A Little Matter Of Genocide

In Rwanda during 1994 Genocide happened between the Hutus and Tutsis. Hutus and Tutsis had disagreements on who will have power which effected the whole population of Rwanda. This leads to the question why there is Genocide in Rwanda? Genocide happened by two clans who caused mass causalities. Others did little to help which caused Genocide to happen in Rwanda.

The persecution of Native Americans began thousands of years ago when the Europeans came over to the Americas to establish colonies. Many Native Americans were killed by the Europeans and Spanish during the colonization, they did not care how the people were treated, the Europeans thought of them as lesser human beings and not as good as themselves. The Europeans had no mercy, “ historians estimate that there were 10 million indigenous peoples living in U.S. territory. But by 1900s, the number had reduced to less than 300,000” (endgenocide.org). These conquistadors were looking for gold, land and other treasure and did not care if they slaughtered all of the Natives. The Europeans were never confronted or tried for this genocide and this was not thoroughly investigated. Some of these deaths were not even from Columbus or any other Europeans that killed the Indians, some Native Americans died just from disease that was brought over, so even if someone did try and investigate what went on in the Americas they

Many people have said that the natives have had the worst genocide of them all. The Natives Culture, land, Natural resources, and their very lives were taken away from them. As wave after wave of the Europeans came to America, all of the natives were forced off of their land. Fifty years after Christopher Columbus had landed in the Bahamas, the

Throughout the period of colonization, several aspects of genocide can be identified. From the Genocide Convention of 1948, genocide was lawfully defined as any of the following committed with the intent to destroy in whole or part a national ethnical, racial, or religious group as such: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions to bring about its destruction, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and/or forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. In what is modern day North America, European settlers began colonizing the area in hopes of achieving their goals of expanding Christianity, acquiring wealth for their countries, and/or gaining personal wealth and power. The European settlers had little care about the indigenous people of the areas they were colonizing, leading to the American Indian Wars (Lasting from 1622 - 1924) and the genocide of Native Americans. During this time period, the Native American population decreased dramatically as a result of brutal war, disease, and torture. The modern day New Mexico area in particular was home to Indian Pueblos, who showed an extreme act of resistance against their Spanish conquerors. What later became known as the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 showed how resistance to genocide can be achievable and the impacts it may have.

Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. ...From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles of racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its Indigenous population. (King 119-120)

The American government's treatment of Native Americans in the 19th century should be considered genocide. Genocide is the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation. And what American governments were doing is literary killing innocent Native Americans which are one hundred percent genocide. They were killing a lot of Indians, but they didn’t want to kill all Indians because they needed some of them to work in the fields. There were a lot of diseases and bacteria speared around which was killing a lot of them. There were estimated about 12 million Indians and about 75-80% were killed by the strategic diseases. In 1890 the last major battle between Native American Indians and U.S. soldiers occurred. It was called the Battle of Wounded Knee and occurred near the Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. Approximately three hundred Sioux Indians were slaughtered. Native Americans found themselves overwhelmed by Anglo-Americans' financial and military resources. But their response to events was neither

THESIS STATEMENT: The Native Americans were historically doomed because of the Europeans inability to accept elements of Native American culture that they felt were savage, the natives inability to acknowledge the Europeans threat to their lifestyle and land, and the far superior European army used to defeat Indian tribes.

The Nazis justified their killing through survival. To the Nazis, as a superior race they had the right to dominate the world, and their survival and lives as individuals were far more important than the people they persecuted. They believed they had the right to expand to cover the globe and to kill everyone who interfered with this mass expansion. They also believed that the natural order of nature required them to assert their dominance, that as the dominant race it was their job to do this, and that it was also nature’s intention (“Victims”). On the other hand, the European settlers justified the killing of the Native Americans as noncompliance. They believed that they had right to the land of North America, since it was only occupied and not colonized. On top of this, the natives were primarily nomadic tribes and did not live in the same area year-round (”Settlement”). In their quest for land, the settlers told the natives they were to move west; when the natives did not obey, they were made to do so by force. These Native Americans were sometimes coerced into leaving their lands through murder and biological warfare by the settlers (“Lewy”). The settlers, however, did not believe the murder of the native people was ultimately necessary. They even set aside tracts of land in which the lives of the American Indians would not be interfered if they complied. They also traded with natives regularly and were greatly assisted

