The Haunting Question of Genocide in the Americas

The question “Was it Genocide?” does indeed haunt many in academia, and should haunt mainstream America, but among Native peoples, with few exceptions, the answer is a settled and resounding “Yes.” All three books discussed here cover two hundred years of United States Indian policies. Two of the three, referring to a half millennium of violent colonial conquest, deal explicitly with the troubling issue of genocide. The third, focused sharply on Wounded Knee, offers what I believe to be a detailed account of the character of a Native American genocide event, although I suspect its author would disagree.

I grew up reading books on the Holocaust and all it has come to mean about the evils of genocide, the term originally coined to give a name to this horror. I also grew up hearing stories of Lakota and Dakota resistance to invasions of our homelands, the hangings of thirty-eight Dakota men at Mankato, Minnesota, in 1862 at the end of the Dakota War, the subsequent internment of over a thousand Dakotas and mixed bloods in a concentration camp at Fort Snelling, the defeat of the Seventh Cavalry on the Greasy Grass, and the revenge killings at Wounded Knee in 1890. Along with progressive historians and some scholars, I came to see these events as outgrowths of the United States’ genocidal policies meant to “cleanse” the land of Indigenous peoples to allow manifest destiny to be fulfilled and a “new” world nation-state achieved, which would defend the freedoms of its citizens of European descent even as it destroyed the lives of Native peoples and their claims to the land. As the years passed I learned more, such as the bodies from the 1862 Mankato executions being used as medical cadavers or trophies or put on exhibition, as oral traditions maintained despite official denials, but finally confirmed in late twentieth-century media. I also heard the pain of descendants of Lakota families not able to prepare the bodies or pray properly for the spirits of their slaughtered relatives interred in a mass grave at Wounded Knee by militia members and soldiers who posed for newspaper photos. Ever so gradually, I came to observe close comparisons between what Holocaust survivors and their descendants called “historical trauma” and “intergenerational grief” and the unreported feelings and perspectives of the “Takini,” survivors of the massacres and body disfigurement of my Lakota and Dakota relatives.

My formal education and lived experience came full circle in November 2014, Native American Heritage Month, when a symposium at the University of California, Riverside, entitled “Killing California Indians: Genocide in the Gold Rush Era,” considered the mass killings by miners and militia in the state’s northern counties that resulted in a 95 percent depopulation rate among Native people. When citizen militias attacked, they killed the men, took the women to sell as sex slaves, and auctioned off children or simply kept them as servants. Laws were passed to legitimate these practices and to pay for the “extermination” of Indians as an uncivilized race, as stated by California’s first governor. Newspapers at the time nonchalantly reported “a good haul of diggers” and “a hundred bucks killed,” accompanied by accounts of the founding of new townships and business ventures in the region. Press accounts of the symposium’s presentations included some scholars’ counterarguments characterizing those of us who described the near-extermination of California’s Native peoples as genocidal as “activists,” intent on overgeneralizing and politicizing unfortunate but unmethodical atrocities.

When we consider the development of the “modern world-system” over the last five hundred years or so, starting with Columbus’s second...