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 been catastrophically reduced since the beginning of the European migration to America. What is the matter here? Why did the people, who had their own developed civilization and inhabited vast territories, reached such a state?
The main "merit" in this belongs to the white settlers. In Spanish and Portuguese-speaking America, the oppression and destruction of the Indians was practically not observed. Here colonialists and indigenous people coexisted peacefully, 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 subsequently formed, the situation was different. Here, the policy of genocide of the 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 relocated to a less habitable area, or simply destroyed. In the history of the United States, there are many bloody pages concerning the mass extermination of the Indian population.
Of particular cruelty and tragedy are: the massacre near Yellow Creek (April 30, 1774), the execution of Indians at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), the massacre on Sand Creek (November 29, 1864) and a number of other cases of destruction of the 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 photograph, American soldiers pose next to a grave containing the bodies of the Indians they shot.
For this operation, which resulted in the destruction of more than 300 civilian Indians, some 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 killed in the United States. However, a number of historians and Indian organizations claim that the genocide of Indians in the United States killed several million indigenous people, 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 hurt the Indians, for whom bison meat was the staple food. From the famine, which was provoked by the Americans, many indigenous people died.
Another very effective way to destroy the Indians in the United States is humanitarian aid, which was sent to the Indian reservations by the "humane" American government. Previously, food products and things included in the humanitarian cargo were infected with pathogens of various diseases. After such "gifts" entire reservations died out.
Here is a map of Indian reservations in the modern United States.
Compare it with the map of the settlement of Indians before the arrival of Europeans, which is given at the beginning of the article. 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 the result of a 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 blame the US government most loudly, which is not surprising. Now in politically correct America, self-flagellation has become the norm, and it is considered bad form to justify the policy of the state.
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, back in 2007 wrote an article titled "Were American Indians Victims of Genocide?" (Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?), the translation of which I want 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, the museum's founder and director, W. Richard West, said the new organization would not shy away from such a difficult topic as efforts to eradicate Native American culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is safe to say that someone will inevitably raise the issue of genocide.
The story of an encounter between European settlers and the Native Americans is not a pleasant read. Among the early publications, perhaps the best known is Helen Hunt Jackson's "The Age of Infamy" (1888), a melancholy account of forced displacement, murder, and total neglect. Jackson's book, which clearly captures some important elements of what happened, also set a pattern of exaggeration and one-sided accusation that persists to this day.
Thus, according to Ward Churchill, Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, the decline in the North American Indian population from 12 million in 1500 to almost 237,000 in 1900 represents "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 Steefarm and Phil Lane, Jr., "there could be no more monumental example of sustained genocide, anywhere in the human record."
The sweeping allegations 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 allegedly ingrained American animosity towards non-white peoples. Historian Richard Drinnon, describing the actions of troops under the command of Kit Carson, called them "the forerunner of the Burning Fifth Marines" that set fire to Vietnamese villages, while in American Indians: The First Victim (1972), Jay David called for modern readers recall how American civilization initiated "theft and murder" and "efforts to ... genocide."
Further allegations of genocide were noted ahead of the 500th anniversary of the landing of Columbus in 1992. The National Council of Churches passed a resolution calling the event an "invasion" that resulted in "enslavement and genocide of the indigenous people." In Conquering Paradise (1990), Kirkpatrick Sale accuses the British and their American successors of pursuing a policy of extermination that has not abated for four centuries. More recent work has followed suit. In 1999, Encyclopedia of Genocide, edited by scholar Israel Charney, articles by Ward Churchill claim that extermination was a "clear goal" of the US government. Cambodia expert Ben Keijerman has also argued that genocide is "the only appropriate way" to describe how the white settlers treated the Indians. And so on.
It is a firmly established fact that 250,000 Native Americans were still alive in the United States at the end of the 19th century. Nevertheless, the number of Indians who lived at the time of the first contact with Europeans is still under scientific debate. Some students of the subject speak of inflating it with a "numbers game", others accuse that the size of the native population was deliberately kept to a minimum in order to make the fall seem less severe than it was.
The difference in ratings is huge. In 1928, ethnographer James Mooney suggested a total of 1,152,950 Indians in all tribes in the area north of Mexico City at the time of European arrival. By 1987, in American Indians: The Holocaust and Survival, Russell Thornton gave a figure of more than 5 million people, nearly five times that of Mooney, while Lenore Steefarm 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 about 10 million in the United States.
Despite the striking differences in 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 the highest figures are taken, they do not by themselves prove that a genocide took place.
To deal with this problem properly, we must begin with the most important cause of the catastrophic decline in the number of Indians, namely, the spread of infectious diseases to which they had no immunity. This phenomenon, known to scientists as the "virgin-soil epidemic", in North America was the norm.
The most deadly pathogen brought by the 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 probably introduced to North America by Europeans.
There is no significant disagreement about all this. The most heinous enemy of Native Americans is not the white man and his weapons, concludes Alfred Crosby, but "the invisible killers whom these people have brought in blood and breath." It is believed that 75 to 90 percent of all Indian deaths are from these killers.
For some, however, this in itself warrants the use of the term "genocide". David Stannard, for example, argues that just as 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 the Euro-American genocide as there were those who were burned, stabbed to death, shot or given to hungry dogs to eat." As an example of actual genocide, Stannard points to the Franciscan missions in California as the "furnace of death".
But here we are in highly contested territory. It is true that in crowded places, with poor ventilation and poor sanitation, the missions encouraged the spread of disease. But it is clearly not true that, like the Nazis, the missionaries were indifferent to the welfare of the new 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 was no comparison with the fate of the Jews in the ghetto. The missionaries had little understanding of the causes of sickness, and there was little they could do medically for them. In contrast, the Nazis knew exactly what was happening in the ghetto and quite deliberately deprived the prisoners of food and medicine, in contrast to Stannard's "death furnaces".
The big picture also doesn't fit with Stannard's idea of illness as a "genocidal war." True, the forced relocation of Indian tribes was often accompanied by great hardship and cruel treatment; The migration of the Cherokee tribe from their homeland to the territory west of the Mississippi in 1838 claimed the lives of thousands of people and went down in history as the "Trail of Tears". But the greatest loss of lives occurred long before this time, and sometimes only after minimal contact with European traders. True, some colonists later welcomed the high mortality among the Indians, considering 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 natives with deadly diseases.
Ward Churchill went further than Stannard, arguing that there was nothing unwitting or unintentional about the disappearance of the bulk of the native population of North America. "It was malice, not nature, that did the work." In short, the Europeans were engaged in 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. Worried about his limited resources, and disgusted by what he saw with what cunning and savage methods the Indians waged wars, Sir Geoffrey Amherst, commander of the British forces in North America, wrote to Colonel Henry Bouquet at Fort Pitt the following: "You will do so, to try to inoculate the Indians [with smallpox] with blankets, and also to try any other method that can help to eradicate this disgusting race."
Bouquet clearly approved of Amherst's proposal, but whether he carried it out remains unknown. Around June 24, two Fort Pitt traders did give blankets and a handkerchief from the Fort Hospital Quarantine to two visiting Delaware Indians, and one trader noted in his diary, "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 that killed hundreds of people.
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 US Army began distributing blankets to the Mandans and other Indians who had gathered at Fort Clark on the Missouri River in present-day North Dakota." He continues: Away from the trade in goods, the blankets were taken from the smallpox quarantine of the military infirmary in St. Louis, and brought upriver aboard the steamboat St. Peter. When the first Indians showed symptoms of illness on July 14, the surgeon advised them to camp near the post office to disperse and seek "refuge" in the villages of healthy relatives.
As a result, the disease spread and the Mandan were "virtually annihilated", other tribes also suffered heavy losses. Referring to the figure of "100,000 or more" who died from the U.S. army-caused smallpox pandemic of 1836-40 (elsewhere he says that the victims were "several times more"), 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 causative factor in the pandemic of 1836-40." As proof they cite a contemporary journal at Fort Clark, Francis A. Chardon.
But Chardon magazine does not explicitly suggest that the US Army was distributing infected blankets, but blames the accidental spread of the disease epidemic to passengers on a passenger ship. As for the "100,000 dead", Thornton not only fails to confirm such apparently absurd figures, but he also points to the infected passengers on the St. Peter's steamship as the reason. Another scholar, relying on newly discovered source material, also disproved the idea of a conspiracy to harm the Indians.
Likewise, any such idea is countered by the desire of the United States government at the time to vaccinate the Indians. Smallpox vaccination, a procedure developed by the English country doctor Edward Jenner in 1796, was first ordered by President Jefferson in 1801. The program continued for three decades, although its implementation was slowed down both by the resistance of the Indians, who suspected it was a stunt, and by the lack of interest on the part of some officials. Yet, as Thornton writes, "Vaccination of the American Indians ultimately reduced the death rate from smallpox substantially."
