Abstract
Although they often differ sharply on the numbers, scholars without exception now portray the European colonization of the Americas as a monumental, perhaps unprecedented, demographic catastrophe for the continents’ indigenous peoples. Rejecting earlier estimates that held that the New World was sparsely populated in 1492, demographers now provide projections that, in their highest estimates, sometimes exceed 112,000,000.1 There is general agreement that, whatever their precise pre-contact numbers, indigenous populations within a century after contact were reduced by 90% or more. There is agreement as well on the prime agent of that decimation: infectious diseases to which native peoples had no immunity. But it is also generally recognized that atrocities against native American peoples committed by the invader-colonizers also contributed to their population decline. Did those atrocities constitute genocide? On that question there has been disagreement and controversy.
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Notes
R. Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), p. 23.
W. Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1997), p. 4.
Quoted in M. A. Jaimes, ‘Sand Creek: The Morning After’, The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization and Resistance, ed. M. A. Jaimes (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992), p. 3. Jaimes concurred, declaring ‘the U.S. destruction of its indigenous population resembled the campaigns of Nazi Germany’ far more closely than more recent genocides in places such as Cambodia. ‘The Third Reich and the United States did what they did for virtually identical reasons.’ Most other cases, she concluded, ‘deviate significantly in motivation if not in method’.
D. E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. xii.
T. Todorov, in The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other [1984] (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), pp. 133–8.
For the full text in English translation, see T. Motolinia, History of the Indians of New Spain (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973).
J. G. Varnar and J. J. Varner, The Dogs of Conquest (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983) provide evidence of the extensive use of ‘dogging’.
J. Axtell, Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 261–2.
S. T. Katz, ‘The Uniqueness of the Holocaust: The Historical Dimension’, in Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, ed. A. S. Rosenbaum (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), p. 49. See also D. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York, Free Press, 1993). Some Holocaust scholars, however, follow Yehuda Bauer in drawing a distinction between the Jewish Holocaust, which they argue was unique, and other instances of genocide, including Nazi killings of members of other ethnic groups.
See Bauer, ‘The Place of the Holocaust in Contemporary History’, in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 1, ed. J. Frankel (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 213–14.
Of the many theoretical redefinitions in the literature on genocide, this writer follows most closely the work of Leo Kuper, who, although recognizing shortcomings in the United Nations convention, works within its parameters because of its standing international law. See, in particular, Kuper’s Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin, 1981).
F. Chalk and K. Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 28.
The quotations above are from Richard Eden’s 1555 translation reprinted in E. Arber, ed. The First Three English Books on America (New York: Kraus Reprint Company, 1971), pp. 70–1.
For the complete text in a modern translation, see F. A. McNutt, trans., De Orbe Novo: The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D’Anghera, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnams’s Sons, 1912.)
For a corrective to the once fashionable view that Peter Martyr anticipated the eighteenth-century cult of the Noble savage, see A. Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 24, 52.
See C. Gibson, The Black Legend: Anti-Spanish Attitudes in the Old World and the New (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1971)
W. S. Mabry, The Black Legend in England: The Development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment, 1558–1660 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1971).
A. A. Cave, ‘Richard Hakluyt’s Savages: The Influence of 16th Century Travel Narratives on English Indian Policy in North America’, International Social Science Review, 60 (1985), 3–24.
George Abbot, A Briefe Description of the Whole World [1589] (London: William Sheares, 1634).
Sir Walter Raleigh, Works, (Oxford: The University Press, 1829), vol. 4, pp. 693–4.
J. Smith, A Map of Virginia [1612], reprinted in P. Barber, ed., The Jamestown Voyages under the First Charter, 1606–1609 (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1969), vol. II, pp. 354, 364, 372
W. Randel, ‘Captain John Smith’s Attitude Toward the Indians’, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 46 (1939), 218–29.
W. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. S. E. Morison (New York: Knopf, 1976), p. 84.
E. Winslow, ‘Good Newes from New England’, [1624] in The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers, ed. E. Arber (New York: Kraus Reprint, 1969), pp. 513–14.
R. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Votages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation [1600] (Glasgow: J. MacLeose and Sons, 1908), vol. 8, pp. 374–83.
E. Johnson, Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence, ed. J. F. Jameson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), pp. 41, 48–9, 79–80.
S. M. Kingsbury, ed., The Records of the Virginia Company of London (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1905–35), vol. III, p. 672.
F. W. Gleach, Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), pp. 148–73
A. T. Vaughan, ‘The Expulsion of the “Salvages”: English Policy and the Virginia Massacre of 1622’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 35 (1972), 57–89
W. F. Craven, ‘Indian Policy in Early Virginia’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 1 (1944), 65–82
W. S. Powell, ‘Aftermath of the Massacre: The First Indian War, 1622–1632’, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 66 (1958), 44–75.