Genocide is not a feature of warfare or rule that can be unilaterally blamed on European nations. It was a natural outgrowth of a people's desire to devastate another group of people for some purpose such as to steal land or gain an economic advantage. The Europeans who sailed to North America were skilled in this particular form of warfare having practiced it on one another for centuries, but they did not have to introduce it to the aboriginal tribes they found there. When the Dutch established a colony at Manhattan, they discovered a group of people who were both warriors and farmers called the Mohawk. This tribe fought in a particular manner that was meant to bring terror to their foes much as Hitler with his blitzkrieg or the United States with its "shock and awe" both of which would come centuries later (Axelrod 2011, 64). During a series of wars termed "Beaver Wars", these Mohawks, along with their partner tribes, waged a genocidal warfare that destroyed or dispersed those they were warring against. The Iroquois, traditional enemies of the Algonquian Federation who were allied with the French, sought to expand their fur hunting territory as a consequence of English/Dutch pressure to produce more fur, and the promise of aid in their fight against enemy tribes.

The slow yet brutal destruction of their population took place from 1492-1891. According to the legal definition by the UN, this act is considered genocide which was perpetrated by both European colonizers and the United States government. Tensions escalated and soon they were dehumanized to the point where massacres such as Wounded Knee, hundreds of innocent Native Americans were slaughtered by American soldiers. A significant precedent of the genocide was when White Americans began making Indians the “other”. By viewing them as uncivilized creatures, it is easy to separate oneself from a group so different.

Genocide is defined as a large killing of a specific group of people, usually ethnic. Although known as the “World’s Police Officer”, the United States is responsible for the longest genocide ever recorded and the most lives lost. According to Dr. Stanton there are eight stages of genocide, and the United States fulfilled most, if not all of those stages. Native Americans were classified as “indians” and “redskins”, both inaccurate and derogatory terms that were commonly used, even by government officials. They were also seen as poor, weak, and uneducated brutes in the public eye. The government and media made natives seemed as they were barbarians who attack innocent Americans so that it would seem justified to take their land and torture

In the past 150 years, tens of millions of men, women and children have lost their lives to ethnic cleansing or genocide. Although the definition is often scrutinized, according to Merriam Webster, "Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political or cultural group". The most notable event associated with the term is the Holocaust. Stated by Judah Gribets, Edward Greenstein and Regina Stein, "nearly six million Jews fell victim to genocide during the years of the Holocaust". Of This number, one million were children who were unable to take care of themselves. People's hopes and dreams for the future were stripped from them, and many families were ripped apart. Many of these people were tortured or raped

Although after World War 1 the Nazis needed someone to blame for the many deaths and poor economy that resulted in losing the war, and the Jews were an easy target to blame, the citizens of Germany should have stopped the genocide, because innocent lives were lost, and they should have been more aware of the horrors and tragedies that were happening within their own backyards.

I believe that the colonials and early Americans did create a genocide of the Native Americans. Some of my belief comes from the statements that were made during that time period, such as those made by Theodore Roosevelt during a lecture in North Dakota in 1886, comparing the Native Americans to cowboys in the Dakotas and that, “I wouldn’t go as far to say that ‘every good Indian is a dead Indian,’ but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” This seems to capture a good picture of the era. The fact that even when offered a higher reward for returning Native Americans alive as prisoners, rather that killing and scalping them, there would still be a much higher rate of bounty

Historians estimate that as much as 95 percent of the Native American population died within a year of Columbus’s initial contact with the New World, and while there were certainly European acts of genocide against the Native Americans that added to