American Holocaust and Genocide

Whither Justice for 100 Million?

posted by MIKOspace

The American Indian Reservation model inspired Hitler as the model for Auschwitz and other Nazi Germany concentration camps during WW2 for the “Final Solution” of his “Jewish Problem”.  Predating the Holocaust, American Indian Reservations were first established as prison camps.  Hitler lauded America's efficiency at rounding up indigenous Native Indians and corralling them into one place for starvation and, eventually, extermination. According to John Toland, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, “Hitler’s studies of English and United States (US) history taught him much regarding the concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide”.    

Native American children were forcibly abducted from their homes and put into US Government-funded and Christian-run boarding schools from the mid 1800’s into the 1950’s. The US Government policy was designed to "civilise" indigenous Indians and to stamp out Native cultures in a deliberate policy of ethnocide and cultural genocide.

In 1869, the US Congress established the Board of Indian Commissioners (BIC), the forerunner of the current Board of Indian Affairs (BIA), which includes the federal boarding school policy.  A key Goal was “to Christianize the Native tribes and eradicate their culture and religion, primarily through removal of the children from reservation settings”.

In these federal boarding schools, Native indigenous children were held in isolation and dormitory-like regimented settings where they were controlled, neglected, and abused. They were punished for speaking their native languages, banned from acting in any way representative of traditional indigenous or cultural practices, stripped of traditional indigenous cultural clothing, with hair and all behaviors with artifacts reflective of their cultures forbidden and removed.

The Native children were systematically inculcated with shame for being Indian, taught their traditions and cultures were evil and sinful, their religions and their life habits ridiculed.  Bottomline, they should be ashamed of being Native Americans through self-loathing and emotional disenfranchisement for their own indigenous Indian cultures.

Without emotional homes and communities support, the Native children were neglected psychologically and frequently abused physically and sexually. Generations of these children became the legacy of the federal boarding school policy.  Those who did not starve or beaten to death and managed to survive the “education” ended up post-traumatic, deeply scarred human beings with stunted mental health, lacking emotional and physical skills, without their own indigenous cultural and language practices as well as parenting skills, family love and relationships, and traditional community interaction skills.

The US Congress had empowered the BIC with the legal authority to remove or coerce the removal of Native American children from their families for placement in boarding schools run by the government and Christian churches. The boarding school policy shifted from direct genocidal murder of indigenous Indian people to the “less hideous” and “more humane” genocidal policy with the same outcome of cultural genocide – the systematic destruction of indigenous Indian communities through the removal and reprogramming of their children. Parents were threatened with the loss of provisions and starvation or even jail for preventing the forced removal and “education” of their children at the federal boarding schools.

In the US Government-funded, Christian Church-run boarding schools, the fundamental principle was to teach Native Americans to reject their tribal indigenous Indian culture and adapt to white society, so as “to kill the Indian, in order to save the man.” This white supremacist racist policy initiative mandated and justified the removal of children from family and community, voluntarily when possible, and by coercion if necessary.

Prevalent mortality from the widespread abuses drove many Native children to escape from their boarding schools.  Those captured were punished by physical restraints, torture, beatings, and isolation in dark cellars with unlighted and poorly ventilated outbuildings designed as jail cells.  At one Carlisle Indian School alone, there were 1,842 desertions and nearly 500 deaths from 1883-1918.

(Photo) - Gravestones of American Indians at the Carlisle Indian Cemetery, where American Indians, including children who died at the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, are buried.

There were some 500 boarding schools in 18 states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Nevada, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin. As recent as 1973, there were still 60,000 American Indian children in these federal boarding schools outside Indian Reservation lands.

It should be noted that “America” was not an uninhabited land when the early British settlers arrived in 1607.  Native indigenous Indians have been in North America for some 27,000 years earlier.  The US Government’s Indian reservation policy effectively stole legacy established tribal lands and confined the Native Indians to a small fraction of the land which belonged to them and their ancestors.

 

The US genocide of Native Indians resulted in the death of millions.  In California alone, the genocide of the indigenous Native people from 1846-1873 reduced their population from 150,000 to around 30,000, according to the book “An America Genocide” by Benjamin Madle, who meticulously narrated the various US Government’s systematic and brutal campaigns to slaughter and enslave the Native people in California.  Similar happenings occurred throughout the US.

From 1492 to before the 20^th Century, the total death toll of Indigenous People has been conservatively estimated to be about 13 million due to the legacy of colonialism, racism and genocide. It is unknown however how many were due to widespread malnutrition and starvation, as well as the pernicious effects of forced labour, alcoholism, declining fertility, despair, demoralization, and other factors.

US GOVERNMENT REPORT ON THE AMERICAN GENOCIDE

https://medium.com/illumination-curated/official-report-genocide-of-native-us-indian-nations-710ff4e65a59?sk=40d6cdff32a7f2d36272d90002d5545b