion of blankets to the Indians, stating that Captain Ecuyer at Fort Pitt (to which Bouquet would be heading with reinforcements) has reported smallpox in the Fort. This indicates at least that the writers knew the plan could be carried out.
-by RedRoadWalker


After 10,000 years in a land with every natural resource they could want the American Aborigines never achieved even a iron age level of civilization.

Is that a moral justification for violently displacing them? No, not at all. It's a recognition of a historical inevitability: Darwin's laws apply to societies and cultures, too.
-by Grumpy

What is sad to me is the way some unfortunate people fixated on a certain position or opposition to someone can miss the point. Michael Medved spent three paragraphs talking about the evils Native Americans suffered. He decried the evils done to them. He simply was making a clear point: that doesn't amount to genocide. He's not arguing nothing bad was done. He's not making the case that Native Americans have nothing to complain about. He's just noting that the use of the word genocide is in error.

The truth is, genocide is a word that has a real meaning. Like torture, using it to describe things less than its true horror cheapens the evils faced by its victims and lessens the power of the word. Throwing genocide around for emotional impact is deceptive and misleading - intentionally so in some cases. While Native American tribes were killed and mistreated, there was no systematic and deliberate policy or attempt to destroy and kill the Native Americans, not a single tribe nor the entire people. Ever, by any US government.

One of the myths that is perpetrated about the white expansion into North America is that we brought diseases to a clean, healthy, and ecologically pure people. That's a pile of crap - the Native Americans had their own diseases (which they shared with the Whites), and the new diseases each other faced were devastating to each other. It's just that whites had superior medical treatment and tended to survive better.

But there's another aspect that isn't discussed. What happens to a tribe that loses it's best warriors to disease, if they are too sick to fight? Even the ones that might recover will be slaughtered in the next raid by an enemy tribe, which was going on constantly. Diseases don't tend to destroy everyone in an infected area, not even 75%. Half is the worst an infectious disease pattern usually will reach at most. Yet we are to believe that the ravages of Smallpox killed 95% of the population of an entire continent?

What is more shameful, however, than anything the US governments of the past did to Native Americans is the present slavery and dehumanization of welfare and dependence upon the US government that far too many tribes now live under.

Native Americans, Genocide