Indians in the USA today are on the verge of extinction! And these are not empty words! The number of this once numerous people has declined catastrophically since the beginning of the migration of Europeans to America. What's the matter? Why did a people who had their own developed civilization and inhabited vast territories reach such a state?
The main “credit” for this belongs to white settlers. In Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking America, there was practically no oppression and destruction of Indians. Colonizers and indigenous people coexisted peacefully here and their mixing took place. As a result of this, new nationalities gradually formed: Brazilians, Argentines, Mexicans, etc.
However, in the part of the North American continent that was colonized by Great Britain and on which the United States was subsequently formed, things were different. Here the policy of genocide of Indians was immediately adopted. Here is a map of the Indian tribes that inhabited the territory of the modern United States before the arrival of Europeans:
The settlers needed new lands, so the indigenous population was either expelled and forcibly resettled in less habitable areas, or simply exterminated. There are many bloody pages in the history of the United States concerning the mass extermination of the Indian population.
Particularly cruel and tragic are: the massacre near Yellow Creek (April 30, 1774), the execution of Indians at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), the Sand Creek massacre (November 29, 1864) and a number of other cases of destruction of indigenous population. At the same time, the genocide of Indians in the United States was often carried out with the knowledge of the authorities and even with the help of regular armed forces. In this photo, US Army soldiers pose next to a grave containing the bodies of Indians they shot.
For this operation, which killed more than 300 Indian civilians, some of the soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest military award in the United States.
It is perhaps impossible to establish the total number of Indians exterminated in the United States. However, a number of historians and Native American organizations claim that several million indigenous people died from the Indian genocide in the United States, which amounted to more than half of their total number.
It should be noted that the extermination of Indians in the United States was carried out not only by direct force, but also by indirect methods. For example, the large-scale extermination of bison proclaimed by the American government in the 19th century led to the almost complete destruction of these animals. This hit the Indians hard, for whom bison meat was the main food product. Many indigenous people died from the famine, which was provoked by the Americans.
Another very effective way of exterminating Indians in the United States was humanitarian aid, which was sent to Indian reservations by the “humane” American government. Previously, food products and things included in humanitarian cargo were infected with pathogens of various diseases. After such “gifts,” entire reservations died out.
Here is a map of Indian reservations in what is now the United States.
Compare it with the map of Indian settlement before the arrival of Europeans, which is given at the beginning of the article. Do you feel the difference?
There is a very common myth that the sharp decline in the number of Indians after the arrival of Europeans in America was a consequence of planned genocide. At the same time, the US government is also accused of genocide.
The most interesting thing is that it is American authors who accuse the US government loudest of all, which is not surprising. Now in politically correct America, self-flagellation has become the norm, and justifying government policies is considered bad form.
Nevertheless, there is an opposite point of view about what happened to the Indians. For example, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Guenter Lewy, wrote an article back in 2007 entitled “Were the American Indians Victims of Genocide?” (Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?), the translation of which I would like to bring to your attention.
On September 21, the National Museum of the American Indian will open its doors. In an interview earlier this year, museum founder and director W. Richard West said the new organization would not shy away from such complex topics as efforts to eradicate Native American culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. It's safe to say that someone will inevitably raise the issue of genocide.
The story of the encounter between European settlers and the indigenous people of America does not make for pleasant reading. Among the early publications, perhaps the best known is Helen Hunt Jackson's A Century of Infamy (1888), a sad account of forced removal, murder, and utter neglect. Jackson's book, while clearly capturing some important elements of what happened, also established a pattern of exaggeration and one-sided accusations that continues to this day.
Thus, according to Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, the reduction of the North American Indian population from 12 million in 1500 to almost 237,000 in 1900 constitutes "an enormous genocide... the most continuous on record." By the end of the 19th century, writes David E. Stannard, a historian at the University of Hawaii, Native Americans were subjected to "the worst human Holocaust the world has ever seen." According to A. Lenore Stipharm and Phil Lane, Jr., "there cannot be a more monumental example of sustained genocide anywhere in the record of human history."
Sweeping accusations of Indian genocide became especially popular during the Vietnam War, when historians opposed to it began to draw parallels between our actions in Southeast Asia and earlier examples of supposedly ingrained American malice toward non-white peoples. Historian Richard Drinnon, writing about the actions of troops under Kit Carson, called them "the forerunner of the Burning Fifth Marines" who set fire to Vietnamese villages, while in American Indians: The First Casualty (1972), Jay David urged modern readers remember how American civilization initiated "theft and murder" and "efforts towards... genocide."
Further accusations of genocide were noted in the lead-up to the quincentenary of Columbus's landing in 1992. The National Council of Churches passed a resolution calling the event an "invasion" that resulted in "slavery and genocide of the indigenous people." In Conquest of Paradise (1990), Kirkpatrick Sale accuses the English and their American successors of pursuing a policy of extermination that continued unabated for four centuries. Later works followed suit. In the 1999 Encyclopedia of Genocide, edited by scholar Israel Charney, articles by Ward Churchill asserted that extermination was the "explicit goal" of the US government. Cambodia expert Ben Keyerman also argued that genocide is "the only appropriate way" to describe how white settlers treated Indians. And so on.
It is a well-established fact that 250,000 Native Americans were still alive in the United States at the end of the 19th century. However, there is still scientific debate about the number of Indians living at the time of first contact with Europeans. Some students of the subject say the overstatement is a "numbers game"; others charge that the size of the indigenous population was deliberately minimized to make the decline appear less severe than it was.
The difference in estimates is huge. In 1928, ethnographer James Mooney proposed a total of 1,152,950 Indians in all tribes in the area north of Mexico City at the time of the arrival of Europeans. By 1987, in the book American Indians: Holocaust and Survival, Russell Thornton put the figure at more than 5 million, nearly five times Mooney's, and Lenore Stipharm and Phil Lane Jr. suggested a total of 12 million. This figure, in turn, remained in the work of anthropologist Henry Dobyns, who in 1983 estimated the indigenous population of all of North America as a whole at 18 million, and in the United States about 10 million.
Despite the striking differences in the numbers, one thing is clear: there is ample evidence that the arrival of the white man caused a sharp decline in the number of Native Americans. However, even if we take the highest numbers, they do not in themselves prove that genocide occurred.
To solve this problem properly, we must begin with the most important reason for the catastrophic decline in the Indians' numbers, namely, the spread of infectious diseases to which they had no immunity. This phenomenon is known to scientists as a "virgin-soil epidemic", in North America was the norm.
The deadliest pathogen introduced by Europeans was smallpox, which sometimes incapacitated so many adults at once that death from starvation and malnutrition was as common as death from disease, and in some cases entire tribes died out. Other killers are measles, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhoid, bubonic plague, cholera and scarlet fever. Although syphilis was clearly native to parts of the Western Hemisphere, it, too, was likely introduced to North America by Europeans.
There is no significant disagreement about all this. The most heinous enemy of the Native Americans is not the white man and his weapons, Alfred Crosby concludes, but “the invisible murderers whom these people brought in blood and breath.” It is believed that between 75 and 90 percent of all Indian deaths are due to these killers.
For some, however, this in itself warrants the use of the term genocide. David Stannard, for example, argues that just as the Jews who died of starvation and disease in the ghettos are counted among the victims of the Holocaust, among the Indians who died of imported diseases, “there were as many victims of Euro-American genocide as those who were burned.” stabbed, shot, or given to hungry dogs." As an example of actual genocide, Stannard points to the Franciscan missions in California as a "furnace of death."
But here we are in highly controversial territory. It is true that in cramped conditions, with poor ventilation and poor sanitation, missions encouraged the spread of disease. But it is clearly not true that, like the Nazis, the missionaries were indifferent to the welfare of their converts. No matter how difficult the conditions in which the Indians worked in compulsory labor, often with inadequate food and medical care, and corporal punishment, their experience could not be compared with the fate of the Jews in the ghetto. The missionaries had little understanding of the causes of disease, and there was little they could do about it medically. In contrast, the Nazis knew exactly what was happening in the ghetto and quite deliberately deprived prisoners of food and medicine, in contrast to Stannard's "death ovens".
The big picture also doesn't fit Stannard's idea of the disease as a "genocidal war." It is true that the forced removal of Indian tribes was often accompanied by great hardship and cruel treatment; The migration of the Cherokee tribe from their homeland to territory west of the Mississippi in 1838 killed thousands of people and became known in history as the Trail of Tears. But the greatest loss of life occurred long before this time, and sometimes only after minimal contact with European traders. True, some colonists later welcomed the high mortality rate among the Indians, viewing it as a sign of divine providence, which, however, does not change the basic fact that the Europeans did not enter the new world in order to infect the local residents with deadly diseases.
Ward Churchill went further than Stannard, arguing that there was nothing involuntary or unintentional about the disappearance of the bulk of the indigenous population of North America. “It was malice, and not nature, that did the work.” In short, the Europeans were waging biological warfare.
Unfortunately, for this thesis we do not know of a single example of such a war, and the documentary evidence is inconclusive. In 1763, a particularly serious uprising threatened the English garrison west of the Allegheny Mountains. Concerned about his limited resources, and disgusted by what he had seen of the treacherous and savage ways in which the Indians waged their wars, Sir Geoffrey Amherst, commander of the British forces in North America, wrote to Colonel Henry Bouquet at Fort Pitt as follows: "You will do so, to try to inoculate the Indians with [smallpox] by means of blankets, and also to try any other method that may help to exterminate this disgusting race."
Bouquet clearly approved of Amherst's proposal, but whether he carried it out remained unknown. Around June 24, two traders at Fort Pitt actually gave blankets and a handkerchief from the Fort's hospital quarantine to two visiting Delaware Indians, and one of the traders noted in his journal, "I hope this will have the desired effect." Smallpox was already present among the Ohio tribes, and at some point after this episode, there was another outbreak in which hundreds of people died.
A second, even less substantiated example of alleged biological warfare concerns an incident that occurred on June 20, 1837. On that day, Churchill writes, “the U.S. Army began distributing blankets to the Mandans and other Indians gathered at Fort Clark on the Missouri River in present-day North Dakota.” He continues: Far from trading in goods, the blankets were taken from the smallpox quarantine of the military hospital in St. Louis, and brought up the river aboard the steamer St. Peter. When the first Indians showed symptoms of illness on July 14, the surgeon advised them to set up camp near the post office to disperse and seek “shelter” in the villages of healthy relatives.
As a result, the disease spread and the Mandans were "virtually wiped out," and other tribes also suffered great losses. Citing the figure of "100,000 or more people" who died from the US Army-induced smallpox pandemic of 1836-40 (elsewhere he says the number was "several times that number"), Churchill refers the reader to Thornton's book, The Indian Holocaust and survival".
Churchill was also supported by Stiffarm and Lane, who write that "the distribution of smallpox-infected blankets by the US Army among the Mandans at Fort Clark... was a causal factor in the pandemic of 1836-40." As proof they cite a contemporary journal at Fort Clark, Francis A. Chardon.
But Chardon magazine clearly does not suggest that the US Army distributed infected blankets, but blames the accidental spread of the disease epidemic on passengers on a passenger ship. As for the "100,000 dead", not only does Thornton not confirm such obviously absurd numbers, but he also points to infected passengers on the St. Peter's as the cause. Another scientist, using newly discovered source material, also debunked the idea of a conspiracy to harm the Indians.
Likewise, any such idea is contradicted by the United States government's desire at the time to vaccinate Indians. Smallpox vaccination, a procedure developed by English country doctor Edward Jenner in 1796, was first ordered by President Jefferson in 1801. The program continued for three decades, although its progress was slowed by both resistance from Indians who suspected it was a stunt and a lack of interest on the part of some officials. Nevertheless, as Thornton writes: "Vaccination of American Indians ultimately substantially reduced the mortality rate from smallpox."
