George Mason University’s “History News Network” (byline Because the Past is the Present, and the Future too) has published 11-22-04 the article “Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?” by Guenter Lewy.
You can read it yourself. I’m not going to go through it point by point.
I will give two brief excerpts:
The sorry tale continues in California. The area that in 1850 became admitted to the Union as the 31st state had once held an Indian population estimated at anywhere between 150,000 and 250,000. By the end of the 19th century, the number had dropped to 15,000. As elsewhere, disease was the single most important factor, although the state also witnessed an unusually large number of deliberate killings.
The discovery of gold in 1848 brought about a fundamental change in Indian-white relations. Whereas formerly Mexican ranchers had both exploited the Indians and provided them with a minimum of protection, the new immigrants, mostly young single males, exhibited animosity from the start, trespassing on Indian lands and often freely killing any who were in their way. An American officer wrote to his sister in 1860: “There never was a viler sort of men in the world than is congregated about these mines.”
What was true of miners was often true as well of newly arrived farmers. By the early 1850’s, whites in California outnumbered Indians by about two to one, and the lot of the natives, gradually forced into the least fertile parts of the territory, began to deteriorate rapidly. Many succumbed to starvation; others, desperate for food, went on the attack, stealing and killing livestock. Indian women who prostituted themselves to feed their families contributed to the demographic decline by removing themselves from the reproductive cycle. As a solution to the growing problem, the federal government sought to confine the Indians to reservations, but this was opposed both by the Indians themselves and by white ranchers fearing the loss of labor. Meanwhile, clashes multiplied.
Lewy absolves, throughout, of any genocidal intent, but you can visit the article and read that for yourself, how the reduction of a native population, such as the indigenous nations that were in what became California, to at least 1/10th of what they were, has everything to do with just plain old “You’ve got what I want and I’m taking it” and nothing to do with genocide. Here he even goes so far as to state the goverment decided to confine Indians to reservations for their own damned good. I mean, all those Indian women prostituting themselves, removing themselves from the reproductive cycle! Send them to the reservations where they can breed in peace, right?
Are you believing this? Following up the mention of Indian women prostituting themselves to feed families, these women themselves “removing” themselves from the reproductive cycle, with the necessity of putting the Indian on the reservation to save him or herself from him or herself? Tell me you find this just as bizarre as I do.
They fucking starved on the reservations. There are plenty of historic accounts of starvation on the reservations. And history states quite plainly the intent of the reservations was to give the white man the Indian’s land and to kill the Indian in the Indian, destroying Indian communities and ways of self-governing. There were even legislators who had the balls to say so. But Lewy says no it was because of starvation and Indian women were decimating the numbers of their tribes by prostituting themselves.
Fuck Lewy who ends in saying.
In the end, the sad fate of America’s Indians represents not a crime but a tragedy, involving an irreconcilable collision of cultures and values. Despite the efforts of well-meaning people in both camps, there existed no good solution to this clash. The Indians were not prepared to give up the nomadic life of the hunter for the sedentary life of the farmer. The new Americans, convinced of their cultural and racial superiority, were unwilling to grant the original inhabitants of the continent the vast preserve of land required by the Indians’ way of life. The consequence was a conflict in which there were few heroes, but which was far from a simple tale of hapless victims and merciless aggressors. To fling the charge of genocide at an entire society serves neither the interests of the Indians nor those of history.
Guess what word is never mentioned in Lewy’s article.
Treaty.
Never once does he mention the word Treaty. We’re supposed to believe all those Indians and Anglos were having it out over individual turf wars and that there were no protocals, that there were no laws telling the White Man, “No, you can not go here.”
That is one of the more glaring ommissions in Lewy’s fucked-up article. How many treaties were there? Well, fuck that. Forget about treaties.
Lewy acknowledges one Anglo atrocity after another, acknowledges decades-long slaughters which drove native populations into terrifying, catastrophic declie, but somehow that’s just what happens when hapless nomadic Indians meet up against superior Anglos. Plop in the grave you go.
