There's always two sides to every story in history. It's sometimes easier for us to believe that the Native American was a savage, it somehow takes the guilt away. There were of course violent Native Americans, but they were also painted with a very wide brush by handed down history. This kind of history is usually never questioned, just swallowed as the truth.

Here's a person who dwelves into a both/and view of the Native American instead of the prefered cowboy and Indian stories. The only way we can vilify other human beings is to make them into savages. This was done with every oppressed people throughout history.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/bl...ike-2010-11-22

Question everything.

A snippet about the author of the above article:

He is the co-author with the Reverend Frank Geer of Where Was God on September 11?, edited by Robert Hutchinson, Brown Trout, 2002. He contributed essays to Within the Stone, a collection of photographs of mineral cross sections by Bill Atkinson, one of the creators of the original MacIntosh computer.

Horgan is currently doing research on the widespread belief that human warfare is inevitable. He would appreciate any input on these topics, especially recommendations for relevant reading materials, organizations, individual sources, etc.

His publications have received international coverage, including front-page reviews and news articles in The New York Times, London Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune. He has been interviewed hundreds of times for print, radio, and television media, including The Lehrer News Hour, Charlie Rose, and National Public Radio's Science Friday. He has lectured and participated in debates with prominent scientists and journalists before dozens of institutions in North America and Europe, including MIT, Caltech, Princeton, Dartmouth, McGill, the University of Amsterdam, and England's National Physical Laboratory.

His awards include the 2005 Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship in Science and Religion; the American Psychiatric Association Certificate of Commendation for Outstanding Reporting on Psychiatric Issues (1997); the Science Journalism Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1992 and 1994); and the National Association of Science Writers Science-in-Society Award (1993). His articles have been selected for The Best American Science and Nature Writing in 2005, 2006 and 2007.

Horgan was an associate editor at IEEE Spectrum, the journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, from 1983 to 1986. He received a B.A. in English from Columbia University's School of General Studies in 1982 and an M.S. from Columbia's School of Journalism in 1983.

Native American Genocide Still Haunts United States

---

By Leah Trabich
New York, USA

In the past, the main thrust of the Holocaust/Genocide Project's magazine, An End To Intolerance, has been the genocides that occurred in history and outside of the United States. Still, what we mustn't forget is that mass killing of Native Americans occurred in our own country. As a result, bigotry and racial discrimination still exist.

"In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue" . . . and made the first contact with the "Indians." For Native Americans, the world after 1492 would never be the same. This date marked the beginning of the long road of persecution and genocide of Native Americans, our indigenous people. Genocide was an important cause of the decline for many tribes.

"By conservative estimates, the population of the United states prior to European contact was greater than 12 million. Four centuries later, the count was reduced by 95% to 237 thousand."

In 1493, when Columbus returned to the Hispaniola, he quickly implemented policies of slavery and mass extermination of the Taino population of the Caribbean. Within three years, five million were dead. Las Casas, the primary historian of the Columbian era, writes of many accounts of the horrors that the Spanish colonists inflicted upon the indigenous population: hanging them en mass, hacking their children into pieces to be used as dog feed, and other horrid cruelties. The works of Las Casas are often omitted from popular American history books and courses because Columbus is considered a hero by many, even today.

Mass killing did not cease, however, after Columbus departed. Expansion of the European colonies led to similar genocides. "Indian Removal" policy was put into action to clear the land for white settlers. Methods for the removal included slaughter of villages by the military and also biological warfare. High death rates resulted from forced marches to relocate the Indians.

The Removal Act of 1830 set into motion a series of events which led to the "Trail of Tears" in 1838, a forced march of the Cherokees, resulting in the destruction of most of the Cherokee population." The concentration of American Indians in small geographic areas, and the scattering of them from their homelands, caused increased death, primarily because of associated military actions, disease, starvation, extremely harsh conditions during the moves, and the resulting destruction of ways of life.

During American expansion into the western frontier, one primary effort to destroy the Indian way of life was the attempts of the U.S. government to make farmers and cattle ranchers of the Indians. In addition, one of the most substantial methods was the premeditated destructions of flora and fauna which the American Indians used for food and a variety of other purposes. We now also know that the Indians were intentionally exposed to smallpox by Europeans. The discovery of gold in California, early in 1848, prompted American migration and expansion into the west. The greed of Americans for money and land was rejuvenated with the Homestead Act of 1862. In California and Texas there was blatant genocide of Indians by non-Indians during certain historic periods. In California, the decrease from about a quarter of a million to less than 20,000 is primarily due to the cruelties and wholesale massacres perpetrated by the miners and early settlers. Indian education began with forts erected by Jesuits, in which indigenous youths were incarcerated, indoctrinated with non-indigenous Christian values, and forced into manual labor. These children were forcibly removed from their parents by soldiers and many times never saw their families until later in their adulthood. This was after their value systems and knowledge had been supplanted with colonial thinking. One of the foundations of the U.S. imperialist strategy was to replace traditional leadership of the various indigenous nations with indoctrinated "graduates" of white "schools," in order to expedite compliance with U.S. goals and expansion.