Thus, European settlers arrived in the New World by various reasons, but none of them intended to infect the Indians with deadly pathogens. As for the US government's accusations that it is responsible for the demographic catastrophe that befell the American Indian population, they are not supported by any evidence or legal arguments. The United States did not wage biological warfare against the Indians, and the large number of deaths due to disease cannot be considered the result of planned genocide.
However, even if up to 90 percent of the decline in the Indian population was the result of disease, significant mortality was caused by mistreatment and violence. But can all or even some of these deaths be considered genocide?
We can study characteristic incidents by following the geographical route of European settlers beginning with the New England colonies. There, first, the Puritans did not consider the Indians they encountered to be natural enemies, but rather friends and potential converts. But their Christianization efforts were unsuccessful, and their relations with the natives gradually became increasingly hostile. The Pequot tribe in particular, with their reputation for cruelty and ruthlessness, were feared not so much by the colonists as by other Indians in New England. In a war caused in part by the intertribal rivalry that eventually ensued, the Narragansett Indians actively participated on the side of the Puritans.
Hostilities began in late 1636 after several colonists were killed. When the Pequots refused to comply with the Massachusetts Bay Colony's demands for the transfer of culprits and other forms of compensation, the colony's first governor, John Endecott, ordered a punitive operation against them. This operation ended in vain. The Pequots retaliated by attacking any settler they could find. Fort Saybrook on the Connecticut River was besieged, and members of the garrison who ventured beyond its borders were ambushed and killed. One captured trader was tied to a post in full view of the fort and tortured for three days. His captors skinned him using hot wood and cut off his fingers and toes. Another prisoner was roasted alive.
Torture of prisoners was indeed a common practice for most Indian tribes, and was deeply rooted in Indian culture. Valuing courage above all, the Indians had little sympathy for those who surrendered or were captured. Prisoners who could not withstand the rigors of traveling through the desert were usually killed on the spot. Among those Indians or Europeans who were taken back to the village, some may have been taken in to replace slain warriors, others were ritually tortured to humiliate them and thus avenge losses in the tribe. After this, the Indians often consumed the body or its parts as ceremonial food and proudly displayed scalps and fingers as trophies of victory.
Although the colonists themselves resorted to torture to extract confessions, the brutality of these practices reinforced the belief that the natives were savages who deserved no mercy. This revulsion at least partially explains the brutality of the Battle of Fort Mystic in May 1637, when John Mason's contingent and Saybrook militia were surprised to find half the Pequot tribe encamped near the Mystic River.
The colonists intended to kill the warriors “with their own weapons,” as Mason said, that is, to plunder villages and capture women and children. But this plan didn't work. About 150 Pequot warriors arrived at the fort during the night, and when the surprise attack began, they emerged from their tents to fight. Fearing the Indians' numerical superiority, the English attackers set fire to the fortified villages and retreated behind the stockade. There they formed a circle and shot everyone who tried to escape. In the second cordon, which the Narragansett Indians formed, they massacred the few who managed to get through the English line. When the battle ended, the Pequots had lost several hundred men, about 300 of them women and children. Twenty Narragansett warriors were also killed.
Some historians accuse the Puritans of genocide, that is, carrying out a deliberate plan to destroy the Pequots. The evidence contradicts this. The use of fire as a means of warfare was not unusual for either Europeans or Indians, and any modern study emphasizes that the burning of the fortress was an act of self-defense and not part of a pre-planned massacre. Moreover, in the later stages of the Pequot War, the colonists spared women, children, and the elderly, which also contradicts the idea of genocidal intent.
The second famous example from the colonial period is King Philip's War (1675-76). This conflict, proportionate in cost to the costliest of all American wars, claimed the lives of one in sixteen men of military age in the colonies; a large number of women and children were also captured. Fifty-two of New England's 90 towns were attacked, seventeen were razed to the ground, and 25 were sacked. Indian casualties were even higher; many of those captured were executed or sold into slavery abroad.
The war was merciless on both sides. From the very beginning, the colonial council in Boston declared that "no one will be killed or wounded who are willing to surrender." But these rules were soon abandoned on the grounds that the Indians themselves did not adhere to either the laws of war or the laws of nature, they hid behind trees, stones and bushes, and did not engage in open battle in a “civilized” manner. Likewise, the desire for retribution was motivated by the atrocities committed by the Indians when they ambushed English troops or seized houses with women and children.
Soon, both colonists and Indians began to dismember corpses and display body parts and heads on poles. (However, the Indians could not be killed with impunity. In the summer of 1676, four men were convicted in Boston for the brutal murder of three Indian women and three Indian children. All of them were found guilty and two of them were executed).
The hatred kindled by King Philip's War became even more pronounced in 1689, when powerful Indian tribes allied with the French against the English. In 1694, the General Court of Massachusetts allocated a small territory to all friendly Indians. For the murder or capture of hostile Indians they were then offered generous rewards, and scalps were accepted as proof of the murder. In 1704 an amendment was made in the direction of "Christian Practice" with a scale of awards based on age and sex. The bounty was prohibited for children under ten years of age, later increased to twelve (sixteen in Connecticut, fifteen in New Jersey). Here, too, the genocidal intent was far from obvious. The practices were justified on the grounds of self-preservation and revenge, and in retaliation for widespread "scalping" carried out by the Indians.
Let's move now to the American border. In Pennsylvania, where the white population doubled between 1740 and 1760, pressure on Indian lands increased significantly. In 1754, incited by French agents, Indian warriors began a long and bloody conflict known as the French and Indian War or the Seven Years' War. By 1763, it is estimated that about 2,000 whites were killed or captured. Stories of real, exaggerated and imagined atrocities spread by word of mouth, in stories and through provincial newspapers. Some British officers ordered that no mercy be shown to captured Indians, and even after the formal end of hostilities, sentiment continued to run so strong that Indian killers such as the infamous Paxton Boys were applauded rather than arrested.
As the United States expanded westward, such conflicts multiplied. This continued until 1784. As one British traveler said, "White Americans have the most vicious antipathy towards the whole race of Indians, and nothing is more common than to hear them talk about exterminating Indians completely from the face of the Earth, men, women and children."
As settlers expanded their borders, they treated the Indians with contempt and often robbed and killed them. In 1782, the militia, who were pursuing Indians who had killed a woman and child, killed more than 90 peaceful Moravian Delawares. Although federal and state officials tried to bring these killers to justice, their efforts, writes historian Francis Pruha, "were ill-suited to the peculiar mentality of frontiersmen who hated Indians and were at the mercy of local courts."
But this is also only part of the story. The view that the Indian problem could only be solved by force was vigorously opposed by a number of federal commissioners who, beginning in 1832, headed the Bureau of Indian Affairs and oversaw a network of agents and subagents in the field. Many Americans on the East Coast also openly criticized the brutal ways of the frontiersmen. Pity for the disappearing Indians, coupled with a sense of remorse, led to the revival of the 18th-century concept of the noble savage. Native Americans have been romanticized in historiography, art, and literature. In particular, James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Longfellow.
On the western border such views were of course perceived as sentimentality. The perception of Indians as noble savages, as cynics noted, was directly proportional to geographic distance from them. Instead, settlers complained loudly that the regular army was unable to respond to the Indian threat more aggressively. The large-scale Sioux uprising in Minnesota in 1862, in which Indians were killed, raped, and plundered, left behind an atmosphere of fear and anger that spread throughout the West.
In Colorado, the situation was especially tense. The Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, who had legitimate grievances against the encroachments of white settlers, also fought for the pleasure, the desire for spoils, and the prestige that comes from success. The land route to the East was especially vulnerable. At some point in 1864, Denver was cut off from all supplies, and there were several slaughterhouses with families on outlying ranches. In one horrific case, all the victims were scalped, the throats of two children were cut, and the body of a mother was torn open and her entrails were pulled over her face.
In September 1864, the Rev. William Crawford wrote about the attitude of the white population of Colorado: "There is only one sentiment regarding the final decision which should be made regarding the Indians: Let them be destroyed, men, women and children. Of course," he added - “I myself do not hold such views.” The Rocky Mountain News, which at first made a distinction between friendly and hostile Indians, also began to advocate the extermination of this depraved, cruel, ungrateful race. While the regular army fought in the Civil War in the South, Western settlers depended on the protection of volunteer regiments, many of which were woefully lacking in discipline. It was local volunteers who committed the Sand Creek, Colorado massacre on November 29, 1864. Formed in August, the regiment was made up of prospectors and cowboys who were tired of ranching and itching for battle. Their commander, the Reverend John Milton Shivington, a politician and ardent Indian hater, called for war without mercy, even against children. He liked to say, “Nits make lice.” This was followed by rampant violence. During the surprise attack on large Indian camps, between 70 and 250 Indians were killed, most of them women and children. The regiment suffered eight casualties and 40 wounded.
News of the Sand Creek massacre sparked protests in the East and led to several requests to Congress. Although some investigators appear to have been biased against Shivington, no one disputes that he gave orders that no one should be left alive, or that his soldiers engaged in mass scalping and other mutilation.
The sad story continued in California. In the area that became the 31st state in 1850, the Indian population was once estimated between 150,000 and 250,000. By the end of the 19th century, this number had dropped to 15,000. As elsewhere, disease was the single most important factor, although the state also saw an unusually high number of targeted killings.
The discovery of gold in 1848 led to fundamental changes in Indian-white relations. Whereas Mexican farmers had previously used Indians as labor and provided them with minimal protection, the new immigrants, mostly young single men, showed hostility towards the Indians from the very beginning of the invasion of Indian lands and were often free to kill anyone who stood in their way. An American officer wrote to his sister in 1860: “There has never been such a vile type of people in the world as those who gathered around these mines.”
This was true of gold miners and was often true of newly arrived farmers. By the early 1850s, whites in California outnumbered Indians by about two to one, and many Indians were gradually forced to move to the less fertile areas of the territory and their numbers began to decline rapidly. Many suffered from hunger, others, desperate for food, began to steal and kill animals. Native American women who relied on prostitution to support their families contributed to the demographic decline by removing themselves from the reproductive cycle. As a solution to the growing problem, the federal government sought to place the Indians on reservations, but this was opposed both by the Indians themselves and by white farmers who feared losing their labor force. Meanwhile, clashes multiplied.
One of the most brutal wars, between the white settlers and the Yuki Indians in the Round Valley of Mendocino County, lasted several years and was fought with great brutality. Although Governor John B. Weller warned against non-suffrage campaigns against Indians. "Our operations against the Indians," he wrote to a volunteer commander in 1859, "must be strictly limited to those known to have been engaged in the murder and destruction of the property of our citizens... and not under any circumstances against women and children." , but his words had little effect. By 1864, the number of Yuki Indians had dropped from about 5,000 to 300.
The Humboldt Bay region, northwest of Round Valley, became the scene of even greater fighting. Here, too, the Indians stole and killed cattle, and the militia responded. A secret union formed in the town of Eureka committed a particularly heinous massacre in February 1860, suddenly attacking Indians sleeping in their homes and killing about sixty, mostly with tomahawks. During the same morning hours, whites attacked two other Indian ranches, with the same deadly results. In all, about 300 Indians were killed in one day, at least half of them women and children.
