Did the US commit genocide against the American Indians??

What exactly is your point? This doesn't seem to be a discussion about whether the colonials practiced genocide on the natives in north america. You seem to want to be saying something else, but I can't figure out what.

I just find it dishonest when people try to make out the Indians as a bunch of peace-loving innocents

For the most part, they were very war-like people. I also feel the need to put things in the proper context of the time period when all this happened. The world was a very different place 300 years ago. Brutality was just a part of life.

I'm not saying that the Indians weren't completely shafted, I'm just saying that I don't think it qualifies as genocide.

Genocide: Definition and Controversies

Genocide Convention 1948

The definitional article included in the 1948 convention stipulates:

Article II

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The critical element is the presence of an "intent to destroy", which can be either "in whole or in part", groups defined in terms of nationality, ethnicity, race or religion. Thus, the imposition of restrictions during the nineteen-sixties and seventies on reproduction in India, through forced sterilization in many instances, or the continuing restrictions in China, do not constitute genocidal policies as the intent is to restrict the size of groups, not to destroy existing groups in whole or in part.

Policies implemented during the Third Reich respecting Jewish, Roma and Sinti groups, on the other hand, were quite clearly genocidal in terms of this article as there was a clearly stated policy indicating the presence of an intent to destroy them. Members of all these groups were processed in extermination camps, were subjected to serious bodily and mental harm, and had conditions inflicted upon them intended to bring about their physical destruction, including starvation in ghettoes, and had measures applied to them intended to prevent births within the group (sterilization).

Many experts, legal and academic, consider these criteria deficient in various respects. Some consider that the criteria are insufficiently broad. For instance, it excludes the physical destruction of certain sub-groups that have regularly been the victims of extensive killing programs. Usually mentioned in this context are members of political or social classes, such as the bourgeoisie, the middle classes, the Kulaks and the intelligentsia. Also, the definition focuses on the physical destruction of the group. There have been many instances in which the group has physically survived but its cultural distinctiveness has been eradicated. A contemporary example is the destruction of Tibetan culture by the Chinese, or that of indigenous tribes in certain countries in South America, Paraguay and Brazil, for instance.

These and other deficiencies need to be understood in the context of the background to the passage of this convention. The term genocide is of recent derivation; etymologically, it combines the Greek for group, tribe-genos, with the Latin for killing-cide. In 1933, at a time when neither the extensiveness nor character of the barbarous practices subsequently carried out under the auspices of the Third Reich could have been foreseen, the jurist Raphael Lemkin submitted to the International Conference for Unification of Criminal Law a proposal to declare the destruction of racial, religious or social collectivities a crime in international law. In 1944 he published a monograph, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, in which he detailed the exterminatory and other practices and policies pursued by the Third Reich and its allies. He went on to argue the case for the international regulation of the "practice of extermination of nations and ethnic groups," a practice which he referred to now as genocide. Lemkin was also instrumental in lobbying United Nations officials and representatives to secure the passage of a resolution by the General Assembly affirming that "genocide is a crime under international law which the civilized world condemns, and for the commission of which principals and accomplices are punishable." The matter was referred for consideration to the UN Economic and Social Council, their deliberations culminating with the signing of the 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide (UNCG).

There are considerable disagreements among experts concerning whether a specific complex of behaviours merits the designation genocide, even leaving aside clear-cut instances of attempts at moral appropriation of the concept. There are various reasons for this. First, like any other legal instrument, it was the outcome of negotiations between parties that held conflicting views as to the proper scope of its constituent parts. On this, see the analysis by Leo Kuper in his Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981, Chapter 2. Although Article IX allows for disputes between parties to be adjudicated by the International Court of Justice, because accusations of genocide are invariable made by one state against another, this has never occurred. Consequently, there is no body of international law to clarify the parameters of the convention.

A second reason for uncertainty as to how the concept can be fitted to particular complexes of behaviour derives from the fact that the "ideal-typical" genocidal complex that Lemkin had in mind was the destruction of European Jewry. This instance of genocide was quite clearly also uppermost in the minds of those who drafted and negotiated the UNCG. Precisely because this particular instance was so central to the genesis of the UNCG, its application to other situations has been problematic. It is quite clear that the programs devised by the Nazi regime for the Final Solution of the Jewish Question lie at the extreme of any continuum of types of mass violence aimed at inflicting significant loss on members of particular groups, whether these be religious, national, ethnical or racial. Although the massacre of Armenians by the Turks during World War I, the destruction of the intelligentsia and others by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia during 1975-1978, and the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s share some elements with the Nazi genocidal program, there are also important differences that call into question whether they meet the criteria specified by Article II of the UNCG.