Probably one of the most ruinous acts to the Indians was the disappearance of the buffalo. For the Indians who lived on the Plains, life depended on the buffalo. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were an estimated forty million buffalo, but between 1830 and 1888 there was a rapid, systematic extermination culminating in the sudden slaughter of the only two remaining Plain herds. By around 1895, the formerly vast buffalo populations were practically extinct. The slaughter occurred because of the economic value of buffalo hides to Americans and because the animals were in the way of the rapidly westward expanding population. The end result was widescale starvation and the social and cultural disintegration of many Plains tribes.

Genocide entered international law for the first time in 1948; the international community took notice when Europeans (Jews, Poles, and other victims of Nazi Germany) faced cultural extinction. The "Holocaust" of World War II came to be the model of genocide. We, as the human race, must realize, however, that other genocides have occurred. Genocide against many particular groups is still widely happening today. The discrimination of the Native American population is only one example of this ruthless destruction.

Credits: Sharon Johnston, The Genocide of Native Americans: A Sociological View, 1996.

Originally Posted by Deb C

Native American Genocide Still Haunts United States

1) If what the various Indian groups in the USA suffered constitutes genocide, then it was the most incompetently executed genocide in history;

2) The closest you get to genocide organized by a society is Indians inflicting genocide against Americans and proto-Americans. The only prisoners most Indian tribes took were women for the purposes of rape and slavery. Compared to what most Indians would have done to Amercans if they had had the opportunity, they got off easy.

Originally Posted by Deb C

There's always two sides to every story in history. It's sometimes easier for us to believe that the Native American was a savage, it somehow takes the guilt away. There were of course violent Native Americans, but they were also painted with a very wide brush by handed down history. This kind of history is usually never questioned, just swallowed as the truth.

Here's a person who dwelves into a both/and view of the Native American instead of the prefered cowboy and Indian stories. The only way we can vilify other human beings is to make them into savages. This was done with every oppressed people throughout history.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/bl...ike-2010-11-22

Question everything.

Deb,

Question everything, particularly the use of never, every, always, all, etc.

The U.S. Army's eventual success in their post-civil war mission against native Americans rested on several key concepts, including but not limited to: use of native Americans against each other (highly successful due to their warrior ethos), destruction of food supplies and re-locating problem populations.

Your subsequent post indicates that you believe genocide was practiced against native Americans. While there is strong evidence to support a genocide hypothesis regarding Columbus and Haiti, the implication that similar practices were widespread enough to result in the deaths ~10 million or more native Americans fails to identify that most of this population is believed to have been wiped out by inadvertant disease before colonization of the Americas became widespread. There is some evidence that disease was used as a weapon against native Americans, but the vast majority of the native American population deaths are mostly believed to have been inadvertant exposure to European diseases by early explorers, not colonists.

Also note that tribal warfare, as practiced by native Americans and almost all tribal societies, is savagely brutal compared to European models of warfare from Westphalia on where an attempt was made to limit the impact of warfare on civilian populations. Casualty rates for tribal warfare populations are usually an order of magnitude higher that casualty rate for populations engaged in the Western way of warfare.

Finally, guilt over actions of past savages, native American or white colonists is, in my opinion, useless. It is better, again in my opinion, to focus your attention on current policies affecting people living now.

Deb: Trablich's piece did not mention the single most significant factor in the reduction of the Native American population, perhaps honestly, perhaps because it didn't fit with her narrative of blame. That factor was smallpox.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_smallpox

After first contacts with Europeans and Africans, some believe that the death of 90–95% of the native population of the New World was caused by Old World diseases.^[31] It is suspected that smallpox was the chief culprit and responsible for killing nearly all of the native inhabitants of the Americas. For more than 200 years, this disease affected all new world populations, mostly without intentional European transmission, from contact in the early 16th century to until possibly as late as the French and Indian Wars (1754–1767).^[32]