Thus, European settlers arrived in the New World different reasons, but none of them were going to infect the Indians with deadly pathogens. As for the accusations of the US government that it is responsible for the demographic disaster that has befallen the American Indian population, they are not supported by any evidence or legitimate arguments. The United States did not wage biological warfare against the Indians, and the large number of deaths due to diseases cannot be considered the result of a planned genocide.
However, even if up to 90 percent of the decline in the Indian population was the result of disease, significant mortality was due to abuse and violence. But can all or at least some of these deaths be considered genocide?
We can study characteristic incidents by following the geographical route of European settlers from the New England colonies. There, in the first place, the Puritans did not regard the Indians they encountered as natural enemies, but rather as friends and potential converts. But their Christianization efforts were not successful, and their relations with the natives gradually became more and more hostile. In particular, the Pequot tribe, with their reputation for cruelty and ruthlessness, was feared not so much by the colonists as by other Indians in New England. In a war caused in part by tribal 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 Massachusetts Bay Colony demands for handovers and other forms of compensation, the colony's first governor, John Endecot, 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 outside 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 with a hot tree 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. Appreciating courage above all, the Indians had little sympathy for those who surrendered or were captured. Prisoners who could not stand the hardships of traveling through the desert were usually killed on the spot. Among those Indians or Europeans who were taken back to the village, some of them could be taken to replace the dead warriors, the rest were subjected to ritual torture in order to humiliate them and thus avenge the losses in the tribe. Thereafter, the Indians often consumed the body or parts of it 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 locals were savages who deserved no mercy. This revulsion explains at least part of the ferocity of the Battle of Fort Mystic in May 1637, when a troop under John Mason and militiamen from Saybrook were surprised to find half of the Pequot tribe encamped next to Mystic River.
The colonists intended to kill the warriors "with their own weapons", as Mason said, that is, to plunder the 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 came out of their tents to fight. Fearing the numerical superiority of the Indians, the English attackers set fire to the fortified villages and retreated behind the palisade. There they formed a circle and shot anyone who tried to escape. In the second cordon formed by the Narragansett Indians, they slaughtered the few who managed to get through the English line. When the battle was over, 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 refutes 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 war with the Pequot, the colonists spared women, children, and the elderly, which also contradicts the idea of genocidal intent.
The second famous example of the colonial period is King Philip's War (1675-76). This conflict, costing in proportion 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 who were also captured. Fifty-two of the 90 New England cities were attacked, seventeen were razed to the ground, and 25 were sacked. Losses among the Indians were even higher, many of those who were captured were executed or sold into slavery abroad.
The war was merciless on both sides. From the outset, the colonial council in Boston declared that "no one will be killed or wounded who is ready 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, hiding behind trees, stones and bushes, and not engaging in "civilized" open battle. Similarly, the atrocities committed by the Indians when they ambushed English troops or seized dwellings with women and children were the reason for the desire for retribution.
Soon, both the colonists and the Indians began to dismember the corpses and expose body parts and heads on poles. (Nevertheless, Indians could not be killed with impunity. In the summer of 1676, four men were tried 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 ignited by King Philip's war became even more pronounced in 1689 when strong Indian tribes allied with the French against the British. In 1694, the Massachusetts General Court allocated a small territory to all friendly Indians. For killing or capturing hostile Indians, they were then offered a generous reward, and scalps were accepted as evidence of the murder. In 1704 an amendment was made in the direction of "Christian practice" with a scale of rewards according to age and sex. The award was banned for children under the age of ten, subsequently increased to twelve (sixteen in Connecticut, fifteen in New Jersey). Here, too, the intention of genocide was far from clear. The practices were justified on grounds of self-preservation and revenge, and in retaliation for the widespread "scalping" practiced by the Indians.
Let's move on to the American frontier. In Pennsylvania, where the white population doubled between 1740 and 1760, pressure on Indian lands increased significantly. In 1754, spurred on 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 taken prisoner. Stories of real, exaggerated, and imaginary atrocities spread by word of mouth, in stories, and through provincial newspapers. Some British officers ordered no leniency towards captured Indians, and even after the formal end of hostilities, feelings continued to run so strongly that Indian killers like 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 for the whole race of Indians, and nothing is more common than to hear them talk about the eradication of Indians completely from the face of the Earth, men, women and children.”
The settlers, when expanding the borders, treated the Indians with contempt, often robbed and killed them. In 1782, the militia, who were chasing Indians who had killed a woman and a 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, "did not fit with the particular mentality of the frontiers, who hated the Indians and on whom the decision of local courts depended."
But that, too, is 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 directed a network of agents and sub-agents in this area. Many Americans on the East Coast, too, openly criticized the crude ways of the frontiersmen. Pity for the disappearing Indians, together with a sense of remorse, led to a revival of the 18th century concept of the noble savage. American Natives have been romanticized in historiography, art, and literature. In particular, James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Longfellow.
On the western frontier, such views were of course perceived as sentimentality. The perception of the Indians as noble savages, as the cynics noted, was directly proportional to the geographical distance from them. Instead, the settlers complained vigorously that the regular army was unable to respond more aggressively to the Indian threat. The large-scale Sioux rebellion in Minnesota in 1862, in which the Indians killed, raped, plundered, left behind an atmosphere of fear and anger that spread throughout the West.
In Colorado, the situation was especially tense. The Cheyenne and Arapah Indians, who had a legitimate grudge against the encroachment of white settlers, also fought for the pleasure, the desire for prey, and the prestige that comes from success. The land route to the East was particularly 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 slit, and the mother's body was torn open and her entrails were pulled over her face.
In September 1864, the Reverend William Crawford wrote of the attitude of the white population of Colorado: "There is only one sentiment as to the final decision which must be taken with regard to 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 distinguished between friendly and hostile Indians, also began advocating the extermination of this depraved, cruel, ungrateful race. While the regular army fought the Civil War in the South, the western settlers depended on the protection of their volunteer regiments, many of which were woefully lacking in discipline. It was local volunteers who massacred Sand Creek, Colorado on November 29, 1864. Formed in August, the regiment was made up of miners and cowboys who were weary of ranching and itching for battle. Their commander, the Reverend John Milton Shivington, a politician and ardent hater of the Indians, called for war without mercy, even against children. He liked to say - "Nits make lice." This was followed by rampant violence. During a surprise attack on large Indian camps, from 70 to 250 Indians were killed, most of them women and children. The regiment lost eight dead and 40 wounded.
News of the Sand Creek massacre sparked protests in the East and led to several inquiries in Congress. Although some interrogators appear to have been biased against Shivington, no one disputes that he gave orders to leave no one alive, or that his soldiers were involved in mass scalping and other mutilations.
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, that number had dropped to 15,000. As elsewhere, illness 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 a fundamental change in Indian-White relations. While earlier Mexican farmers used the Indians as labor force 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 the Indian lands and often freely killed anyone who was in their way. An American officer wrote to his sister in 1860: "There never was such a vile type of people in the world as those who gathered about these mines."
This was true of gold miners and was often true of newcomer 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 least fertile parts of the territory and their numbers began to decline rapidly. Many suffered from hunger, while others, desperate for food, began stealing and killing animals. Indian women who made a living as prostitutes 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 settle Indians on reservations, but this was opposed by both the Indians themselves and white farmers who feared losing their labor force. Meanwhile, clashes multiplied.
One of the most brutal wars, between white settlers and 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 a non-electoral campaign against the Indians. "Our operations against the Indians," he wrote to the commander of the volunteers in 1859, "should be limited strictly against those known to have been involved 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 Yuca Indians had dropped from about 5,000 to 300.
The Humboldt Bay region, northwest of Round Valley, has been the scene of even greater clashes. Here, too, the Indians stole and killed cattle, and the militia responded. A secret alliance formed in the city of Eureka carried out a particularly heinous massacre in February 1860, surprisingly 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 outrage and remorse. "White settlers", writes the historian only 20 years later, "received a great provocation .... But no one was hurt, there were no robberies or cruelties that could justify the brutal murder of innocent women and children." This was also the opinion of the majority of the inhabitants of Eureka, where the grand jury condemned the massacre, and in cities such as San Francisco, such killings were repeatedly criticized. But the atrocities continued. In the 1870s, as one historian summed up the situation in California, "only the remnants of the indigenous population were still alive, and those who had survived in the maelstrom of the previous quarter century were dislocated, demoralized, and pathetic."
