Native American Genocide Quotes

My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain...There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory.

Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.

Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shore, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations.

I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream . . . the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered.

There is no doubt that the United States has much to atone for, both domestically and abroad...To produce this horrible confection at home, start with our genocidal treatment of the Native Americans, add a couple hundred years of slavery, along with our denial of entry to Jewish refugees fleeing the death camps of the Third Reich, stir in our collusion with a long list of modern despots and our subsequent disregard for their appalling human rights records, add our bombing of Cambodia and the Pentagon Papers to taste, and then top with our recent refusals to sign the Kyoto protocol for greenhouse emissions, to support any ban on land mines, and to submit ourselves to the rulings of the International Criminal Court. The result should smell of death, hypocrisy, and fresh brimstone.

Understand indigenous healing will also heal other nations and peoples. We've all been living on broken ugly systems built on genocide and slavery. Strengthening and empowering others, in whatever capacity, also helps the self.

Hitler had studied America from afar, both envying and admiring it, and attributed its achievements to its Aryan stock. He praised the country’s near genocide of Native Americans and the exiling to reservations of those who had survived.

. . . [H]ad North America been a wilderness, undeveloped, without roads, and uncultivated, it might still be so, for the European colonists could not have survived. They appropriated what had already been created by Indigenous civilizations. They stole already cultivated farmland and the corn, vegetables, tobacco, and other crops domesticated over centuries, took control of the deer parks that had been cleared and maintained by Indigenous communities, used existing roads and water routes in order to move armies to conquer, and relied on captured Indigenous people to identify the locations of water, oyster beds, and medicinal herbs.

Nor can the one day of suffering Jesus supposedly endured compare with the Holocaust, the genocide of Native Americans or the pain of those who were tortured during the Inquisition. His supposed contribution to the world hardly compares with the hard work, sacrifice and discipline of intelligent individuals who have dedicated their lives to science and medicine. Just because Jesus was considered a Higher Power does not make his alleged suffering any higher than yours or mine.

Jimmy said, "We survived slavery. Think about that. Not because we were strong. The American Indians were strong, and they were on their own land. But they have not survived genocide. You know how we survived?" I said nothing. "We put surviving into our poems and into our songs. We put it into our folk tales. We danced surviving in Congo Square in New Orleans and put it in our pots when we cooked pinto beans. We wore surviving on our backs when we clothed ourselves in the colors of the rainbow. We were pulled down so low we could hardly lift our eyes, so we knew, if we wanted to survive, we had better lift our own spirits. So we laughed whenever we got the chance.

At the time, Alcatraz had been taken over by Native Americans who were protesting against a long series of broken treaties, genocidal policies, and racist exploitation.

Their disappearance from the human family would be no great loss to the world.

Under the crust of that portion of Earth called the United States of America—"from California . . . to the Gulf Stream waters"—are interred the bones, villages, fields, and sacred objects of American Indians. They cry out for their stories to be heard through their descendants who carry the memories of how the country was founded and how it came to be as it is today. [opening lines of the Introduction; ellipsis sic].

There's a type of despair that is unique to those who are exiled on their own lands. When you are taken from your home and transported to a different place you can hold the dream of home in your heart. But, when your home is taken and you are hunted and killed on your own land, there is no home for you to dream about.

there's a sickness worse than the risk of death and that's forgetting what we should never forget.

Of a thousand Red Stick and allied insurgents, eight hundred were killed. [Andrew] Jackson lost forty-nine men.

If Irish or Italian culture dies in America it really isn't that big a deal. They will still exist in Italy and Ireland. Not so with us. There is no other place. North America is our old country.

If the Texans had kept out of my country, there might have been peace. But that which you now say we must live on is too small. The Texans have taken away the places where the grass grew the thickest and the timber was the best. Had we kept that, we might have done the things you ask. But it is too late. The white man has the country which we loved, and we only wish to wander on the prairie until we die.

The European habit of indiscriminately killing women and children when engaged in hostilities with the natives of the Americas was more than an atrocity. It was flatly and intentionally genocidal. For no population can survive if its women and children are destroyed.

In the United States we are at such a disadvantage because we do not know how to talk about the genocide inflicted on indigenous people. We do not know how to talk about slavery. Otherwise it would not have been assumed that simply because of the election of one Black man to the presidency we would leap forward into a postracial era. We do not acknowledge that we all live on colonized land. And in the meantime, Native Americans live in impoverished conditions on reservations. They have an extremely high incarceration rate—as a matter of fact, per capita the highest incarceration rate—and they suffer disproportionately from such diseases as alcoholism and diabetes. In the meantime, sports teams still mock indigenous people with racially derogatory names, like the Washington Redskins. We do not know how to talk about slavery, except, perhaps, within a framework of victim and victimizer, one that continues to polarize and implicate.

Do my brothers know the name of this favored people?” “It was the Lenni Lenape,” returned Magua, affecting to bend his head in reverence to their former greatness. “It was the tribes of the Lenape! The sun rose from water that was salt, and set in water that was sweet, and never hid himself from their eyes. But why should I, a Huron of the woods, tell a wise people their own traditions? Why remind them of their injuries; their ancient greatness; their deeds; their glory; their happiness; their losses; their defeats; their misery? Is there not one among them who has seen it all, and who knows it to be true? I have done. My tongue is still for my heart is of lead. I listen.

We were born naked and have been taught to hunt and live on the game. You tell us that we must learn to farm, live in one house, and take on your ways. Suppose the people living beyond the great sea should come and tell you that you must stop farming and kill your cattle, and take your houses and lands, what would you do? Would you not fight them?

When you look at it objectively, that’s what most colonists do—they land then find a way of wiping out their competition. In America is was blankets covered with smallpox and in Australia it was permits to hunt aborigines. If you wipe a whole people from the face of the earth, then there’s no one to point fingers at you. It’s just their spirits that haunt you and spirits can’t do shit.

