Is the US government guilty of genocide?
[FAO readers : as you may notice, some of the articles have been written further back in time. It’s just that they were written previously in French for a French alternative media website, legrandsoir.info, and recently translated in English for a wider audience]
“If we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down until that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi… in war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy them all.” Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States, 28 August 1807.
It is estimated that the Amerindian population of North America at the end of the 15th century, when the first Europeans set foot on the continent, numbered more than 12 million. Over the next two centuries, more than three-quarters of these populations were decimated by diseases against which they had no immune defence, as well as by the incessant wars that pitted them against the European settlers.
At the time of the USA's independence in 1776, the European colonies located mainly in the east of the North American continent numbered between 3 and 4 million people. This foreign presence pushed the indigenous peoples towards the western regions. A few years later, the first pioneers crossed the Mississippi River to begin the slow process of conquering the West. This marked the beginning of a century during which more than 400 peace treaties were signed between the authorities of the young America and the representatives of the Indian tribes, treaties which were all, without exception, violated by the former.
The Sand Creek Massacre in 1864 for instance is representative of the systematic attitude of settlers and of the United States government in similar episodes, in a global and conscious desire to exterminate indigenous peoples. A few years earlier, in 1851, the Treaty of Fort Laramie was signed, in which the United States recognised large parts of present-day Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas, over which it had no rights whatsoever, as the property of Native American tribes. Seven years later, in 1858, gold was discovered in Colorado, triggering the Pike's Peak gold rush and the violation of the Treaty of Fort Laramie by a large number of European settlers who moved illegally onto Native American lands, provoking de facto confrontations. In 1861, the Cheyennes and Arapahos, keen to keep the peace despite everything, sent a representation of chiefs who signed the Treaty of Fort Wise ceding most of their lands to the United States. This left them with less than one thirteenth of the territories that the Treaty of Fort Laramie had granted them ten years earlier.
Among the Indian chiefs who signed this treaty were Black Cloud, White Antelope and Lean Bear.
Three years later, in 1864, Colorado troops under the command of US Army Colonel John Chivington began attacking and destroying Cheyenne camps without any declaration of war or apparent reason. On 16 May 1864, a detachment came upon a Native hunting camp containing Black Cloud and Lean Bear, signatories to the Treaty of Fort Wise. Lean Bear, who had already met Lincoln at the White House, always carried with him documents signed by the President of the United States certifying that he was a friend of the United States. He rode towards the soldiers fully confident that the meeting would be peaceful, but as he approached they opened fire and shot him dead. They were acting under orders from Chivington to kill any Cheyenne they encountered.
“Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! ... I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven to kill Indians. ... Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice!” Colonel John Milton Chivington
Following these incidents, John Evans, the Governor of Colorado, sent a letter to the various tribes inviting all those who wanted peace to present themselves at Fort Lyon, where they would be recognised as peaceful and placed under the protection of the United States government. Black Cloud led his people to Fort Lyon, where they were settled on Sand Creek. At the centre of the camp, he decorated the top of his teepee with an American flag and a white flag to signal to anyone that they were peaceful and under the protection of the United States government. Most of the people in the camp were women and children, and most of the warriors had gone hunting. Twice they had signed treaties ceding vast swathes of their territory to preserve the peace, twice the United States had violated those treaties, invaded their lands and killed their people. And finally, they surrendered to the mercy of the United States and settled where they were told, in the hope of living in peace and guaranteed safety.
On 29 November 1864, Colonel Chivington ordered his detachment to surround the camp and fire. The women and children gathered around the American flag overhanging their chief's teepee. White Antelope was shot as he approached the troops, shouting for them to cease fire. Later, his body was mutilated, he was scalped, and his nose, ears and genitals were cut off. The soldiers entered the camp armed with rifles and sabres and massacred everyone they could. Eyewitness accounts tell of scalped children with smashed skulls, pregnant women disembowelled, children used as training targets by the soldiers, mutilated bodies... Black Cloud managed to escape from the camp and continued to devote himself as best he could to obtaining a lasting peace, until 1868 when he was shot in the back by soldiers while crossing a river.
Chivington, who had orchestrated the massacre, was never prosecuted.
The US government has never recognised the genocidal nature of these acts. On the contrary, the official American historiography, which excludes the term genocide, tends to minimise the nature of the massacres by describing them as acts of war committed in a context of war in response to other acts of war, by drawing historical parallels that are hazardous, to say the least, between the American Indian wars and the wars against the Nazis, and by denying the scale of the forces involved, which, even if they had been equivalent, would not erase the reality: the American Indians were defending their land against an invader.
Are the United States guilty of genocide against the Native American peoples?
“If we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down until that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi… in war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy them all.” Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States, 28 August 1807.
In the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the United Nations defines genocide as the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, whether or not by a combination of the following acts :
- killing members of that group
- causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of that group
- intentionally inflicting on that group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
- taking measures to prevent births within the group, or transferring children from the group to another group against their will.
The US government made numerous attempts to inoculate indigenous populations with smallpox. These extracts from correspondence between two US army officers bear witness to this.
General Jeffery Amherst, 8 July 1763: "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…”
Colonel Henry Bouquet, July 13, 1763: "I will try to infect the Indians by means of blankets that may fall into their hands, taking care not to contract the disease myself".
General Jeffery Amherst, July 16, 1763: "You will do well to try to infect the Indians by means of blankets, as well as to try any other method that may serve to extirpate this execrable race."
Colonel Henry Bouquet, 19 July 1763: "All your Directions will be observed.”
Furthermore, while it is undeniable that diseases were also spread among the native populations through peaceful contact or in some other accidental way, the fact remains that they led to situations of famine, with the sick unable to hunt because they were weakened, and that malnutrition added to miserable living conditions or forced displacements favoured their spread and worsened their impact.
In the 60s and 70s, the American health services sterilised thousands of American Indian women without their consent or even without their knowledge.
In both Canada and the United States, thousands of Amerindian children were forced to attend religious boarding schools with the avowed aim of "killing the Indian to save the man". These notoriously harsh and brutal schools were located far from the reserves so that the children had as little contact as possible with their families and culture. The children were forced to speak a different language and the practice of activities specific to the Native Americans was forbidden, with corporal punishment used to inculcate these rules. These schools, whose aim was to eradicate Native American culture and replace it with the dominant culture, were still operating in the 1980s.
The names of these peoples - Apache, Cherokee, Navajo, Sioux, etc. - are now used to name war machines, SUV and other luxury vehicles.
Thanksgiving, the holiday celebrated in November, is also said to be linked to a massacre of Amerindians by European settlers in the 17th century who, after inviting them to a feast to thank them for their help and welcome, then massacred them and thanked God for having allowed them to "eliminate the savages".
The State of Israel's policy towards the Palestinian people, supported by the United States, is eerily similar to that pursued against the American Indian peoples from 1776 to the present day. Tsahal has just made it simpler (i.e. without consequences) to shoot Palestinian civilians: from now on they will be able to shoot people throwing stones or molotov cocktails... at least they have the authorisation now.
In 1900, there were fewer than 250,000 American Indians left in the United States, all forced to live on reserves in poverty from which they would never escape, and consuming massive amounts of alcohol and drugs in the hope of escaping their shame and misfortune.