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," said one of the officers, who "have no parallel in savage warfare." The trails to the west were at a similar risk: 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 obedience, Generals Sherman and Sheridan, who for two decades after the Civil War commanded the army's combat units fighting the Indians on the plains, adopted the same strategy that they had used with success in their march through Georgia and into the Shenandoah Valley. Unable to defeat the Indians on the open prairie, they pursued them to winter camps where the 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 adopted at the time. The principles of limited warfare 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, Francis 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. (note mine)]. But in the villages, fighting Indians who refused to surrender were considered legitimate war targets. In any case, it never happened to exterminate the Plains Indians, despite the heated remarks on the subject, outraged by Sherman, and despite Sheridan's famously poignant remark that "the only good Indian I ever saw was dead". Although Sheridan did not mean that all Indians should be shot on the spot, 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
Here, by the way, another myth is refuted. I specifically highlighted Sheridan's phrase about the dead Indian. The fact is that it was subsequently 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 goes on to write:
As for the last of the mentioned collisions, it took place on December 29, 1890, at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. By this time, the US 7th Cavalry had gained a reputation for aggressiveness, especially after its surprise attack in 1868 on Cheyenne Indians in a village on the Washita River in Kansas, where about 100 Indians were killed by General George Custer's men.
However, Washita's battle, although one-sided, was not a massacre: the wounded warriors received first aid, and 53 women and children who hid in their lodges survived the attack and were taken prisoner. There were no unarmed innocents among the Cheyenne, as their leader Black Kettle admitted, that they were conducting regular raids in Kansas, which he was powerless to stop.
The clash at the Wounded Knee, 22 years later, must be seen in the context of the Ghost Dance religion, a messianic movement which, since 1889, caused great unrest among the Indians in the area and which was interpreted by the whites as a general call to war. While the Sioux camp was searching for weapons, several young men created an incident by opening fire on the soldiers surrounding the camp. The soldiers, furious at what they considered an act of betrayal by the Indians, returned fire. The army's losses were 25 killed and 39 wounded, mostly as a result of friendly fire. Over 300 Indians died.
Wounded Knee has been called "perhaps the most famous Indian genocide in North America". But, as Robert Utley concluded in a careful analysis, it is better to describe it as "a lamentable, tragic event of war," a bloodbath that neither side wanted. In a situation where women and children were mixed with men, it was inevitable that some of them 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 in general, as established by the commission of inquiry created by order of President Harrison, officers and soldiers made every effort to avoid killing women and children.
On January 15, 1891, the last Sioux surrendered. Apart from a few isolated skirmishes, the American Indian War was over.
The Genocide Convention was approved by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948 and entered into force on 12 January 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 were adopted prima-facie, and it is by using this definition that we must assess 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 central meaning of this formulation. During the course of the convention's work, some argued for a clear description of the reason or motive for the destruction of the group. In the end, instead of 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 existence of the group as a national, ethnic, racial or religious entity. Evidence of such a motive, according to one legal scholar, "would be an integral part of the proof of a plan for genocide, and hence the intent of genocide."
The decisive role of intentionality in the Genocide Convention is that, in accordance with its terms, the huge number of Indian deaths from epidemics cannot be considered genocide. Deadly diseases were not deliberately introduced, and Europeans cannot be blamed for their ignorance of what medical science would discover only a few centuries later. In addition, military actions that led to the death of civilians, like the battle of Washita, cannot be considered acts of genocide, since the killing of innocent people was not the goal, and the soldiers were not sent to destroy the Indians as a certain group of people. On the other hand, some massacres in California, where both perpetrators and their supporters openly admitted that they wanted to destroy the Indians as an ethnic community, can indeed be considered, under the terms of the convention, as genocidal intent.
However, when talking about 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 fairly significant number, in relation to the overall group as a whole", adding that actual or attempted destruction must also refer to "the defendant's actual ability to destroy a group in a certain geographical area within his area of control , and not in relation to the entire population of this group in a broader geographical sense. If this principle is accepted, atrocities such as the Sand Creek massacre, limited to one group in a particular locality, could also be considered an act of genocide.
Of course, it is far from easy to apply a legal concept developed in the middle of the 20th century to events that took place many decades, if not hundreds of years, ago. Our knowledge of many of these cases is incomplete. In addition, the perpetrators are long dead and therefore cannot be tried in court, where the most important factual details could be established and the 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 effect (laws ex post facto). Morally, even if we accept the idea of universal principles transcending specific cultures and eras, we must be careful in condemning, say, the conduct of wars during the American colonial period, which for the most part corresponded to the prevailing notions of good and evil.
The real task is, in the context of a particular situation, to find out the options for its presentation. Given the circumstances and moral standards of the time, did the people whose behavior we judge have the choice to act differently? This approach will lead us to be more lenient with the New England Puritans who fought for their survival than with the prospectors and volunteer militias in California who often killed Indian men, women and children for no other reason than to satisfy their appetite for gold. and earth. The former also fought their Indian adversaries in an era that cared little for humane standards of warfare, while the latter committed their atrocities in the face of fierce condemnation not only by self-styled humanists in the far east, but by 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 for good reason the Genocide Convention provides that only "persons" can be charged with a crime, perhaps even excluding legal proceedings against the government. Equally significant is the fact that a massacre such as Sand Creek was undertaken by volunteers from the local militia 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, concludes Robert Utley, "the army fired on civilians by accident, not purposefully." As far as society as a whole, even if some elements within the white population, mostly in the West, have occasionally advocated extermination, no US government official has ever seriously proposed it. Genocide was never an American policy or the result of a policy.
Violent clashes between whites and native Americans were probably inevitable. Between 1600 and 1850, a dramatic increase in population led to massive waves of emigration from Europe, and the many millions who arrived in the New World gradually moved west into the seemingly unlimited expanse of America. There is no doubt that America's 19th century idea, "Manifest Destiny", was partly a rationalization of gain, but the resulting Indian migration was unstoppable, 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 fate of the Indians of America 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 change the nomadic lifestyle of hunters for the sedentary lifestyle of a farmer. The new Americans were convinced of their cultural and racial superiority, unwilling to provide the indigenous inhabitants of the continent with a huge reserve of land required by the way of life of the Indians. The consequence of this was a conflict in which there were several heroes, but which was far from a simple story about an unfortunate victim and a merciless aggressor. It is not in the interest of the Indians or history to charge the whole society with genocide.
In conclusion, I want to debunk another myth that Levy did not specifically say anything about. This myth lies in the fact that whites allegedly deliberately killed bison in order to deprive the Indians of their livelihood, since hunting for bison was their main occupation and source of food.
Indeed, after the arrival of the whites, the number of bison began to decline sharply, 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 save it. This paradox may bother vegetarians. Take bison for example: 500 years ago, perhaps 30 million of these huge mammals inhabited North America. By the end of the 1800s, several causes - natural climate change and their mass killings - reduced the bison population to about 1,000. And yet today, North America is home to an estimated 450,000 bison, the kind of recovery that has a lot to do with the development of our appetite for them.
USDA-inspected slaughterhouses will kill about 50,000 bison for human consumption this year. In 2000, that figure was just 17,674. Although bison consumption remains negligible compared to beef, Americans eat 90,000 cattle daily. 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 satisfying red meat lovers. (Marketing studies show that men, in particular, are more fond of bison, which Americans have long called buffaloes, although as a zoological species they are bison, not buffaloes.) 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), has largely defined itself through its bison offering, which includes burgers that taste stronger than The chain plans to open its 48th restaurant next month, this time in Naperville, Illinois.
How could all this be good news for the King of the American Plains? And now that we've revived the bison as species, can we figure out how to make sure not to do it again - to kill them intelligently and humanely?
In order to answer these questions, we must first correct a misunderstanding, namely that the alleged 19th century white man's greed for skins and the actual policy of genocide against Native Americans led to the destruction of tens of millions of bison. This is wrong. Bison expert Dale Lott demonstrates in his well-known natural history American Bison (2002) that bison populations often declined dramatically in pre-industrial times when dry air currents moved south into the plains. In 1841, before William Cody (the most famous of several people 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 grasslands of the state.
But climate change alone was not enough to wipe out 30 million bison. People play a big role. By 1700, the Indians began to hunt on horseback, which allowed them to kill prey much more effectively than approaching on foot, as had been the case for the previous 9,000 years. Thanks to steam locomotives, transportation of bison skins became cheaper, and in 1870 tanners learned how to make useful skins from them. Demand grew and the new "Sharps buffalo rifle" [Christian Sharp - the designer who in 1848 developed a gun that was widely used for hunting buffalo and which was called the "Sharps buffalo rifle" (note mine)] allowed hunters to meet this demand. The last significant buffalo hunt ended in 1883, after which there was almost nothing left.