So the history of the modern state can also be read as the history of race, bringing together the stories of two kinds of victims of European political modernity: the internal victims of state building and the external victims of imperial expansion. Hannah Arendt noted this in her monumental study on the Holocaust, which stands apart for one reason: rather than talk about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Arendt sited it in the imperial history of genocide. The history she sketched was that of European settlers killing off native populations. Arendt understood the history of imperialism through the workings of racism and bureaucracy, institutions forged in the course of European expansion into the non-European world: “Of the two main political devices of imperialist rule, race was discovered in South Africa, and bureaucracy in Algeria, Egypt and India.” Hannah Arendt’s blind spot was the New World. Both racism and genocide had occurred in the American colonies earlier than in South Africa. The near decimation of Native Americans through a combination of slaughter, disease, and dislocation was, after all, the first recorded genocide in modern history.

As with Hispaniola, Tenochtitlán, Cuzco, and elsewhere, the Spaniards’ mammoth destruction of whole societies generally was a by-product of conquest and native enslavement, a genocidal means to an economic end, not an end in itself. And therein lies the central difference between the genocide committed by the Spanish and that of the Anglo-Americans: in British America extermination was the primary goal, and it was so precisely because it made economic sense.

For too long the depth of racism in American life has been underestimated. The surgery to extract it is necessarily complex and detailed. As a beginning it is important to X-ray our history and reveal the full extent of the disease. The strands of prejudice toward Negroes are tightly wound around the American character. The prejudice has been nourished by the doctrine of race inferiority. Yet to focus upon the Negro alone as the "inferior race" of American myth is to miss the broader dimensions of the evil. Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations. This is in sharp contrast to many nations south of the border, which assimilated their Indians, respected their culture, and elevated many of them to high position. It was upon this massive base of racism that the prejudice toward the nonwhite was readily built, and found rapid growth. This long-standing racist ideology has corrupted and diminished our democratic ideals. It is this tangled web of prejudice from which many Americans now seek to liberate themselves, without realizing how deeply it has been woven into their consciousness.

I surveyed the country that had cost us so much trouble, anxiety and blood, and that now caused me to be a prisoner of war. I reflected upon the ingratitude of the whites when I saw their fine houses, rich harvests and everything desirable around them; and recollected that all this land had been ours, for which I and my people had never received a dollar, and that the whites were not satisfied until they took our village and our graveyards from us and removed us across the Mississippi.

almost all Americans would properly applaud President Walesa’s long-overdue acknowledgment of and apology for the horrors that were perpetrated against Jewish and other European “worthy” victims in Poland’s Nazi extermination centers during forty ghastly months in the 1940s, they by and large continue to turn their backs on the even more massive genocide that for four grisly centuries was perpetrated against what their apathy implicitly defines as the “unworthy” natives of the Americas.

The white men in the East are like birds. They are hatching out their eggs every year, and there is not room enough in the East and they must go elsewhere; and they come west, as you have seen them coming for the last few years. And they are still coming, and will come until they overrun all of this country; and you can't prevent it. [...] Everything is decided in Washington by the majority, and these people come out west and see that the Indians have a big body of land they are not using, and they say we want the land.

In a more perfect world, that would’ve also been the moment when she’d say, “Look, honey, I know you resonate with the character of Pocahontas, but we already live on stolen land and you are not an indigenous person, so it would be very insensitive for you to wear someone else’s culture as a costume.” “Certainly, Mother,” I’d respond. “You’re absolutely correct. My teacher taught us about the land theft and subsequent genocide of Native American nations in kindergarten last week as part of our People’s Herstory class, so I shouldn’t go as Pocahontas. But could I go as another Disney princess instead?

You have driven me from the East to this place, and I have been here two thousand years or more. [...] My friends, if you took me away from this land it would be very hard for me. I wish to die in this land, I wish to be an old man here. [...] I have not wished to give even a part of it to the Great Father [the President]. Though he were to give me a million dollars I would not give him this land. [...] When people want to slaughter cattle they drive them along until they get them to a corral, and then they slaughter them. So it was with us. [...] My children have been exterminated; my brother has been killed.

Religious intolerance is an idea that found its earliest expression in the Old Testament, where the Hebrew tribe depicts itself waging a campaign of genocide on the Palestinian peoples to steal their land. They justified this heinous behavior on the grounds that people not chosen by their god were wicked and therefore did not deserve to live or keep their land. In effect, the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian peoples, eradicating their race with the Jew's own Final Solution, was the direct result of a policy of religious superiority and divine right. Joshua 6-11 tells the sad tale, and one needs only read it and consider the point of view of the Palestinians who were simply defending their wives and children and the homes they had built and the fields they had labored for. The actions of the Hebrews can easily be compared with the American genocide of its native peoples - or even, ironically, the Nazi Holocaust. With the radical advent of Christianity, this self-righteous intolerance was borrowed from the Jews, and a new twist was added. The conversion of infidels by any means possible became the newfound calling card of religious fervor, and this new experiment in human culture spread like wildfire. By its very nature, how could it not have? Islam followed suit, conquering half the world in brutal warfare and, much like its Christian counterpart, it developed a new and convenient survival characteristic: the destruction of all images and practices attributed to other religions. Muslims destroyed millions of statues and paintings in India and Africa, and forced conversion under pain of death (or by more subtle tricks: like taxing only non-Muslims), while the Catholic Church busily burned books along with pagans, shattering statues and defacing or destroying pagan art - or converting it to Christian use. Laws against pagan practices and heretics were in full force throughrout Europe by the sixth century, and as long as those laws were in place it was impossible for anyone to refuse the tenets of Christianity and expect to keep their property or their life. Similar persecution and harassment continues in Islamic countries even to this day, officially and unofficially.

