The effects of genocide on youth include psychological and demographic effects and impacts their transition into adulthood. Unresolved trauma of genocide has an impact on future generations of youth.[1]
Demographic effects involve the transfer of children during genocides. These children are moved away from their homes and into other areas. This causes there to be significant shifts in populations within the countries that experience these genocides. Often times, these children are then stripped of their cultural identity and assimilated into the culture that they have been placed in to.
The effects of genocide on youth are not seen solely in the children that experienced the genocide, but also in the youth of future generations. It is important to look these intergenerational effects in order to understand the background of these children and to see how these experiences shape their futures.
Native Americans in the United States were subject to military and colonial expansion policies and relocation that killed millions of Indians. Violence combined with exposure to disease killed 95 percent of the American Indian population between 1492 and 1900, the worst demographic collapse in human history.[2] Scholarly debates have not resolved whether these deaths can be officially defined as genocide because of questions over the intent of
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Documented cases of girls being raped and children being cut into pieces were described in the states of Arizona, Ohio, and Wyoming in the late 18th and early 19th century.[3] Children were taken prisoner after battles between whites and Native Americans.ref name=":2">Pierpaoli Jr., Paul (2011). "Demographics, Historical". In Tucker, Spencer. The Encyclopedia of North American Indian Wars, 1607-1890: A Political, Social, and Military History. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. p. 471. ISBN
Native American’s greeted the new colonists in a friendly, welcoming manner from the start. The new colonists considered this a sign of weakness, stating how easy it would be to dominate the native people. When Columbus arrived, there were 12-15 million Native Americans in the Americas, in 1890 there was under 250,000, with 98% of the population gone. With the belief in Manifest Destiny, the colonists forced the Native American’s off their own land, farther and farther from where they originated from, and eventually onto reservations, removing them from their way of life and their culture. During the transition from their homeland to reservations, many of the Native American’s died due to disease, cold, hunger, and the hardships of travel. Along with the annexation, the colonists demanded assimilation.
On September 8, 2000, the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) made a formal apology for the their participation in ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ of the Indigenous Nations of the Western Territories of the Unites States.2 From forced relocation to obscure lands and forced assimilation into the white man’s view of the world, the BIA previously set out to ‘destroy all things Indian’.3 Through the colonization of Turtle Island (North America), the American Federal policy set out to eliminate in part or as a whole, the Indigenous populations.4 The attitudes of the colonists were intentionally detrimental and the process is naturally exterminatory.5 The process of colonization was often exemplified by violent confrontations, deliberate massacres, and in some cases, total annihilations of a people.6 The culture of conquest was developed and practiced by Europeans well before they landed on Turtle Island as the practice was developed, and perfected well before the fifteenth century.7 Taking land and imposing values and ways of life on the social landscape created a conflictual relationship with the Indigenous peoples and forced a new way of life that ultimately destroyed those that previously existed there.8 Modern Europe
The unjust history of America contains the many Native American genocides executed throughout the 1790s-1920s over
Since the very first contact, the Native Americans have been treated as subordinates, being mistreated, shamed, embarrassed, and oppressed by white settlers. After the Revolutionary War in the late 1700’s, matters only got worse for the Native Americans. Population was skyrocketing due to a great deal of immigration of white settlers in the early to mid 1800’s, and there wasn’t enough space for everyone. With this came expansion, and to reach the goals they had set out for it, the Native Americans had to go. A prime example of this is shown in Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” where in chapter seven he talks about the forced removal of Native Americans from their lands, carelessness and failure by the American government to protect, and multiple slaughters carried out by the American military on the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, Choctaw, Sac and Fox, and the Seminole tribes. Closely related is “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee,” written by Dee Brown, his writings from chapter thirteen focus on the Nez Perces tribe that resided in Oregon, and their attempt at a journey in Canada, and other western Indian tribes’ affairs. To go along with Zinn and Brown, is Alan Brinkley’s “American History,” which posed an unbiased view of what modern day textbooks are informing students across the nation about what happened to the Native Americans. An article titled “The North American Indian Holocaust,” written by
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
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.