Indians, a short educational program on history
Indians are the indigenous peoples of the United States
Learn the history of what the colonizers did with the natives of America!
introduction
Judging by the unrestrained and persistent aggressive actions in relation to the still non-colonized countries (of which there are literally a few left), the US way of thinking did not lean towards creation.
- History of the development of America
- Genocide. Data. Statistics
- Indian Wars
1. The history of the development of America
The official date for the discovery of America is 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, 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, 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 made claims to the entire continent. The continent was inhabited by many different Indian tribes with a total number of about 10-15 million people.
Little information has come down to us about the expedition.
What is certain is that the English ships in 1498 reached the North American mainland and passed along its eastern coast far to the southwest. Sebastian Cabot turned back and returned to England in the same 1498.
We know about the great geographical achievements of the Cabot 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 marked "sea discovered by the English" and with several English flags.
By the middle of the 16th century, Spain's dominance of the Americas was almost absolute.
After the English admirals defeated the largest Spanish fleet (by far the most violent storm) of the day in 1588, Spain fell into the shadows, never to recover from the blow.
Leadership in the "relay race" of colonization passed to England, France and Holland.
In December 1620, the ship "Mayflower" arrived on the Atlantic coast of Massachusetts with 102 Calvinist Puritans ("Pilgrim Fathers"). 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 were not distinguished by either common religious beliefs or equal social status.
Beginning in the mid-17th century, Great Britain tried to establish complete control over the economic operations 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) had made significant progress. Especially American industrialists succeeded in building ships, which made it possible to quickly establish trade.
The English Parliament considered these successes so threatening that in 1750 it passed a law forbidding the construction of rolling mills and iron-cutting workshops in the colonies. Foreign trade of the colonies was also subjected to harassment. And that was the premise of the War of Independence.
By the second half of the 18th century, the population of the American colonies more and more clearly acted 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.
Dissatisfaction was also shown by American industrialists and merchants, who were extremely dissatisfied with the colonial policy of the mother country. The presence of British troops (remaining there after the seven-year war) in 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 an alliance 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 the 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 American War of Independence in American literature is more often called the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) - a war between the British Loyalists (loyal to the legitimate government of the British crown) on the one hand and the revolutionaries of 13 English colonies (patriots) on the other, who proclaimed their independence from Great Britain as an independent union state in 1776. Significant political and social changes in the life of the inhabitants of North America, caused by the war and the victory in it of supporters of independence, are referred to in American literature as the "American Revolution". Course of the war: 1775-1783
September 3, 1783 Great Britain recognized the independence of the United States. The new American government relinquished claims to the west bank of the Mississippi and to British Canada. On November 25 of that year, the last British troops left New York. About 40,000 loyalists evacuated to Canada with them.
2. Genocide. Data. Statistics
Here is how R. Edberg, known to us, writes about the fate of the Indians:“Having exterminated the herds of the son of the prairies, having taken away the lands where he hunted, the rivers where he fished, he was made a stranger in his own country. The religious ideas of the Indian were connected with what surrounded him; they were expressed in deep reverence for the firmament and earth, trees and flowing waters. When he was torn out of what he had grown together with, death entered his heart.”
R. Edberg. Letters to Columbus. M., 1986. S. 67.
indian genocide, material from Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia, Indians - a common name for the indigenous population of America (with the exception of the Eskimos and Aleuts). The name arose from the erroneous idea of the first European navigators (Christopher Columbus and others) at the end of the 15th century, who considered the transatlantic lands they discovered to be India. According to the anthropological type, the Indians belong to the Americanoid race.
SPANISH
The Spaniards were not only VERY cruel to the natives, but also established laws, on 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. Since the introduction of dogs to the continent, the Spaniards fed them with dead Indians. One surviving letter from a Spaniard reads:…when I returned from Cartagena, I met a Portuguese named Rohe Martin. On the porch of his house hung pieces of chopped up Indians to feed his dogs, as if they were wild beasts ... "
In 1495, Christopher Columbus issued a law that obliged all Indians over the age of 14 to pay quarterly (3 months) to the Spaniards in gold or 25 pounds of cotton (in areas where there was no gold). Those who paid such a "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 overdue, then the Indians cut off the hands of both hands, hung them around their necks and sent them to die in their village.
It was unrealistic to fulfill the requirement of the law, since the Indians had to quit cultivating their fields, hunting and only mining gold. Hunger has begun.
In 1498, the Indian Forced Labor Act went into effect. to the Spaniards. The reason was dissatisfaction with the income received from the collection of gold and the sale of natives into slavery. 
In July-September 1539, the conquistador Francisco de Chávez razed the Kingdom of Carua Conchucos to the ground., which was part of the Inca Empire until 1533 and killed 600 Indian children under the age of three, which was the most massive murder of children in history.
In 1598, in response to the murder of 11 Spanish soldiers, don Juan de Onate made a punitive expedition and in the three-day battle at Mount Acoma destroyed 800 Indians and ordered the amputation of the left leg every male in the tribe over 25.
Cause of many casualties among the Yanomami Indians, who lived in the Amazon River Delta, was the territory rich in minerals where the tribe lived. A large number of Indians died from infections brought there by builders and soldiers. Today, the Yanomami number 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, in alliance with the Mohicans and the Narragansett tribe, attacked a Pequot village (in present-day Connecticut) and burned approximately 600-700 people alive.
On March 8, 1782, 96 baptized Indians were killed. American People's Militia from Pennsylvania during the American Revolutionary War.
The Indians were soldered with alcohol, set against each other; they were used as "allies" in the wars between the British and French colonialists for dominance in North America, they were deceived, they violated treaties; the Indians were forcibly taken away from their lands and pushed further inland to the barren lands. The colonialists waged a real hunt for the scalps of the Indians. Legislatures in the New England colonies set a hefty price of £50 to £100 for each scalp delivered, including those of Indian women and children.
It is also known that The US Senate entered into an agreement with the Cherokee tribe to buy 8 million acres of their land for 50 cents per acre. Later, these lands were sold to gold miners for $30,000 per acre. Fraudulently, the modern territory of Manhattan was bought from the Indians.
Between the 16th and 18th centuries widespread forcible eradication idolatry and baptism, the destruction of faith in the Quechua tribe.
On April 30, 1774, the Yellow Creek Massacre took place. near modern Wellsville, Ohio. A group of Virginia frontier settlers, led by young bandit Daniel Greathouse, killed 21 Mingos, including Logan's mother, daughter, brother, nephew, sister, and cousin. The murdered daughter of Logan - Tunay, was on last term pregnancy. She was tortured and gutted while she was alive. The scalp was taken from both her and the child who was cut out of her. Other mingos were also scalped.
In 1825, the US Supreme Court, in one of its decisions, formulates Doctrine of discovery. According to this doctrine, the ownership of newly discovered lands is at the disposal of the government whose subjects discovered this territory. The doctrine was used to deprive the "aboriginal population" (in this case, the Indians) of the right to own land, which according to the doctrine was considered "no man's land". The right to the lands of "discovered" lands now belongs to those who "discovered" them.
(Note: the official date of the discovery of America is October 12, 1492 by Christopher Columbus).
On the basis of this doctrine, already in 1830, the Indian Removal Act was adopted, the victims of which were the Five Civilized Tribes.
February 26, 1860 on Indian Island off the coast of northern California, six local residents, landowners and businessmen, massacred the Wiyot Indians, killing with axes and knives at least 60, and possibly more than 200 women, children and the elderly.
In 1867, the Indian Reservation Removal Act appeared. Indian reservations were created in unsuitable places for Agriculture. In the first decades they were overcrowded, resulting in hundreds of thousands of famines. Large reserves are located on the Colorado Plateau in Arizona (the Navajo tribe), in the mountains in northern Utah, on the Great Plains in the states of North Dakota and South Dakota, along the Missouri River (Sioux Indian 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 South Dakota, there was a massacre of the Lakota Indians by the US Army. Here the Indians gathered to hold their popular “spirit dances”. According to various estimates, about 300 people were killed and buried.
The terrible consequences of the extermination of buffalo for the tribes who depended on these animals for their lives.
The Indians traditionally hunted bison only to satisfy their vital needs: for food, as well as for the manufacture of clothing, housing, tools and utensils.
American General Philip Sheridan wrote:"The buffalo hunters have done more in the last two years to solve the acute problem of the Indians than the entire regular army has done in the last 30 years. They are destroying the Indian material base. Send them gunpowder and lead, if you like, and let them kill, skin and sell them until they wipe out all the buffalo!"
