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A SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW The term Genocide derives from the Latin (genos=race, tribe; cide=killing) and means literally the killing or murder of an entire tribe or people. The Oxford English Dictionary defines genocide as "the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group" and cites the first usage of the term as R. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, (1944) p.79. "By 'genocide' we mean the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group." The U.N. General Assembly adopted this term and defended it in 1946 as "....a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups." Most people tend to associate genocide with wholesale slaughter of a specific people. However, "the 1994 U.N. Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, describes genocide beyond outright murder of people as the destruction and extermination of culture." Article II of the convention lists five categories of activity as genocidal when directed against a specific "national, ethnic, racial, or religious group." These categories are:
Genocide or the deliberate extermination of one ethnic group by another is not new, for example in 1637 the Pequot Indians were exterminated by the Colonists when they burned their villages in Mystic, Connecticut, and then shot all the other people -- including women and children -- who tried to escape. The United States Government has refused to ratify the U.N. convention on genocide. There are many facets of genocide which have been implemented upon indigenous peoples of North America. The list of American genocidal policies includes: Mass-execution, Biological warfare, Forced Removal from homelands, Incarceration, Indoctrination of non-indigenous values, forced surgical sterilization of native women, Prevention of religious practices, just to name a few. By mass-execution prior to the arrival of Columbus the land defined as the 48 contiguous states of America numbered in excess of 12 million. Four centuries later, it had been reduced by 95% (237 thousand). How? When Columbus returned in 1493 he brought a force of 17 ships. He began to implement slavery and mass-extermination of the Taino population of the Caribbean. Within three years five million were dead. Fifty years later the Spanish census recorded only 200 living! Las Casas, the primary historian of the Columbian era, writes of numerous accounts of the horrendous acts that the Spanish colonists inflicted upon the indigenous people, which included hanging them en masse, roasting them on spits, hacking their children into pieces to be used as dog food, and the list continues. This did not end with Columbus' departure, the European colonies and the newly declared United States continued similar conquests. Massacres occurred across the land such as the Wounded Knee Massacre. Not only was the method of massacre used, other methods for "Indian Removal" and "clearing" included military slaughter of tribal villages, bounties on native scalps, and biological warfare. British agents intentionally gave Tribes blankets that were intentionally contaminated with smallpox. Over 100 thousand died among the Mingo, Delaware, Shawnee and other Ohio River nations. The U.S. army followed suit and used the same method on the Plains tribal populations with similar success. FORCED REMOVAL FROM HOMELANDS For a brief periods after the American Revolution, the United States adopted a policy toward American Indians known as the "conquest" theory. In the Treaty of Fort Stansix of 1784, the Iroquois had to cede lands in western New York and Pennsylvania. Those Iroquois living in the United States (many had gone to Canada where the English gave them refuge) rapidly degenerated as a nation during the last decades of the eighteenth century, losing most of their remaining lands and much of their ability to cope. The Shawnees, Miamis, Delawaresm, Ottawans, Wyandots, and Potawatomis watching the decline of the Iroquois formed their own confederacy and informed the United states that the Ohio river was the boundary between their lands and those of the settlers. It was just a matter of time before further hostilities ensued. FORCED ASSIMILATION The Europeans saw themselves as the superior culture bringing civilization to an inferior culture. The colonial world view split reality into popular parts: good and evil, body and spirit, man and nature, head and hear, European and primitive. American Indians spirituality lacks these dualism's; language expresses the oneness of all things. God is not the transcendent Father but the Mother Earth, the Corn Mother, the Great Spirit who nourishes all It is polytheistic, believing in many gods and many levels of deity. "At the basis of most American Native beliefs is the supernatural was a profound conviction that an invisible force, a powerful spirit, permeated the entire universe and ordered the cycles of birth and death for all living things." Beyond this belief in a universal spirit, most American Indians attached supernatural qualities to animals, heavenly bodies, the seasons, dead ancestors, the elements, and geologic formations. Their world was infused with the divine - The Sacred Hoop. This was not