By Ian Jobling • 5/7/08
When I was writing my response to Roger Cohen’s proposal for a museum dedicated to slavery and segregation, I read the comments on Cohen’s article at his blog. Not a single commenter pointed out the absurdity of Cohen’s belief that whites had not sufficiently recognized their historical mistreatment of blacks. However, a number of them did write that another monument to white guilt was needed: a museum memorializing the “genocide” of American Indians. This alleged genocide is a mainstay of leukophobic anti-Americanism. Fortunately, Guenter Lewy, the historian who also debunked false stories of Vietnam War atrocities, examined the question in a 2004 Commentary article, and found claims of genocide to be groundless. That the Indian population of the United States was almost entirely wiped out after European settlement is an established fact. At the end of the 19th century, there were 250,000 Indians in America. Anthropologists have estimated that between one and 12 million Indians lived in the territory north of Mexico before Europeans arrived.
Does this loss of life constitute genocide? The contemporary definition of genocide is acts of war undertaken with the purpose of eradicating a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. By this standard, Lewy concludes, although there were isolated acts of genocide against the Indians, genocide was never the policy of the United States government or army.
Seventy-five to 90 percent of Indian deaths were the result of disease, mostly smallpox, not warfare. While “scholars” like the notorious Ward Churchill have claimed that whites deliberately spread diseases like smallpox among Indians, there is only one instance in which plausible documentation of deliberate infection exists. In 1763, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, after whom my alma mater Amherst College is named, advised one of his officers to give blankets infected with smallpox to Indians, and the officer seems to have acted on the idea. Other allegations of biological warfare do not stand up to scrutiny.
Since the Amherst atrocity occurred during in the colonial period, it cannot be blamed on the American government, of course. Indeed, it was American policy starting in 1796 to vaccinate Indians against small pox. It would be odd if Ameicans tried to kill off Indians by means of a disease they were trying to prevent!
Genocide of the Indians was never the policy of the US army or government. The army was under orders to spare women, children, and men who surrendered or were too severely wounded to fight. Although some non-combatants were killed during army attacks, any deliberate killing of a non-combatant was punishable by law. In fact, after the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1889, President Harrison investigated killings of non-combatants and found that the army did everything in its power to avoid them. The army also provided first aid and hospital care for wounded Indians.
Whites did not always adhere to such high ethical standards, however. In the colonial era, the British army conducted some genocidal campaigns against Indians. After independence, the unofficial posses of white settlers who did battle with Indians were also barbaric at times. The American government considered such acts criminal and prosecuted them.
While the policy of the American government was never genocide, that of the Indians certainly was. The Indians were never inhibited by any of the scruples that restrained the US army. The history abounds with accounts of “acts of devilish cruelty” that had “no parallel in savage warfare,” in the words of one army officer quoted by Lewy. Rape and the slaughter of non-combatants was common during Indian raids, as was torture of prisoners. Lewy writes:
The torture of prisoners was indeed routine practice for most Indian tribes, and was deeply ingrained in Indian culture. Valuing bravery above all things, the Indians had little sympathy for those who surrendered or were captured. Prisoners unable to withstand the rigor of wilderness travel were usually killed on the spot… [Other prisoners would be] subjected to a ritual of torture designed to humiliate them and exact atonement for the tribe’s losses. Afterward the Indians often consumed the body or parts of it in a ceremonial meal, and proudly displayed scalps and fingers as trophies of victory.
The concepts of human rights and the ethical conduct of warfare are inventions of the white race. No other race invented them independently, and certainly, the Indians knew nothing of them. Far from being proof of the barbarism of the white race, then, the wars against the Indians testify to the unique compassion of Western culture.