In 1519 Hernán Cortés landed on the shores of what is now Mexico and was then the Aztec empire. In 1520 another group of Spanish arrived in Mexico from Hispaniola, bringing with them the smallpox which had already been ravaging that island for two years. When Cortés heard about the other group, he went and defeated them. In this contact, one of Cortés's men contracted the disease. When Cortés returned to Tenochtitlan, he brought the disease with him.
Soon, the Aztecs rose up in rebellion against Cortés and his men. Outnumbered, the Spanish were forced to flee. In the fighting, the Spanish soldier carrying smallpox died. After the battle, the Aztecs contracted the virus from the invaders' bodies.^{[citation needed]} Cortes would not return to the capital until August 1521. In the meantime smallpox devastated the Aztec population. It killed most of the Aztec army and 25% of the overall population.^[33] The Spanish Franciscan Motolinia left this description: "As the Indians did not know the remedy of the disease…they died in heaps, like bedbugs. In many places it happened that everyone in a house died and, as it was impossible to bury the great number of dead, they pulled down the houses over them so that their homes become their tombs."^[34] On Cortés's return, he found the Aztec army’s chain of command in ruins. The soldiers who still lived were weak from the disease. Cortés then easily defeated the Aztecs and entered Tenochtitlán.^[35] The Spaniards said that they could not walk through the streets without stepping on the bodies of smallpox victims.^{[citation needed]}
The effects of smallpox on Tahuantinsuyu (or the Inca empire) were even more devastating. Beginning in Colombia, smallpox spread rapidly before the Spanish invaders first arrived in the empire. The spread was probably aided by the efficient Inca road system. Within months, the disease had killed the Sapa Inca Huayna Capac, his successor, and most of the other leaders. Two of his surviving sons warred for power and, after a bloody and costly war, Atahualpa become the new Sapa Inca. As Atahualpa was returning to the capital Cuzco, Francisco Pizarro arrived and through a series of deceits captured the young leader and his best general. Within a few years smallpox claimed between 60% and 90% of the Inca population,^[36] with other waves of European disease weakening them further. A handful of historians argue that a disease called Bartonellosis might have been responsible for some outbreaks of illness, but this opinion is in the scholarly minority.^[37] The effects of Bartonellosis were depicted in the ceramics of the Moche people of ancient Peru.^[38]
Even after the two mighty empires of the Americas were defeated by the virus and disease, smallpox continued its march of death. In 1561, smallpox reached Chile by sea, when a ship carrying the new governor Francisco de Villagra landed at La Serena. Chile had previously been isolated by the Atacama Desert and Andes Mountains from Peru, but at the end of 1561 and in early 1562, it ravaged the Chilean native population. Cronicles and records of the time left no accurate data on mortality but more recent estimates are that the natives lost between twenty and twenty five percent of their population. The Spanish historian Marmolejo said that gold mines had to shut down when all their Indian labor died.^[39] Mapuche fighting Spain in Araucanía regarded the epidemic as a magical attempt by Francisco de Villagra to exterminate them because he could not defeat them in the Arauco War.^[29]
In 1633 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the Native Americans were struck by the virus. As it had done elsewhere, the virus wiped out entire population groups of Native Americans. It reached Mohawks in 1634,^[40] the Lake Ontario area in 1636, and the lands of the Iroquois by 1679. During the 1770s, smallpox killed at least 30% of the West Coast Native Americans.^[41][42] The smallpox epidemic of 1780–1782 brought devastation and drastic depopulation among the Plains Indians.^[43] This epidemic is a classic instance of European immunity and non-European vulnerability. It is probable that the Aboriginals contracted the disease from the ‘Snake Indians’ on the Mississippi. From there it spread eastward and northward to the Saskatchewan River. According to David Thompson’s account, the first to hear of the disease were fur traders from the Hudson’s House on October 15, 1781.^[44] A week later reports were made to William Walker and William Tomison, who were in charge of the Hudson and Cumberland Hudson’s Bay Company posts. By February, the disease spread as far as the Basquia Tribe. Smallpox plagued whole tribes and left few survivors. E. E. Rich described the epidemic by saying that “Families lay unburied in their tents while the few survivors fled, to spread the disease.” ^[45] After reading Tomison’s journals, Houston and Houston, have calculated that out of the Aboriginals that traded at the Hudson and Cumberland houses, ninety-five percent died of smallpox.^[43] Paul Hackett adds to the mortality numbers suggesting that perhaps up to one half to three quarters of the Ojibway situated west of the Grand Portage died from the disease. The Cree also suffered a casualty rate of approximately seventy-five percent with similar effects found in the Lowland Cree.^[46] Not only did smallpox devastate the Aboriginal population, it did so in an unforgiving way. William Walker described the epidemic stating that “the Indians [are] all Dying by this Distemper … lying Dead about the Barren Ground like a rotten sheep, their Tents left standing & the Wild beast Devouring them.”

Smallpox was of course brought to the New World by Europeans, but not deliberately, and so does not fit easily into the narrative being presented, but it was responsible for more deaths among Native Americans than all the cruelty, intolerance, and oppression ever imposed. And so the biggest part by far of the reason for the decline in Native American population was not genocide but accident.

This was the worst plague in known history. It outstrips the runner-up, the Black Death, by a mile. The Black Death is estimated to have killed off about a third of the population of Europe in the 14th century. That's very bad, but can't compare to what smallpox did to the Native Americans, killing 90 to 95% of them. Smallpox is a disease that originated in cattle and evolved to infect humans. It arose in Asia because humans there herded cattle. We have no records of what happened when the disease first appeared, but it must have been devastating. Over generations, Asian, African, and European humans developed partial immunity to the disease. It could still infect Europeans and sometimes kill them, having something around a ten percent mortality rate. But Native Americans, with no immunity at all, suffered near-total mortality.