Sheridan in the US Congress proposed to establish a special medal for hunters ( on one side of which is an image of a dead bison, and on the other - a dead Indian), emphasizing the importance of the extermination of bison. 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 of a decline in bison from 30 million in 1800 to less 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 live 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, more than a hundred thousand.
In 1850, at the first session of the California Legislature, the "Indian Administration and Protection Act" was passed, which outlined the principles for the future relationship between whites and Indians. Giving the Indians some legal protection, The act nevertheless fixed the inequality of whites and Indians before the law and began widespread abuse of the use of Indians as labor force, albeit allowing them to live on private lands.
During 1851 and 1852, the California Legislature approved $1.1 million for the arming and maintenance of militia units to "suppress the hostile Indians," and issued $410,000 in bonds in 1857 for the same purpose. Although, theoretically intended to resolve conflicts between whites and Indians, these payments only stimulated the formation of new detachments of volunteers and an attempt to destroy all Indians in California.
At the level of local municipalities, rewards for the killed Indians were practiced. Shasta City in Northern California paid $5 per head of an Indian in 1855; a settlement near Marysville in 1859 paid a bounty from donated funds "for every scalp or other convincing evidence" that an Indian had been killed. In 1861 Tehama County had plans for 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 which 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 be resettled 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 estimated death toll along the road is from 4 to 15 thousand.
potawatomi death road(eng. 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 houses of the Indians were burned to prevent their return. Within 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 stay in Indiana and Michigan.
The exact number of victims cannot be established, because the exact number of the population before the arrival of Columbus is not known.
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 American Indian organizations and historians claim that the number of North American Indians dropped from 15 million to 237,000 between 1500 and 1900.
Before colonization, there were 2200 Indian tribes on two continents, after colonization 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 in the United States (so far).
Indians now have two main sources of income- government subsidies and gambling.
Indian reservations received the right to establish casinos in 1998.
Despite the income received by the Indians from the gambling business, their standard of living remains at an extremely low level.
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 homes.
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 the Indians is a record high for the United States - it reaches 15%, and in some reservations - 80% (the national average does not exceed 6%).
According to the US Census Bureau(US Census Bureau), the median income of a Native American family is $32,116 per year, however, according to the Indian agency TribalNews, food prices on reservations are about 2 times higher than prices in stores located in common areas.
A bachelor's degree (awarded after graduating from college) is 9.3% of Indians. Some reservations have less than 0.5% bachelors. In the US as a whole, this figure is 20.3%.
American Indians are twice as likely as the rest of the United States to be victims of violent crime.
Curiously, the natives of the United States (Indians), who have been living 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.
One in three Indians receive financial assistance from the federal government. In addition, the Indians are provided with food at the expense of the federal budget, they are guaranteed to buy a house on credit, they are provided with an increased allowance for children, and they organize free training courses.
Washington Profile
In 2009, the U.S. Congress included in the Defense Spending Act a Statement of Official Apology to the U.S. Indians
for "the many instances of violence, mistreatment, and neglect suffered by Indigenous Peoples at the hands of citizens of the United States."
The Obama administration is rumored to be paying over $1 billion to 41 Native American tribes. as compensation for the mismanagement of their lands and income from the exploitation of the natural resources of those lands, including oil and gas. By paying this amount, the US government secured 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 peoples of North America and the United States of America. Also, this term refers to the wars of white settlers with Indians that preceded the formation of the United States.The wars that began in colonial times continued until the massacre at Wounded Knee and the "closure" of the American Frontier in 1890. Their result was the subjugation of the 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 clash between the Sioux Indians and the US Army, and one of the last battles of the Indian Wars.
Sand Creek Massacre (1864)- attack by American volunteers under the command of Colonel John Chivington on the peaceful settlement of the southern Cheyenne and southern Arapaho on the Sand Creek.
In 1861, the Southern Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho signed a peace treaty with U.S. officials at Fort Wise.
In the early morning of November 29, 1864, Colonel Chivington's soldiers attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment at a large bend in Sand Creek. A huge American flag, given to him at the council, fluttered above the tipi of the Black Kettle leader, and below it a small white flag, a sign that his camp was peaceful.
The attack turned out to be a complete surprise for the Indians, they rushed to run up the stream. Among the first killed were Left Hand and the Cheyenne chief White Antelope, an old man of seventy-five. The riders cut off the retreat of the Indians, the few Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors began to dig in and cover the retreat of women and children who sought to hide in the nearby hills. The Indians fought back for four hours, most of them died, the survivors retreated up the stream, among them was the Black Kettle.
Chivington's soldiers acted very cruelly. They scalped dead men and cut off women's breasts, mutilating the corpses beyond recognition. Women and children who offered no resistance were killed, the wounded were finished off.
After the end of the massacre, Chivington soldiers captured fragments of dismembered bodies as trophies, including the genitals of the victims and human embryos, they showed their booty to the people of Denver.
163 Indians killed (mostly women and children)
Belykh - 24 killed, 52 wounded.
The Sand Creek massacre disrupted the traditional communal order the Southern Cheyenne. Most of the killed leaders were for peace with the white people. The influence of the Dog Warriors, who have always opposed the conclusion of any agreements with outsiders and settlement on the reservation, has increased.
The US government created a commission to investigate the actions of Colonel Chivington. The American authorities admitted their responsibility for the events at Sand Creek and agreed to pay compensation to the surviving Cheyenne and Arapaho.
The Sand Creek massacre was reflected in the films
"Soldier in Blue"
"Little Big Man"
series "To the West"
All of these films are in this collection.
Battle of Washita (1868)
The Battle of Washita was a battle fought between the Southern Cheyenne and the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army 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 ratified only in July 1868. The peace concluded at Medicine Lodge Creek did not last long. The following year, clashes broke out again between the Cheyenne and white settlers. The government sent troops against the 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 Fort Cobb military post, about 100 miles from his camp site, to reassure the fort commander that he wanted to live in peace with the Americans, he was told that the US Army had already launched a military campaign against hostile Indian tribes. The Indian agent told him that the only safe place for his people was around the fort and that 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 a surprise attack became possible. The village consisted of 75 tips (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 Apaches.
During the attack, soldiers killed Black Kettle and his wife, survivors of Sand Creek.
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 875 Cheyenne horses to be shot. Soon the soldiers were forced to retreat - many Indian warriors from neighboring camps hurried to the rescue of the people of the Black Kettle. George Custer sent a detachment of Major Elliot to block their way. After a short fight, Elliot's entire group was killed. Caster himself hurried to leave the captured and burned camp.
Opinions vary widely about the Cheyenne who died. According to Custer's official report, 103 warriors, 16 women and several children were killed. However, Custer, like most American officers of that time, often exaggerated his merits. The 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 fought between the Sioux Cheyenne Indian Union and the United States Army 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 in an 1868 treaty to the Sioux and Cheyenne, and discovered gold there. In 1875 there was an influx of gold miners in the Black Hills.
The US government tried to buy Indian lands, but no agreement was reached - the Sioux and Cheyenne made desperate attempts to expel 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 fraudulent way. It required all free Indians to register before January 31, 1876, otherwise they were to be considered enemies.
Indian camp scouts spotted a large force of General George Crook's soldiers on June 16, 1876. Under the command of Crook were 47 officers and about 1,000 soldiers of the American army, as well as 262 scouts from the Crow and Eastern Shoshone. Having made a night march, the Sioux and Cheyenne attacked the soldiers in the morning, to whom this was a complete surprise.
From morning until sunset, the Sioux and Cheyenne opposed the soldiers and a band of Crow and Eastern Shoshone Scouts. Crook's scouts took the brunt first. For some time, two, and then three independent fights were fought at once. The forces of both sides were approximately equal - approximately 1200 soldiers each. The Sioux and Cheyenne attacked and then retreated and dispersed into small groups. The soldiers were aimed fire, and their scouts pursued the Sioux and Cheyenne. During the battle, the attackers and retreaters repeatedly changed places.
Although the battle was hard and long, the losses on 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 victorious.
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 Cheyenne also called this battle The Battle when a sister saved her brother.
The main result of this battle was that the Sioux and Cheyenne realized that they could withstand a large army of whites and defeat it.
Forces and losses of the parties:
Indians: Sioux, Cheyenne / Commanders: Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull / Troop: 1,200
Losses: 10-36 killed / 21 wounded
On the white side: United States, Eastern Shoshone, Crowe / Commander - George Crook
army:
47 officers
1,000 soldiers
176 Crow Scouts
86 Eastern Shoshone Scouts
Losses: 10-32 killed / 28 wounded
Battle of the Little Bighorn (June 25-26, 1876) (Custer's last battle)
The Battle of the Little Bighorn was a battle fought between the Lakota-Northern Cheyenne Indian Union and the U.S. Army's 7th Cavalry Regiment on 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 comply with the order to “block the retreat route”, but decided, without waiting for the main forces to approach, to attack thousands of Indians.