at all a personal being presiding ominpotently over the salvation or damnation of individual people as the Europeans believed. For the Europeans such beliefs were pagan. Thus, the conquest was rationalized as a necessary evil that would bestow upon the heathen "Indians" a moral consciousness that would redeem their amorality. The world view which converted bare economic self interest into noble, even moral, motives was a notion of Christianity as the one redemptive religion which demands fealty from all cultures. In this remaking of the American Indians the impetus which drove the conquistador's invading wars not exploration, but the drive to expand an empire, not discovery of new land, but the drive to accumulate treasure, land and cheap labor. CULTURE Culture is the expression of a people's creativity -- everything they make which is distinctively theirs: language, music, art, religion, healing, agriculture, cooking style, the institutions governing social life. To suppress culture is to aim a cannonball at the people's heart and spirit. Such a conquest is more accomplished than a massacre. "We have seen the colonization materially kills the colonized. It must be added that it kills him spiritually. Colonization distorts relationships, destroys and petrifies institutions, and corrupts....both colonizers and the colonized." Strategies of targeting American Indian children for assimilation began with violence. Forts were erected by Jesuits, in which indigenous youths were incarcerated, indoctrinated with non-indigenous Christian values, and forced into manual labor. Schooling provided a crucial tool in changing not only the language but the culture of impressionable young people. In boarding schools students could be immersed in a 24 hours bath of assimilation. "The founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania , Capt. Richard H. Pratt, observed in 1892 that Carlisle has always planted treason to the tribe and loyalty to the nation at large. More crudely put, the Carlisle philosophy was, "Kill the Indian to save the man." At the boarding schools children were forbidden to speak their native languages, forced to shed familiar clothing for uniforms, cut their hair and subjected to harsh discipline. Children who had seldom heard an unkind word spoken to them were all too often verbally and physically abused by their white teachers. In short, "there was a full-scale attempt at deracination -- the uprooting or destruction of a race and its culture." A few American Indian children were able to run away, others died of illness and some died of homesickness. The children, forcibly separated from their parents by soldiers often never saw their families until later in their adulthood, after their value-system and knowledge had been supplanted with colonial thinking. When these children returned from boarding schools they no longer knew their native language, they were strangers in their own world, there was a loss, a void of not belonging in the native world, nor the white man's world. In the movie "Lakota Women," these children are referred to as "Apple Children [red on the outside, white on the inside]" they do not know where they fit in, they were unable to assimilate into either culture. This confusion and loss of cultural identity, leads to suicide, drinking and violence. The most destructive aspect of alienation is the loss of power, of control over one's destiny, over one's memories, through relationships -- past and future. Jose Noriega's well-documented historical account of the forced indoctrination of colonial thought into the minds of American Indian children as a means of disrupting the generational transmission of cultural values, clearly demonstrates the cultural genocide employed by the U.S. government as a means of separating the American Indians from their land. FORCED REMOVAL The "Indian Removal" policy was implemented to "clear" land for white settlers. Removal was more than another assault on American Indians' land titles. Insatiable greed for land remained a primary consideration, but many people now believed that the removal was the only way of saving American Indians from extermination. As long as the American Indians lived in close proximity to non-Native American communities, they would be decimated by disease, alcohol, and poverty. The Indian Removal Act began in 1830. Forced marches at bayonet-point to relocation settlements resulted in high mortality rates. The infamous removal of the Five Civilized Tribes -- the Choctaws, Creeks, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Seminoles -- is a dismal page in United States history. By the 1820's the Cherokees, who had established a written constitution modeled after the United States Constitution, a newspaper, schools, and industries in their settlements, resisted removal. In 1838 the federal troops evicted the Cherokees. Approximately four thousand Cherokees died during the removal process because of poor planning by the United States Government. This exodus to Indian Territory is known as the Trail of Tears. More than one hundred thousand American Indians eventually crossed the Mississippi River under the authority of the Indian Removal Act. STERILIZATION Article II of United Nations General Assembly