Without the impact of smallpox, it's doubtful that Europeans could have conquered and colonized the Americas at all. Note that Cortez failed to conquer the Aztec Empire on his first attempt and finally succeeded only after the plague had ravaged the population. In North America, the disease left empty lands and villages ready for English and French settlers to inhabit. Imagine an East Coast inhabited by ten times as many natives as lived there when the Pilgrims arrived. The outcome would have been completely different.

That doesn't make the cruelty and oppression suffered by Native Americans any less wrong. But it's important to get the facts straight. The slaughter of the Native Americans and the drastic reduction of their population was, for the most part, accomplished by nature, not by man.

EDIT: Ryan beat me to it.

Originally Posted by JDG 66

1) If what the various Indian groups in the USA suffered constitutes genocide, then it was the most incompetently executed genocide in history;

There was no plan. Relations between First Peoples and Euro-Americans have ranged from cordial to horrific, and the transition from cordiality to a wave of extermination has been incredibly swift at times. The best situations for First people other than being left alone included the fur trade (typically, French traders ended up with Native wives by necessity), missionary efforts (missionaries who wanted Indian tribes to accept Jesus presumably wanted the Indians around to witness to the usefulness and benevolence of Christ), and assimilation. Maybe there was some stray Indian who got picked up by some loving white family and ended up assimilating. As an extreme example, Heather Locklear looks about as stereotypically white as anyone could be and has a Scottish-sounding name. But "Locklear" is a surname associated with Lumbee Indians of North Carolina.

There was never any Holocaust-like plan to exterminate Indian populations. But if one was in the wrong village (Wounded Knee) at the wrong time and was an Indian one wasn't going to survive. Add to that some pitched battles that Americans provoked -- battles in which hunter-gatherers were expected to challenge an Industrial Age army with unlimited resources behind it -- and Little Big Horn was a clear exception. Wounded Knee was more the norm.

It's also arguable that, at least in the Southwest and Northern Plains, the tribes most likely to survive were either those in the most isolated topography or that put up the best fight. The best-organized tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Iroquois, Delaware, Choctaw) were also more likely to survive.

2) The closest you get to genocide organized by a society is Indians inflicting genocide against Americans and proto-Americans. The only prisoners most Indian tribes took were women for the purposes of rape and slavery. Compared to what most Indians would have done to Amercans if they had had the opportunity, they got off easy.

Primitive tribes have often had their equivalents of berserker attacks that 'separated the men from the boys', showed who was too reckless to survive and who was too cowardly to lead, and who got a wife from the neighboring tribe. Your depiction of First Peoples as automatic dangers to any Europeans says far more about you than about First Peoples. Your pretentious ignorance about people who defy facile generalization shows you for the fool that you are. Considering what white people have done to fellow white people, I would be wary of your projection.

Even the most warlike of First Peoples, like the Sioux, the Apaches, and the Navajos, were far better than Nazis.

Originally Posted by pbrower2a

Primitive tribes have often had their equivalents of berserker attacks that 'separated the men from the boys', showed who was too reckless to survive and who was too cowardly to lead, and who got a wife from the neighboring tribe. Your depiction of First Peoples as automatic dangers to any Europeans says far more about you than about First Peoples. Your pretentious ignorance about people who defy facile generalization shows you for the fool that you are. Considering what white people have done to fellow white people, I would be wary of your projection.

Even the most warlike of First Peoples, like the Sioux, the Apaches, and the Navajos, were far better than Nazis.

IMO too many accounts of relations between Indians and Europeans had an agenda, whether the "original revisionist" history which painted the picture of a John Wayne movie where white Europeans were innocent settlers callously slaughtered by native tribes in cold blood, *or* the new counter-revisionist history which swings the pendulum in the complete opposite direction, as if every encounter led to native victimization, that whites always provoked Indians and "got what they deserved" or as if tribes always lived with each other in peace and harmony before the white man arrived.

I've read fairly objective histories of the tribe in which I'm an enrolled member, and it is full of squabbles over land with other neighboring enemy tribes and was fairly often engaged in warfare against other tribes before contact with Europeans. Not that this makes our tribe the "bad guys" but our history has many of the same unfortunate sagas that European history has played out in the years since.

Originally Posted by RyanJH

Deb,

Question everything, particularly the use of never, every, always, all, etc.

The U.S. Army's eventual success in their post-civil war mission against native Americans rested on several key concepts, including but not limited to: use of native Americans against each other (highly successful due to their warrior ethos), destruction of food supplies and re-locating problem populations.

Your subsequent post indicates that you believe genocide was practiced against native Americans. While there is strong evidence to support a genocide hypothesis regarding Columbus and Haiti, the implication that similar practices were widespread enough to result in the deaths ~10 million or more native Americans fails to identify that most of this population is believed to have been wiped out by inadvertant disease before colonization of the Americas became widespread. There is some evidence that disease was used as a weapon against native Americans, but the vast majority of the native American population deaths are mostly believed to have been inadvertant exposure to European diseases by early explorers, not colonists.