The defeat of Custer caused a huge resonance in the United States, obscure to Europeans because of the local scale of the battle. Society demanded that the guilty be punished. Many hypotheses have been put forward, most of which can be refuted. For example, Custer was accused of separating forces, however, he had used it successfully before.
Indians: Lakota, Santee, Yanktonai, Cheyenne, Arapaho
Leaders: Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Bile
Army: 1,500 - 2,000 people.
Indian losses: 36 - 136 killed / 150 - 200 wounded
White settlers in the US: 7th Cavalry Regiment
Commanders: George A. Custer †, Marcus Reno, Frederic Benteen, Bloody Knife †
troops: 31 officers, 566 soldiers, 40 scouts, 15 non-combatants
White losses: 266 killed / 55 wounded
Massacre at Wounded Knee (1890)
(English Wounded Knee Massacre) - was the last major armed clash between the Sioux Indians and the US Army, and one of the last battles of the Indian Wars.
On December 29, 1890, a detachment of five hundred men of the 7th U.S. Cavalry, supported by four cannons, surrounded the camp of two tribes of Sioux Indians who were resisting attempts by white Americans to seize their land, with the aim of delivering them to a railroad station for transportation to a reservation in Omaha, Nebraska .
The regimental commander, Brigadier General James William Forsythe, ordered his soldiers to take away weapons from the Indians, but at the end of the disarmament, someone opened fire (who fired and why is not known for certain), which provoked a fight.
During the battle, 25 soldiers and 153 Indians were killed, including men, women and children. It is believed that many 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 the Czech ethnographer Miloslav Stingl, the massacre at Wounded Knee was the fault of Colonel Forsythe, commander of the 7th Cavalry Regiment. Among the Sioux was a deaf Indian named Coyote Black, who did not hear the order to surrender his weapons. Colonel Forsythe, deciding that he was faced with malicious disobedience, ordered to shoot the camp with unarmed and half-dead people from fatigue.
In movie:
The story of the massacre is featured in the 2007 film Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
The story about the deaf Black Coyote is reflected at the very beginning of the film "Hidalgo".
This massacre is shown at the end of the TV series "Into the West".
All these films are
"Indian Wars" - each of us heard these words. In the imagination, a picture familiar from westerns and other adventure films immediately arises: a convoy of immigrants crossing the endless prairie is attacked by the Indians. Savages on horseback, dressed in bright national costumes, with painted faces, decorated with feathers, brandishing tomahawks and firing from Winchesters with a wild whoop, trying to kill the unfortunate "pale faces" and scalp them. Well, Hollywood (an integral part of US agitprop) is doing a great job, and it is not for nothing that huge sums of money are being poured into it. But one must understand that the image of savage Indians, whose life consists only in hunting for the scalps of peaceful settlers, has nothing to do with reality.
The history of the relationship between the natives of North America and immigrants from Europe is written, without exaggeration, in blood. By the blood of the natives 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 clear deep rivers. It is quite difficult to determine the number of Indian tribes that occupied the territory of the modern United States at the time of the beginning of European colonization. Researchers give different numbers: from a million to five million. Although all aborigines 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 developed 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, a clear hierarchy of society was traced. The Indians of California (Campo, Cahuilla, Chumash, Miwoks, Modocs, Oloni, Paiutes, etc.) were engaged in hunting and gathering. One of their main foodstuffs was ... acorns, from which they made many dishes. Some of the tribes led a nomadic way of life and lived in primitive equality, some moved to settled life, they had leaders, property inequality developed (albeit rather 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 for a longer time, 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. Southwest (modern states of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado) is the region of ancient agricultural civilizations. The outstanding agricultural cultures of the Pima and Pueblo, as well as the unique Navajo culture, arose here. Local Indians lived in fortified settlements, built irrigation facilities, grew many cultivated plants, planted gardens, and domesticated the turkey. They came close to the creation of 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. Buffalo served as the main source of food and clothing for them, so the Indians moved after herds of these animals, overcoming 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 tribes of the Iroquois, Abenaki, Hurons, Mohicans, Massachusetts, and others, collectively known as the "Woodland Indians," lived in the Northeast. They led a sedentary life, engaged in agriculture. Hunting and gathering served as an additional source of food. The Indians lived in small villages, lived in large family communities. At the head of each clan and tribe were two leaders: one "civilian", and the second - a military one. Women played a very important role in management and economy. The tribes that inhabited the modern Southeast of the United States (Delaware, Creeks, Muskogee, Cherokee, Chickasaw, etc.) lived in settlements that stood on the banks of rivers or the sea, were engaged in very productive agriculture 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 copied the Aztec empire in many ways.
The independent development of 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 the conquests of the New World. The conquerors were at first the Spaniards and the Portuguese, later they were joined by the Dutch, French and British. European "knights" unleashed a fierce war against the local population. War of annihilation. What was her reason? First, Europeans were attracted by gold. They were literally obsessed with the idea of finding the mythical "country of El Dorado" - a country where gold supposedly literally lies underfoot. However, the aliens themselves did not want to work in the gold mines at all - in their opinion, Indian slaves should have done this.
The second reason was that the Europeans sought to seize fertile and exploitable territories. In Western Europe at that time, capitalist relations began to actively develop. A few became rich, while the majority became impoverished and ruined. Yesterday's peasants, artisans, small merchants, unable to compete with big business, lost everything and became beggars. The discovery of America instilled in them new hope. I hope to get my own land again, to become a prosperous person. Only now, the fact that PEOPLE already lived on this earth was not taken into account.
Why? The fact is that the Europeans did not consider the Indians to be people! Three races were mentioned in the Bible: "Japhetic" (Caucasians), "Simitic" (Mongoloids) and "Chamic" (Negroids). Not a word was said about the Indians. In addition, the Indians were not Christians, but professed their traditional religions. All this made it possible for Catholic and Protestant theologians to equate the Indians with ... animals !!! In all seriousness, it was argued that the natives of America had no soul, therefore, firstly, their land automatically became “no man's land” and each colonist could seize it with impunity, and, secondly, it was possible to treat the natives like wild animals. Thus, on behalf of the “Lord God” himself, the European settlers were given, in fact, carte blanche for outrages and violence. They could do anything with the locals: "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 León landed on the coast of present-day Florida. The Spaniards were looking for gold and immediately started a war against the locals. So, in 1515, the Spaniards massacred several hundred indigenous people of East 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 found his inglorious end.
However, after de Leon rushed other predators. In 1525, the Spanish massacred about a hundred Indians and enslaved another 60 along the coast of North Carolina. In 1526, the conquistadors launched an offensive in Georgia, but, having met stubborn resistance from the Indians, they were forced to retreat. In general, despite the superiority in weapons and equipment, the Spanish knights, clad in armor and armed with steel swords and arquebuses, could not at that time break the courageous resistance of the Indians, who stubbornly defended their independence. In 1527, Panfilo de Narvaez's expedition 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. Nevertheless, the knights were defeated and were forced to shamefully flee. 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 fought in the territory of 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 recalcitrant Indians. And yet, the Spaniards again failed to gain a foothold in North America. The Indians offered fierce resistance, de Soto himself died in 1542, and the miserable remnants of his army barely made it to 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 first blow was taken by the Zuni Indians, who lived in New Mexico. The Spaniards captured their settlements and robbed everything clean. After that, the Coronado detachments launched an offensive in Arizona, Colorado, and Texas. Everywhere their path was accompanied by unparalleled robberies and violence; according to contemporaries, Coronado left "scorched earth" behind him. However, all the efforts of the conquerors were again shattered by the stamina 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 second half of the 16th century, they intensify their pressure on Florida. As a result, they succeeded, 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 inner parts of the peninsula invariably met with stubborn resistance and failed. In the 1570s, the Spaniards stepped up their pressure on the lands of the southwest of the modern United States. The Hopi, Navajo, Pueblo, and Zuni tribes offered stubborn resistance to the invaders. The Spaniards, in turn, brought down cruel repressions on the recalcitrant. The conquered lands were seized by the nobles, who turned the Indians into their serfs. The Catholic Inquisition also appeared, which began cruel persecution of the "pagans", arranging frightening burnings at the stake. This whole system of cruel exploitation and open arbitrariness aroused the resistance of the courageous Indians, who more than once rose up in arms against the invaders. The Spaniards did not feel safe anywhere and sat out in fortified forts, however, the Indians often captured them too. The conquistadors failed to consolidate their dominance over the "subjugated" lands.