Then there was indignation and repentance. “The white settlers,” writes a historian only 20 years later, “received great provocation.... But no one was hurt, there was no robbery or cruelty that could justify the brutal murder of innocent women and children.” This was also the view of most residents of Eureka, where a grand jury condemned the massacre and in cities such as San Francisco such killings were repeatedly harshly criticized. But the atrocities continued. In the 1870s, as one historian summed up the situation in California, "only a remnant of the native population was still alive, and those who had survived the maelstrom of the previous quarter century were dislocated, demoralized, and miserable."
Finally we come to the wars on the Great Plains. After graduation Civil War, large waves of white migrants arriving simultaneously from the east and west squeezed the Indians between them. In response, the Indians attacked vulnerable white outposts; their “acts of diabolical cruelty,” one officer reported, “unparalleled in savage warfare.” The trails in the west faced similar risks: in December 1866, an army detachment of 80 men was ambushed on the Bozeman Trail and all the soldiers were killed.
To force the natives into submission, Generals Sherman and Sheridan, who for two decades after the Civil War commanded the Army combat units fighting the Indians on the plains, used the same strategy that they had successfully used in their march through Georgia and into the Shenandoah Valley. Unable to defeat the Indians on the open prairie, they pursued them into winter camps, where cold and snow limited their mobility. There they destroyed homes and food supplies, a tactic that inevitably resulted in the deaths of women and children.
Genocide? These actions were almost certainly in accordance with the laws of war accepted at the time. The principles of limited war and non-military immunity were codified in Francis Lieber's Order No. 100, issued to the Army on April 24, 1863 [Referring to the so-called "Lieber Code". In 1863, an American military lawyer, Frances Lieber, at the request of President Abraham Lincoln, wrote “Instructions for the Command of the Armies of the United States on the Battlefields,” on the basis of which this Order No. 100 was issued. (my note)]. But in the villages, fighting Indians who refused to surrender were considered legitimate military targets. In any case, there was never a desire to exterminate the Plains Indians, despite the heated statements on this issue, indignant at Sherman, and despite Sheridan's famously sharp remark that "the only good Indian I ever saw was dead". Although Sheridan meant not that all Indians should be shot on sight, but that none of the fighting Indians on the plains could be trusted, his words, as historian James Axtell rightly noted, did “more harm to Indian-white relations than any number of Sand Creeks or Wounded Knees [Referring to two battles in which many Indians died. Sand Creeks have already been written about above, and Wounded Knees will be discussed below. (my note)]."
Here, by the way, another myth is refuted. I specifically highlighted Sheridan's phrase about the dead Indian. The fact is that it was later distorted and it turned into a well-known phrase - "a good Indian is a dead Indian". Agree that this is not the same thing. Levi further writes:
As for the last mentioned clash, it took place on December 29, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. By this time, the U.S. 7th Cavalry had acquired a reputation for aggression, especially after its 1868 surprise attack on Cheyenne Indians at a village on the Washita River in Kansas, where about 100 Indians were killed by General George Custer's men.
However, the Battle of Ouachita, although one-sided, was not a massacre: first aid was provided to the wounded warriors, and 53 women and children who were hiding in their cabins survived the attack and were taken prisoner. There were no unarmed innocents among the Cheyenne, as their leader Black Kettle admitted that they carried out regular raids in Kansas that he was powerless to stop.
The clash at Wounded Knee, 22 years later, must be seen in the context of the Ghost Dance religion, a messianic movement which had caused great unrest among the Indians in this area since 1889 and which had been interpreted by the whites as a general call for war. While the Sioux camp was being searched for weapons, several youths created an incident by opening fire on the soldiers surrounding the camp. The soldiers, furious at what they saw as an act of Indian treachery, returned fire. Army casualties were 25 killed and 39 wounded, mostly from friendly fire. More than 300 Indians died.
Wounded Knee has been called "perhaps the most famous genocide of North American Indians." But, as Robert Utley concluded in a meticulous analysis, it is better described as "an unfortunate, tragic accident of war," a bloodbath that neither side wanted. In a situation where women and children were mixed with men, it was inevitable that some would be killed. But several groups of women and children were actually released from the camp, and the wounded Indian soldiers were also rescued and taken to the hospital. There may have been a few deliberate killings of civilians, but overall, as the commission of inquiry created by order of President Harrison found, officers and soldiers made every effort to avoid killing women and children.
On January 15, 1891, the last Sioux warriors surrendered. Apart from isolated isolated skirmishes, the American Indian War was over.
The Genocide Convention was approved by the United Nations General Assembly on December 9, 1948, and entered into force on January 12, 1951. After a long delay, it was ratified by the United States in 1986. Since genocide is now a technical term in international criminal law, the definitions established by the Convention have been accepted prima facie, and it is by using this definition that we must make an assessment of the applicability of the concept of genocide to the events we are considering.
According to Article II of the Convention, the crime of genocide consists of a series of acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such.” Virtually all legal scholars accept the centrality of this formulation. During the work on the convention, some argued for a clear description of the reason or motive for the destruction of the group. In the end, rather than listing such motives, the problem was solved by adding the words "as such", i.e. the motive or reason for destruction must be the end of the group's existence as a national, ethnic, racial or religious entity. Proof of such a motive, according to one legal scholar, "would be integral to the proof of a genocidal plan, and therefore genocidal intent."
The decisive role of intentionality in the Genocide Convention is that, according to its terms, the huge number of Indian deaths from epidemics cannot be considered genocide. Deadly diseases were not introduced intentionally and Europeans cannot be blamed for their ignorance of what medical science would discover only centuries later. In addition, military actions that led to the death of civilians, like the Battle of Ouachita, cannot be considered acts of genocide, since the killing of innocent people was not the goal, and the soldiers were not aimed at destroying the Indians as a specific group of people. On the other hand, some of the massacres in California, where both the perpetrators and their supporters openly admitted that they wished to destroy the Indians as an ethnic community, may indeed be considered, under the terms of the convention, to be genocidal intent.
However, when referring to the destruction of a group “in whole or in part,” the convention does not address the question of what percentage of the group must be affected in order to qualify as genocide. As a guide, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia suggested "a sufficiently significant number, in relation to the total group as a whole", adding that actual or attempted destruction must also refer to "the actual ability of the accused to destroy the group in a certain geographical area within his sphere of control , rather than in relation to the entire population of that group in a broader geographical sense." If this principle were accepted, atrocities such as the Sand Creek Massacre, limited to one group in a specific locality, could also be considered an act of genocide.
Of course, it is far from easy to apply a legal concept developed in the mid-20th century to events that occurred many decades, if not hundreds, of years ago. Our knowledge of many of these cases is incomplete. Moreover, the perpetrators are long dead and therefore cannot be tried in court, where critical factual details and relevant legal principles could be clarified.
Applying the standards of today's events to the past raises other questions, legal and moral. Although history has no statute of limitations, our legal system rejects the idea of retroactive laws (after the fact). Morally, even if we accept the idea of universal principles beyond specific cultures and eras, we should be careful in condemning, say, the conduct of wars during America's colonial period, which largely conformed to prevailing notions of good and evil.
The real task is, in the context of a specific situation, to find out the options for presenting it. Given the circumstances and moral standards of the time, did the people whose behavior we judge have a choice to act differently? Such an approach would lead us to be more lenient with the Puritans of New England, who fought for their survival, than with the prospectors and militias of California, who often killed Indian men, women, and children for no other reason than to satisfy their appetite for gold. and the earth. The former also fought their Indian adversaries in an era that cared little about humane standards of warfare, and the latter committed their atrocities in the face of furious condemnation not only from self-proclaimed humanitarians in the far east, but also from many of their fellow citizens in California.
Finally, even if some episodes can be considered genocide, that is, the desire for genocide, they certainly do not justify the condemnation of the entire society. Guilt is personal, and it is not for nothing that the Genocide Convention stipulates that only “persons” can be charged with a crime, perhaps even excluding legal proceedings against the government. Equally significant is that the Sand Creek massacre was carried out by local militia volunteers and was not an expression of official US policy. No unit of the regular US Army has ever been involved in such atrocities. In most cases, Robert Utley concludes, "the army shot at civilians by accident rather than on purpose." As for society as a whole, even if some elements among the white population, mainly in the West, advocated extermination from time to time, no US government official ever seriously suggested it. Genocide has never been an American policy or the result of a policy.
Violent clashes between whites and Native Americans were probably inevitable. Between 1600 and 1850, dramatic population growth led to massive waves of emigration from Europe, and the many millions of people who arrived in the New World gradually moved west into the seemingly limitless Americas. There is no doubt that the idea of 19th century America, "Manifest Destiny" was partly a rationalization of profit, but the result was that the Indian Removal could not be stopped, like other great migrations of the past. The US government could not prevent the westward movement even if it wanted to.
In the end, the sad plight of America's Indians is not a crime, but a tragedy involving irreconcilable clashes of cultures and values. Despite the efforts of well-meaning people in both camps, there was no good decision this collision. The Indians were not ready to exchange the nomadic lifestyle of hunters for the sedentary lifestyle of farmers. The new Americans were convinced of their cultural and racial superiority and did not want to provide the indigenous inhabitants of the continent with the huge reserve of land required by the Indian way of life. The result was a conflict in which there were several heroes, but which was far from a simple tale of hapless victim and merciless aggressor. Blaming an entire society for genocide is neither in the best interests of the Indians nor in the interests of history.
In conclusion, I want to debunk one more myth that Levi did not specifically say anything about. This myth is that the whites allegedly deliberately destroyed bison in order to deprive the Indians of their livelihood, since hunting bison was their main occupation and source of food.
Indeed, the number of bison began to decline sharply after the arrival of the whites, but there were several reasons for this. Many works have been written on this topic. For example, in Time magazine, written in 2007, which says the following about this problem:
Sometimes you have to eat an animal to keep it. This paradox may bother vegetarians. Take bison as an example: 500 years ago, perhaps 30 million of these enormous mammals inhabited North America. By the late 1800s, a combination of natural climate change and mass killings had reduced the bison population to about 1,000. Yet today, North America is home to an estimated 450,000 bison, a type of recovery that has much to do with our development. they have no appetite.
This year, USDA-inspected slaughterhouses will kill about 50,000 bison for human consumption. In 2000, the figure was only 17,674. Although bison consumption remains small compared to beef, Americans eat meat from 90,000 cattle every day. Bison is by far the fastest growing sector in the meat business. We love bison because it's much less fatty than beef but still satisfies red meat lovers. (Marketing research shows that men in particular prefer bison, which Americans have long called buffalo, even though as a zoological species they are bison rather than buffalo.) All the way up to Ted's Montana Grill (named after one of its founders, Ted Turner, former vice chairman of Time's predecessor, Time Warner Inc.), it largely defined itself through its offering of bison, which includes burgers that taste stronger than beef The chain plans to open its 48th restaurant next month, this time in Naperville, Illinois.
How can all this be good news for the king of the American plains? And now that we have revived the bison as biological species, can we figure out how to make sure we don't do this again - to kill them wisely and humanely?
To answer these questions, we must first correct a misunderstanding: namely, that the white man's supposed 19th century greed for pelts and actual genocidal policies toward Native Americans led to the destruction of tens of millions of bison. This is wrong. Bison expert Dale Lott demonstrates in his acclaimed natural history, American Bison (2002), that bison populations often declined precipitously in pre-industrial times as dry air flowed south into the plains. In 1841, before William Cody (the most famous of several men known as "Buffalo Bill") was even born, a cold winter left a layer of ice over the Wyoming prairie so hard that even the largest bison could not break through to the grass. Millions of bison died, and the species never returned to the state's grasslands.
