HAPPY THANKSGIVING! Giving thanks to the Indian Genocide

How come they don't talk about about the Indians Holocaust like we do the Jewish ?

American Indian Genocide or American Indian Holocaust are terms used by specialists in American Indian history

By mass-execution prior to the arrival of Columbus the land defined as the 48 contiguous states of America numbered in excess of 12 million. Four centuries later, it had been reduced by 95% (237 thousand)

American Holocaust: D. Stannard (Oxford Press, 1992) – “over 100 million killed” “[Christopher] Columbus personally murdered half a million Natives”

“Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination – by starvation and uneven combat – of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”— P. 202, “Adolph Hitler” by John Toland

Amerindians had a...complex relationship with the United States. In one view they were occupying land that Americans wanted for themselves.

The Europeans saw themselves as the superior culture bringing civilization to an inferior culture.

“A war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct.”
– California Governor Peter H. Burnett, 1851 

In 1949, however, the U.S. government took a step back towards 19th century bigotry, as the Hoover Commission urged the assimilation of the Natives

Massacres:

Sand Creek Massacre

On November 29, 1864, 700 militia from Colorado and the surrounding territories surrounded a peaceful encampment of so-called "Peace Chiefs," predominantly from the Cheyenne and Arapahoe, who had been invited to end the "Indian Wars." Without warning or cause, they opened fire and slaughtered approximately 150 Native Americans from various "western" tribes. Colonel Chivington and his men cut fetuses out of the women, slaughtered infants by stepping on their heads with their boots, cut the genitals off men and women, and decorated their horses and wagons with scalps, genitalia, and other body parts, before parading through Denver

Wounded Knee Massacre

As the U.S. government were herding Sioux onto reservations, a Paiute shamanamong them named Wovoka came up with the syncretic "Ghost Dance" religion, mixing numerous indigenous beliefs and Christianity. Wovoka taught that the dance, along with loving each other, living in peace, working hard and refraining from stealing, fighting amongst each other or with the whites and traditional self-mutilation practices would hasten the reunion of the living and the deceased. This reunion would coincide with the sweeping away of the evil in the world and renewing the earth with love, faith and prosperity. Many Sioux though interpreted this sweeping away of evil and renewing the earth as meaning the cleansing of the white Americans from their lands. This interpretation spread rapidly among the Sioux, causing alarm with the U.S. authorities, who sought to quell the movement by arresting chiefs-most notoriously Sitting Bull, who was shot to death in the process of his arrest.

Sitting Bull's death caused a number of his tribesmen to flee the reservation. Later when journeying to another reservation they were intercepted by a regiment of cavalry, which attempted to disarm them. One deaf-mute man did not understand the order, so he failed to put down his rifle. It went off as soldiers took it from him, resulting in their comrades opening fire, believing they were under attack. 150 Sioux were killed in all. This massacre was committed by the Seventh US Cavalry, a unit formerly under command of General George A. Custer, so revenge for his spectacular, lethal defeat in battle with the Sioux and their allies may have contributed to it

Gnadenhutten Massacre

Colonial militia slaughtered 96 Lenape Native Americans whose only crime was being the wrong skin color on March 8, 1782.^[10] Despite being singled out as a neutral Native American tribe by Colonel Broadhead, they were still rounded up and placed into two killing homes by American miltiamen, who scalped men, women and children. When confronted by their killers and told they would die, the Christian Lenape prayed to Jesus before being killed by their fellow Christians.

                     AT LEAST 97 KNOWN INDIAN MASSACRE IN NORTH AMERICA

The "Indian Removal Act" of 1830 attempted to move roughly 50,000 Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and others from their home to Indian Territory (present day Oklahoma). The U.S. government did not provide any means of transportation, forcing them to walk the 2,200 miles. One can reasonably argue that the U.S. government did fully expect many of them to die on the way — especially children and the elderly. The U.S. government recorded 4,000 deaths on just one of many re-location marches among the Cherokee alone; estimates of the total death toll range from as low as 5,000 to as high as 25,000

The theft of Native American lands required a similar justification. In 1823, the Doctrine of Discovery was written into U.S. law as a way to deny land rights to Native Americans in the Supreme Court case, Johnson v. McIntosh

By 1871, the federal government stopped signing treaties with Native Americans and replaced the treaty system with a law giving individual Indians ownership of land that had been tribal property. This "Indian Homestead Act", official known as the Dawes Act, was a way for some Indians to become U.S. citizens.

