Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America by Gary Clayton Anderson (review)

In Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America, Gary Clayton Anderson argues that colonial and United States policies toward and treatment of Native Americans were not genocidal, but are instead better understood as ethnic cleansing. Anderson examines the Indian policies of the British North American colonies and the United States from 1607 to the end of the allotment era, drawing on dozens of episodes to support his argument that Euro-Americans, from colonial governors to presidents and frontier settlers, pursued ethnic cleansing as a consistent, stated Indian policy.

Anderson’s argument is strongest where he shows, in painstaking detail, a centuries-long effort by colonists and American citizens, by means fair and foul, to strip Indians of their land. He ably illustrates this effort across different eras of Indian policy and regions of what is now the continental United States. Whether this constitutes a policy of ethnic cleansing is less clear, as he offers no definition of ethnic cleansing beyond mentioning the prohibition of forced deportation and relocation of populations under international law. His argument would benefit from drawing more on the theoretical scholarship on genocide and ethnic cleansing.

On the question of genocide his intervention is less convincing, owing to inconsistencies in how he defines genocide. Anderson calls the legal definition of genocide—the one set out in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide—a “dead letter” because it allows too many crimes and perpetrators to fall under its definition (p. 4). He relies on the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court as the standard against which to characterize violence against native peoples because he contends that for violence to be considered genocide, “a legitimate government must plan, organize, and implement the crime” (p. 13). Even with this narrower scope, he adds his own criteria to further refine the definition, maintaining that no genocide could have been perpetrated against native peoples because “large numbers of Indians survived” (p. 4)—a criterion inconsistent with the legal definition.

Anderson’s argument is also confused by his inconsistent definition of “Indians.” In some cases, he treats native peoples as one group, which allows him to emphasize the large number of Indian survivors of white violence. This has the effect of diminishing the severity of violence perpetrated against Indian people while treating them as a monolithic group rather than as hundreds of distinct societies that engaged and experienced colonialism differently. In other cases, he argues that the deaths of specific groups in particular episodes of violence “hardly equal the numbers of those killed under other regimes,” suggesting that the murder of a few hundred or few thousand people does not constitute genocide (p. 217).

Scholars familiar with particular regions or episodes covered in the book might take issue with Anderson’s use of evidence in certain cases. For example, in his discussion of California’s Indian policy, he fails to account for the explicitly genocidal rhetoric espoused by the state’s political leadership, including at least two governors, as well as their funding of militias bent on exterminating Indians. Such omissions cast doubt on his conclusion that “there is no evidence that any state or federal governmental entity ever supported” the actions of California militias that planned to exterminate the Indian population (p. 217).

As an intervention into the growing field of scholarship on the question of genocide in North America, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian deserves the attention of scholars in the field, as well as those teaching courses in the field of Native American history that grapple with the genocide question. Whether or not readers agree with Anderson’s conclusions, his arguments and evidence will surely provoke lively conversations.