But climate change alone was not enough to wipe out 30 million bison. People played a big role. By 1700, the Indians began hunting on horseback, which allowed them to kill prey much more efficiently than approaching on foot, as had been the case for the previous 9,000 years. Thanks to steam locomotives, transportation of bison hides became cheaper, and in 1870 tanners learned to make useful leather from them. Demand grew and the new "Sharps buffalo rifle" allowed hunters to meet this demand. The last significant buffalo hunt ended in 1883, after which there was almost nothing left.
Indians, a brief history lesson
Indians are the indigenous peoples of the United States
Learn the history of what the colonialists did to the indigenous people of America!
introduction
Judging by the unrestrained and persistent aggressive actions towards countries that have not yet been colonized (of which there are literally only a few left), the US way of thinking has not leaned towards creation.
- History of the exploration of America
- Genocide. Data. Statistics
- Indian Wars
1. History of the exploration of America
The official date of the discovery of America is considered to be October 12, 1492., when the expedition of Christopher Columbus, heading towards India, came across one of the Bahamas.The first expedition (he had 4 expeditions in total) of Christopher Columbus (1492-1493) consisting of 91 people on the ships “Santa Maria”, “Pinta”, “Nina” left Palos on August 3, 1492, and turned west from the Canary Islands ( September 9), crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the subtropical zone and reached the island of San Salvador in the Bahamas archipelago, where Christopher Columbus landed on October 12, 1492 (the official date of the discovery of America).
A British subject (Italian by nationality), the navigator Cabot reached the shores of North America in 1498, after which Great Britain laid claim to the entire continent. The continent was inhabited by many different Indian tribes with a total population of about 10-15 million people.
Little information has reached us about the expedition.
What is certain is that English ships reached the North American continent in 1498 and passed along its eastern coast far to the southwest. Sebastian Cabot turned back and returned to England in the same year 1498.
We know about the great geographical achievements of Cabot's expedition not from English, but from Spanish sources. Juan La Cosa's map shows, far to the north and northeast of Hispaniola and Cuba, a long coastline with rivers and a number of place names, with a bay on which is written: "the sea discovered by the English" and with several English flags.
By the middle of the 16th century, Spain's dominance on the American continent was almost absolute.
After English admirals defeated the largest Spanish fleet of the time in 1588 (in a largely brutal storm), Spain faded into obscurity, never to recover from the blow.
Leadership in the “relay race” of colonization passed to England, France and Holland.
In December 1620, the Mayflower ship carrying 102 Puritan Calvinists (“Pilgrim Fathers”) arrived on the Atlantic coast of Massachusetts. This event is considered the beginning of the purposeful colonization of the continent by the British. They entered into an agreement between themselves, called the Mayflower. It reflected in the most general form the ideas of the first American colonists about democracy, self-government and civil liberties.
The first colonists of North America did not have the same religious beliefs or equal social status.
Beginning in the mid-17th century, Great Britain sought to establish complete control over the economic transactions of the American colonies, implementing a scheme in which all manufactured goods (from metal buttons to fishing boats) were imported into the colonies from the mother country in exchange for raw materials and agricultural goods.
Meanwhile, American industry (mainly in the northern colonies) achieved significant success. American industrialists especially succeeded in building ships, which allowed them to quickly establish trade.
The English Parliament considered these successes so threatening that in 1750 they passed a law prohibiting the construction of rolling mills and iron-cutting workshops in the colonies. Foreign trade of the colonies was also subject to oppression. And this was the prerequisite for the War of Independence.
By the second half of the 18th century, the population of the American colonies increasingly emerged as a community of people who were in confrontation with the mother country. The development of the colonial press played a significant role in this.
American industrialists and traders also showed dissatisfaction, extremely dissatisfied with the colonial policy of the metropolis. The presence of British troops (remaining there after the Seven Years' War) on the territory of the colonies also caused discontent among the colonists. Demands for independence were increasingly heard.
In 1754, on the initiative of Benjamin Franklin, a project was put forward to create a union of the North American colonies with their own government, but headed by a president appointed by the British king. Although the project did not provide for complete independence of the colonies, it caused an extremely negative reaction from the British government.
All this became the prerequisites for the American War of Independence.
The War of American Independence in American literature is more often called the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) - a war between British Loyalists (loyal to the legitimate government of the British Crown) on the one hand and the revolutionaries of the 13 English colonies (patriots) on the other, who declared their independence from Great Britain as an independent union state in 1776. Significant political and social changes in the lives of North Americans caused by the war and the victory of supporters of independence in it are called the “American Revolution” in American literature. Progress of the war: 1775-1783
On September 3, 1783, Great Britain recognized the independence of the United States. The new American government abandoned claims to the west bank of the Mississippi and British Canada. On November 25 of that year, the last British troops left New York. About 40,000 loyalists evacuated with them to Canada.
2. Genocide. Data. Statistics
This is how the well-known R. Edberg writes about the fate of the Indians:“Having destroyed the herds of the son of the prairies, taking away the lands where he hunted, the rivers where he fished, he was made a stranger in his own country. The Indian's religious ideas were related to his surroundings; they were expressed in deep reverence for the sky and the earth, trees and flowing waters. When he was torn out from that with which he had grown together, death entered his heart.”
R. Edberg. Letters to Columbus. M., 1986. P. 67.
Indian genocide, material from Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia, Indians - the common name for the indigenous population of America (with the exception of Eskimos and Aleuts). The name arose from the erroneous idea of the first European navigators (Christopher Columbus and others) of the late 15th century, who considered the transatlantic lands they discovered to be India. According to their anthropological type, Indians belong to the Americanoid race.
SPANISH
The Spaniards were not only ESPECIALLY cruel to the indigenous people, but also established laws according to which the Indians were punished with death and often simply argued who could cut a person with one blow of a saber from top to bottom. For one Spaniard killed, a hundred Indians were killed. From the moment dogs were brought to the continent, the Spaniards fed them with killed Indians. One surviving letter from the Spaniard reads: "…when I returned from Cartagena, I met a Portuguese man named Roge Martin. On the porch of his house hung parts of cut-up Indians to feed his dogs, as if they were wild animals..."
In 1495, Christopher Columbus passed a law that required all Indians over 14 years old to pay quarterly (3 months) to the Spaniards with gold or 25 pounds of cotton (in areas where there was no gold). Those who paid this “tax” were given a copper token with the date of the last payment. The token thus extended the right to live for three months. If the date on the token was expired, then the Indians had both hands cut off, hung around their necks, and sent to their village to die.
It was impossible to fulfill the requirement of the law, since the Indians had to stop cultivating their fields, hunting and only engage in gold mining. Hunger began.
The Indian Forced Labor Act came into effect in 1498. on the Spaniards. The reason was dissatisfaction with the income received from the collection of gold and the sale of aborigines into slavery. 
In July-September 1539, the conquistador Francisco de Chavez razed the Kingdom of Carhua Conchucos to the ground., part of the Inca Empire until 1533, killed 600 Indian children under the age of three, which became the largest massacre of children in history.
In 1598, in response to the murder of 11 Spanish soldiers, Don Juan de Onate led a punitive expedition and in the three-day battle of Mount Acoma killed 800 Indians and ordered the amputation of his left leg every man of the tribe is over 25 years old.
The cause of numerous casualties among the Yanomami Indians, who lived in the Amazon River delta, served as the mineral-rich territory in which the tribe lived. A large number of Indians died from infections brought there by construction workers and soldiers. Today the Yanomami population is about 500 people; for comparison, in 1974 their number was approximately 2,000 people.
ENGLISH COLONISTSOn the evening of May 26, 1637, English colonists under the command of John Underhill, allied with the Mohicans and the Narragansett tribe, attacked a Pequot village (in modern-day Connecticut) and burned approximately 600-700 people alive.
On March 8, 1782, 96 baptized Indians were killed American militia from Pennsylvania during the American Revolutionary War.
The Indians were fed alcohol and set against each other; they were used as “allies” in the wars between English and French colonialists for dominance in North America, they were deceived, they violated treaties; The Indians were forcefully deprived of their lands and pushed further inland to infertile lands. The colonialists waged a real hunt for the scalps of the Indians. The legislatures of the New England colonies set a high price of 50 to 100 pounds sterling for each delivered scalp, including the scalps of Indian women and children
It is also a known fact that The US Senate entered into an agreement with the Cherokee tribe to purchase 8 million acres of their land for 50 cents per acre. These lands were later sold to gold miners for $30,000 per acre. The modern territory of Manhattan was also fraudulently purchased from the Indians.
In the period from the XVI to the XVIII centuries. forced extermination was widely carried out idolatry and baptism, the destruction of faith in the Quechua tribe.
On April 30, 1774, the Yellow Creek Massacre occurred. near modern Wellsville, Ohio. A group of Virginia frontier settlers, led by young bandit Daniel Greathouse, killed 21 Mingo people, including Logan's mother, daughter, brother, nephew, sister, and cousin. Logan's murdered daughter, Tunai, was on last date pregnancy. She was tortured and gutted while she was alive. Both she and the child who was cut from her were scalped. Other Mingos were also scalped.
In 1825, the US Supreme Court, in one of its decisions, formulated The Doctrine of Discovery. According to this doctrine, title to newly discovered lands is vested in the government whose subjects discovered the territory. The doctrine was used to deprive the "aboriginal population" (in this case, Indians) of ownership of land, which according to the doctrine was considered "no man's land." The right to the lands of the “discovered” lands now belongs to those who “discovered” them.
(Note: The official date of the discovery of America is considered to be October 12, 1492 by Christopher Columbus).
Based on this doctrine, already in 1830 the Indian Removal Act was passed, the victims of which were the Five Civilized Tribes.
February 26, 1860 on Indian Island, off the coast of northern California, six native landowners and businessmen carried out a massacre of Wiyot Indians, killing at least 60, and possibly more than 200, women, children and elderly people with axes and knives.
In 1867, the Indian Relocation Act was passed. Indian reservations were created in unsuitable places for Agriculture. In the first decades they were overcrowded, causing famine to kill hundreds of thousands. Large reservations are located on the Colorado Plateau in Arizona (Navajo Tribe), in the mountains of northern Utah, on the Great Plains in North Dakota and South Dakota, along the Missouri River (Sioux Tribe), on the intermountain plateau in Wyoming and in foothills of the Cordillera in Montana (Cheyenne Indians). A large number of reservations are located along the US-Canada border. .jpg)
December 29, 1890 near Wounded Knee In the state of South Dakota, the Lakota Indians were massacred by the US Army. Here the Indians gathered to perform their popular “spirit dances.” According to various estimates, about 300 people were killed and buried.
The terrible consequences of the extermination of buffaloes on the tribes, whose lives depended on these animals.
The Indians traditionally hunted bison only to satisfy their vital needs: for food, as well as for making clothing, housing, tools and utensils.
American General Philip Sheridan wrote:"The buffalo hunters have done more in the last two years to solve the Indian problem than the entire regular army has done in the last 30 years. They are destroying the material base of the Indians. Send them gunpowder and lead, if you like, and let them kill, skin and sell them until they exterminate all the buffalo!"
Sheridan proposed in the US Congress to establish a special medal for hunters ( on one side of which is embossed the image of a dead bison, and on the other - a dead Indian), emphasizing the importance of bison extermination. Colonel Richard Irving Dodge said: "The death of every buffalo is the disappearance of the Indians."
As a result of predatory extermination, the number of bison decreased by the beginning of the 20th century. from several tens of millions to several hundreds. Historian Andrew Eisenberg wrote about the decline in bison numbers from 30 million in 1800 to fewer than a thousand by the end of the century.
In 1887, the English naturalist William Mushroom, who traveled across the prairies, noted: “Buffalo trails were visible everywhere, but there were no living bison. Only the skulls and bones of these noble animals turned white in the sun.”