Hitler had studied America from afar, both envying and admiring it, and attributed its achievements to its Aryan stock. He praised the country’s near genocide of Native Americans and the exiling to reservations of those who had survived. He was pleased that the United States had “shot down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.” He saw the U.S. Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 as “a model for his program of racial purification,” historian Jonathan Spiro wrote. The Nazis were impressed by the American custom of lynching its subordinate caste of African-Americans, having become aware of the ritual torture and mutilations that typically accompanied them. Hitler especially marveled at the American “knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.

when the United States and Britain denied their non-propertied classes and their female citizens suffrage, or when the US operated a colonial system of slavery, genocide, and racial apartheid, no culturalist arguments were advanced to explain this grave democratic deficit among white Euro-American property-owning Protestant Christian men either (the only exception was the use by antebellum Northern white abolitionists of culturalist arguments against Southern whites as sexually excessive and libertine—on account of having learned such traits from their Black slaves and from living in a warmer climate—and confining of women, but no arguments were offered to explain the racism of Northern whites against Blacks and Native Americans, let alone Northern intolerance of Catholics and Mormons or discrimination against women).

Extend the sphere," Madison wrote, and, "you take in a greater variety of parties and interests," and you make it difficult for either a mob majority or a tyrannical minority to unite "to invade the rights of other citizens." Whatever one's take on any of the debates of the day (especially the debate over slavery), and whatever one's philosophical understanding of the relationship of republicanism to land, commerce, finance, and labor, most agreed on practicalities. Also wanted to remove Spain from the Mississippi; also wanted the capacities to pacify hostile native Americans and put down rebellions of poor people; and all wanted Great Britain to get out of the way of their commerce. All wanted "room enough," as Thomas Jefferson would put it in his 1800 inaugural address, to be protected from Europe's "exterminating havoc." Expansion became the answer to every question, the solution to all problems, especially those two caused by expansion.

‎"What Zolberg calls the 'Melville principle' is an excellent expression of the fundamental right to free movement... for one surely needs to explain what is natural about state structures, in rich and poor countries alike, that confine the movements of billions of people to live and play anywhere they want. Melville's vision, echoed in Walt Whitman's poetry, is a far better prospect to imagine than the persistence of a primitive form of nationalism based on exclusion and expulsion, or a social model of gated communities antagonizing the poor by keeping them out of bounds. These are simply not rational long-term solutions for an already besieged planet. If Moors or Moriscos are the residual prototype of Gypsies, Native Americans, Africans, Jews, Hispanics, and, in general, the West's undesirables since 1492, we might as well avoid the tragedies that dogmatic concepts of national identities have engendered -- the expulsion of Jews in 1492; the expulsion of Moriscos in 1609; the scapegoating of minorities as infidels in the nation's holy body politic; and the horrors of genocide visited on various non-Europeans and on Jews in Nazi Germany -- by accepting our true nature as mestizos in a world where national, racial, ethnic, and cultural boundaries are dangerous illusions.

Now, let me preface this story with the following: If you think that I am in any way endorsing cultural appropriation by writing this, you should just stop reading. I swear to Goddess,* if I hear about any one of you reading this passage and deciding, “Okay, yeah, great, the moral of this story is that Jacob thinks it’s awesome for white people to dress up as Native Americans for Halloween, so I’m gonna go do that,” I will use the power of the internet to find out where you live and throw so many eggs at your house that it becomes a giant omelet. Or if you’re vegan, I will throw so much tofu at your house that it becomes a giant tofu scramble. The point of this passage is not that white people should dress their children as Native Americans for Halloween. That’s basically the opposite of the point here. Capisce? All that being said, it was 1997. I was six years old and hadn’t quite developed my political consciousness about cultural appropriation or the colonization of the Americas and subsequent genocide of Native American people at the hands of white settlers yet. I also didn’t know multiplication, so I had some stuff to work on. What I did know was that Pocahontas was, by far, the most badass Disney princess. Keep in mind that Disney’s transgender-butch-lesbian masterpiece Mulan wasn’t released until a year later, or else I would’ve obviously gone with that (equally problematic) costume.

One might pause here to wonder how it is that the United States claims to support democracy and freedom in the world when it so often backs dictators like the Shah and Somoza. As I tell my human rights class every year, the United States always supports democracy and freedom, except when it doesn’t, which is all the time…. As political analyst Stephen Gowans explains, the United States is simply not what it claims to be, and most likely never has been: The United States—which began as 13 former British colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America pursuing a “manifest destiny” of continental expansion, (the inspiration for Nazi Germany’s lebensraum policy); which fought a war with Spain for colonies; which promulgated the Monroe Doctrine asserting a sphere of influence in the Americas; which stole Panama to create a canal; whose special operations forces project US power in 81 countries; whose generals control the militaries of the combined NATO members in Europe and the military forces of South Korea; whose military command stations one hundred thousand troops on the territories of former imperialist rivals, manifestly has an empire. And yet this reality is denied, as assuredly as is the reality that the United States, built on the genocide of Native Americans and the slave labor of Africans, overtly white supremacist until the mid-1960s, and covertly white supremacist since, is unequivocally not a beacon of Enlightenment values, unless liberalism is defined as equality and liberty assigned exclusively to white men who own productive property. Indeed, so antithetical is the United States to the liberal values of the equality of all peoples and nations, freedom from exploitation and oppression, and the absence of discrimination on the bases of class, race, and sex, that it’s difficult to apprehend in what sense the United States has ever been liberal or has in any way had a legitimate claim to being the repository of the values of the Enlightenment.2

Admission to the Union followed on September 9,185o. However, the federal government continued to play a vital role in California: the role of a bystander and enabler of genocide. With as many as 15o,ooo Native Americans living in the soon-to-be state, California had by far the largest Native American population in the Union. The federal government was the legal authority responsible for dealing with Native peoples, who were considered people of sovereign nations in terms of diplomacy and treaty making. In the course of the next two decades, though, the federal government would prove reluctant to contradict the will of the white citizens in California in their democratically driven campaign of physical extermination through violence, kidnapping, exposure, and compulsory starvation.