Also note that tribal warfare, as practiced by native Americans and almost all tribal societies, is savagely brutal compared to European models of warfare from Westphalia on where an attempt was made to limit the impact of warfare on civilian populations. Casualty rates for tribal warfare populations are usually an order of magnitude higher that casualty rate for populations engaged in the Western way of warfare.

Finally, guilt over actions of past savages, native American or white colonists is, in my opinion, useless. It is better, again in my opinion, to focus your attention on current policies affecting people living now.

I do not propose guilt but accountability for our past actions. Owning our actions is the first step to our taking responsibility so we don't continue to make the same mistakes. But then, maybe this is why we keep making the same mistakes.

I do understand what you are saying about absolutes. This is why I promote hearing both sides of the issues. If we do not learn from our past mistakes regarding our treatment of the Native American, then we will for sure continue to demonize others so that our killing them will take away the human face of suffering. This continues to happen in our day and time; vilify the enemy so that our killing them is justified. Think about Iraq and how many innocent people we have killed there. The most tragic, being thousands of babies during our sanctions.

Let me remind you of the cruelty of Euorpeans with the Salem witch trials. Burning women at the stake is extremely cruel in my estimation. Wouldn't you think?

So your saying that I need to focus on what is happening now, and not the past, is asking me to disregard what we can learn from our mistakes. Today's event's are happening because we haven't learned anything. We just keep repeating the same mistakes. Only thing different in too many respects are the names and places.

When will we ever learn?

Originally Posted by Deb C

I do not propose guilt but accountability for our past actions. Owning our actions is the first step to our taking responsibility so we don't continue to make the same mistakes.

Actually there's a step before that, which is to correctly identify what our past actions actually were. Calling the impact of white people on the Native Americans "genocide" does not help that.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

Actually there's a step before that, which is to correctly identify what our past actions actually were. Calling the impact of white people on the Native Americans "genocide" does not help that.

Even moreso, given the fact that colonial Europeans actually did engage in an actual genocide of an indigenous people. Just not in America.

An after thought:

I too often have read on this forum excuses for our very bad behavior of oppressing others, here at home and especially in war. I attempt to present the other side of the situation. Balance is needed in our positions. Neither side is perfect or innocent, but neither are they all bad or all good.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

Actually there's a step before that, which is to correctly identify what our past actions actually were. Calling the impact of white people on the Native Americans "genocide" does not help that.

When the white person is responsible for wiping out millions of a certain race, what would you call that? If the Native American had done the same to the white culture, what would we call that?

Originally Posted by Deb C

When the white person is responsible for wiping out millions of a certain race, what would you call that? If the Native American had done the same to the white culture, what would we call that?

The vast majority of American Indians died inadvertently from European diseases.

As for the rest, they were pushed aside in sporadic conflicts over multiple centuries.

Originally Posted by Deb C

When the white person is responsible for wiping out millions of a certain race, what would you call that? If the Native American had done the same to the white culture, what would we call that?

Depends. Genocide is the deliberate attempt to exterminate a whole people. It is very rare. While there was serious mistreatment of the Native Americans, there was no deliberate attempt to wipe out the entire race of people, at least not by white people as a whole in the New World. Isolated individuals may of course have been exceptions. I would also question whether white people were actually responsible for "millions" of Native American deaths; if that was true, it remains a fact that your quoted piece above counted as culpable deaths many that were not. EDIT: The Trail of Tears is estimated to have killed 4,000 Cherokee. It would take 250 incidents of comparable magnitude to make up one million deaths. Of course, the Trail of Tears makes the history books precisely because it wasn't typical; it was unusually bad in terms of death toll and consequences. Given this calculation, it's just barely possible that over the years from 1492 until the turn of the 20th century, over a million Native Americans were killed by Europeans and their descendants. So it's unlikely that "millions" is technically correct, although "over 1 million" is more likely to be true. In any case, it remains true that one cannot arrive at a correct total by subtracting the 1900 Native American population from the estimated pre-Columbian total. That treats all of the deaths from smallpox and other European diseases as deliberate killing of natives by Europeans, which is not accurate.

Did you even read my post above on the effect of smallpox on the Native Americans? That was what was responsible for the overwhelming majority of reduction in population, NOT deliberate actions by Europeans or U.S. citizens. A virus is morally incapable of committing genocide or any other crime even if the effective outcome is the same.

When you call European actions towards the Native Americans "genocide" when it clearly wasn't, you have the effect of discrediting any other arguments you may make on the subject. It was wrong, it was severe, it deserves condemnation and, as you say, we need to learn from it. But it was not genocide, and calling it that is the antithesis of learning.

I too often have read on this forum excuses for our very bad behavior of oppressing others, here at home and especially in war. I attempt to present the other side of the situation. Balance is needed in our positions.

Get the facts straight and any "balance" will take care of itself. Attempts to impose "balance" artificially inevitably distorts the facts, and that is what you have done here. That others have distorted the facts equally in the opposite direction does not excuse you.