The winters of 1880 - 1887 became hungry for the Indian tribes, among them there was a very high mortality rate, more than a hundred thousand.
In 1850, during its first session, the California Legislative Assembly passed the Indian Government and Protection Act, which outlined the principles for future relations between whites and Indians. By providing Indians with some legal protection, The act nevertheless established the inequality of whites and Indians before the law and marked the beginning of widespread abuses regarding the use of Indians as labor. albeit allowing them to reside on private lands.
During 1851 and 1852, the California Legislature approved the allocation of $1.1 million to arm and maintain militia units for the “suppression of hostile Indians” and in 1857 issued bonds in the amount of $410,000 for the same purposes. Although, theoretically intended to resolve conflicts between whites and Indians, these payments only stimulated the formation of new volunteer units and an attempt to destroy all Indians in California.
At the level of local municipalities, rewards for killed Indians were practiced. The authorities of Shasta City in Northern California paid $5 per head of an Indian in 1855, and the settlement near Marysville in 1859 paid a reward from funds donated by the population “for every scalp or other convincing proof” that an Indian had been killed. In 1861, there were plans in Tehama County to create a fund "to pay for Indian scalps" and two years later Honey Lake paid 25 cents per Indian scalp.
The German ethnologist Gustav von Koenigswald reported, that members of the anti-Indian militia "poisoned the drinking water of the village of Kaingang with strychnine... causing the death of approximately two thousand Indians of all ages."
Trail of Tears- the forced relocation of American Indians, the bulk of whom were the Five Civilized Tribes, from their native lands in the southeastern United States to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) in the western United States. The Choctaw tribe was the first to resettle in 1831. Along the way, the Indians suffered from lack of a roof over their heads, disease and hunger, many died: for the Cherokee tribe alone, the estimate of the number of deaths along the road ranges from 4 to 15 thousand.
Potawatomi Death Road(English Potawatomi Trail of Death) - the forced relocation of the Potawatomi tribe from Indiana to eastern Kansas, which took place from September 4 to November 4, 1838.
The Indians' houses were burned to prevent their return. Over the course of 2 months, the Potawatomi traveled a distance of about 1060 kilometers. More than 40 people died along the way. In November 1838, about 750 Potawatomi arrived in eastern Kansas. Some Indians managed to escape and remained in Indiana and Michigan.
The exact number of victims is impossible to determine, because the exact number of the population before the arrival of Columbus is unknown.
However, it is assumed that before the discovery of America, up to 60 million Indians lived on the continent, of which from 8 million to 15 million lived in North America.
A number of Indian organizations and historians in the United States claim that the number of Indians in North America from 1500 to 1900 decreased from 15 million to 237 thousand.
Before colonization, there were 2,200 Indian tribes on two continents; after colonization, there were 500 tribes. By the way, American Indians spoke 550 languages!
INDIANS OF AMERICA NOW
The Indian population is rapidly increasing due to the high birth rate.
According to the US Census, in 2010 the number of Indians reached 2.9 million people
There are 564 registered Indian tribes and 563 reservations (so far) in the United States.
Indians now have two main sources of income- government subsidies and gambling.
Indian reservations received the right to create casinos in 1998.
Despite the income Indians receive from the gambling business, their standard of living remains extremely low.
24.5% of Indians live below the poverty line, while 12% of the US population is considered poor.
A family of four is considered poor if its total annual income does not exceed $16,895, and a single person - if its income does not exceed $9,039.
Only 55% of Indians own their own home.
Approximately 20% of Indian homes do not have running water or sewerage. Indian houses are overcrowded in 32% of cases - up to 25 people can live in three rooms.
Unemployment among Indians is a record high for the United States - it reaches 15%, and on some reservations - 80% (the national average does not exceed 6%).
According to the US Census Bureau(US Census Bureau), the average income of a Native American family is $32,116 per year, however, according to the Indian agency TribalNews, food prices on reservations are approximately 2 times higher than prices in stores located in regular areas.
9.3% of Indians have a bachelor's degree (awarded after graduating from college). On some reservations, the number of bachelors is less than 0.5%. In the US as a whole, this figure is 20.3%.
American Indians are twice as likely as other US residents to be victims of violent crime.
It is curious that the indigenous people of the United States (Indians), who have lived in an English-speaking environment for several hundred years, watching TV, listening to the radio and using the Internet, were able to preserve their native language.
23.8% of Indians do not speak English at home, compared to 85% of Navajo Indians.
Every third Indian receives financial assistance from the federal government. In addition, at the expense of the federal budget, Indians are supplied with food, guaranteed to buy a house on credit, provided with increased child benefits and organized free advanced training courses.
Washington ProFile
In 2009, the US Congress included in the defense spending bill a statement of formal apology to US Indians
for "the many instances of violence, mistreatment and neglect suffered by Indigenous Peoples at the hands of citizens of the United States."
Rumor has it that the Obama administration will allegedly pay 41 Indian tribes more than a billion dollars as compensation for poor management of their lands and income from the development of the natural resources of these lands, including oil and gas. By paying this amount, the US government achieved the withdrawal of claims filed by the tribes.
3. Indian Wars
The Indian Wars are commonly referred to as a series of armed conflicts between the indigenous people of North America and the United States of America. This term also refers to the wars between white settlers and Indians that preceded the formation of the United States.Wars dating back to colonial times continued until the Wounded Knee Massacre and the "closing" of the American Frontier in 1890. Their result was the conquest of North American Indians and their assimilation or forced relocation to Indian reservations.
The most significant Indian wars:
Sand Creek Massacre (1864)
Battle of Washita (1868)
Battle of Rosebud (1876)
Battle of the Little Bighorn (June 25-26, 1876) (Custer's Last Stand)
- was the last major armed conflict between the Sioux Indians and the US Army, and one of the last battles of the Indian Wars.
Sand Creek Massacre (1864)- attack of American volunteers under the command of Colonel John Chivington on the peaceful village of the Southern Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho on the Sand Creek River.
In 1861, the Southern Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho signed a peace treaty with U.S. officials at Fort Wise.
Early on the morning of November 29, 1864, Colonel Chivington's soldiers attacked a camp of peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho at the Great Bend of Sand Creek. Above Chief Black Kettle's tipi flew the huge American flag that had been presented to him at the council, and below it a small white flag, as a sign that his camp was peaceful.
The attack came as a complete surprise to the Indians; they rushed to run up the creek. One of the first to be killed was Left Hand and the Cheyenne leader White Antelope, a seventy-five-year-old man. The horsemen cut off the Indians' path to retreat; the few Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors began to dig in and cover the retreat of women and children who sought refuge in the nearby hills. The Indians fought back for four hours, most of them were killed, the survivors retreated up the creek, among them was Black Kettle.
Chivington's soldiers acted very brutally. They scalped the dead men and cut off the breasts of women, mutilating the corpses beyond recognition. Women and children who offered no resistance were killed and the wounded were finished off.
After the massacre ended, Chivington's soldiers captured fragments of the dismembered bodies, including the victims' genitals and human embryos, as trophies, and they showed their booty to the residents of Denver.
163 Indians killed (mostly women and children)
Whites - 24 killed, 52 wounded.
Sand Creek Massacre Shattered Traditional Communities among the Southern Cheyennes. Most of the killed leaders were for peace with the white people. The influence of the Dog Warriors, who always opposed concluding any treaties with outsiders and settling on a reservation, increased.
The US government created a commission to investigate the actions of Colonel Chivington. American authorities admitted responsibility for the events at Sand Creek and agreed to pay compensation to the surviving Cheyenne and Arapaho.
Sand Creek Massacre featured in films
"Soldier in Blue"
"Little Big Man"
series "To the West"
All these films are in this collection.
Battle of Washita (1868)
The Battle of Washita was a battle between the Southern Cheyenne and the Seventh Cavalry of the United States Army that took place on November 27, 1868, near the Washita River, Oklahoma.
In 1867, the Indian tribes of the southern Great Plains signed a peace treaty with the US government at Medicine Lodge Creek, which the Senate did not ratify until July 1868. The peace at Medicine Lodge Creek did not last long. The following year, fighting began again between the Cheyenne and white settlers. The government sent troops against hostile Indians.
In mid-October 1868, General Philip Sheridan began planning a new punitive campaign against the Southern Cheyenne. When Chief Black Kettle visited the military post of Fort Cobb, about 100 miles from the location of his camp, to again assure the fort commander that he wanted to live in peace with the Americans, he was told that the US Army had already begun a military campaign against hostile Indian tribes. The Indian agent told him that the only safe place for his men was around the fort and he had no authority to give them protection.
On the morning of November 23, General Sheridan ordered Colonel George Custer to go in search of hostile Indians.
The Black Kettle camp was discovered by Osage scouts and it was thanks to them that the unexpected attack became possible. The village consisted of 75 tipis (teepee means any dwelling), a little further from it there were two more large camps: one - Cheyenne and Arapaho, the other - Comanche, Kiowa and Kiowa-Apache.
During the attack, soldiers killed Black Kettle and his wife, both Sand Creek survivors.
Women and children fled, the soldiers covered their retreat. The village was burned, all property was destroyed, many women and children were captured. Custer ordered the shooting of 875 Cheyenne horses. Soon the soldiers were forced to retreat - many Indian warriors from neighboring camps were rushing to the rescue of the people of the Black Kettle. George Custer sent Major Elliot's detachment to block their path. After a short fight, Elliot's entire group was killed. Custer himself hastened to leave the captured and burned camp.
Opinions about the Cheyenne deaths vary greatly. According to Custer's official report, 103 soldiers, 16 women and several children were killed. However, Custer, like most American officers of that time, often exaggerated his merits. Cheyenne survivors spoke of the deaths of 13 warriors, 16 women and 9 children.
Battle of Rosebud (1876)
The Battle of Rosebud was a battle between the Sioux-Cheyenne Indian Union and the United States Army that took place on June 17, 1876, near the Rosebud River, Montana.
In 1874, an expedition led by George Armstrong Custer explored the Black Hills, part of a reservation promised to the Sioux and Cheyenne Indians in an 1868 treaty, and discovered gold there. In 1875, there was an influx of gold prospectors into the Black Hills.
The US government tried to buy Indian lands, but no agreement was reached - the Sioux and Cheyenne made desperate attempts to drive the white people from their land. Spotted Tail and Red Cloud, visiting Washington, refused to sell the Black Hills for $6 million. The American government began to solve the problem in its usual deceptive way. It required all free Indians to register by January 31, 1876, or they were to be considered enemies.
Scouts from the Indian camp discovered a large force of General George Crook's soldiers on June 16, 1876. Crook commanded 47 officers and about 1,000 U.S. Army soldiers, as well as 262 Crow and Eastern Shoshone scouts. Having made a night march, the Sioux and Cheyenne attacked the soldiers in the morning, for whom this was a complete surprise.
From morning until sunset, the Sioux and Cheyenne confronted soldiers and a troop of Crow and Eastern Shoshone scouts. Crook's scouts were the first to take the hit. For some time, two, and then three independent fights were fought at once. The forces of both sides were approximately equal - approximately 1200 soldiers. The Sioux and Cheyenne attacked and then retreated and scattered into small groups. The soldiers fired accurately while their scouts pursued the Sioux and Cheyenne. During the battle, the attackers and retreaters changed places several times.
Although the battle was difficult and long, the losses of both sides were small. Crook's soldiers used up almost all their ammunition in battle and he was forced to curtail the military campaign. The soldiers retreated, while the Indians considered themselves winners.