the most general condition for guilt-free massacre is the denial of humanity to the victim. You call the victims names like gooks, dinks, niggers, pinkos, and jags. The more you can get high officials in government to use these names and others like yellow dwarfs with daggers and rotten apples, the more your success.... If contact is allowed, or it cannot be prevented, you indicate the contact is not between equals; you talk about the disadvantaged, the deprived. Troy Duster, "Conditions for Guilt-Free Massacre" (1971)

These New World practices (enslavement and genocide) formed another secret link with the anti-human animus of mechanical industry after the sixteenth century, when the workers were no longer protected either by feudal custom or by the self-governing guild. The degradations undergone by child laborers or women during the early nineteenth century in England's 'satanic mills' and mines only reflected those that took place during the territorial expansion of Western man. In Tasmania, for example, British colonists organized 'hunting parties' for pleasure, to slaughter the surviving natives: a people more primitive, scholars believe, than the Australian natives, who should have been preserved, so to say, under glass, for the benefit of later anthropologists. So commonplace were these practices, so plainly were the aborigines regarded as predestined victims, that even the benign and morally sensitive Emerson could say resignedly in an early poem, 1827: "Alas red men are few, red men are feeble, They are few and feeble and must pass away." As a result Western man not merely blighted in some degree every culture that he touched, whether 'primitive' or advanced, but he also robbed his own descendants of countless gifts of art and craftsmanship, as well as precious knowledge passed on only by word of mouth that disappeared with the dying languages of dying peoples. With this extirpation of earlier cultures went a vast loss of botanical and medical lore, representing many thousands of years of watchful observation and empirical experiment whose extraordinary discoveries-such as the American Indian's use of snakeroot (reserpine) as a tranquilizer in mental illness-modern medicine has now, all too belatedly, begun to appreciate. For the better part of four centuries the cultural riches of the entire world lay at the feet of Western man; and to his shame, and likewise to his gross self-deprivation and impoverishment, his main concern was to appropriate only the gold and silver and diamonds, the lumber and pelts, and such new foods (maize and potatoes) as would enable him to feed larger populations.

In most cases, governments were at least willing to turn their heads, if not send help, when Native populations were being exterminated. Yet above all else, settlers, ranchers, and miners, like their brethren in the southern portion of the state, used voluntary, democratic associations to greatest effect in bringing about the genocide of California's Indigenous people.

Given that many Euro-Americans thought Indians were animals, it was easy to rationalize killing them as something more akin to killing a pesky animal near one's home or herd, rather than accepting it as murder of another human being. As the Chico Weekly Courant described it, "Nothing but extermination will keep them from committing their depredations. It is a false notion of humanity to save the lives of these red devils. There should be no prisoners taken, but a general sacrifice made of the whole race."The

The taking of trophies, especially the mutilation attendant to beheadings and scalping, was elemental to the genocide of Native peoples. Reinforcing the savage, animal, and inhuman nature of their victims lay behind the collection of such trophies by the perpetrators. 117 Wright and his men were rewarded economically with bounties paid by the community and reimbursement and pay by the state, and socially with adulation from their local communities. In part, this helps to explain the rise of a category of men known as "Indian hunters," who came to prominence in northern California during the r85os and i86os.

What perhaps made it all the better for non-Native residents of Long Valley was that not one member of the community had ever been killed-not in raids, not by unexplained murder, not in action as a member of Farley's company.121 In fact no evidence exists of any Euro-American even being wounded."' Hundreds of Native people had died to make sure cattle, horses, and oxen could roam free.

Others included gambling, prostitution, drunkenness, and using Native Americans and their villages as target practice. At other times, rape was mixed with murder, arson, and thievery, leading to campaigns of extermination of entire communities.141 But not all elements of the genocide of Native peoples were as visible as murder, arson, or even rape. As a result of malnutrition, rape, and forced cohabitation, disease was destroying the health and fertility of Indigenous peoples throughout California.

He abandoned any thought of stemming the tide of such extermination because as part of God's master plan, genocide of the Indian "race [was] beyond the power and wisdom of man to avert."' Indeed in the minds of some nineteenth-century Euro-Americans, to turn away from genocide would be to contravene God's plan. More important, in Burnett's mind, to do other than

That law that created the native corporations was the idea of tanik American corporations to undermine tribal integrity.” “What do you mean?” Bertie asks. “Everywhere else in the U.S., tribes have their own government, their own land, and their own money.” “They have a monopoly on casinos, you mean,” Bertie says cautiously. “Whatever it is. Our tribes in Alaska don’t have nothing. It’s the native corporations who have all the land and the money, and they’re the ones making decisions.” “But don’t you think they’re making decisions in the best interests of their shareholders, the native people?” “They’re just making money for their shareholders like any other corporation,” Mandy says. “And they hire taniks in Anchorage offices to carry out their business. They don’t care about whether people up here are taking their dividends and drinking them away. I hate to say it, but I got to agree with Luther. It’s a long, slow genocide, all done under the corporations’ laws.

Anthropology should be required for citizenship for people who are native-born because it helps them to understand the world we live in, the country we live in, the histories we have. People really don’t know much about their own culture, their own country. For instance, people really don’t know to what extent the United States has mistreated its own native peoples. In my home state of California, we had veritable genocide that lasted from the period of the gold rush to the first decade of the twentieth century. We have never really confronted and acknowledged that. To move forward, we have to face our complicated history with indigenous genocide, slavery, and eugenics applied to immigrants in the 1920s as well. Our history is not all negative, of course. I love to travel across the country by car every few years to meet with and talk with Americans from different parts of the country. There is also a lot to be proud of in being an American. But we do have to understand how our nation came into its present form. We’re no different from any other country. All nations are born in violence. But our role is to make them less violent, make them more viable, make them more equitable. That’s where anthropology comes in. I think anthropology helps us to look and question what Virginia Woolf called “unreal loyalties” — loyalties to a particular definition of an ethnic group or an origin story. Instead, anthropology helps us to understand and engage the richness, complexity, and conflict involved in making the United States. In this way anthropology can help us become better Americans.

