Crimes and Cover-ups in American Politics by Donald Jeffries

Author:Donald Jeffries
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510741485
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2019-04-24T16:00:00+00:00

COWBOYS AND INDIANS

The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.

—David E. Stannard

According to the most radical sources, Christopher Columbus and his fellow Spaniards were responsible for the deaths of eight million Arawaks—the indigenous population of the West Indies. Ward Churchill attributed these deaths to “torture, murder, forced labor, starvation, disease and despair.” A Spanish missionary, Bartolome de las Casas, testified to witnessing the dismemberment, beheading, and rape of some 3,000 people. As author Barry Lopez summarized it, “The Spanish cut off the legs of children who ran from them. . . . They made bets as to who, with one sweep of his sword, could cut a person in half. . . . They used nursing infants for dog food.” While the Spanish tended to view the natives as natural slaves, the later English settlers saw them as savages beyond any hope of salvation.

As John F. Kennedy would later charge, “the treatment of the American Indian is a national disgrace.” In 1851, California governor Peter H. Burnett declared, “A war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct.” Continuing a bloody “bounty” program that began in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey in the early 1700s, Shasta City, California offered five dollars for every Indian scalp around the time the forty-niners first arrived in the state looking for gold. To understand how successful this genocidal program was, we need only look at the fact that there were some 150,000 Native Americans in California before the forty-niners came, but by 1870 there were less than 30,000. Major newspapers editorialized in favor of exterminating the Indians. And the great Union hero General William Tecumseh Sherman said, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux [Lakotas] even to their extermination: men, women, and children.” The 1890 attack on the Wounded Knee, North Dakota Indian reservation resulted in the death of Chief Sitting Bull, who had rejected “the ways of the white man,” as well as some 150 other Native Americans. In an early twentieth-century Supreme Court decision, it was ruled that the US government had the right to overturn all laws of the Cherokee Nation.

In 1928, a study conducted by the Brookings Institution found living conditions on Indian reservations to be deplorable. This did result in improved healthcare, land rights, and education for Native Americans, but many states continued to deny them the right to vote. Utah became the last state to approve Native American suffrage, in 1956. Forced assimilation policies resulted in tribal religion being outlawed, and Indian children were sent to boarding schools and forbidden to practice their traditional cultures. Native American activists like Russell Means charged that the United States government had committed genocide against Native Americans for hundreds of years.

The American government’s own very conservative estimates state that between one and four million Native Americans died because of the Europeans who invaded their lands. Native Americans lost 98 percent of their land in the process.

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