It is believed that it was thanks to the participation of Crow and Eastern Shoshone scouts that George Crook avoided complete defeat. No wonder the Sioux and Cheyenne called the Battle of Rosebud the Battle of Our Indian Enemies. The Cheyennes also called this battle the Battle when the sister saved the brother.
The main result of this battle was that the Sioux and Cheyenne realized that they could resist a large white army and defeat it.
Strengths and losses of the parties:
Indians: Sioux, Cheyenne / commanders: Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull / army: 1,200 people.
Casualties: 10-36 killed / 21 wounded
On the White side: USA, Eastern Shoshone, Crow/Commander - George Crook
army:
47 officers
1,000 soldiers
176 Crow Scouts
86 Eastern Shoshone Scouts
Casualties: 10-32 killed / 28 wounded
Battle of the Little Bighorn (June 25-26, 1876) (Custer's Last Stand)
The Battle of the Little Bighorn was a battle between the Lakota-Northern Cheyenne Indian Union and the Seventh Cavalry of the United States Army that took place June 25–26, 1876, near the Little Bighorn River, Montana. The battle ended with the destruction of five companies of the American regiment and the death of its famous commander, George Custer.
The only irrefutable fact is that Custer did not carry out the order to “block the route of retreat,” but decided, without waiting for the main forces to arrive, to attack thousands of Indians.
The defeat of Custer caused a huge resonance in the United States, which was incomprehensible to Europeans due to the local scale of the battle. Society demanded that the perpetrators be punished. Many hypotheses have been put forward, most of which can be refuted. For example, Custer was accused of dividing forces, however, he had successfully used this before.
Indians: Lakota, Santee, Yanktonai, Cheyenne, Arapaho
Leaders: Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Bile
Troops: 1,500 - 2,000 people.
Indian losses: 36 - 136 killed / 150 - 200 wounded
White settlers of the USA: 7th Cavalry Regiment
Commanders: George A. Custer †, Marcus Reno, Frederick Benteen, Bloody Knife †
troop: 31 officers, 566 soldiers, 40 scouts, 15 non-combatants
White casualties: 266 killed / 55 wounded
Massacre at Wounded Knee (1890)
Wounded Knee Massacre was the last major armed conflict between the Sioux Indians and the US Army, and one of the last battles of the Indian Wars.
On December 29, 1890, a force of five hundred men of the 7th U.S. Cavalry, supported by four cannons, surrounded the camp of two Sioux tribes resisting white American attempts to seize their lands, with the goal of delivering them to the railroad station for transportation to a reservation in Omaha, Nebraska. .
The regimental commander, Brigadier General James William Forsythe, ordered his soldiers to take the weapons from the Indians, but towards the end of disarmament, someone opened fire (who shot and why is not known for certain), which provoked a fight.
During the battle, 25 soldiers and 153 Indians, including men, women and children, died. It is believed that many of the soldiers were accidentally killed by their own comrades, since the shooting was carried out in chaos at very close range, and most of the Indians were already disarmed. About 150 Indians were able to escape.
According to Czech ethnographer Miloslav Stingl, the massacre at Wounded Knee was the fault of Colonel Forsythe, commander of the 7th Cavalry. Among the Sioux there was a deaf Indian named Black Coyote who did not hear the order to surrender his arms. Colonel Forsythe, deciding that he was faced with malicious disobedience, ordered the shooting of a camp with people unarmed and half dead from fatigue.
In movie:
The story of the massacre is chronicled in the 2007 film Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
The story of Black Coyote, who suffers from deafness, is reflected at the very beginning of the film Hidalgo.
This massacre is shown at the end of the series "Into the West".
All these films are
“Indian wars” - each of us has heard these words. The imagination immediately brings to mind a picture familiar from Westerns and other adventure films: a train of settlers crossing the endless prairies is attacked by Indians. Savages on horseback, dressed in bright national costumes, with painted faces, decorated with feathers, waving tomahawks with a wild whoop and shooting from Winchesters, trying to kill the unfortunate “pale-faced” and scalp them. Well, Hollywood (an integral part of US agitprop) is doing a great job, and it’s not for nothing that huge sums of money are being poured into it. But we must understand that the image of savage Indians, whose life consists only of hunting for the scalps of peaceful settlers, has nothing to do with reality.
The history of the relationship between the indigenous people of North America and immigrants from Europe is written, without exaggeration, in blood. The blood of the indigenous people of the New World. Who were only to blame for the fact that they lived in a region with good climatic conditions. They lived on fertile lands, on the banks of clean, deep rivers. It is quite difficult to determine the number of Indian tribes that occupied the territory of the modern United States at the beginning of European colonization. Researchers give different figures: from one million to five million. Although all Aboriginal people were genetically related to each other, there was no single nation. The territory of the present United States was inhabited by several hundred tribes.
Nevertheless, scientists identify several large cultural and historical communities that emerged by the end of the 15th century. The Indians of the Pacific Coast (Chinook, Haida, Kwakiutl, Tlingit, Salish, Wakashi, Tsimshian, etc.) were mainly engaged in hunting sea animals, as well as fishing. They lived in large tribal communities ruled by elected leaders. In their environment, property inequality was quite significant, and a clear hierarchy of society could be traced. The Indians of California (Campo, Cahuilla, Chumash, Miwok, Modoc, Ohlone, Paiute, etc.) were hunters and gatherers. One of their main food products was... acorns, from which they made many dishes. Some tribes led a nomadic lifestyle and lived in primitive equality, some switched to sedentary life, leaders appeared in them, and property inequality developed (albeit quite slowly).
The Indians of the Rocky Mountains (Mono, Pima, Papago, Shoshone, etc.) were mainly engaged in hunting. Living in very unfavorable climatic conditions, they retained primitive tribal relations longer, although by the middle of the 19th century they also had the institution of military leaders. The Indians who occupied the territory of the South-West of the modern USA stood at a higher level of development. The Southwest (modern states of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado) is an area of ancient agricultural civilizations. The prominent Pima and Pueblo farming cultures arose here, as well as the unique Navajo culture. Local Indians lived in fortified settlements, built irrigation structures, grew many cultivated plants, planted gardens, and domesticated turkey. They came close to creating statehood.
The vast expanses of the Central and Great Plains (famous prairies) were occupied by numerous tribes of hunters and gatherers: Sioux, Dakota, Lakota, Blackfoot, Apache, Comanche, Arapaho, Cheyenne, etc. The main source of food and clothing for them was bison, so the Indians moved after herds of these animals, covering distances of many kilometers and not staying long in one place. These tribes were at the stage of decomposition of primitive communal relations; they had leaders and elders.
The Northeast was inhabited by tribes of the Iroquois, Abenaki, Huron, Mohicans, Massachusetts, and others, collectively known as the Woodland Indians. They led a sedentary lifestyle, engaged in agriculture. Hunting and gathering served as an additional source of food. The Indians lived in small villages and lived in large family communities. At the head of each clan and tribe there were two leaders: one “civilian”, and the second - military. Women played a very important role in management and farming. The tribes that inhabited the modern Southeastern United States (Delaware, Creek, Muskogee, Cherokee, Chickasaw, etc.) lived in settlements located on the banks of rivers or the sea and were engaged in very productive farming and hunting. Among these tribes, property and social inequality was already very noticeable. Some of them came close to creating states, and the Natchez tribe, who lived in Louisiana, even created a monarchical state that largely copied the Aztec empire.
The independent development of the Indian tribes was interrupted in 1492, when a Spanish expedition led by Christopher Columbus discovered the Bahamas. Three years later, in 1495, the era of the so-called "Conquests" - the era of conquest of the New World. The conquerors were initially the Spaniards and Portuguese, later joined by the Dutch, French and English. European “knights” launched a brutal war against the local population. A war of destruction. What was its reason? First, Europeans were attracted to gold. They were literally obsessed with the idea of searching for the mythical “country of Eldorado” - a country where gold supposedly literally lies under their feet. However, the newcomers themselves did not want to work in the gold mines at all - in their opinion, this should have been done by Indian slaves.
The second reason was that Europeans sought to capture fertile and exploitable territories. In Western Europe at this time capitalist relations began to actively develop. A few became rich, while the majority became poor and ruined. Yesterday's peasants, artisans, small traders, unable to compete with big business, lost everything and became beggars. The discovery of America inspired them new hope. The hope of acquiring my own land again and becoming a prosperous person. Only now, the fact that PEOPLE already lived on this land was not taken into account.
Why? The fact is that Europeans did not consider Indians to be people! The Bible mentioned three races: “Japhetic” (Caucasians), “Simitic” (Mongoloids) and “Chamic” (Negroids). Not a word was said about the Indians. In addition, the Indians were not Christians, but practiced their traditional religions. All this made it possible for Catholic and Protestant theologians to equate the Indians to... animals!!! It was argued in all seriousness that the native inhabitants of America had no soul, therefore, firstly, their land automatically became “no man’s land” and every colonist could seize it with impunity, and, secondly, the natives could be treated like wild animals. Thus, European settlers, on behalf of the “Lord God” himself, were essentially given carte blanche for excesses and violence. They could do whatever they wanted to the local residents: “tame” (i.e., enslave) or exterminate.
In 1493, Pope Alexander VI divided the “newly discovered lands” between the Spanish and Portuguese kings. Thus began the first act of the Indian drama. In 1513, a detachment of Spanish conquistadors under the command of Juan de Leon landed on the coast of modern Florida. The Spaniards were looking for gold and immediately began a war against the local inhabitants. So, in 1515, the Spaniards killed several hundred indigenous people of Eastern Florida, and captured 500 people as slaves and sent them to plantations in Puerto Rico. In 1521, Juan de Leon walked along the coast of Florida with fire and sword, but in the end the combined forces of the Indian tribes managed to defeat the conquerors, while the newly-minted governor himself met his inglorious end.
However, other predators rushed after de Leon. In 1525, the Spanish killed about a hundred Indians and enslaved another 60 on the North Carolina coast. In 1526, the conquistadors launched an offensive in Georgia, but, encountering stubborn resistance from the Indians, they were forced to retreat. In general, despite their superiority in weapons and equipment, the Spanish knights, clad in armor and armed with steel swords and arquebuses, were unable at that time to break the courageous resistance of the Indians, who stubbornly defended their independence. In 1527, the expedition of Panfilo de Narvaez set out to conquer Florida. The Spaniards took hostages, burned villages, destroyed food supplies, trying to force the Indians to recognize the authority of the Spanish king. And yet the knights were defeated and were forced to flee shamefully. In 1539 the conquerors came again. This time they were led personally by the Governor of Cuba, Hernando de Soto. For four years, the Spaniards waged military operations in the modern states of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas and Oklahoma. The path of the conquistadors was “crowned” with burned villages and the corpses of rebellious Indians. And yet, the Spaniards again failed to gain a foothold in North America. The Indians put up fierce resistance, de Soto himself died in 1542, and the pitiful remnants of his army barely reached Mexico.
At the same time, the attention of the Spaniards was drawn to the Southwest. In 1540, the conquistador Francisco de Coronado, known for his cruelty, set out on a campaign to conquer these lands. The Zuni Indians who lived in New Mexico took the first blow. The Spaniards captured their settlements and plundered everything. After this, Coronado's troops launched an offensive in Arizona, Colorado, and Texas. Everywhere their path was accompanied by unprecedented robberies and violence; according to contemporaries, Coronado left “scorched earth” behind him. However, all the efforts of the conquerors were again defeated by the steadfastness of the Indians, who fought to the end. As a result, in 1542, the remnants of the conquerors ingloriously returned home.