Treaties? Who the fuck ever heard of treaties? Lewy writes,
Lastly we come to the wars on the Great Plains. Following the end of the Civil War, large waves of white migrants, arriving simultaneously from East and West, squeezed the Plains Indians between them. In response, the Indians attacked vulnerable white outposts; their “acts of devilish cruelty,” reported one officer on the scene, had “no parallel in savage warfare.” The trails west were in similar peril: in December 1866, an army detachment of 80 men was lured into an ambush on the Bozeman Trail, and all of the soldiers were killed.
To force the natives into submission, Generals Sherman and Sheridan, who for two decades after the Civil War commanded the Indian-fighting army units on the Plains, applied the same strategy they had used so successfully in their marches across Georgia and in the Shenandoah Valley. Unable to defeat the Indians on the open prairie, they pursued them to their winter camps, where numbing cold and heavy snows limited their mobility. There they destroyed the lodges and stores of food, a tactic that inevitably resulted in the deaths of women and children.
Genocide? These actions were almost certainly in conformity with the laws of war accepted at the time.
Bastard completely ignores the 1868 Great Sioux Treaty.
Even NARA has a page upon on the treaty.
In the spring of 1868 a conference was held at Fort Laramie, in present day Wyoming, that resulted in a treaty with the Sioux. This treaty was to bring peace between the whites and the Sioux who agreed to settle within the Black Hills reservation in the Dakota Territory.
The Black Hills of Dakota are sacred to the Sioux Indians. In the 1868 treaty, signed at Fort Laramie and other military posts in Sioux country, the United States recognized the Black Hills as part of the Great Sioux Reservation, set aside for exclusive use by the Sioux people. In 1874, however, General George A. Custer led an expedition into the Black Hills accompanied by miners who were seeking gold. Once gold was found in the Black Hills, miners were soon moving into the Sioux hunting grounds and demanding protection from the United States Army. Soon, the Army was ordered to move against wandering bands of Sioux hunting on the range in accordance with their treaty rights. In 1876, Custer, leading an army detachment, encountered the encampment of Sioux and Cheyenne at the Little Bighorn River. Custer’s detachment was annihilated, but the United States would continue its battle against the Sioux in the Black Hills until the government confiscated the land in 1877. To this day, ownership of the Black Hills remains the subject of a legal dispute between the U.S. government and the Sioux.
Source: NARA. Go look it up yourself.
So, duh, those Indians fighting the soldiers on the Great Plains and the soldiers fighting them back, it was all “conformity with the laws of war” of the time.
Well Lewy there were treaties too, you bastard. I don’t have a clue who you are, Lewy and I’m not even going to bother to look it up right now. I don’t care if you’ve written a million and thousand good articles. Though I’m totally ignorant of who you are, I’m not going to bother right now to look you up. Because….
When it comes to American Indians, you are a bastard.
Next time, try writing into your history something about treaties and how the anglos were supposed to not go into certain areas, that they were supposed to be Indian lands, but the anglos decided screw that, we’ll take what we fucking want.
If you had mentioned the word treaty just once in your damned article I might have bothered to read the whole thing and all your excuses as to why there was no genocide or ethnocide involved.
With views like Lewy’s you better believe the past is the present and the future too. As in, “We’ll take what we want because we want it and afterwards we’ll plead cultural differences and ignore treaties and mark it all up to the indigenous population being y’know,just plain unable to keep up with the times!”
This article of Lewy’s is one of the highlighted articles in George Mason’s “History News Network Teacher’s Edition”.
High school history teachers: Help is on the way!
The History News Network (HNN) has developed a special Hot Topics edition designed to help you interest students in history.
Our Hot Topics page is ideal for teachers of history who are trying to show students how history is relevant to their lives. It’s also obviously ideal for social studies teachers.
Five minutes on our site and you’ll be able to build an entire class around almost any event in the news.
Most importantly, you’ll have instant access to reliable articles written by professional historians.
Source: Here, right here!
I don’t see where there is an exclusive section on American Indian history with other articles offering different viewpoints. Instead there are several articles on different subjects published a month.
Fucking irresponsible.
Anyway. Here it is! Feed it to your high school students! Reliable articles written by professional historians like this one in which you can assure your students that there was no genocide, no ethnocide, the Anglos and Indians fought it out just like in the Wild West Picture Shows, with no treaties at all!!!!!!! And the anglos won!
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