VII
To understand why disease took such a toll, you really do have to look
at the context, and that’s not just a matter of John Smith and
Jeffrey Amherst and the officers at Fort Clark purposefully infecting
Indians with deadly diseases. What happens when the Spanish open missions
along the California coast and impress the local Indians to labor in
the fields, working them 12, 14, sometimes 16 hours a day, six days
a week—really grueling labor—and provide them a daily caloric
intake about one-eighth that fed the average African chattel slave?152
No big surprise. The Indians weaken, sicken, and die. Just like the
Jews who were used as slave laborers at the Dora plant, for example.153
Well, there is a difference: the Jewish dead get tallied into the toll
of the Holocaust while the Indians get counted as part of the “inadvertent”
toll attributed to disease and their own failure to have developed an
immunity to it. What happens when the first batch of Indian slave laborers
in the missions are dead? The priests send out the military to round
up another batch, and the process is repeated. Just like the Jews, only
for Indians it lasts, not for three or four years, but for generations.
What happens when you take an entire population—babies, old people,
pregnant women, everybody—and force-march them at bayonet-point
for about 1,500 miles, part of it in the dead of winter, without providing
anything resembling adequate food, shelter, or medical support? That’s
what they did to my mother’s people, the Cherokees, during the
1830s. A little over half of all Cherokees died during or as a direct
result of the Trail of Tears, and all of those fatalities are chalked
up to the supposedly “benign” categories of exposure and
disease.154 Same for my father’s people, the Creeks, and the Seminoles
as well; about half those who began the Trail never finished it. Choctaws
and Chickasaws, died in a lesser proportions, but the principle was
no different.155
Then there are the
concentration camps into which Indians were herded for years on end.
Hitler is supposed to have gotten the idea from British practice during
the Boer War, but I’m not sure that that was his only source of
inspiration. He was familiar with the main contours of U.S. Indian policy,
after all, so it’s entirely possible he was aware of things like
the Navajo experience at Bosque Redondo.156 It’s not much talked
about in polite histories of the United States, but that was where the
army interned the entire Navajo population for four years, from 1864
to 1868, right alongside old Fort Sumner, in New Mexico. The Navajos
were literally living in holes in the ground. They were trying to subsist
on the little bit of flour the army issued them, mixing it with water
and making “soup” because they were completely unfamiliar
with it. About half of all Navajos died during those four years, deaths
for which I guess I’m supposed to conclude nobody was responsible
because they’re attributable to disease.157 It’s worth mentioning
in this connection that the death rates in some of the more notorious
nazi camps like Dachau and Buchenwald were much lower than that prevailing
at Bosque Redondo. Probably the worst of the nazi concentration camps—I’m
talking about concentration camps, not extermination centers like Auschwitz
and Sobibór, which comprise an entirely different category—was
Mauthausen, and the rate there was less than 60 percent.158 In other
words, the worst the nazis had to offer was no worse than what the U.S.
did to the Navajos, and the Navajo example is hardly unique.
The point is, that
the entire history of European/Euroamerican expansion in North America
is made up of a process in which native peoples are systematically dislocated
from their land bases, their economies obliterated, people continuously
scattered as refugees, living under extreme stress and anxiety, hiding
in the most barren regions or force-marched into internment centers,
and on and on.
Now that we’ve
disposed of the myth that the eradication of native population was all
some sort of centuries-long “inadvertent tragedy,” a few
words are in order about what it’s used by its proponents to divert
attention away from. And that, sticking to Axtell’s premise that
75 percent of everybody who disappeared died of disease, is the one-quarter
of those 15 million people who, even he concedes, died in other ways.
That’s roughly 3.5 million corpses that have to be accounted for.
And when you force the debate into this area, it’s pretty much
agreed that they didn’t just die, they were killed outright and
in some truly ugly ways. But still it’s argued that genocide is
not an accurate word by which to describe what happened to them. Why?
Because, it’s claimed, the killing did not occur within the framework
of any officially-articulated policy of extermination.159 Can you believe
it?
Well, on this score,
let me start by saying just two words: “scalp bounties.”