Genocide is an extremely broad subject with various different definitions. Genocide could be one or more leaders trying to get rid of a large group of people by killings or attacks, or it can be against a smaller group of people in a less violent manner. Genocide has been a very extreme problem in society and various reports of genocidal events have been recorded in history, but how does one go about finding the precise and accurate definition of a “genocide”? Genocidal acts are placed into different categories and are defined in different degrees. The Commission on Human Rights has set up seven treaties that describe acts of genocide. Regardless of committees’ attempts to limit or abolish acts of genocide, genocide was a very important
The events that happened during the Armenian genocide was very disturbing as to why and how it happened. For the Armenians it was mainly the women and kids who were forced to be converted to islam. Another measure of the genocidal process is deleting all traces of the population who have been massacred or driven away by such deportations. Women were raped and sold in slave
5. I imagine that the rwandan genocide is remebered and taught to children because history plays such a huge role in Rwanda. The cambodian genocide is not remembered fondly in the minds of the world in fact the Cambodian genocide is remembered as the end of a hard time for the Cambodians. I think that it is important to for parents as well as teachers to teach the children about the acts that occured in order to ensure there is no bias or false history being spread.
For more than 300 years, since the days of Christopher Columbus and the Spanish Government, an attempt of genocide of the Native American Indian has existed. From mass brutal murders and destruction by Spanish and American armies, to self-annihilation through suicide, homicide, and alcohol induced deaths brought about because of failed internal colonialism and white racial framing. Early Explores used Indigenous inhabitants upon first arriving to the America’s to survive the New World and once they adapted, internal colonialism began with attempts to convert the Indians to Christianity, repressing their values and way of life, forcing them into slavery, and nearly exterminating an entire culture from existence.
b. causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;<br>c. deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;<br>d. imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;<br>e. forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.<br>(Destexhe).<br><br>In this paper, I will argue that the act of genocide as here defined, has been committed by the United States of America, upon the tribes and cultures of Native Americans, through mass indoctrination of its youths. Primary support will be drawn from Jorge Noriega's work, "American Indian Education in the United States." The paper will then culminate with my personal views on the subject,
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
Genocide, a dire event, has been recurring time and time again throughout history. In the past, there was the Holocaust, where Hitler exterminated over six million Jews based on his anti-semitic views. Elie Wiesel, a Jewish author, has become a very influential man in educating the world of the true events of the Holocaust due to his involvement in the disaster. Presently, a genocide is occurring in the Darfur region of southern Sudan, in which according to Cheryl Goldmark, “a systematic slaughter of non-Arab residents at the the hands of Arab militiamen called Janjaweed” has been taking place since 2003. (1) Not only is genocide a tragic historical event, it also continuously occurs today.
The leftover human repercussion is harrowing. Trapped between two cultures, neither of which acknowledges, accepts, or embraces them, the children must face life's bleakest moments. Most live in torturous poverty and are constrained to attacks of segregation, alienation, and scorn. Physical and sexual abuse are prevalent, and many end up in prostitution and sex trade. The psychological devastation includes depression, poor self-esteem, post-traumatic anxiety disorder, drug abuse, and suicide. Despite the occasional references to Amerasians in today's culture, the fact still remains that this a largely unrecognized problem. Granted that many human tragedies around the world, the Amerasian issue is not precisely at the center of worldwide attention.
There have been an abundance of studies focused on the effects of the persecuted, ranging from the specific effects to their causes. Many studies focus on long-term psychological effects of those victimized in the genocide seventeen years before the study. Through a cross-sectional study conducted between men and women, researchers found that the persecuted were less likely to have any children, had a lower education, and had an elevated risk of earning a low income (Rugema 18). Furthermore, both men and women showed signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, and “feelings of insecurity about the future accompanied by psychological distress” as a result of persecution