Originally Posted by Justin77

Even moreso, given the fact that colonial Europeans actually did engage in an actual genocide of an indigenous people. Just not in America.

Thank you for that, Justin. Yes, a good cure for hyperbole is looking at the real thing.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

Depends. Genocide is the deliberate attempt to exterminate a whole people. It is very rare. While there was serious mistreatment of the Native Americans, there was no deliberate attempt to wipe out the entire race of people, at least not by white people as a whole in the New World. Isolated individuals may of course have been exceptions. I would also question whether white people were actually responsible for "millions" of Native American deaths; if that was true, it remains a fact that your quoted piece above counted as culpable deaths many that were not. EDIT: The Trail of Tears is estimated to have killed 4,000 Cherokee. It would take 250 incidents of comparable magnitude to make up one million deaths. Of course, the Trail of Tears makes the history books precisely because it wasn't typical; it was unusually bad in terms of death toll and consequences. Given this calculation, it's just barely possible that over the years from 1492 until the turn of the 20th century, over a million Native Americans were killed by Europeans and their descendants. So it's unlikely that "millions" is technically correct, although "over 1 million" is more likely to be true. In any case, it remains true that one cannot arrive at a correct total by subtracting the 1900 Native American population from the estimated pre-Columbian total. That treats all of the deaths from smallpox and other European diseases as deliberate killing of natives by Europeans, which is not accurate.

Did you even read my post above on the effect of smallpox on the Native Americans? That was what was responsible for the overwhelming majority of reduction in population, NOT deliberate actions by Europeans or U.S. citizens. A virus is morally incapable of committing genocide or any other crime even if the effective outcome is the same.

When you call European actions towards the Native Americans "genocide" when it clearly wasn't, you have the effect of discrediting any other arguments you may make on the subject. It was wrong, it was severe, it deserves condemnation and, as you say, we need to learn from it. But it was not genocide, and calling it that is the antithesis of learning.



Get the facts straight and any "balance" will take care of itself. Attempts to impose "balance" artificially inevitably distorts the facts, and that is what you have done here. That others have distorted the facts equally in the opposite direction does not excuse you.



Thank you for that, Justin. Yes, a good cure for hyperbole is looking at the real thing.

And you beat me to it this time - .

Originally Posted by Deb C

An after thought:

I too often have read on this forum excuses for our very bad behavior of oppressing others, here at home and especially in war. I attempt to present the other side of the situation. Balance is needed in our positions. Neither side is perfect or innocent, but neither are they all bad or all good.

Anyone who claims to have an excuse for oppressing others (except as punishment for individual crimes) has an ethical counterfeit.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

Depends. Genocide is the deliberate attempt to exterminate a whole people. It is very rare. While there was serious mistreatment of the Native Americans, there was no deliberate attempt to wipe out the entire race of people, at least not by white people as a whole in the New World. Isolated individuals may of course have been exceptions. I would also question whether white people were actually responsible for "millions" of Native American deaths; if that was true, it remains a fact that your quoted piece above counted as culpable deaths many that were not. EDIT: The Trail of Tears is estimated to have killed 4,000 Cherokee. It would take 250 incidents of comparable magnitude to make up one million deaths. Of course, the Trail of Tears makes the history books precisely because it wasn't typical; it was unusually bad in terms of death toll and consequences. Given this calculation, it's just barely possible that over the years from 1492 until the turn of the 20th century, over a million Native Americans were killed by Europeans and their descendants. So it's unlikely that "millions" is technically correct, although "over 1 million" is more likely to be true. In any case, it remains true that one cannot arrive at a correct total by subtracting the 1900 Native American population from the estimated pre-Columbian total. That treats all of the deaths from smallpox and other European diseases as deliberate killing of natives by Europeans, which is not accurate.

Did you even read my post above on the effect of smallpox on the Native Americans? That was what was responsible for the overwhelming majority of reduction in population, NOT deliberate actions by Europeans or U.S. citizens. A virus is morally incapable of committing genocide or any other crime even if the effective outcome is the same.

When you call European actions towards the Native Americans "genocide" when it clearly wasn't, you have the effect of discrediting any other arguments you may make on the subject. It was wrong, it was severe, it deserves condemnation and, as you say, we need to learn from it. But it was not genocide, and calling it that is the antithesis of learning.



Get the facts straight and any "balance" will take care of itself. Attempts to impose "balance" artificially inevitably distorts the facts, and that is what you have done here. That others have distorted the facts equally in the opposite direction does not excuse you.



Thank you for that, Justin. Yes, a good cure for hyperbole is looking at the real thing.

Brian, there are many statistics out there in regards to the numbers. The govenrment reports much lower than whatever the actual figures were according to some other experts. And it wasn't just mistreatment of the Native American, it was abuse and murder in too many respects. Possibly millions.