resolution, 1946: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, as such: (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. In the mid-1970s a Choctaw-Tsalagi Indian Health Services doctor was approached by a 26-year-old American Indian woman who desired a "womb transplant." She had been sterilized when she was 20 at the Indian Health Service hospital in Claremont, Oklahoma. It was discoverd that 75 percent of the Claremont sterilizations were non-therapeutic, that women American Indians were being prompted to sign sterilization forms they didn't understand, that they were being told the operations were reversible, and that some women were even being asked to sign sterilization papers while they had yet to come out of birthing sedation. Common Sense magazine reported that the Indian Health Service "was sterilizing 3,000 Indian women per year, 4 to 6 percent of the child bearing population...Dr. R. T. Ravenholt, [then] director of the federal government's Office of Population, later confirmed that 'surgical sterilization has become increasingly important in recent years as one of the advanced methods of fertility management'." Ravenholt's response to these inquires "told the population Association of America in St. Louis that the critics were 'a really radical extremist group lashing out at a responsible program so that revolution would occur'." From the beginning of European control there has been an unrelenting drive to commit genocide over another culture. The American Indians were a majority so the Europeans called them an enemy. One of the major facts the United States Government has failed to understand is that the spiritual aspect of life is inseparable from the economic and the political aspects. The loss of tradition and memory will be the loss of positive sense of self. Those reared in traditional American Native societies are inclined to relate events and experiences to one another, they do not organize perceptions or external events in terms of dualities or priorities. This egalitarianism is reflected in the structure of American Indian literature, which does not rely on conflict, crises, and resolution for organization. INTELLECTUAL RICHES American Indians felt comfortable with the environment, close to the moods and rhythms of nature, in time with the living planet. Europeans were quite different, viewing the earth itself as lifeless and inorganic, subject to any kind of manipulation or alteration. Europeans tended to be alienated from nature and came to the New World to use the wilderness, to conquer and exploit its natural wealth for private gain. But for American Indians, the environment was sacred, possessing a cosmic significance equal to its material riches. The earth was sacred -- a haven for all forms of life -- and it had to be protected, nourished, and even worshipped. Chief Smoholla of the Wanapun tribe illustrated American Native reverence for the earth when he said in 1885:
American Indians' agricultural and medical wisdom had been ignored by the European invaders. In their rush to control the land and people much has passed them by and much has been destroyed. Sadly, what seems to have been almost totally ignored is the American Indians' knowledge that the Earth is their mother. Because their mother continues to give us life we must care for and respect her. This was a ecological view of the earth. "There are tens of millions of people around the world who, within only the last few centuries -- and some cases only the last few years -- have seen their successful societies brutally assaulted by ugly destructive forces. Some American Indian societies have been obliterated. Some peoples have suffered separation from the source of their survival, wisdom, power, and identity: their lands. Some have fallen from the pressure, compromised, moved to urban landscapes, and disappeared, but millions of American Indians, including tens of thousands here in the United States, have gained strength in the face of all their adversity. Their strength is rooted in the earth and deserves to succeed." In writing this paper I have attempted to broaden your knowledge of genocide and American Indians. This is not a complete history of the genocide that has occurred in the United States, nor is it meant to be. Personal Accounts - Sterilizing Native Americans women: One of the people who initiated the government investigation into IHS sterilization policy was Dr. Connie Uri, a Choctaw Indian physician working at the Claremore, Oklahoma IHS facilities. Dr. Uri had noticed in the hospital records that a large amount of sterilization surgeries had been performed. She then conducted her own interviews with the women involved and found that many had received the operation a day or two after childbirth. In the month of July 1974 alone there were 48 sterilizations performed and several hundred had already been conducted in the last two years (Akwesasne Notes, 1974: 22). The hospital records show that both tubal ligation and hysterectomies were used in sterilization. Dr. Uri commented: "In normal medical practice, hysterectomies are rare in women of child bearing age unless there is cancer or other medical problems" (Akwesasne Notes, 1974: 22). Besides the questionable surgery techniques