The genocide of Indigenous Americans

When European settlers arrived in the Americas, historians estimate there were over 10 million Native Americans living there. By 1900, their estimated population was under 300,000. Native Americans were subjected to many different forms of violence, all with the intention of destroying the community. In the late 1800s, blankets from smallpox patients were distributed to Native Americans in order to spread disease. There were several wars, and violence was encouraged; for example, European settlers were paid for each Penobscot person they killed. In the 19th century, 4,000 Cherokee people died on the Trail of Tears, a forced march from the southern U.S. to Oklahoma. In the 20th century, civil rights violations were common, and discrimination continues to this day

This is just North America.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

Books

Alex Alvarez – Native America and the question of genocide

Ward Churchill – A little matter of genocide: holocaust and denial in the Americas, 1492 to the present

Alexander Laban Hinton – Hidden genocides: power, knowledge, memory

Leslie Alan Horvitz – Encyclopedia of war crimes and genocide

Ben Kiernan – Blood and soil: a world history of genocide and extermination from Sparta to Darfur

Alexander Mikaberidze – Atrocities, massacres, and war crimes: an encyclopedia

David E. Stannard – American Holocaust: the conquest of the New World

Andrew John Woolford – Colonial genocide in indigenous North America

GENOCIDE OF THE CALIFORNIA INDIGENOUS PEOPLE.

Prior to the arrival of the Spanish in 1769, the indigenous peoples of the San Francisco Peninsula, the Ramaytush, numbered about 2,000 persons. They were divided into ten independent tribes along the San Francisco Peninsula.

Mission San Francisco De Assis, now known as Mission Dolores, was founded by Fray Francisco Palou on July 29, 1776. The Aramai tribe of the Ramaytush was almost entirely incorporated into Mission Dolores by 1784. “By 1801 all of the native San Francisco Peninsula people had joined Mission Dolores,”1 and about eighty percent of the population had died. By 1850 only about five Ramaytush families survived.

The near complete destruction of the Ramaytush resulted in large part from disease, and poor living and working conditions at the mission. At Mission Dolores average life expectancy after baptism was only four years. The high rates of death inevitably destroyed tribal communities and tribal culture.

The Mexican Secularization Act of 1833 granted only a few mission Indians land, but the vast majority of natives fled the missions and became an exploited laboring class on Spanish and Mexican ranchos across the State. “While missionization destroyed populations and dismantled families and tribes, secularization dispersed the remaining Indians across the state.”

“The destruction, dismantling, and dispersion of the missionized California Indians was further exacerbated by the genocide, kidnapping, and legalized servitude of Indians by European Americans. “Still, a few lineages, families, and tribes did survive to the present, but like many other Indians in the State, missionized Indians faced problems associated with extreme poverty—poor health care, substandard education, and unemployment—which continues to this day.”

GENOCIDE OF THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE IN THE AMERICS, BY THE SPANISH.

An estimated 8 million indigenous people died because of the Spanish colonization of the Americas, died, primarily through the spread of Afro-Eurasian diseases, wars, and atrocities.The population of Indigenous Americans is estimated to have decreased from approximately 145 million to around 7-15 million between the late 15th and late 17th centuries, representing a decline of around 90-95%.

GENOCIDE BY ALL THE EUROPEAN SETTLERS.

Mistreatment and killing of Native Americans continued for centuries, in every area of the Americas, including the areas that would become Canada, the United States, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Chile. In the United States, the American Indian Wars and the doctrine of manifest destiny contributed to the genocide, with one major event being the Trail of Tears.

we have nothing to be proud of when it comes to the settling and colonization of the new world.