It’s being made out that the whole point of the war was to topple the Taliban regime and liberate Afghan women from their burqas, we are being asked to believe that the U.S. marines are actually on a feminist mission . (If so, will their next stop be America’s military ally Saudi Arabia?) Think of it this way: in India there are some pretty reprehensible social practices against “untouchables”, against Christians and Muslims, against women. Pakistan and Bangladesh have even worse ways of dealing with minority communities and women. Should they be bombed? Should Delhi, Islamabad and Dhaka be destroyed? Is it possible to bomb bigotry out of India? Can we bomb our way to a feminist paradise? Is that how women won the vote in the U.S? Or how slavery was abolished? Can we win redress for the genocide of the millions of Native Americans upon whose corpses the United States was founded by bombing Santa Fe?

...the bottom line is Columbus Day is just a celebration of genocide.

To this faith, the world owes the modern institutional versions of orphanages, hospitals, and higher education, along with the intellectual revolutions of the Enlightenment. Renaissance painting and architecture, classical music, and the abolition movement, as well as the modern movements for workers’ rights, women’s suffrage, and civil rights, were all by-products, directly or indirectly, of Christian beliefs and actions. Despite Christianity’s positive influences in many areas, Christians were also responsible for the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Thirty Years’ War, the genocide of native civilizations in the Americas, the Salem witch trials, American slavery and the slave trade, the Third Reich in Germany, “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland, the Rwandan genocide, and other atrocities. Clearly, Christianity has been both a positive and negative force in the world.

Societies in acute distress often form what anthropologists call “crisis cults,” which promise recovered grandeur and empowerment during times of collapse, anxiety, and disempowerment. A mythologized past will magically return. America will be great again. The old social hierarchies, opportunities, and rules will be resurrected. Prescribed rituals and behaviors, including acts of violence to cleanse the society of evil, will vanquish the malevolent forces that are blamed for the crisis. These crisis cults—they have arisen in most societies that faced destruction, from Easter Island to Native Americans at the time of the 1890 Ghost Dance—create hermetically sealed tribes informed by magical thinking. We are already far down this road. Our ruling elites are little more than Ice Age hunters in Brooks Brothers suits, as the anthropologist Ronald Wright told me, driving herds of woolly mammoths over cliffs to keep the party going without asking what will happen when the food source suddenly goes extinct. “The core of the belief in progress is that human values and goals converge in parallel with our increasing knowledge,” the philosopher John Gray wrote. “The twentieth century shows the contrary. Human beings use the power of scientific knowledge to assert and defend the values and goals they already have. New technologies can be used to alleviate suffering and enhance freedom. They can, and will, also be used to wage war and strengthen tyranny. Science made possible the technologies that powered the industrial revolution. In the twentieth century, these technologies were used to implement state terror and genocide on an unprecedented scale. Ethics and politics do not advance in line with the growth of knowledge—not even in the long run.

In our history of racism, words have had a starring role in the brutalization of people of color. Beyond “nigger” and beyond black America, words have been used in the oppression of many races. I will not use those words here, because I am a black woman, and I do not feel comfortable invoking the painful history of words used to oppress Native American people, Asian American people, Latinx people, and more, when my community has not had to suffer the consequences of how those words have been used to justify genocide, internment camps, and more. But, looking at American history, words have been used to separate, dehumanize, and oppress, and the power of those words is still felt today. Picture a water fountain

Wikipedia: Beaver Wars The Iroquois effectively destroyed several large tribal confederacies, including the Mohicans, Huron (Wyandot), Neutral, Erie, Susquehannock (Conestoga), and northern Algonquins, with the extreme brutality and exterminatory nature of the mode of warfare practiced by the Iroquois causing some historians to label these wars as acts of genocide committed by the Iroquois Confederacy.

it is white Americans who have murdered our black and brown brothers and sisters. After the genocide and forced removal of Native Americans, the enslavement of millions of Africans, and the lynching of more than 4,400 of their surviving descendants, it is white Americans who have used our faith as a shield to justify our actions, deny our responsibility, and insist on our innocence. We, white Christian Americans, are Cain.

don’t know precisely when Tommy came to identify as antiwar, but it was very young. Once it dawned on him that violence was the essence of war, it overthrew his early naïve fascination with military history. I associate this change with his learning the basic facts of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then about the horrors of the Holocaust. These historical events shook him and kept him up at night, sometimes giving him dreadful nightmares, and when he learned about genocidal violence against Native Americans, he stopped playing war and battle games altogether. After he learned what war actually was, and how it destroyed people’s lives and communities, his fascination with it ended—or, to be more precise, the character of his fascination changed. What he cared about was stopping wars and blocking militarism as a cultural and political obsession.

Healing for the Native Ministry. It says in part: For the policy of genocide and for the ongoing unjust policies of the United States government, we ask your forgiveness. . . . For the destruction of the Native family structure through the demoralization of Native American men, for placing your children in foster homes and boarding schools, and for the subservient positions forced on your women, we ask for your forgiveness. For over three-hundred broken treaties, for the myth of “Manifest Destiny,” and for the notion that Native people stood in the way of progress, we ask your forgiveness. For the sins of the church, for withholding the true gospel, for misrepresenting Jesus Christ, and for using religion in an attempt to “civilize the Natives,” we ask your forgiveness . . . We ask for . . . Forgiveness for taking your land at gunpoint and for forcing you on to barren reservations . . . Forgiveness for the policy of our government of genocide toward the Native Americans . . . Forgiveness for the broken treaties . . . Forgiveness for the ongoing policies of the government . . . Forgiveness for misrepresenting the gospel to our Native American forefathers. When your fathers asked us for truth we gave them white man’s religions. When your fathers asked for God we withheld the true gospel of Jesus Christ.47

Native American youths, like the children of war veterans, like the children of Holocaust survivors, like the children of Cambodian genocide survivors, and like the children of the World Trade Center attack survivors, are among the modern world’s newest victims of transgenerational trauma.