being allowed to take place, there was also the charge of harassment in obtaining consent forms. In an incident of harassment at the Claremore facility, one woman was told by social workers and other hospital personnel that she was a bad mother and they would have to take away her children. They would then place the children in foster homes if she did not agree to the surgery (Akwesasne Notes, 1974: 22). In one study conducted on the Navajo Reservation and sponsored by the PHS, researchers (who may have ignored the reports of such questionable sterilization procedures, or subtly adjusted their language to satisfy their sponsors) reported: From 1972 to 1978 we observe a 130 per cent increase in the number of induced abortions performed. During this time the ratio of abortions per 1,000 deliveries has increased from approximately 34 to 77 (an increase of 126 per cent) (Temkin-Greener, 1981: 405). While not exactly within the confines of sterilization, the numbers indicate that the family planning program on the Navajo Reservation was definitely acquiring federal funds to carry on such a massive project. The statistics concerning Navajo sterilization are just as interesting: Between 1972 and 1978 the percentage of interval sterilization has more than doubled from 15.1 per cent in 1972 to 30.7 per cent in 1978 (Temkin-Greener, 1981: 406). The report itself is clinical and methodical; however, the researchers did comment slightly about the relationship between patient and physician: Older women who become pregnant may be much less concerned about reducing their childbearing and may do so primarily when they are influenced by health care providers (Temkin-Greener, 1981: 406). There is room for speculation concerning how much influence these providers stressed in light of previously mentioned charges of harassment and deceit. Once the word of sterilization spread through Indian Country, some tribal leaders carried on their own investigation. Marie Sanchez, a tribal judge of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, interviewed 50 women, 26 of whom reported that they were sterilized. One doctor told several women that they each had several children and it was time they stopped having children; others were told that they could have children after the operation (Dillingham, 1977: 28). The values that American Indians have toward the number of children a woman bears are quite different than that of white America. There are many Indians who feel that population control should not apply to them. They believe the federal government has done enough to limit the number of Indians on this continent, and the idea of limiting the number of children is based on what whites feel is a comfortable amount. Other researchers have found these general feelings to be true in regard to limiting family numbers. ...the family economic situation, the ability to care for the children now and later, family happiness, and the feeling that the couple had enough children were valid considerations in a decision to delay or prevent further pregnancies (Liberty, 1976: 63-64). ...freedom for the mother to work, and the belief that a small population is good for the country, were generally not sufficient cause [for birth control] (Liberty, 1976: 64). CREDITS/SOURCES:
Native American Indians have lived in harmony and balance with their environment for thousands of years. In just a short amount of time, the non-Indians who came to Turtle Island (Mother Earth) with an attitude of dominion over the earth and a lack of understanding that man and nature are interrelated has quickly lead to the poisoning and destruction of the environment and people. This attitude has caused "Ecocide" of Native America, and the environmental destruction of Indian lands and people. This book boldly states that ironically Native Americans with their close ecological harmony are now "among the primary victims of 'ecocide' in today's polluted world." Native Americans have become victims of "ecocide" because of greedy money hungry corporations that value money over people and a United States government that has failed to enforce the very laws they created to protect the environment and people. As one reads through the environmental degradation that is revealed by this book, one becomes shocked and appalled. Shocked and appalled by the crass industrial corporations who have committed ecocide and genocide in the face of the United States environmental laws, like the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, that have been implemented in the early 1970's to prevent such poisoning and destruction to Mother Earth. This books is well researched, well written, and is a must read for anyone interested in obtaining a deeper understanding of Native American environmental issues plaguing Indian lands today and the ill effects to both the people and the Natural World. The authors, Donald Grinde a Professor of History and a Yamasee Indian, and Bruce Johansen, a Professor of Communications and Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha are well established writers who are highly respected for their integrity by the Native American Indian community. "Ecocide of Native America: Environmental Destruction Of Indian Lands and People" begins by