However, at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries, new predators appeared in North America - the Dutch, French and British. In 1607, the British 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 met the first settlers very friendly, helped them to get used to the new place. They provided food, taught to grow local crops. However, for all this, the whites paid with black ingratitude. It never occurred to them to thank the Indians, without whom all the settlers would have died in the very first winter: according to their ideas, the “savages” were simply obliged to serve the Christians and follow 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 gratuitous labor of the Indians. Armed gangs staged attacks on Indian settlements, captured captives and turned them into slavery. The colonialists also captured children and women, forcing the men to lay down their arms and work on the plantations.
In the North, the situation of the Indians was even worse. Masses of colonial farmers who needed land rushed there. And the people who inhabited these lands were not needed at all. Whites seized lands and drove the Indians to the West, and those who did not want to leave their native places were brutally killed. Soon the indigenous people realized that if they want to save life and freedom, they will have to join the fight. Into a fight not for life, but for death, with a cruel and treacherous 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 life of peaceful hunters and farmers, were to become Warriors.
However, in this war, the Indians were initially doomed. And the point is not even that the whites possessed firearms and steel armor, not that they were united, and the Indian tribes were fragmented. Native Americans were not killed by bullets - they were killed by DISEASE. The colonialists brought to the New World previously unknown diseases: plague, smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, etc. The Indians had no immunity from them. So, for example, 80% of all Abenaki died of smallpox, without even engaging in battles with the whites. Some tribes of the disease mowed clean, and colonists came to the "liberated" lands in this way.
And yet the Indians did not give up and did not ask for mercy. They preferred to die in battle than to live as slaves. The Indian drama was coming to its climax. The first blow was taken by the Algonquian tribes living on the lands of modern New England. Beginning in 1630, English Protestant settlers methodically "cleared" the land from the Indians. At the same time, the Indian tribes were drawn into the Anglo-French rivalry: for example, the French made 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 most bloody dramas was the destruction of the Pequot tribe in 1637, who lived in Connecticut. This small tribe refused to acknowledge the sovereignty of the English crown. Then the English suddenly attacked the Pequots. Surrounding their settlement at night, they set fire to it, and then staged a terrible massacre, killing everyone indiscriminately. Over 600 people were killed in one night. After that, the British staged a real hunt for the surviving Pequots. Almost all of them were killed, and the few survivors were enslaved. Thus, the colonialists made it clear to all Indians what fate awaits all the rebellious.
There was also an endless massacre in the South: the English planters first tried to turn the Indians into slaves, but they refused to work on the plantations, escaped and raised uprisings. Then it was decided to completely kill them all, and to import slaves from Africa to the plantations. By the middle of the 17th century, the colonialists had essentially destroyed all the Indians who lived on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. The survivors went to the West, but the colonialists, greedy for the land, rushed there too. As a result, the Indians realized that one by one they would be defeated and destroyed. As a result, in 1674, the Wampanoag, Narrangaset, Nipmuk, Pokamptuk, Abenaki tribes entered into an alliance and rallied around the great sachem Metakom. In 1675 they raised an uprising against the British. A stubborn war went on for a whole year, but the Iroquois League came out on the side of the British, which predetermined the outcome of the war. The colonialists brutally dealt with the rebels. Metakom himself was treacherously murdered on August 12, 1676. The British sold his wife and children into slavery, and the leader's body was quartered and hung on a tree. The severed head of Metacom was impaled and put on display on a hill in Rhode Island, where it remained for more than twenty years. The Wampanoag and Narrangaset tribes were almost completely exterminated. The number of victims is evidenced by the fact that by the beginning of the war, 15,000 Indians lived in New England. And by the end of it, only 4,000 remained.
In 1680, the Indians became embroiled in a 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 expelled by the British. Expansion continued in the 18th century. It was led by both the British and the French. The first focused mainly on the "development" of North and South Carolina. Muscogee tribes living here were destroyed and expelled from their native lands. Violence and excesses of the colonialists caused a powerful uprising in 1711, launched by the Iroquois Tuscarora tribe. The Chikasawas soon joined them. The stubborn war went on for two years and ended with the massacre of the British over the vanquished. The Tuscarora tribe was almost completely destroyed.
The French at that 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 the base of the invaders. The Indians resisted valiantly, but the advantage was on the side of the Europeans. A particularly severe blow fell on the Natchez, who lived on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. 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, as a result, starting from 1710, the French led a series of extermination wars against the Indians, ending by 1740 with the almost complete destruction of the Natchez. However, the French did not succeed in completely subjugating the Indians. But their most stubborn opponent was the Iroquois. The Iroquois League, which united five related tribes, was the main center of resistance to the colonialists. Since 1630, the French have repeatedly declared war on the League, but all their attempts to break the resistance of the Indians invariably failed.
Meanwhile, the British in 1733 began the colonization of Georgia, accompanied by the massacre of the peaceful Indian population. And in 1759 they started a war against the Cherokee, during which they savagely 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 leader of the Ottawa tribe, Pontiac. Pontiac vowed to stop white expansion. He managed to gather a large force, his military alliance included almost all the Algonquins who lived 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 draw 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, who suddenly made peace with the British and stopped supplying the Indians with firearms and ammunition, also played a role. As a result, the Algonquins were defeated, and Pontiac was forced to make peace. True, the British could not boast of victory either: the English king forbade the colonists to cross the Appalachian mountains. However, fearing the power of Pontiac, the British organized his assassination in 1769.
In 1776, the North American colonies rebelled against the English king. I must say that both warring parties sought to involve the Indians in the fighting, promising them various benefits. They succeeded: the Indian tribes again found themselves on different front lines and killed each other. So, 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 to the ground all the captured villages, tortured and killed women, the elderly and children, destroyed all food supplies, dooming the Indians to starvation. As a result of many years of stubborn fighting, the resistance of the Indians was broken. In 1795, the Iroquois League (or rather, what was left of it) signed a surrender. Huge lands in the Great Lakes region passed under the control of the whites, and the surviving Indians were placed on reservations.
In 1803, the US government bought Louisiana from France. The French, desperate to conquer the freedom-loving Indian tribes and busy with wars in Europe, left it to the new masters. Of course, no one asked the Indians themselves about anything. Immediately after the purchase, masses of immigrants rushed to the West. They were eager to get free lands, and the indigenous population, as was already customary, was to be destroyed.
In 1810, the tribes of Ojibwe, Delaware, Shawnee, Miami, Ottawa and others united around the courageous leader of the Shawnee Tecumseh and his brother, the prophet Tenskwatawa. Tecumseh led the resistance to the colonialists north of the Ohio River, hatching the idea of an independent Indian state. In 1811 the war began. In the stronghold of the rebels created by Tecumseh - the "City of the Prophet", warriors from many tribes of the Middle East and South of the USA flocked, 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 Tippecane by future US President General Harrison. But in 1812, Tecumseh supported part of a powerful confederacy of the Creek tribe living in Alabama, and the uprising received a 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 soldiers, he captured the hitherto impregnable Fort Detroit without a single shot, forcing his garrison to capitulate by military cunning. However, on October 5, 1813, the great Shawnee chief died in action 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 face to face with a superior enemy. Tecumseh's rebellion was put down. The Creek tribes held out until 1814, but were also defeated. The victors staged a terrible massacre, destroying several thousand civilians. After that, all the lands north of the Ohio River came under the control of the United States, the Indians were either driven off their lands or placed on reservations.
In 1818, the United States government bought 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 Seminoles were the most numerous among the tribes of Florida. Led by their leaders, they waged a stubborn war against the invaders for forty years and defeated them more than once. However, they failed to withstand the US Army. By 1858, almost all the Indians of Florida (several tens of thousands of people) were destroyed. Only about 500 Indians remained alive, whom the colonialists placed in reservations in the swamps.
And in 1830, under pressure from the planters, the US Congress decided to deport all the indigenous inhabitants of the Southeastern United States. By this time, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek tribes had reached high level development. They built their cities, engaged in agriculture and various crafts, 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 to the west of the Mississippi, while all their real estate and almost all movable property was appropriated by the white colonialists. 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 reprisals from the victors.
The mass deportation of Indian tribes to the right bank of the Mississippi began. The white settlers who came to the inhabited places shamelessly robbed the unfortunate and committed all sorts of atrocities, remaining unpunished. By the late 1830s, there were almost no natives left east of the Mississippi; those who managed to avoid deportation were herded onto reservations.