The attitude of Oregon pioneers toward the Indians was recorded by Father John Beeson, one of the early settlers. Of his fellows, most of whom were from Missouri, he wrote: ‘Among them it was customary to speak of the Indian man as a buck, the woman as a squaw, until at length, in the general acceptance of the terms, they ceased to recognize the rights of humanity in those to whom they were so applied. By a natural and easy transition, from being spoken of as brutes, they came to be thought of as game to be shot or vermin to be destroyed.’ Any white man found dead was assumed to have been murdered by Indians, and often his death was made an excuse for raiding the nearest Indian village and killing all the men, women, and children found there. In one instance an elderly white miner who had refused to participate in such raids was called on by a score of men and forced to join them. Father Beeson related, ‘After resting on the mountains, they shot him, cut off his head, leaving it on the limb of a tree, and divided his property among themselves.

Here in the United States, very little effort has been made to voice formal apologies, make reparations, or pass political mandates about education. Yet this country was founded in part by genocidal policies directed at Native Americans and the enslavement of Black people. Both of these things are morally repugnant. Still I love my country. In fact, it is because I love my country that I want to make sure the mistakes of our past do not get repeated. We cannot afford to cover over the dark chapters of our history, as we have for decades upon decades. It is time for that to stop.

By Amherst’s direction, hostile Indian tribes were provided with blankets contaminated with smallpox: “Could it not be contrived to send the smallpox among those disaffected tribes of Indians? We must, on this occasion, use every stratagem in our power to reduce them” (14).

Ainda é preciso dizer? O Brasil foi fundado sobre um cemitério indígena. Todo dia é alguém que some, mano.

White Fragility Sonnet (A Record of White Crimes Against Humanity) Whiteness has done more harm to the world than good, Till you look past your whiteness, you cannot be human. Orange 'n musky trash of white privilege diss diversity, What else would you expect from colonial descendants! Every generation has its fraudsters like Edison, Every generation has trashy maniacs like Columbus. Every generation has war-merchants like Kissinger, Every generation has its churchillian doofus. White people tortured the Africans, White people booted Native Americans; White people massacred the Vietnamese, White people lynched and looted the Indians. White people caused genocide after genocide, Yet you still boast about white superiority. You proclaim that people of color are inferior, While white society is the epitome of savagery. If devil had a color, it would be white - Yet I say, color is nonsense, we're all equal. I am human enough to give you place beside me, All I expect is that, a human behaves human. After all the heartaches inflicted by white people, A 100 generations worth apology won't be sufficient. Yet I am human enough to declare, we are all equal; All I ask is that, humans finally behave human. They say, I'm spreading hate against the whites; To which I say, human making is my mission. There is no hope for humanitarian uplift, Unless you renounce all fragile intoleration. If you wanna learn about tolerance, ask a person of color, How do you even tolerate the sight of white people, when the wrongs done to you by whites are unparalleled in history! You'll realize, there's no mythical secret to integration, For ages we've known no other life but of inclusivity. Middle East, India and Far East, have been the melting pot of integration, before the whites even knew what integration is. Yet you say white people are superior - so be it; Cowards always take refuge in fairytales, to justify their fragility and prejudice. If you wanna be a decent human being, Never draw moral parameters from the west. No matter whether you're born of east or west, Remember, you are human first, then all else. To recognize diversity is science, To celebrate diversity is humanity. To recognize privilege is common sense, To abandon privilege builds human society.

During the nineteenth century, the U.S. government offered bounties for murdering Native Americans and, perhaps more fundamentally, provided free farmland and other business opportunities to settlers willing to encroach on Native American territories.9 A similar process continues today, particularly in Central and South America.

the town had been the arrival port for thousands of Yoeme people, deported from Sonora in the first years of the twentieth century, under the regime of Porfirio Díaz. People who had been forcibly removed from their homes and villages because of their resistance to the opening of their ancestral land — the largest, most fertile river valley in Mexico — to make way for Mexican and American venture capitalists.

This unfortunate race, whom we had been taking so much pains to save and to civilize, have by their unexpected desertion and ferocious barbarities justified extermination and now await our decision on their fate

It’s being made out that the whole point of the war was to topple the Taliban regime and liberate Afghan women from their burqas. We’re being asked to believe that the US marines are actually on a feminist mission. (If so, will their next stop be America’s military ally Saudi Arabia?) Think of it this way: in India there are some pretty reprehensible social practices, against ‘Untouchables’, against Christians and Muslims, against women. Pakistan and Bangladesh have even worse ways of dealing with minority communities and women. Should they be bombed? Should Delhi, Islamabad, and Dhaka be destroyed? Is it possible to bomb bigotry out of India? Can we bomb our way to a feminist paradise? Is that how women won the vote in the United States? Or how slavery was abolished? Can we win redress for the genocide of the millions of Native Americans, upon whose corpses the United States was founded, by bombing Santa Fe?

Nothing about the the birth of America is great - America is a terrorist nation, built by terrorists who invaded other people's land, stripped them of their homes, and built a spin-off of the ruthless British empire over their blood and bones.

The pilgrims were not pioneers, they were terrorists.

Up to 95 percent of the original Native American population, estimated at roughly twenty million people, disappeared after the invasion of European colonizers.