Yes I did read what you posted and understand what you were saying about the diseases that killed so many. I don't doubt that fact. But it wasn't just disease. There were many ways that the white person killed the Native American. It wasn't just with bullets. The direct action of killing the buffalo was an attempt to get rid of the indian. The sterilization of thousands of women was another.

Just like in Iraq. We didn't kill all of those babies with bullets, just took away their access to clean water.

And I'm not making excuses. I'm telling you where I'm coming from in my position. There's a difference.

Originally Posted by Deb C

Brian, there are many statistics out there in regards to the numbers. The govenrment reports much lower than whatever the actual figures were according to some other experts.

The number of natives killed was what it was. There is no room for fudge factors. Either you know or you don't. If the government is lowering the figures (and frankly I see no reason why it would do so at this point), why would the "other experts" be more reliable? If you don't have a solid source that can be trusted, then you don't know, and can draw no conclusions.

And it wasn't just mistreatment of the Native American, it was abuse and murder in too many respects. Possibly millions.

I don't dispute that nor would anyone be likely to dispute it. I dispute use of the term "genocide." I also dispute your figures.

Yes I did read what you posted and understand what you were saying about the diseases that killed so many. I don't doubt that fact. But it wasn't just disease.

Correct. It was only something like 99% diseases. Other factors, including murder by white people, did happen. However, you were (or rather your quoted article was) making an argument that, before Columbus arrived, there were X number of natives and, by a much later date, there were Y, and that consequently X-Y natives were deliberately killed off by white people. And the fact of the smallpox plague makes that a false argument. The overwhelming majority of the reduction in population among Native Americans after Columbus was not due to deliberate action by white people but due to the illnesses (especially smallpox) inadvertently brought over the ocean. Bear in mind that in order for white people to bring these diseases among the natives, they had to be sick themselves. The idea that they would do this deliberately is absurd.

There are similar flaws in some of your other arguments. For example, the eradication of the buffalo herds was not intended to wipe out the people who depended on them for food, but rather to wipe out their way of life and the potential threat they posed to settlers. The plains natives could survive without the buffalo (other tribes did as did white people), they just couldn't survive as migrating buffalo-hunters without the buffalo.

I'm not trying to excuse any of this, you understand. None of it is excusable, but it doesn't help matters any to resort to hyperbole. Get the facts right. That's very important.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

The number of natives killed was what it was. There is no room for fudge factors. Either you know or you don't. If the government is lowering the figures (and frankly I see no reason why it would do so at this point), why would the "other experts" be more reliable? If you don't have a solid source that can be trusted, then you don't know, and can draw no conclusions.



I don't dispute that nor would anyone be likely to dispute it. I dispute use of the term "genocide." I also dispute your figures.



Correct. It was only something like 99% diseases. Other factors, including murder by white people, did happen. However, you were (or rather your quoted article was) making an argument that, before Columbus arrived, there were X number of natives and, by a much later date, there were Y, and that consequently X-Y natives were deliberately killed off by white people. And the fact of the smallpox plague makes that a false argument. The overwhelming majority of the reduction in population among Native Americans after Columbus was not due to deliberate action by white people but due to the illnesses (especially smallpox) inadvertently brought over the ocean. Bear in mind that in order for white people to bring these diseases among the natives, they had to be sick themselves. The idea that they would do this deliberately is absurd.

There are similar flaws in some of your other arguments. For example, the eradication of the buffalo herds was not intended to wipe out the people who depended on them for food, but rather to wipe out their way of life and the potential threat they posed to settlers. The plains natives could survive without the buffalo (other tribes did as did white people), they just couldn't survive as migrating buffalo-hunters without the buffalo.

I'm not trying to excuse any of this, you understand. None of it is excusable, but it doesn't help matters any to resort to hyperbole. Get the facts right. That's very important.

Maybe you need to read over your post for insinuation of absolutes. Obviously, you consider your information correct and mine are wrong. Looks very much like an either/or position to me. I really don't want ot go there with my facts are right and yours are wrong. We have to get past these divides as a culture. I'm proposing a both/and position on the issue. Because as I said before - neither is completely correct and no one is completely wrong.

Nuff said.

If anyone is interested in information about the sterilization of Native American Indian women, and the reasons, here's a link. It could possibly be an eye opener for some.

http://aimwest.info/index.php?option...302&Itemid=126

Originally Posted by Deb C

Maybe you need to read over your post for insinuation of absolutes. Obviously, you consider your information correct and mine are wrong. Looks very much like an either/or position to me.

I don't consider your information incorrect. I consider it misinterpreted. I believe, and can prove, that you are drawing logically incorrect conclusions from it.

Estimates of pre-Columbian populations range from about 50 million to twice that. Estimates of the death toll from smallpox run to 90 to 95% of the pre-Columbian population. Using the lower estimates in both cases results in a death toll of 45 million from the disease. Using the upper estimates gives a death toll of 95 million. I am not clear at all how many Native Americans were, over the four hundred years from when Columbus landed to when it pretty much stopped, killed by Europeans and their descendants, but that it was as high as 45 million is simply nonsensical. If you have any figures to dispute this -- other than simply comparing before-and-after populations, which is the error you made before -- please present those figures.