[Source: S D Stein. "Genocide." In E Cashmore (ed.). Dictionary of Race and Ethnic Relations. Fourth Edition. London: Routledge, 1996]

California, it seems, urgently needed a Northern California Indian reservation. Whites were pouring into the Bay Area and redwood countryside, but the nearest reservation was far away in the upper Sacramento Valley. "This leaves out and entirely unprovided for the entire coast from the bay of San Francisco to the country of the Klamath, where there are a large number of Indians scattered over a vast extent of country which is now rapidly settling," California's superintendent of Indian affairs wrote in 1855.

A new reservation was clearly essential. Not that other solutions hadn't been tried; in his inaugural address to the legislature, California's first governor called for a "war of extinction" against the Indians, and said their complete destruction was "the inevitable destiny of the Race." In that same year of 1850, the state budgeted over a million dollars to reimburse Indian-hating whites who wanted to organize "private military forays."

But wholesale genocide isn't so easy. Searching for a place to warehouse Northern California Indians, Indian agent Simmon P. Storms visited Round Valley. "I think that in the valley and in the mountains around are at least 5,000 Indians and that the valley can be made to support 20,000 or more," Storms wrote. "It is the best place for Indians I ever saw. I did not see a sick Indian or one affected with the venereal..."

Leaving the area, Storms encountered several parties of whites heading for the valley to homestead. No matter, wrote Storm; once the reservation is established, "they will probably go elsewhere." The U.S. Government officially claimed a portion of the valley in June, 1856, naming the reservation "Nome Cult."

The reservation became a convenient place to dump Natives when whites ran out of bullets or the nerve to murder. One administrator later wrote: "...in 1856, the first expedition by the whites against the Indians was made, and has continued ever since...there were so many of these expeditions that I cannot recollect the number; the result was that we would kill on an average, 50 or 60 Indians on a trip and take some prisoners, which we always took to the reserve..."

A great exodus began as the people were driven out of their homelands, reaching at least as far south as Sonoma County. Starting around 1857, horse-riding whites with bullwhips -- either local milita or vigilantes, there being at the time only a breath of difference between the two -- forced entire villages to walk to Nome Cult, a torturous passage remembered as "The Death March." Pomo elder Grant Smith recalls his grandmother's tale: "They herded them like cattle, like animals. Old people couldn't make it, couldn't keep up and died on the road. [When I was a boy] they talked about it, they would talk about what happened on the road and they would cry, go all to pieces. It was misery, it was hardship. It was death."

The Death March is one of those whispered family tales of horror, little spoken of. One account was told to a Pomo woman by her great-grandfather: an old woman unable to keep the pace begged to be buried there on the trailside, her favorite basket at her side. Another record was passed on by an elder, who remembered that mothers killed their own babies rather than see them die a slow death on the March.

But Sonoma State University professor Ed Castillo thinks some of the people came voluntarily. They saw the reservation as a refugee camp, a place where they could be safe from the increasing threat of white violence by vigilantes.

"Vigilante groups drove Indians out of their communities," says Castillo. "It was absolute chaos in California; it wasn't until the end of the Civil War that authorities regained control. It's one thing for the army to drive them out, but another when local people get together to do it. There is no evidence whatsoever that the army drove them to these reservations."

Also significant is an 1850 California law that made it legal to arrest native people "on the complaint of any resident citizen" and hired out to the top bidder for four months. Later amendments authorized indenturing the children of the people until they were 25 years old. These laws were not revoked until 1867.

But at Round Valley, conditions were even worse than at home. They competed not with the whites for food, but with animals. Rationed only six ears of corn daily, they tried using traditional gathering methods, but were often chased off land now owned by whites. In the Round Valley history "Genocide and Vendetta," an eyewitness account appears: "I saw a man driving some squaws from a clover field inside the reservation; they were picking clover or digging roots; he said he would be damned if he would allow them to [do this], as he wanted it for hay."

Other horrors threatened. There were few white women in the region, and many young Native women were raped. Two years after the reservation was established, twenty percent of the people were found to have venereal disease. Also common was kidnapping of their children who were highly esteemed as house-servants, regularly fetching $50 for a child who could cook, and up to $100 for a "likely young girl." The reservation provided white slave-traders with a ready supply of merchandise.

I just find it dishonest when people try to make out the Indians as a bunch of peace-loving innocents. For the most part, they were very war-like people.