Up to 95 percent of the original Native American population, estimated at roughly twenty million people, disappeared after the invasion of European colonizers. While there was direct violence toward Native Americans, many of these deaths can be attributed to the introduction of smallpox. Smallpox is a virus that is spread when one comes into contact with infected bodily fluids or contaminated objects such as clothing or blankets. The virus then finds its way into a person's lymphatic system. Within days of infection, large, painful pustules begin to erupt over the victim's skin. In school curriculums, this has often been taught as an unfortunate tragedy, an accidental side effect of trade, and therefore a reason to claim that the Europeans did not commit genocide. However, in recent years, many historians have recognized that the spreading of smallpox was an early form of biological warfare, one which was understood and used without mercy from at least the mid-1700s. Noted conversations among army officials include letters discussing the idea of "sending the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes" and using "every stratagem to reduce them." Another official, Henry Bouquet, wrote a letter that told his subordinates to "try to Innoculate [sic] the Indians, by means of Blankets, as well as to Try Every other Method, that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race." They followed through on their plan, giving two blankets and a handkerchief from a Smallpox Hospital alongside other gifts to seal an agreement of friendship between the local Native tribes and the men at Fort Pitt, located in what is now western Pennsylvania.

No one wanted to use the word 'murder' then, using instead words more apt to talking about a pest problem than a human race. Even today the United States still has not officially recognized genocide in its history.

Even today the United States still has not officially recognized genocide in its history.

I wanted to devour this woman's dignity. Congratulations for what exactly? For having a family who made it through genocide? For being part of the slim population of surviving Native Americans post-colonization? An anger simmered in my throat, begging to be let loose on this stupid woman who was there to simply enjoy her vacation. How dare she remain blissfully unaware of the modern existence of Native Americans when all she had seen were movies making us look like history? As mad as I was, I knew it wasn't her fault and I couldn't muster up the energy to boil my anger into a response.

Indian boarding schools began in 1860, with the first school being established on the Yakima Indian Reservation in Washington State. These schools were designed to take Native American youths and mold them into members of "civilized society"; to make them White. The schools taught the basics of education, such as arithmetic, but also taught the students to practice Christianity and that the political structures of the United States were ideal for everyone. The actual goal was to eradicate every ounce of Native cultures.

Pratt created the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and his motto was "kill the Indian, save the man." At this school, and others that would open and follow in its wake, tens of thousands of Native children faced abuse and neglect. They were often forcibly removed from their homes and taken to these schools that were sometimes across the country from their original lives. When they arrived, the children were forced to cut their hair and change their names. They were made to become White in look and label, stripped of any semblance of Native heritage. The children were not allowed to speak their Native tongues, some of them not knowing anything else. They were prohibited from acting in any way that might reflect the only culture they had ever known. At Pratt's Carlisle Indian Industrial School alone, the numbers revealed the truth of what this treatment did. Of the ten thousand children from 141 different tribes across the country, only a small fraction of them ever graduated. According to the Carlisle Indian School Project, there are 180 marked graves of Native children who died while attending. There were even more children who died while held captive at the Carlisle school and others across the county. Their bodies are only being discovered in modern times, exhumed by the army and people doing surveys of the land who are finding unmarked burial sites. An autograph book from one of the schools was found in the historical records with one child's message to a friend, "Please remember me when I'm in the grave." The US Bureau of Indian Affairs seemed to think Pratt had the right idea and made his school the model for more. There ended up being more than 350 government-funded boarding schools for Natives in the United States. Most of them followed the same ideology: Never let the children be themselves. Beat their language out of them. Punish them for practicing their cultures. Pratt and his followers certainly killed plenty of Indians, but they didn't save a damn thing.

the systematic genocide and removal of Native Americans from their historic lands by white European settler colonists, who acted with the support of soldiers supplied by the government and moral justifications produced by the church.

My America fosters the spirit of self-correction, Your America lies in the continuation of exploitation. My England lives in a willful drive for making amends, Your England lies in deliberate denial of historic mess. My Australia battles to assimilate those once wronged, Your Australia boasts proudly atrocious plunders as tradition. I wish I could tell you, you and I are the same, but we are not. My earth is a celebration of people, Your earth is chained to dead customs.

Blood and Blunder (The Sonnet) The world is filled with atrocious holidays, Columbus Day, Australia Day and Thanksgiving. Holidays steeped in blood and blunder, are passed on proudly as occasion of merrymaking. Imagine celebrating 9/11 as a day of freedom, Yet colonizers do exactly that without shame. And these animal holidays are a thousand times more atrocious than the crash of nine eleven. Nine eleven is a ghastly stain upon history, there is no doubt or question about that. But what about the infinitely larger stains, inflicted, respected and celebrated by cowards! Human rights can never prevail till we dismantle every false celebration. Animals find honor in blood and blunder, We become human through course correction.

There have been many genocidal attempts, without and within, to destroy and/or misrepresent the histories, futures, languages, and traditional thoughts of Native peoples. But traditions, unlike doctrines, can persist and evolve at the same time. This anthology is a response to modern-day Native people becoming more and more disgruntled with spurious representations. Each writer has built a bridge between what has been “presented wrongly” and what needs to be “expressed accurately.

These bridges support revelations in opposition to repudiations and personal testimonies challenging thematic stereotypes. Although

Several Nations from the United States and Canada are embodied in this collection. Even so, no individual writer attempts to speak for his or her entire Nation, only from personal experiences dealing with non-Indians as well as Indians. Sadly, for whatever reasons, some of our worst enemies are on occasion our own people. The

This anthology is a testament to American Indian consciousness continuing to circulate, regardless of past or present genocidal attempts, whether cerebral, endemic, systematic, or otherwise.