W. W. Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large, being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619 (New York: R. & G. & W. Bartow, 1823), vol. I, p. 128.
G. B. Nash, Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early North America, 4th edn (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000), p. 73.
For a detailed analysis of tribal relations in early colonial Virginia, see J. F. Fausz, The Powhatan Uprising of 1622: A Historical Study of Ethnocentricism and Cultural Conflict (Ph.D. dissertation, College of William and Mary, 1977). Also of value, and more accessible, are Fausz’s articles, including ‘The Barbarous Massacre Remembered: Powhatan’s Uprising of 1622 and the Historians’, Explorations in Ethnic Studies, 1 (1978), 16–36;’Profits, Pelts and Power: English Culture in the Early Chesapeake, 1620–1662’, Maryland Historian, 4 (1983), 15–30; ‘Patterns of American Aggression and Accommodation Along the Mid-Atlantic Coast’, in Cultures in Contact: The Impact of European Contacts on Native American Cultural Institutions AD 1000–1800, ed. W. W. Fitzhugh (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1985), pp. 225–68.
F. Parkman, France and England in North America, ed. D. Levin (New York: Viking, The Library of America, 1983), vol. I, p. 1084.
A. T. Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620–1675 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1965), pp. 93–154.
The notions of the Pequots as aggressive invaders of southern New England and of their terrorization of the indigenous tribes there are challenged in N. Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, European and the Making of New England, 1500–1675 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 93–154
A. A. Cave, ‘The Pequot Invasion of Southern New England: A Reassessment of the Evidence’, New England Quarterly, 62 (1989), 27–44.
The most thorough exposition of an economic interpretation of the Pequot War is F. P. Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest (New York: Norton, 1976), pp. 177–227.
For the argument that Puritan ideology and cultural misunderstandings were major causative factors in the war, see A. A. Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996).
See, for example, Chalk and Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide, pp. xiv, 36; Nash, Red, White and Black, pp. 99–102; R. Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), pp. 40–5
H. Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), pp. 14–15.
S. T. Katz, ‘The Pequot War Reconsidered’, The New England Quarterly, 64 (1991), 206–24.
Katz’s arguments were challenged in M. Freeman, ‘Puritans and Pequots: The Question of Genocide’, The New England Quarterly, 68 (1995), 278–93. Freeman argued that the Pequot War was one of the many cases in which nation-destruction was part of the process of nation building, a process he regarded as inherently genocidal.
See also S. T. Katz, ‘Pequots and the Question of Genocide: A Reply to Michael Freeman’, The New England Quarterly, 69 (1995), 641–9.
C. Orr, ed., History of the Pequot War: The Contemporary Accounts of Mason, Underhill, Vincent and Gardiner (Cleveland, OH: Helman-Taylor, 1897), p. 81.
See R. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944).
R. D. Karr, ‘“Why Should You be So Furious?” The Violence of the Pequot War’, Journal of American History, 85 (1988), 876–909 provides a useful comparative analysis that demonstrates that the slaughter of non-combatants and the killing of prisoners of war was not uncommon in European conflicts in which one side, or both, viewed the other as less than a legitimate belligerent. However, he sidesteps the genocide issue. The burden of his argument appears to be that Indians were not victims of genocide.
T. Barta, ‘Relations of Genocide: Land and Lives in the Colonization of Australia’, in Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, eds, I. Wallimann and M. N. Dobkowski, 2nd edn (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), p. 239.
Scalping was a war practice employed by some, but by no means all, pre-Columbian Americans. Where it was found, it operated largely as a quasi-religious ritual intended, not only to terrorize the enemy, but also to appropriate the strength and power of the fallen warrior. Scalps were given places of honour in Indian villages and sometimes formally adopted into the tribe. See J. Axtell, ‘The Unkindest Cut, or Who Invented Scalping? A Case Study’, and ‘Scalping: The Ethnohistory of a Moral Question’, in The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 16–38 and 205–44.
Thomas Barten, quoted in C. Van Doren and J. P. Boyd, Indian Treaties Presented by Benjamin Franklin, (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1938), pp. lxxxi–ii.
F. Anderson, Crucible of War (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 2000), pp. 457–71.
E. Lazarus, Black Hills, White Justice (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), p. 29.
Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, p. 187; L. Carranco and E. Beard, Genocide and Vendetta: The Round Valley War of Northern California (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981).
W. W. Newcomb, The Indians of Texas (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1961).
For a comprehensive view of the evolution of ‘irregular war’ in British North America, see J. Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
B. Church, History of the Eastern Expeditions of 1689, 1690, and 1692 (Boston: Waggins and W. P. Lunt, 1867), pp. 11–12.
S. Brumwell, White Devil: A True Story of War, Savagery, and Vengeance in Colonial America (New York: Da Capo Press, 2004). Brumwell, drawing on Indian oral histories, concludes Rogers greatly exaggerated the number he killed at St. Francis. It tells us much about his mindset that he would do so.