exploring Native American Indians as the first ecologist. The main idea behind this chapter is to show that Indian people have a traditional ecological knowledge, respect, and belief that they are stewards of Mother Earth and to dispel European propaganda that Indians abused their environment. I have always found the Europeans attempt to claim Indians abused Mother Earth as an appalling and lame attempt to justify their own destruction and continued exploitation of Turtle Island. Grinde and Johansen explore numerous Native American environmental perspectives from Indians of different Nations that shows that their traditional teachings include a deep respect for nature and an understanding that man and nature are interrelated and dependent on one another for survival. To show this respect and interconnectedness of man and the Natural World, the authors include a quote from Tom Porter, a Mohawk, who gave the following Thanksgiving Address to open the New York Assembly hearings in regard to the environmental crisis at Akwesasne (the Mohawk Nation): "[Before] our great-great grandfathers were first born and given the breath of life, our Creator at that time said the earth will be you mother. And the Creator said to the deer, and the animals and the birds, the earth will be your mother, too. And I have instructed the earth to give food and nourishment and medicine and quenching of thirst to all life... We. The people, humbly thank you today, mother earth. Our Creator spoke to the rivers and our creator made the rivers not just as water, but he made the rivers a living entity.... You must have reverence and great respect for your mother earth....You must each day say "thank you" [for] every gift that contributes to your life. If you follow this pattern, it will be like a circle with no end. Your life will be as everlasting as your children will carry on your flesh, your blood, and your heartbeat." The previous quote shows the respect for the natural world and how it is important to give thanks, for we, man and nature, are all related. "Ecocide" of Native America is also cultural genocide because the traditional ways to live, of providing for their families, and their spiritual connection with the Natural World has become greatly impeded by the poisoning of the waters, air, and the destruction of Mother Earth. In chapter seven, "Akwesasne's Toxic Turtle," the authors reveal the environmental degradation at Akwesasne caused by industries surrounding the reservation, and they discuss some of the devastating effects that polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB's) and fluoride can have on humans, the Natural World, and on cultural survival. In this section, they talk about snapping turtles being found that have such a high level of PCB's that enable the turtles themselves to be classified as "toxic waste." Unfortunately, many of the ill effects to the land, animals, people, medicine plants, and those yet born are unknown, and only time will tell the extent and full effects of the pollution. In chapter eight, "The High Cost of Uranium", the authors, write about the harmful effects to the environment and humans caused by the uranium mining in the Black Hills (Paha Sapa) and on the Navajo Nation. The authors write that people often think that the biggest nuclear accident in America was Three Mile Island, but that is not true, for the "biggest expulsion of radioactive material in the United States occurred on July 16, 1978 at 5 A.M. on the Navajo Reservation." In this chapter, the authors explain in detail what happened when 100 million gallons of radioactive water gushed through the dam into the Rio Puerco destroying a major water source for the Navajo. Furthermore, not only is the process of strip mining devastating to the land, the huge iron jaws tearing into the breast of Mother Earth, but the tailings that are left over after uranium is mined and then left sitting in piles on top of the land are radioactive. Many people who have lived around these tailings have died of cancer from the exposure. A picture of a dead horse that died from drinking this contaminated water caused by uranium mining is quite eye opening. This book is a must read, for it will open one's eyes to the destruction of Indian lands and people, the "ecocide" of Native America that continues today. When people think of environmental destruction in the proportions revealed in this book within Indian Country, one thinks of economically poor third world countries and not America. It is appalling that our generations to come have to plant their feet on a sick planet so that a few greedy people can get rich. I highly recommend getting a copy of this book, so we can all be aware of the "ecocide" going on within Indian lands across Turtle Island in hopes that we may stand together and demand that the industries victimizing Indian people and lands be stopped before it is too late. Mother Earth can heal, but it is going take each one of us working together as one heart, one body, and one mind to help her do so. CREDITS/SOURCES:
Ever since Christopher Columbus accidentally “discovered” the Western Hemisphere, Native Americans have been pushed to the limits of human endurance. European explorers and colonists conquered the nations and peoples they encountered and established new nations of “new” peoples, throughout the Americas. In the process, the formerly free peoples of the Americas have been subjugated and placed in enclaves where the remnants are “permitted” to live. Genocide
in Texas REDLAND, Texas - It is a history that the United States buried, along with the Indian women and children. But there is an invoice for the smallpox blankets given to Indians to eradicate them and a printed record of the scalp laws with payments of 10 pounds of silver for the scalp of an Indian child. Steve Melendez, Pyramid Lake Paiute and president of the American Indian Genocide Museum in Houston, said the genocide of American Indians is a fact of history that must be recorded accurately in history so Indian nations can heal and racism in America can be countered. Melendez said the invaders of this continent carried out systematic genocide to eradicate Indians and it continues today, with the recent theft of Western Shoshone land in Nevada by the United States government. Melendez spoke on genocide at the commemoration of the massacre at Neches, near Tyler in northeast Texas, where the Texas militia murdered 800 Indian men, women, children and elderly on July 16, 1839. On display was the invoice documenting the smallpox that was distributed to Delaware Indians by way of blankets and handkerchiefs in 1763. “I think it is ironic that we stand here today at the site of a destroyed Delaware village. For it was the Delaware Indians in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania who were given the smallpox blankets back in 1763. Many people don’t believe that the Indians were given smallpox blankets but we have found the invoice from Fort Pitt.” The invoice states: “To sundries got to replace in kind those which were taken from the people in the hospital to convey the smallpox to the indians. Viz: 2 Blankets; 1 silk hankerchef and 1 linnen.” Speaking to several hundred people, including Cherokee and other tribes, Melendez said, “Was there genocide in America? “The killing here continued in the surrounding area until July 24. A militia force was stationed to the north to cut the Indians off if they fled north but they never saw battle. They were not needed.” The people were slaughtered. Texas Cherokee and 13 associated bands led by Chief Bowles and Chief Big Mush were among 800 men, women, children and elderly killed on July 16, 1839. The bands included Shawnee, Alabama, Delaware, Kickapoo, Quapaw, Choctaw, Biloxi, Ioni, Coushatta, Mataquo and Caddo of the Neches. “At some point in history, America has to acknowledge the wrongs that were done and call them what they were - Genocide”, Melendez said. “At some point in history, America has to acknowledge that the way they confiscated Native lands was not right. At some point in history, America has to call things like what happened here - they have to call it extermination, which it was.” “On July the 7th, our President George W. Bush signed into law bill H.R. 884 which arbitrarily confiscated 24 million acres of Western Shoshone Land.” Melendez pointed out that in its final report to Congress, the Indian Claims Commission, which was the vehicle used to value the Western Shoshone land, describes itself as a commission and not a judicial court. This commission arbitrarily set the price of Western Shoshone lands at 15 cents an acre. “Fifteen cents an acre! We had the All Star Game in Houston last Tuesday and hot dogs were selling for five dollars apiece. At this kind of an exchange rate, the Western Shoshone would have to sell 33 acres of land just to buy a hot dog. History seems to keep repeating itself over and over again”, Melendez said. “Any memorial that is erected here should not be called the Battle of the Neches. We should honor the dead with the truth, and call it what it was - Genocide in the Americas.” During the 11th annual Neches memorial ceremony, tribes gathered to pray at a monument erected in memory of Cherokee Chief Bowles. Danny Hair, chairman of the North American Indian Cultural Association of Texas, told those gathered that the spirits of the ancestors remain strong here. The American Indian Cultural Society hosted the ceremony, which included Cherokee Nation Chief Chad Smith and Cherokee National Youth Choir from Tahlequah, Okla. For more information, please contact indmuseum@yahoo.com and American Indian Genocide Museum http://www.aigenom.com Texas
appropriate location for American Indian Genocide Museum (Part two) HOUSTON - There was no state that surpassed Texas in the genocide of American Indians. Now, it is here in Texas that the American Indian Genocide Museum is documenting the American holocaust. “They were run out of Texas”, said Steve Melendez, Pyramid Lake Paiute of Nevada, now living in Texas and president of the museum. “We are really sitting on a powder keg here in Texas.” Melendez said the museum is retelling Indian history and hopes it will lead authors to rewrite textbooks without bias. “It seems like the Indian side of the story has never been told. They would rather live in this sanitized view of history.” The payment for Indian scalps, including the scalps of Indian children, was written in the laws of Massachusetts. “The Acts and Resolves of