There were two reasons why the treaty system was abandoned.

1. First, white settlers needed more and more land, and the fact that tribes were treated as separate nations with separate citizens made it more difficult to take land from them and "assimilate" them into the general population. Assimilation had become the new ideal. The goal was to absorb the tribes into the European-American culture and make Native people more like mainstream Americans.


2. Second, the House of Representatives was angry that they did not have a voice in these policies. Under the Constitution, treaties are ratified by the U.S. Senate, not the House, even though the House has to appropriate the money to pay for them. So Congress passed a compromise bill in 1871 that, in effect, brought an end to the treaty system. The bill contained the following language buried in an appropriations law for the Yankton Indians:

   "PROVIDED, That hereafter no Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe , or power with whom the United States may contract by treaty. 

The Horror of Native American Boarding Schools from their words 

Congressman Henry Dawes had great faith in the civilizing power of private property. He said that to be civilized was to "wear civilized clothes ... cultivate the ground, live in houses, ride in Studebaker wagons, send children to school, drink whiskey [and] own property." This act was designed to turn Indians into farmers, in the hopes they would become more like mainstream America.

 In 1892, US Army officer Richard Pratt delivered a speech in which he described his philosophy behind US government-run boarding schools for American Indians. "A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one," he said. "In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man."

From 1879 until the 1960s, more than 100,000 American Indian children were forced to attend boarding schools. Children were forcibly removed or kidnapped from their homes and taken to the schools. Families risked imprisonment if they stood in the way or attempted to take their children back

Many of the country's 100 schools were still active up until the 1970s. Generations of children were subjected to dehumanization, cruelty and beatings, all intended to strip them of their Native identity and culture. The ultimate goal was to "civilize" the children.

These religious boarding schools weren't just meant to civilize and Christianize Native Americans, but to create a generation that would be more willing to cooperate and sign their land away to the government. Some reservations were sitting on coal and oil reserves and the government wanted it

"The whole move was to make Indian children white," says McGowan. "Of course, at the end of the school experience, the children still weren't white. They were not accepted by white mainstream America. When they went back to their tribal homelands, they didn't fit in at home any more either."

 Indians describing their boarding school experiences:

"We had all our clothes taken from us."

"I remember always going to bed hungry."

"We were being punished, but none of us really knew why."

"It wasn't punishment. It was beatings. You'd put your hands down and they'd slam the desk down on your hands. They'd take you downstairs and make you kneel down on either a broom handle or a pencil."

"Soap. That's what she used to wash my mouth. I'll never forget the burning, the choking, the helplessness, the fading out that I went through."

 "All goes along quietly out here," one priest wrote in 1968, with "good religious and lay faculty" at the mission. There are troublesome staffers, though, including "Chappy," who is "fooling around with little girls -- he had them down the basement of our building in the dark, where we found a pair of panties torn." Later that year, Brother Francis Chapman was still abusing children, though by 1970, he was "a new man," the reports say. In 1973, Chappy again "has difficulty with little girls."

"Saturday night we had a movie," says Toledo. "Do you know what the movie was about? Cowboys and Indians. Cowboys and Indians. Here we're getting all our people killed, and that's the kind of stuff they showed us."

"Busted his head open and blood got all over," Wright recalls. "I had to take him to the hospital, and they told me to tell them he ran into the wall and I better not tell them what really happened."

"I'll never forget my sister's screams as the nuns beat her with a shovel after a pair of scissors went missing," said Mary Jane Wanna Drum, 64, who attended a Catholic institution in Sisseton, South Dakota, for the children of her tribe, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

   THE REAL THANKSGIVING

       https://www.manataka.org/page269.html