Disease was responsible for the overwhelming majority of the reduction in population of Native Americans between the end of the 15th century and the end of the 19th. Most of that population reduction occurred by the end of the 16th century, long before most of North America was settled by Europeans. Violence, oppression, and deliberate murder by Europeans and their descendants most definitely did happen, and was inexcusable, but in terms of numbers killed was trivial by comparison. The evidence is clear if you are willing to look at it. If you are not willing to look at it, well, that says a lot about your own disconnect from reality.

You are NOT proposing a "both/and" position on the issue, and it is NOT true that "neither is completely correct" and we may arrive at truth by splitting the difference; in fact, that is never the case on any issue. The truth (when we are talking facts) is arrived at by examining the evidence, not by any such feel-good nostrum. Compromise in politics is necessary. Compromise in science or history is a corruption of honesty with politics. It is not acceptable.

Guys, seriously, this is pointless. Human's of every race, creed, culture and religion have slaughtered and enslaved each other since the dawn of recorded history. Trying to apply 21st Century sensibilities to the past is a fruitless endeavor. That is revisionist history at its worst. You just have to realize nothing is black and white. Hollywood movies to the contrary, bad people do good things and good people do bad things. Just what do we do today that seems perfectly normal to us will some bleeding heart in the future condemn us for?

Deb I am sorry to say, if we get into a real all-out 4T war, vilifying the enemy is a part of it. Poke around the internet for posters of how the Germans and Japanese were portrayed during WWII, and that is living memory for a substantial amount of the population.

Originally Posted by Dedalus

Guys, seriously, this is pointless. Human's of every race, creed, culture and religion have slaughtered and enslaved each other since the dawn of recorded history. Trying to apply 21st Century sensibilities to the past is a fruitless endeavor. That is revisionist history at its worst. You just have to realize nothing is black and white. Hollywood movies to the contrary, bad people do good things and good people do bad things. Just what do we do today that seems perfectly normal to us will some bleeding heart in the future condemn us for?

Deb I am sorry to say, if we get into a real all-out 4T war, vilifying the enemy is a part of it. Poke around the internet for posters of how the Germans and Japanese were portrayed during WWII, and that is living memory for a substantial amount of the population.

Exactly. The Romans depopulated whole Gaulish chiefdoms and sold any survivors into slavery. Even if you adjust for exaggerated figures, Caesar's men probably killed hundreds of thousands of Gauls and enslaved an even greater number. After one of their interventions in Greece they razed Corinth and enslaved it's inhabitants. And of course, they razed Carthage and killed every man, woman, and child.

As a preview of the 2012 election, I think we should pay attention to the course of the Wisconsin recall elections. Here are some preliminary results:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/0...ide&via=blog_1

6:59 PM PT: In case you're just joining us, the AP called the SD-30 race for Democrat Dave Hansen, who's winning by a huge 38-point margin. In the GOP primaries, Kim Simac is up 58-42 with 30% of the vote reporting in SD-12, while Jonathan Steitz is up 63-37 over Fred Ekornaas in SD-22, with 29% of the vote in.


7:16 PM PT: SD-22 called for Steitz.


7:17 PM PT (Steve Singiser): Here is a quick stat that cannot be overlooked, and speaks to voter intensity in Wisconsin. It looks like the two GOP primaries tonight in the Badger State will have turnouts in the 15,000 person range, give or take. The turnouts last week on the Dem side ranged from 21,700 to over 35,000. Indeed, three of the Democratic primaries last week are likely to have turnouts higher than tonight's general recall election in SD-30, won handily by Democrat Dave Hansen. The Republicans are clearly lagging behind the Democrats in voter intensity. That could speak well for Democratic chances next month to reclaim the state Senate.


7:40 PM PT (Steve Singiser): And the night is over, and fairly quickly. AP calls SD-12 (GOP) for Kim Simac. She will now take on Jim Holperin. And, with that, Wisconsin part II is in the books. Congratulations to Democrat Dave Hansen of SD-30, who fended off his recall in decisive fashion (66-34, with Marinette County still to report). Congratulations also (and this is becoming repetitive) to our polling partners at PPP, who have hit yet another poll on the screws. They called the landslide yesterday, and hit it almost on the number. Great job by them, as always. Last one out of here, be sure to turn out the lights. Good night, everyone!

The general election that was held was one of the Republican counter-recall petitions. One of the GOP candidates failed to get enough signatures on the petition to run, so there was no need for a primary. The Democrat easily held onto his seat against the one candidate that did get his act together in time. The other two were elections primaries to decide the Republican candidate that will stand against the incumbent Democrat in a later race. The Democratic primaries for the six recall elections to unseat Republicans have already been held. The comments about voter turnout and intensity relate to a comparison between the parties' primaries.