the Province of Massachusetts Bay”, Vol. I, states the rate for Indian scalps began at 50 pounds. The price for the scalp of Indian children under 10 was 10 pounds of silver. The scalp law read, “That there shall be paid out of the publick treasury of this province unto any party or parties that shall voluntarily go forth at their own charge, by commission as aforesaid, in the discovery and pursuit of the said Indian enemy and rebels, for every man or woman of the said enemy that shall be by them slain, the sum of fifty pounds; and for every child of the said enemy under the age of ten years that shall be by them slain, the sum of ten pounds ...” When the slaughter subsided in the United States, scalp bounty hunters went to Mexico and slaughtered entire villages. They would leave arrows at the sites to make it look like Indians carried out the carnage. “This is not revisionist history, this will really shock people”, Melendez said. Melendez has also discovered an invoice for the blankets and handkerchiefs used by the British to convey small pox to Delaware Indians. It is from Fort Pitt, in modern-day Pittsburg. Pointing out that such invoices have long been concealed, Melendez said, “They don’t want this information to get out.” But it was not only the Delaware Indians who received small pox blankets. In Texas, a military colonel distributed small pox to imprisoned Indians and then released them so that they would return to their tribes and infect their people. This account comes from Col. James Neill in “Recollections of Early Texas, Memoirs of John Holland Jenkins”. “On this raid, Colonel Neill adopted a singular, if not barbarous, method of sending destruction upon the Indians. Having procured some smallpox virus, he vaccinated one of the captive warriors, and then released him to carry the infection into his tribe! Nothing was ever heard as to the success or failure of this project.” Some presidents of the United States also voiced racism and determination to eliminate American Indians. President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt was among those who felt land should be taken from the “savages”. Roosevelt is quoted speaking of the red, black and yellow Aboriginal landowners in “The Winning of the West, Vol. 4, The Indian Wars”. Roosevelt said, “The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori, - in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people. The consequences of struggles for territory between civilized nations seem small by comparison. Looked at from the standpoint of the ages, it is of little moment whether Lorraine is part of Germany or of France, whether the northern Adriatic cities pay homage to Austrian Kaiser or Italian King; But it is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.” Melendez points out that the bounty for Indian scalps and distribution of small pox virus was accompanied by the movement to rid the Plains of buffalo and replace them with cattle, as described in the “Memoirs of Gen. W. T. Sherman”. “They naturally looked for new homes to the great West, to the new Territories and States as far as the Pacific coast, and we realize today that the vigorous men who control Kansas, Nebraska, Dakota, Montana, Colorado, etc., etc., were soldiers of the civil war. These men flocked to the plains, and were rather stimulated than retarded by the danger of an Indian war. This was another potent agency in producing the result we enjoy to-day, in having in so short a time replaced the wild buffaloes by more numerous herds of tame cattle, and by; substituting for the useless Indians the intelligent owners of productive farms and cattle-ranches.” In Texas, only three federally-recognized tribes remain, the Alabama Coushatta Tribe on the eastern border, the Ysleta del Sur (Tigua) on the southwestern border and the Kickapoo in Eagle Pass, Tex. In the 1700s, President of the Republic of Texas Mirabeau Lamar pressed for the extermination of Indians, including the massacre of 800 Cherokee and related bands at Neches 165 years ago. Melendez said now Texas is considering constructing a monument in Lamar’s memory. “It is like putting up a statue of Hitler”, Melendez said. These are facts that the American Indian Genocide Museum hopes will usher in a new era of healing for Indian people and counter racism in America. The museum board, now searching for a building to house their data as a permanent museum, has a vision to defeat prejudice and discrimination through education. The American Indian Genocide Museum is a memorial to the victims of ethnic cleansing. Along with countering racism, the museum is exposing prejudice generated toward Native peoples through biased reporting of history. A library and microfilm archive will be available. The museum states, “The problem with dehumanizing people in order to take their land is, that the next step is to take their lives also. Genocide in the Americas is not an easy subject to address - not for any American.” Melendez, pointing out that he is father and grandfather, said, “I want better for my kids and grandkids.” For more information, please contact indmuseum@yahoo.com and American Indian Genocide Museum http://www.aigenom.com CREDITS/SOURCES:
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