Every U.S. state and territory in the “Lower 48,” and every
antecedent colony, whether it was English, French, Spanish or Dutch,
had in place at one time or another, and usually for a very long time,
an official policy whereby a bounty would be paid for proof of death
of an Indian—any Indian—in the form of his or her scalp
or, in some cases, their “bloody red skin.”160 That’s
the origin of the term “redskin,” by the way—it’s
not about complexion—so you can imagine how we feel—and,
more importantly, how our kids feel—about the Washington “Redskins”
football team.161
The way the bounties
worked, generally speaking, was that you’d be paid a certain rate
for the scalp of an adult male Indian, half that rate for the scalp
of an adult female, and half that for the scalp of a child of either
sex. A child was usually defined as an Indian under 10 years of age,
including fetuses.162 Around 1700, Massachusetts Colony was paying £100
Sterling for the scalp of an adult male, and that was four times the
annual income of an average farmer. So you end up with farmers shooting
random Indians whenever they happen to pass by. And you also end up
with a whole milieu of professional scalp hunters. The record is absolutely
riddled with this sort of thing: John Sullivan’s troops returning
from their 1779 campaign against the Senecas wearing Indian-skin leggings,163
William Henry Harrison’s men skinning Tecumseh to make “souvenirs”
after they killed him at Tippecanoe in 1811,164 Andrew Jackson’s
cutting off the noses of the dead at Horseshoe Bend,165 Chivington’s
volunteers returning to Denver from Sand Creek with female genitalia
stretched over their hats in 1864.166 The bounty on Indian scalps in
Minnesota was $200 in 1863.167 In Texas, a bounty was first offered
by the Spanish, then continued by Mexico, then continued by first the
Republic, then the State of Texas, and not discontinued until the 1880s,
when the legislature determined that there were no longer enough Indians
left to warrant its continuation.168 In California, private citizens
continued the bounty even after the state legislature repealed it.169
The bottom line
isn’t how grisly it all was; it’s that the payment of scalp
bounties conforms to even the most restrictive definition of genocidal
policy, and that the policy was unequivocally official. The most unabashed
deniers—and, again, James Axtell is one of them—have claimed
that it still doesn’t add up to genocide because a bounty was
never formally proclaimed by the central government in Washington, and
because payment of the bounties wasn’t made from the federal treasury,
but, even apart from the obvious “how many angels can dance on
the head of a pin” properties of the argument, it’s a pure
subterfuge.170 The feds were in a lot of cases reimbursing the states
for their expenditures in this connection, so it’s simply an accounting
issue.171 Not only are the scalp bounties clinical proof that genocide
was at the core U.S. Indian policy, the history they embody demonstrates
rather compellingly that the Germans were by no means “unique”
in treating genocide as a business.172
This, I think, is
enough to make the case. But, if you need more, go back to Svaldi’s
Sand Creek and the Rhetoric of Extermination. You’ll find that
that particular massacre occurred in the context of an overall exterminatory
policy publicly enunciated by Colorado Governor David Evans and parroted
by every official and newspaper editor in the territory.173 You’ll
also find ranking military commanders like successive Generals of the
Army William Tecumseh Sherman and Phil Sheridan proclaiming “extermination”
as the principle guiding their operations against Indians.174 And you’ll
find an endless corroborating background chatter. These were the people
in charge and their subordinates, so it’s fair to say that their
utterances establish the policy framework in which we must understand
the slaughters of native people at places like Sand Creek and the Bad
Axe, Bear River, Horseshoe Bend, Blue River and the Washita and the
Marias, Camp Robinson and Wounded Knee…175
Finally, those who
wish to seek refuge from the truth in the fact that the de facto U.S.
policy of genocide against Indians was never enshrined in a single,
absolutely unambiguous policy statement by an American head of state,
should be advised that Hitler never made one with regard to the Jews
either.176 True, he alluded to it often enough, and in hindsight there’s
no mistaking his meaning, but the fact is that there are a number of
U.S. presidents who made statements much more straightforward than his.
In truth, there is not one nazi policy or planning document which articulates
the regime’s intent to physically exterminate the Jews. Not one.
Not even the record of the famous Wannsee Conference in which it was
decided to undertake “the final solution of the Jewish question.”
Everything is couched in euphemisms like “resettlement”
and “special treatment” and the like.177 It follows that
if the evidentiary standard for assessing nazi culpability were set
at the same level orthodox American historians have fixed it with regard
to the U.S., nazi culpability would be equally “impossible to
prove.” Perhaps more so. Yet, simply by juxtaposing their actions
and their statements, anybody capable of tying their shoes without an
instruction manual can decipher that what happened to the Jews at the
hands of the nazis was genocide. It’s no different here.
I’m not saying
that the historical genocide of American Indians was somehow “worse”
than that of the Jews. I could, simply by turning the “logic”
of Jewish exclusivist arguments around on them: Indians died in vastly
greater numbers, our proportionate population loss was far more severe,
the extermination processes to which we were subjected were much more
sustained, and so on.178 But that would be as absurd as it would be
insensitive and counterproductive. One genocide is neither worse nor
“better” than another. And so I say only that the American
Holocaust must be seen as occupying the same footing as the Jewish Holocaust,
that it must be accorded equal weight, standing and significance.179
It’s the same argument I make with regard to the Gypsy Porrajmos.
In neither case, Indians or Gypsies, do I request such recognition.
I demand it. And, by the same token, I demand that those who deny genocide,
whether it be the genocide of American Indians, or the genocide of the
Gypsies, or the genocide of anyone else, be called by their right name.
They are liars—holocaust deniers—nothing else, and they
must be treated accordingly.
Why is this so important?
I’d hope it were obvious, but let me spell it out. What is the
phenomenon at issue here? Genocide. I think it’s safe to say that
we all want it to stop. To stop it, we must first be able to define
it, accurately and comprehensively. Denial serves to preclude, or at
least retard, our collective ability to achieve either accuracy or comprehensiveness
of definition. So, it’s part and parcel of what Eric Markusen
and Robert Jay Lifton termed “the genocidal mentality,”
that is, the attitude or complex of attitudes that makes genocide possible.180
To combat holocaust denial in any and all its myriad forms is thus to
combat a concrete manifestation of genocide itself. And I can think
of no more worthy effort than that. Can you?
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