However, failures did not force the Spaniards to retreat. In the 2nd half of the 16th century, they intensified their attack on Florida. As a result, they managed, having destroyed most of the coastal tribes, to establish their control over part of the territory of Florida. However, the attempts of the conquistadors to enslave the Indians of the interior parts of the peninsula invariably met with stubborn resistance and failed. In the 1570s, the Spaniards intensified their attack on the lands of the Southwest of the modern United States. The Hopi, Navajo, Pueblo, and Zuni tribes stubbornly resisted the invaders. The Spaniards, in turn, brought down brutal repression on the disobedient. The conquered lands were taken over by nobles who converted the Indians into their serfs. The Catholic Inquisition also appeared, which began brutal persecution of the “pagans”, organizing frightening burnings at the stake. This entire system of brutal exploitation and open tyranny evoked resistance from courageous Indians, who more than once rose up in arms against the invaders. The Spaniards did not feel safe anywhere and sat in fortified forts, however, the Indians often captured them too. The conquistadors failed to strengthen their dominance over the “conquered” lands.
However, at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries, new predators appeared in North America - the Dutch, French and English. In 1607, the English founded the city of Jamestown in what is now Virginia. In 1610 the French built Quebec, and in 1620 New Amsterdam appeared. It should be noted that the Indians greeted the first settlers very friendly and helped them get comfortable in the new place. They supplied them with food and taught them how to grow local crops. However, the whites paid for all this with black ingratitude. It never occurred to them to thank the Indians, without whom all the settlers would have died in the first winter: in their opinion, the “savages” were simply obliged to serve the Christians and carry out all their orders. Plantations of tobacco, cane and cotton soon began to appear in the South. The planters, of course, did not intend to work themselves, but dreamed of taking advantage of the free labor of the Indians. Armed gangs attacked Indian settlements, captured prisoners and enslaved them. The colonialists also captured children and women, forcing men to lay down their arms and work on the plantations.
In the North, the situation of the Indians was even worse. Masses of colonist farmers who needed land flocked there. And the people who inhabited these lands were not needed at all. The whites seized lands and expelled the Indians to the West, and those who did not want to leave their homes were brutally killed. The natives soon realized that if they wanted to preserve life and freedom, they would have to fight. In a struggle for life and death, with a cruel and insidious enemy who did not recognize any “noble laws”, who vilely attacked and destroyed everything that came in his way. The Indians, who before the arrival of the whites practically did not know wars and led the lives of peaceful hunters and farmers, were destined to become Warriors.
However, in this war the Indians were doomed from the very beginning. And the point is not even that the whites had firearms and steel armor, not that they were united, and the Indian tribes were fragmented. It wasn't bullets that killed the Native Americans, it was DISEASES that killed them. Colonizers brought previously unknown diseases to the New World: plague, smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, etc. The Indians had no immunity from them. For example, 80% of all Abenaki died from smallpox without even fighting with the whites. Some tribes were mowed down by the disease, and colonists came to the lands “liberated” in this way.
And yet the Indians did not surrender and did not ask for mercy. They preferred to die in battle rather than live as slaves. The Indian drama was reaching its climax. The first to bear the blow were the Algonquin tribes, who lived on the lands of modern New England. Beginning in 1630, English Protestant settlers methodically “cleared” the land of Indians. At the same time, the Indian tribes were drawn into Anglo-French rivalry: for example, the French entered into alliances with the Hurons and Algonquins, and the British enlisted the support of the Iroquois League. As a result, the Europeans pitted the Indians against each other, and then finished off the winners.
One of the bloodiest dramas was the destruction of the Pequot tribe in 1637, who lived in Connecticut. This small tribe refused to recognize the supreme authority of the English crown over itself. Then the English suddenly attacked the Pequots. Having surrounded their settlement at night, they set it on fire, and then carried out a terrible massacre, killing everyone indiscriminately. Over 600 people were killed in one night. After this, the British staged a real hunt for the surviving Pequots. Almost all of them were killed, and the few who survived were enslaved. Thus, the colonialists made it clear to all Indians what fate awaited all the rebellious.
There was also endless massacre in the South: English planters first tried to turn the Indians into slaves, but they refused to work on the plantations, escaped and rebelled. Then it was decided to kill them all completely and import slaves from Africa to the plantations. By the middle of the 17th century, the colonialists essentially destroyed all the Indians living on the Atlantic coast. The survivors went to the West, but colonialists greedy for land also rushed there. As a result, the Indians realized that one by one they would be defeated and destroyed. As a result, in 1674, the Wampanoag, Narrangaset, Nipmuc, Pocamptuk, and Abenaki tribes entered into an alliance and rallied around the great sachem Metacom. In 1675 they rebelled against the British. The stubborn war went on for a whole year, but the Iroquois League took the side of the British, which predetermined the outcome of the war. The colonialists brutally dealt with the rebels. Metacom himself was treacherously killed on August 12, 1676. The British sold his wife and children into slavery, and the leader's body was quartered and hanged on a tree. Metacom's severed head was impaled and displayed on a hill in Rhode Island, where it remained for over twenty years. The Wampanoag and Narrangaset tribes were almost completely exterminated. The number of victims is indicated by the fact that at the beginning of the war there were 15 thousand Indians living in New England. And by the end of it, only 4 thousand remained.
In 1680, the Indians became embroiled in a decades-long war between England and France that raged until 1714. The British and French preferred to fight with the hands of the Indians; as a result of this fratricidal massacre, by the beginning of the 18th century there were practically no indigenous people left in New England. The survivors were driven out by the British. In the 18th century, expansion continued. It was led by both the British and the French. The first focused mainly on the “development” of North and South Carolina. The Muskogean tribes living here were destroyed and expelled from their native lands. The violence and outrages of the colonialists caused a powerful uprising in 1711, started by the Iroquois Tuscarora tribe. Soon the Chickasawas joined them. The stubborn war lasted for two years and ended with the bloody massacre of the vanquished by the British. The Tuscarora tribe was almost completely destroyed.
The French at this time conquered the so-called. Louisiana - vast lands from Ohio to Kansas and from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico. Back in 1681, they were declared the property of the French crown, and at the beginning of the 18th century, the city of New Orleans was built at the mouth of the Mississippi, which became a stronghold of the invaders. The Indians resisted valiantly, but the advantage was on the side of the Europeans. The Natchez, who lived on the Gulf Coast, suffered a particularly severe blow. The Natchez, as mentioned above, were one of the most developed peoples of North America. They had a state headed by a deified monarch. The Natchez monarchs refused to recognize themselves as vassals of the French king, and as a result, starting in 1710, the French waged a series of wars of extermination against the Indians, which ended by 1740 with the almost complete destruction of the Natchez. However, the French failed to completely subjugate the Indians. But their especially stubborn opponents were the Iroquois. The Iroquois League, which united five related tribes, was the main center of resistance to the colonialists. Beginning in 1630, the French repeatedly declared war on the League, but all their attempts to break the resistance of the Indians invariably failed.
Meanwhile, the British began colonizing Georgia in 1733, accompanied by the massacre of the peaceful Indian population. And in 1759 they started a war against the Cherokees, during which they barbarously killed several hundred civilians and forced the Indians to move to the West. The steady advance of the British led to the fact that in 1763 the Algonquian tribes rallied around the great chief of the Ottawa tribe, Pontiac. Pontiac vowed to stop white expansion. He managed to gather large forces; his military alliance included almost all the Algonquins living in the Northeast. By 1765, he had defeated almost all the British garrisons in the Great Lakes region, with the exception of the well-fortified Fort Detroit, which was besieged by the rebels. The Indians were close to victory, but the British managed to drag the Iroquois into the war on their side, presenting the matter in such a way that if Pontiac won, he would start a war with the League. The betrayal of Pontiac’s “allies”, the French, also played a role, who suddenly made peace with the British and stopped supplying the Indians with firearms and ammunition. As a result, the Algonquins were defeated, and Pontiac was forced to make peace. True, the British could not boast of victory: the English king forbade the colonists to cross the Appalachian mountains. However, fearing the power of Pontiac, the British organized his murder in 1769.
In 1776, the North American colonies rebelled against the English king. It must be said that both warring parties sought to attract Indians to the fighting, promising them various benefits. They succeeded: the Indian tribes again found themselves on different front lines and killed each other. Thus, the Iroquois League supported the English king. As a result, immediately after the victory, the newly-minted American authorities unleashed new war. They conducted it extremely cruelly: they did not take prisoners. They burned down all the captured villages, tortured and killed women, old people and children, destroyed all food supplies, dooming the Indians to starvation. As a result of many years of stubborn fighting, the Indian resistance was broken. In 1795, the Iroquois League (or rather, what was left of it) signed a surrender. Vast lands in the Great Lakes region came under white control, and the surviving Indians were confined to reservations.
In 1803, the US government purchased Louisiana from France. The French, despairing of conquering the freedom-loving Indian tribes and busy with wars in Europe, left it to the new masters to do this. Of course, no one asked the Indians themselves anything. Immediately after the purchase, masses of immigrants rushed to the West. They longed to receive free lands, and the indigenous population, as was already the custom, was subject to destruction.
In 1810, the Ojibwe, Delaware, Shawnee, Miami, Ottawa and other tribes united around the courageous Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his brother, the prophet Tenskwatawa. Tecumseh led the resistance to the colonialists north of the Ohio River, hatching the idea of creating an independent Indian state. In 1811 the war began. Warriors from many tribes in the Middle East and South of the United States flocked to the rebel stronghold created by Tecumseh, the “City of the Prophet,” who agreed to take part in the uprising. The war was very stubborn, but the numerical and technical superiority of the whites played a role. Tecumseh's main military forces were defeated on November 7, 1811 at the Battle of Tippecanoe by future US President General Harrison. But in 1812, Tecumseh was supported by part of the powerful Creek confederacy living in Alabama, and the rebellion received new impetus. In June 1812, the United States declared war on the British Empire, and Tecumseh and his supporters joined the British army. With only 400 of his warriors, he captured the hitherto impregnable Fort Detroit without firing a single shot, forcing its garrison to capitulate by military cunning. However, on October 5, 1813, the great Shawnee chief died in battle while fighting for the British with the rank of brigadier general. The betrayal of the whites again played its fatal role - at the decisive moment of the Battle of Downville, the English soldiers shamefully fled from the battlefield and Tecumseh’s warriors were left alone with a superior enemy. Tecumseh's rebellion was crushed. The Creek tribes held out until 1814, but were also defeated. The winners carried out a terrible massacre, killing several thousand civilians. After this, all lands north of the Ohio River came under US control, and the Indians were either driven off their lands or placed on reservations.
In 1818, the US Government purchased Florida from Spain. Planters rushed to the newly acquired state, who began to unceremoniously seize ancestral Indian lands and destroy the indigenous population who refused to work for the slave owners. The most numerous of the Florida tribes were the Seminoles. Led by their leaders, they waged a stubborn war against the invaders for forty years and defeated them more than once. However, they were unable to withstand the US Army. By 1858, virtually all of Florida's Indians (several tens of thousands of people) were exterminated. Only about 500 Indians survived, whom the colonialists placed on reservations in the swamps.
And in 1830, under pressure from the planters, the US Congress decided to deport all indigenous residents of the Southeastern United States. By this time, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek tribes had reached high level development. They built their cities, practiced agriculture and various crafts, and opened schools and hospitals. The constitutions they adopted were much more democratic than the US Constitution. The whites themselves called the Indians of the Southeast "civilized people." However, in 1830, they were all forcibly deported from their places west of the Mississippi, while all their real and almost all personal property was appropriated by white colonizers. The Indians were essentially settled in the bare steppe, without giving them any means of subsistence; as a result, about a third of the members of these tribes died from hunger and deprivation associated with deportation.
