The Ugly History Of The Native American Genocide That You Didn’t Learn In School.. Daily Brutality

Over the course of 500 bloody years, the Native American genocide carried out by both European settlers and the U.S. government left millions dead.

Library of CongressU.S. soldiers bury Native American corpses in a mass grave following the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1891 when some 300 Lakota Native Americans were killed.

The years-long controversy and protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline that started in 2016 shed new light on the issues that have plagued Native Americans for hundreds of years — and sadly still continue.

The Standing Rock Sioux feared that the pipeline would wreck their lands and spell environmental disaster. Sure enough, the pipeline was completed despite their protests and began carrying oil in June 2017.

Then, a 2020 environmental review confirmed what the Sioux had been saying from the beginning: the leak detection system was inadequate and there was no environmental plan in the event of a spill.

Ultimately, the pipeline was ordered to close in July 2020, bringing four long years of conflict to an end. However, the protracted unrest was about more than the pipeline itself.

At the root of the conflict lay systems of oppression that for centuries worked to wipe out Native American populations and acquire their territorial holdings by force. Through war, disease, forced removal, and other means millions of Native Americans died.

And only in recent years have historians begun to call the United States’ treatment of their Indigenous people what it really is: an American genocide.

Did The United States Commit Genocide?

Library of CongressThis late 19th-century political cartoon depicts a white federal agent squeezing profits out of a reservation while the Native Americans who live there starve.

As historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz said, “genocide was the inherent overall policy of the United States from its founding.”

And if we consider the United Nations’ definition of genocide authoritative, Dunbar-Ortiz’s assertion is right on the mark. The U.N. defines genocide as:

“Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Among other things, the colonists and the U.S. government perpetrated warfare, mass killings, destruction of cultural practices, and separation of children from parents. Clearly, many of the actions taken against the Native Americans by the United States settlers and government were genocidal.

Not only did the United States commit genocide against Native Americans, but they did it over a period of hundreds of years. Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado calls it a “vast genocide… the most sustained on record.”

In fact, Adolf Hitler, whose genocide of 6 million European Jews shocked the world, took inspiration from the way the United States had systematically eliminated much of their Indigenous population.

In recent years, prominent political figures in the United States have finally begun to acknowledge the Native American genocide and how many Native Americans were killed.

In 2019, California governor Gavin Newsome made headlines when he offered an apology to California’s tribes, saying, “It’s called a genocide. No other way to describe it, and that’s the way it needs to be described in the history books.”

As Americans come to grips with how many Native Americans were killed in the history of the United States, it’s important not to forget or erase this brutal chapter of history.

The Scope Of The Native American Genocide

Wikimedia CommonsLanding of Columbus by John Vanderlyn (1847).

The size of the Native American population before the arrival of Christopher Columbus has long been debated, both because reliable data is extraordinarily hard to come by and because of underlying political motivations.

That is, those who seek to diminish U.S. guilt for the Native American genocide often keep the pre-Columbus native population estimate as low as possible, thus lowering the Native American death count as well.

So, estimates of the pre-Columbus population vary wildly, with numbers ranging from approximately 1 million to approximately 18 

Thanks for reading leave your thoughts in the comments section below

Read more on our Rare History Channel