Quoted in G. B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution (New York: Viking, 2005), p. 351.
D. Svali, Sand Creek and the Rhetoric of Extermination: A Case Study in Indian White Relations (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989), pp. 187–9.
Quoted in T. G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press), p. 79.
The most authoritative and balanced study is S. Hoig, The Sand Creek Massacre (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961).
W. R. Dunn, ‘I Stand by Sand Creek’: A Defense of Colonel John M. Chivington and the Third Colorado Cavalry (Ft. Collins, CO: Old Army Press, 1985) offers an example of the acceptance of Chivington’s questionable claim that he found numerous scalps of white women and children at the Sand Creek encampment. Rogers had used the same argument to justify his indiscriminate killing of Indians at St. Francis a century earlier.
Captain Nathaniel Lyon, quoted in C. E. Trafzer and J. Hyer, eds, Exterminate Them! Written Accounts of the Murder, Rape and Enslavement of Native Americans During the California Gold Rush (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1999), p. 18.
D. H. King and E. R. Evans, eds, ‘Memoirs of the Grant Expedition Against the Cherokees in 1761’, Journal of Cherokee Studies, 2 (1977), 271–336.
B. A. Mann, George Washington’s War on Native America (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005).
A. C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Quotations from E. A. Fenn, ‘Biological Warfare in Eastern North America’, Journal of American History, 86 (2000), 1154–8.
G. E. Dowd, War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 190.
D. Gookin, ‘An Historical Account of the Doings and Sufferings of the Christian Indians in New England, in the Years 1675, 1676, 1677’, Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society, 2 (1836), 419–534.
W. E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1957).
R. Downes, Council Fires on the Upper Ohio (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1940), pp. 139–40.
Governor John Penn to Thomas Penn, September 12, 1766, quoted in N. B. Wainright, George Croghan: Wilderness Diplomat (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), p. 232.
C. E. Carter, ed., Correspondence of General Thomas Gage with the Secretaries of State 1763–75, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1931), vol. I, p. 152.
W. H. Harrison, ‘Message to the Legislature, 17 May 1807’, in Messages and Letters of William Henry Harrison, ed. L. Esarey, 2 vols. (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana State Historical Society, 1922), vol. I, pp. 233–4.
Quoted in S. E. Miller, An Ohio River Boundary? The Contested Ohio Country 1783–1795 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toledo, 2006), p. 80.
Quoted in B. Madley, ‘Patterns of Frontier Genocide 1803–1910: the Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California and the Herero of Namibia’, Journal of Genocide Research, 6 (2004), 167–92.
On genocide in California after 1848, see, in addition to Trafzer and Hyer, eds, Exterminate Them! and Carranco and Beard, Genocide and Vendetta, the following: S. F. Cook, The Conflict between the California Indian and White Civilization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976)
R. F. Heizer, ed., The Destruction of the California Indians (Santa Barbara, CA: Peregrine Smith, 1974)
A. L. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).
W. Sherman, Forced Native Labor in Sixteenth Century Central America (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), p. 311.
For an excellent review of the evidence, see in addition to Cook (cited below) R. H. Jackson and E. Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1995).
For the most recent trends in Native American historiography, see D. A. Mihesuah, ed., Natives and Academics (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1998)
R. Thornton, ed., Studying Native America (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998).
The historiography of contemporary genocides in Latin America is in its formative stages. Probably the most thorough to date exposes the systematic murder of indigenous peoples by the Guatemalan military dictatorship in the early 1980s. See R. Carmack, Harvest of Violence: The Mayan Indians and the Guatemalan Crisis (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990)
C. Smith, Guatemalan Indians and the State, 1540 to 1988 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990)
B. Manz, Refugees of a Hidden War: The Aftermath of Counterinsurgency in Guatemala (Albany, NY: State University Press of New York, 1988)
G. Lovell, A Beauty that Hurts: Life and Death in Guatemala (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000)
V. Sanford, Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
G. Grandin, ‘History, Motive, Law, Intent: Combining Historical and Legal Methods in Understanding Guatemala’s 1981–1983 Genocide’, in The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, eds, R. Gellately and B. Kiernan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 339–52.
On other regions in Latin America, S. Davis, Victims of the Miracle: Development and the Indians of Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)
R. Arens, ed., Genocide in Paraguay (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1976).
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Cave, A.A. (2008). Genocide in the Americas. In: Stone, D. (eds) The Historiography of Genocide. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297784_11
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