Such blatant violence could not go unavenged. In 1832, the Sauk and Fox Indian tribes took up arms against the invaders. They were led by the 67-year-old leader Black Hawk. Only a year later, with great difficulty, the Whites managed to defeat the rebels. The defeat of the Indians caused new repressions on the part of the victors.
Mass deportation of Indian tribes to the right bank of the Mississippi began. The white settlers who came to their habitable places shamelessly robbed the unfortunate people and committed all sorts of atrocities, remaining unpunished. By the late 1830s, there were almost no Native people left east of the Mississippi; those who managed to avoid deportation were forced onto reservations.
In 1849, the United States defeated Mexico and took away its lands in the Rocky Mountain Southwest and California. At the same time, England was forced to cede Oregon to the United States. A stream of colonialists immediately rushed there. The Indians were driven from the best lands and their property was plundered. As a result, in the same year, the tribes of the North-West (Tlingit, Wakashi, Tsimshian, Salish, etc.) declared war on the whites. For four long years, fighting raged in the modern states of Oregon and Washington. The Indians fought bravely, but lacking firearms, they could not resist. Tens of thousands of Native Americans were killed and their villages burned. Many Northwest tribes were wiped out entirely, while others were left with a few hundred people who were driven deep into Oregon to mountain reservations.
The fate of the California Indians was very tragic. Already in 1848, gold was found there; as a result, a lot of adventurers and bandits rushed to the region who wanted to get rich. Gold lay on Indian lands, and therefore the tribes of peaceful hunters and gatherers were doomed. On February 26, 1860, on Indian Island, off the coast of northern California, six locals massacred the Wiyot Indians, killing 60 men and more than 200 women, children and elders. The authorities of Shasta City in Northern California paid $5 per head of an Indian in 1855, and the settlement near Marysville in 1859 paid a reward from funds donated by the population “for every scalp or other convincing proof” that an Indian had been killed. In 1863, Honey Lake County paid 25 cents per Indian scalp. By the early 1870s, most of the California Indians had been exterminated or removed to the interior, desert parts of the state. The most stubborn resistance was provided to the white invaders by the Modocs, led by the leader Kintpuash (“Captain Jack”), which lasted from 1871 to 1873. The rebellion ended with the heroic defense of the Lava Beds mountain stronghold by a handful of Modocs against the US Army and the capture of Chief Kintpuash, who was soon convicted by a white court and hanged as a criminal. After being exiled to Indian Territory, of the 153 survivors of the Modoc War by 1909, only 51 remained alive.
After the end of the American Civil War, in 1865 the American government declared the lands of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains open to “free colonization.” All land was declared the property of the white settler who first came to these places. What about the Indians - Navajo, Apache, Comanche, Shoshone, Lakota - the original owners of the prairies and mountains? It was decided to end them once and for all. In 1867, Congress passed the Indian Reservation Act. From now on, all Indian tribes, with one stroke of the pen, lost their ancestral lands and had to live on reservations located in desert and mountainous areas remote from water. Without the permission of the American authorities, no Indian henceforth dared to leave their reservation.
It was a sentence. Sentence to all tribes without exception. Descendants of the first settlers who came to the New World back in the Stone Age, they became strangers, NOT citizens in their native land. The Indian drama has reached its climax. The Indians, naturally, refused to capitulate and prepared for war. The whites also had no doubt that the Indians would fight: plans for the war were drawn up ahead of time. It was decided to starve the Indians. In this regard, American soldiers launched a real hunt for bison, which served as the main source of food for the inhabitants of the Great Plains. Over the course of 30 years, several MILLIONS of these animals were destroyed. So, in Kansas alone in 1878, about 50 thousand of these animals were destroyed. It was one of the largest ecocides on the planet.
The second method of strangling the disobedient was to poison the sources fresh water. The Americans poisoned the waters of rivers and lakes with strychnine on a truly industrial scale. This caused the death of several tens of thousands of Indians. However, in order to break the freedom-loving inhabitants of the prairies, a lot of blood had to be shed. The Indians resisted courageously. Several times they defeated large detachments of the American army. The Battle of the Little Bighorn River in Montana gained worldwide fame in 1876, when the combined forces of the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians destroyed an entire detachment of American cavalry led by General Custer. And there were many such examples! The Indians stormed forts, cut railroads, and waged skillful guerrilla warfare in the mountains. However, the forces were unequal. The colonialists stopped at nothing. With fire and sword they “combed” the mountains and prairies, destroying the recalcitrant troops. The whites were armed with multi-shot revolvers, rapid-fire rifles, and rifled artillery. In addition, the Indian tribes were never able to coordinate their actions with each other, which the colonialists took advantage of. They crushed each nation one by one.
By 1868, the Shoshone were almost completely destroyed. In 1872, the Cheyenne stopped resisting, and in 1879 the Comanches were finally defeated. The Apaches fought with the fury of the doomed until 1885. The Sioux held out the longest - until the beginning of 1890. But in the end, they too were crushed. The denouement of the drama came on December 29, 1890, near the Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, when American soldiers from the 7th Cavalry Regiment shot more than 300 people from the Lakota people who had gathered for the ritual holiday of the Dance of the Spirits and the former Wholesale chipization in Italy begins, therefore, unprepared for resistance. The surviving Lakota were escorted to the reservation. The Indian Wars are over. There was no capitulation - there was simply no one else to fight.
Scientists still cannot determine exactly how many indigenous people of North America died during the beginning of white colonization. They died from swords and arquebuses, from rifles and cannons, from hunger and cold during various deportations. The most modest figures are 1 million, although in reality it is much more. Millions of men, women, and children have found themselves victims of a terrible human vice - GREED. They were killed simply because they lived on fertile lands, simply because they “sat” on gold mines, simply because they refused to become slaves on plantations. The Indians fought bravely. They fought literally to the last drop of blood; dozens of tribes were simply wiped off the face of the earth. Those who, despite everything, survived, were destined for the sad fate of the inhabitants of the reservations. The reservations were, in fact, self-governing concentration camps: tens of thousands of Indians died of hunger there, froze in the winter and died of thirst in the summer. In 1900, American authorities officially announced the “closure of the frontier”; thus the fact was recognized that all the lands had already been captured. Nobody thought about the Indians. It seemed that there were none left at all, that after a certain amount of time the pitiful remnants of the once proud and powerful tribes would die, unable to bear the harsh conditions of captivity. But that did not happen. The Indians survived. They survived and were reborn, no matter what. And in the 2nd half of the 20th century they again raised the banner of the struggle for Freedom. But that's a completely different story...
Sergey Oreshin
21-04-2015, 07:04
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Native Americans lost their history, their lands, their culture, but their destruction is a topic least discussed in secular history.
Only a source with a biased approach will name the exact figure of the Indian population before the arrival of Columbus and its remainder after the first contacts with Europeans. More or less serious work offers several options. But the discrepancies in the assessments of historians and ethnographers are enormous.
According to Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, the decline in the number of North American Indians from an estimated 12 million (1500) to barely 237,000 (1900). Such data expresses “multiple genocide.”
University of Hawaii historian David Stannard writes: “By the end of the 19th century, Native Americans were subjected to the worst holocaust the world had ever seen, raging across two continents continuously for four centuries, destroying the lives of tens of millions of people.”
The population of North America before first contact with Europeans is the subject of active debate. Some estimates of the original population of the United States and Canada ranged from 2 to 12 million. Over the subsequent time, their number decreased to the already mentioned 237 thousand.
The number of Indians remaining by the beginning of the 20th century is almost the same for all researchers. But it is difficult to calculate how many of the indigenous population decreased at an incredible rate under the influence of the “pilgrims.” The exact number of Indians killed could damage the image of the United States. Therefore, officials do their best to suppress attempts to introduce the term “genocide” into American history.
Researcher Peter Montague believes that early on Europeans dominated the 100 million native people across the Americas.
Inaccuracies and huge differences in estimates of the American population before the European invasion allow us to play with the numbers. Some complain that the number of Indians in many sources is deliberately reduced so that its reduction does not seem so severe.
In world history, the most famous genocide is Hitler's genocide of the Jews. There is almost no talk about the destruction of the Indians, who suffered much greater losses. But it is interesting that American history in relation to the Indians showed not only blatant cruelty and inhumanity, but also became a role model for the Hitler regime. The idea of concentration camps was not Hitler's "original idea". Biographer John Toland wrote that Hitler was to some extent inspired by the Indian reservation system.
“Regarding the idea of concentration camps, he owed much of his research to the history of England and America. He was fascinated by the camps in South Africa for Boer prisoners and in the wild west for Indians. Hitler often praised to his associates the effectiveness of American destruction through starvation and unequal battles with the red savages, who could not be tamed by captivity.”
Of course, recognizing these facts is not in the interests of the United States. American patriotism teaches its citizens and others that America is a great and free country. But you can't be the greatest nation in the world when you're accused of genocide. Especially if your country's politics were the inspiration in planning one of the most devastating genocides.
The indigenous population after the arrival of Columbus declined significantly over the following decades. Some were killed directly by Europeans, others were killed indirectly through exposure to diseases to which the Indians had no immunity. Epidemics and diseases did claim many Indian lives, but to justify mass extermination on this basis alone is to ignore the well-documented American policy of extermination.
Since 1792, Christopher Columbus has been considered a real hero; there is a holiday named after him. But, unfortunately, this historical character has a dark side. Peter Montague, author of a thematic work on the navigator, writes that Columbus described the Arawaks (the indigenous people of the Caribbean islands) as timid, awkward, free and generous. And he rewarded them with death and slavery. On his second expedition, Columbus took on the title of “Admiral of the Ocean-Sea” and continued to unleash a reign of terror never seen before. By the time he completed it, eight million Arawaks (almost the entire indigenous population of Haiti) had been exterminated by torture, murder, forced labor, starvation, disease and despair.
All the following centuries, the power of the New World, through its actions, only confirmed how the indigenous population hindered them. History has left illustrative examples of destruction.
In 1763, Geoffrey Amherst, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in North America, wrote to Fort Pitt: “You will do well to try to poison the Indians with smallpox, by means of blankets, as well as if you try any other method of exterminating the loathsome race.” In June of that year, two Delaware Indians visiting the port were given blankets and scarves from the quarantine hospital. One of their sellers wrote in the magazine: “I hope this will have an epidemiological effect.” Prior to this, the technique of contaminated items was attempted among tribes in Ohio. Hundreds of people died. Huge human losses from these measures continued into the next century. From 1836 to 1840, 100,000 Indians were killed through Fort Clark.
Raids on Indian camps were also actively practiced. In February 1860, a vile night attack took the lives of 300 indigenous inhabitants of the Round Valley in one day. The tragedy at Wounded Knee is considered the most symbolic. A regiment of American soldiers had the task of disarming the Indians in their camp, but in the process a chaotic shot was heard, which the regiment perceived as a call to battle. The unarmed Indians could not withstand the gunfire. The results of the massacre are captured in horrific photographs taken three days later - the frozen corpses of men, women and children. The bodies found were buried in a mass grave. American troops posed for photos in front of the burial site, and 20 soldiers later received the Medal of Honor for the massacre.
Despite the obvious losses and lack of humane treatment of Indians throughout history, current politicians still disagree with the word “genocide”, offering stupid arguments. Republican Senator Ellen Roberts considered that this term could only be used in relation to a people completely exterminated. These people are driven by blind patriotism. Their ancestors used the Indians as live targets for target practice. But, of course, American society is unable to admit such shameful facts of history.