When I visit schools, I explain that modern Indians dress like everybody else and speak English. That our tribal regalia, the buckskin and feathers, are not everyday garb but are reserved for special events. I say that we are proud of our beautiful, colorful clothing, which is important in our traditions, but it is only a part of being Indian. The part that they can’t see, our beliefs, our values, make us Indian even though we no longer wear buckskins, beads, and feathers and don’t live in teepees. As an adult I can handle the stereotypes, and as an author I try to correct the misconceptions and tell the truth about American Indians. Unfortunately, Indian children can have negative feelings about themselves because they don’t fit this false image. Educators have found that the way children view themselves is important to their success in school and how they relate to others. But an unrealistic idea of what and who Indians are supposed to be confuses a child when he or she compares those images to his or her parents and other relatives. Some

A degree from UC Berkeley will never change the fact that I cannot understand my grandfather when he asks for more coffee.” —Esther G. Belin (Navajo) from In the Cycle of the Whirl. L

Indians love baseball,” jokes Charlie Hill, “but we don’t set up camp in the ballpark! Hey, if the Atlanta Braves think that using Indians as mascots is simply harmless fun, then why not have them dress up some white guy in a three-piece suit and have him shuffle around a mobile home parked in the middle of the outfield every time their team scores a hit? Or how about changing the names of a few of these sports teams? Why not have the Atlanta White Boys or the Kansas City Caucasians or the Chicago Negroes, the Washington Jews or New York Rednecks?” My

The sports page told me that the New Jersey Niggers had beaten the Boston Micks. Some player on the Houston Hebes had accused the San Antonio Spics of dropping their last game to get a higher draft pick. The league was expanding to Toronto, and since they had already honored African Americans, Irish Americans, Jewish Americans, and Hispanic Americans, they wanted to name a team to honor Native Americans. They

They sent out notices to all the tribal leaders, and they told us we could have whatever we wanted: Prairie Niggers, if the New Jersey team did not object, Redskins, Savages, Warriors, Heathens, Braves, Bucks—and of course the cheerleaders would be the Squaws, unless we wanted to modernize the language and just call them the Cunts. But

Firewater Sometimes I think how alcohol’s a marvelous solvent, can remove red people from a continent, turn bronze to guilt. What was DuPont’s old motto—Better things for better living through chemistry? You take potatoes from Peru, barley from Palestine, maize from Mexico, sugar cane from

from Indo-China— put in some wild yeast from the air, ferment it and voilà! you’ve now got Vodka for the Volga, beer for the Brits, Bourbon for Balboa’s kids, Joy-juice for the Kickapoos. Pour this into an Inner City and create your Designated Criminal Class purely to blame for everything, or rub it on the Reservations and

you’ll see each fetus wizen up inside its fertile womb. Yet drip it into the veins of Congress or a Corporation, just watch those Mountain Men outwrestle steers, gulping their liquid god go wildly enthusiastic so they can write laws in stone with one hand while joysticking lovers with the other, sacking Montana and out-dunking Jordan, out-leveraging—who was it, Archimedes, popped the world’s blue eyeball into a Swiss snowbank? See, ghettoites, how sociable our masters are, these Bacchanalians, never alcoholic, immune in suburbs where bad sex has died and gone to heaven, no AIDS, no illegitimate children, all the schools have classic curricula and every personal fetus will be delivered right on time, uncorked like Chateauneuf du Pape, unscrewed like Southern Comfort to gurgle on its snowy tablecloth, caress with rosy fingers its parents’ egos and become a tax loophole. Classic, ah Classic these Metamorphoses

of Alcohol— but please, be careful how you tell of them, remember Ovid shivering on the Black Sea shores, wondering how to get back in to one of the Roman villas once again. November

Stannard begins with a stunning statistic: of the ten to twelve million native Indians who once populated the American continent, between 90 and 95 percent perished as a consequence of exposure to the white man. This is a catastrophic event, by any measure, but even so Stannard admits that most of these deaths were due to plagues and epidemics unwittingly transmitted from Europeans to the Indians. Whatever we call this, we cannot call it genocide because genocide involves the intent to exterminate a population.

Our land here is the dearest thing on earth to us. Men take up land and get rich on it, and it is very important for us Indians to keep it.

We have been south and suffered a great deal down there. Many have died of diseases which we have no name for. Our hearts looked and longed for this country where we were born. There are only a few of us left, and we only wanted a little ground, where we could live. We left our lodges standing, and ran away in the night. The troops followed us. I rode out and told the troops we did not want to fight; we only wanted to go north, and if they would let us alone we would kill no one. The only reply we got was a volley. After that we had to fight our way, but we killed none who did not fire at us first. My brother, Dull Knife, took one-half of the band and surrendered near Fort Robinson. [...] They gave up their guns, and then the whites killed them all.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, two contemporary theorists of U.S. empire, have also suggested that the root of contemporary U.S. imperial abuses “should be traced back to the very origins of the country, to black slavery and the genocidal wars against the Native Americans.

The atrocities committed against the Native Americans of North America are evident in stark statistics provided by the United to End Genocide, the largest activist organization operating in the United States today. When the first European explorers set foot in North America in the 15th century, an estimated 10 million or so natives inhabited the vast terrain. 5 centuries later, that number had plummeted to 300,000.

Between 1492 and the American Revolution, the indigenous population in North America declined by 90%. In 1491 Native people controlled all of the 2.4 billion acres that would become the United States of America. Native Americans now control about 56 million acres, roughly 2 percent. America's Existential Crisis: Our Inherited Obligations to Native Nations.

A land acknowledgement or territorial acknowledgement is a formal statement, often spoken at the beginning of a public event, that it is taking place on land originally inhabited by or belonging to indigenous people. In Canada, land acknowledgements became popular after the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission report (which argued that the country's Indian residential school system had amounted to cultural genocide) and the election of liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau that same year.[2] By 2019, they were a regular practice at events including National Hockey League games, ballet performances and parliament meetings. Critics of land acknowledgements have described them as excesses of political correctness or expressed concerns that they amount to empty gestures that avoid actually addressing the issues of indigenous communities. Ensuring the factual accuracy of acknowledgments can be difficult due to problems like conflicting land claims or unrecorded land exchanges between indigenous groups. In the United States, the practice of land acknowledgements has been described as "catching on" as of 2020.