In 1849, the United States defeated Mexico and took away its lands in the Southwest Rocky Mountains as well as California. At the same time, England was forced to cede Oregon to the USA. A stream of colonialists immediately rushed there. Indians were driven from the best lands and robbed of their property. As a result, in the same year, the tribes of the North-West (Tlingit, Wakashi, Tsimshians, Salish, etc.) declared war on the whites. For four long years, hostilities flared in the territory of the modern states of Oregon and Washington. The Indians fought courageously, but without firearms, they could not resist. Tens of thousands of Native Americans were killed, their villages burned. Many tribes of the Northwest were wiped out entirely, while others were left with a few hundred people who were evicted deep into Oregon to mountain reservations.
The fate of the Indians of California was very tragic. Already in 1848, gold was found there, as a result, a lot of adventurers and bandits who wanted to get rich rushed to the region. Gold lay on the 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 local residents massacred the Wiyot Indians, killing 60 men and more than 200 women, children and the elderly. Shasta City in Northern California paid $5 per head of an Indian in 1855; a settlement near Marysville in 1859 paid a bounty from donated funds "for every scalp or other convincing evidence" that an Indian had been killed. In 1863, Honey Lake County paid 25 cents for an Indian scalp. By the early 1870s, most of the California Indians had been wiped out or moved to the interior, desert parts of the state. The most stubborn resistance was offered to the white invaders by the modocs, led by the leader Kintpuash (“Captain Jack”), which lasted from 1871 to 1873. The uprising ended with the heroic defense of the mountain citadel of Lava Beds by a handful of modoks from the US Army and the capture of the leader Kintpuash, who was soon convicted by a white court and hanged as a criminal. After being exiled to "Indian Territory", out of 153 modocs who survived the 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 the Rocky Mountains open to "free colonization". All land was declared the property of a white settler who first came to these places. And what about the Indians - Navajos, Apaches, Comanches, Shoshone, Lakota - the original owners of the prairies and mountains? It was decided to put an end to them once and for all. In 1867, Congress passed the Reservation Indian Removal Act. From now on, all Indian tribes with one stroke of the pen lost their ancestral lands and had to live in reservations located in desert and mountainous areas remote from the water. Without the permission of the American authorities, not a single Indian would henceforth dare to leave his reservation.
It was a verdict. A verdict to all tribes without exception. The descendants of the first settlers who came to the New World back in the Stone Age, they became strangers, non-citizens in their native land. The Indian drama has come to its end. The Indians naturally refused to capitulate and prepared for war. The whites also had no doubt that the Indians would fight: the plans for the war were drawn up ahead of time. It was decided to break the Indians with hunger. 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. For 30 years, several MILLIONS of these animals have been destroyed. So, only in one Kansas in one 1878 about 50 thousand of these animals were destroyed. It was one of the largest ecocides on the planet.
The second way to strangle the rebellious was to poison the springs 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, it took a lot of blood to shed. The Indians resisted courageously. Several times they smashed large detachments of the American army. The Battle of the Little Bighorn River in Montana in 1876 gained worldwide fame when a combined force of 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 the forts, cut the railroads, waged skilful guerrilla warfare in the mountains. However, the forces were unequal. The colonizers stopped at nothing. With fire and sword, they "combed" the mountains and prairies, destroying the detachments of the recalcitrant. The whites were armed with multi-shot revolvers, rapid-fire rifles, and rifled artillery. In addition, the Indian tribes were never able to coordinate actions with each other, which the colonialists took advantage of. They smashed every nation one by one.
By 1868, the Shoshone were almost completely destroyed. In 1872, the Cheyenne ceased resistance, in 1879 the Comanches were finally defeated. 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 Wounded Knee 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 festival of the Dance of the Spirits and the former total chipization in Italy begins, therefore, unprepared for resistance. The Lakota survivors were escorted to the reservations. The Indian Wars are over. There was no surrender - 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, children have fallen victim to a terrible human vice - GREED. They were killed simply because they lived on fertile lands, simply because they “sat” on gold deposits, simply because they refused to become slaves on plantations. The Indians fought bravely. They literally fought to the last drop of blood; dozens of tribes were simply wiped off the face of the earth. Those who, in spite of 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 in them, froze in winter and died of thirst in summer. In 1900, the American authorities officially announced the "closure of the frontier"; thus the fact was recognized that all the lands had already been captured. Nobody cared about the Indians. It seemed that they did not remain at all, that after a certain amount of time the miserable remnants of the once proud and powerful tribes would die, unable to endure the harsh conditions of imprisonment. But that did not happen. The Indians survived. Survived and reborn, no matter what. And in the second half of the 20th century, the banner of the struggle for Freedom was raised again. But that's a completely different story...
Sergey Oreshin
21-04-2015, 07:04
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Native Americans have lost their history, their lands, their culture, but their destruction is the least discussed topic 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 remnant 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, Professor of Ethnic Sciences at the University of Colorado, the reduction in the number of North American Indians from an estimated 12 million (1500) was 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 most terrible holocaust the world had ever seen, raging across two continents continuously for 4 centuries, destroying the lives of tens of millions of people."
The population of North America before the first contact with Europeans is the subject of active discussion. According to some estimates, the original population of the United States and Canada ranged from 2 to 12 million. Over the subsequent time, their number was reduced 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 what number of the indigenous population has decreased at an incredible pace under the influence of the "pilgrims". The exact number of Indians killed could be damaging to the image of the United States. Therefore, officials in every possible way suppress attempts to introduce the term "genocide" into American history.
Researcher Peter Montague believes that at the very beginning, Europeans dominated over 100 million natives across America.
Inaccuracies and huge differences in the estimates of the American population before the Europeans invaded make it possible 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 cruel.
In world history, the most famous genocide is Hitler's genocide of the Jews. Almost no one talks about the destruction of the Indians, who suffered much greater losses. But it is interesting that the American history in relation to the Indians showed not only blatant cruelty and inhumanity, but also became a role model for the Nazi regime. The idea of concentration camps was not Hitler's "original idea". Biographer John Toland wrote that Hitler was somewhat inspired by the Indian reservation system.
“Regarding the idea of concentration camps, he owed a great deal to his studies of the history of England and America. He admired camps in South Africa for Boer prisoners and in the wild west for Indians. Hitler often praised to his close associates the effectiveness of American destruction through starvation and unequal battles with red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.
Of course, the recognition of 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 it is impossible to be the greatest nation in the world when you are accused of genocide. Especially if your country's politics were the inspiration for designing one of the most devastating genocides ever.
The indigenous population after the arrival of Columbus declined significantly over the following decades. Some were directly killed by the Europeans, others were indirectly destroyed by contact with diseases from which the Indians had no immunity. Epidemics and disease did take many Indian lives, but to justify the fact of mass destruction with this argument alone is to ignore the well-documented American policy of extermination.
Christopher Columbus has been considered a real hero since 1792, there is a holiday named after him. But, unfortunately, this historical character has a dark side. Peter Montagu, author of a thematic work on the navigator, writes that Columbus described the Arawaks (the indigenous population of the Caribbean) as fearful, awkward, free and generous. And rewarded them with death and slavery. On his second expedition, Columbus assumed the title of "Admiral of the Ocean-Sea" and went on to unleash a reign of terror never seen before. When he completed it, eight million Arawaks (nearly the entire indigenous population of Haiti) were exterminated by torture, murder, forced labor, starvation, disease, and despair.
All the following centuries, the power of the New World, by their actions, only confirmed how they were hindered by the indigenous population. 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: "It will be well if you try to inoculate the Indians with smallpox, by means of blankets, as well as if you try any other method of eradicating a disgusting race." In June of that year, two Delaware Indians visiting the port were given blankets and kerchiefs from the quarantine hospital. One of the salesmen wrote in a journal: "I hope this will have an epidemiological effect." Prior to this, the technique of infected things had been undertaken among the tribes in Ohio. Hundreds of people have died. Huge human losses from these measures continued into the next century. From 1836 to 1840, 100,000 Indians were massacred through Fort Clark.
Actively practiced and raids on the camps of the Indians. In February 1860, a vile night attack claimed the lives of 300 natives of the Round Valley in one day. The most symbolic is the tragedy at Wounded Knee. A regiment of American soldiers had the task of disarming the Indians in their camp, but in the process a chaotic shot was heard, perceived by the regiment as a call to battle. The unarmed Indians could not resist the gunshot attack. The result of the massacre is 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. The US military was photographed in front of the burial, and 20 soldiers later received the Medal of Honor for the massacre.
Despite the obvious loss and lack of human treatment of the Indians throughout history, current politicians still do not agree with the word "genocide", offering stupid arguments. Republican Senator Ellen Roberts considered that this term can only be used in relation to a people who have been completely exterminated. These people are driven by blind patriotism. Their ancestors used the Indians as living targets for shooting practice. But, of course, American society cannot recognize such shameful facts of history.
