Native American genocide in the United States
The destruction of Native American peoples, cultures, and languages has been characterized by some as genocide. Debates are ongoing as to whether the entire process or only specific periods or events meet the definitions of genocide. Many of these definitions focus on intent, while others focus on outcomes. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide", considered the displacement of Native Americans by European settlers as a historical example of genocide. While description as genocide has found increasing acceptance within Indigenous and genocide studies, mainstream scholarship on US and Native American history has largely rejected it, preferring to describe it as ethnic cleansing or certain events as genocidal.
Historians have long debated the pre-European population of the Americas. In 2023, historian Ned Blackhawk suggested that Northern America's population had halved from 1492 to 1776 from about 8 million people to under 4 million. Russell Thornton estimated that by 1800, some 600,000 Native Americans lived in the regions that would become the modern United States and declined to an estimated 250,000 by 1890 before rebounding.
The virgin soil thesis, coined by historian Alfred W. Crosby, proposes that the population decline among Native Americans after 1492 is due to Native populations being immunologically unprepared for Old World diseases. While this theory continues to receive support in popular imagination and academia, recently, some scholars argue that many Native American populations did not plummet after initial contact with Europeans, but only after violent interactions, including wars, removal, confinement to reservations and forced assimilation, and that these exacerbated the effects of disease.
The population decline among Native Americans after 1492 is attributed to various factors, including Eurasian diseases like influenza, pneumonic plagues, cholera, and smallpox. Additionally, conflicts, massacres, forced removal, enslavement, imprisonment, and warfare with European settlers significantly contributed to the reduction in populations and the disruption of traditional societies. Historian Jeffrey Ostler emphasizes the importance of considering the American Indian Wars, campaigns by the U.S. Army to subdue Native American nations in the American West starting in the 1860s, as genocide. Scholars increasingly refer to these events as massacres or "genocidal massacres", defined as the annihilation of a portion of a larger group, sometimes intended to send a message to the larger group.
Native American peoples have been subject to both historical and contemporary massacres and acts of cultural genocide as their traditional ways of life were threatened by settlers. Colonial massacres and acts of ethnic cleansing explicitly sought to reduce Native populations and confine them to reservations. Cultural genocide was also deployed, in the form of displacement and appropriation of Indigenous knowledge, to weaken Native sovereignty. Native American peoples still face challenges stemming from colonialism, including settler occupation of their traditional homelands, police brutality, hate crimes, vulnerability to climate change, and mental health issues. Despite this, Native American resistance to colonialism and genocide has persisted, both in the past and the present.
Background
Population estimates for the pre-Columbian U.S. territory generally range from between 1 and 5 million people. Prominent cultures in the historical period before colonization included: Adena, Old Copper, Oasisamerica, Woodland, Fort Ancient, Hopewell tradition and Mississippian cultures.In the classification of the archaeology of the Americas, the post-Classic stage is a term applied to some Precolumbian cultures, typically ending with local contact with Europeans. This stage is the fifth of five archaeological stages posited by Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips' 1958 book Method and Theory in American Archaeology. In the North American chronology, the "post-classic stage" followed the classic stage in certain areas, and typically dates from around AD 1200 to modern times.
The Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast were of many nations and tribal affiliations, each with distinctive cultural and political identities, but they shared certain beliefs, traditions, and practices, such as the centrality of salmon as a resource and spiritual symbol. Their gift-giving feast, potlatch, is a highly complex event where people gather to commemorate special events. These events include the raising of a totem pole or the appointment or election of a new chief. The most famous artistic feature of the culture is the totem pole, with carvings of animals and other characters to commemorate cultural beliefs, legends, and notable events.
The Mississippian culture was a mound-building Native American civilization that archaeologists date from approximately 800 CE to 1600 CE, varying regionally. It was composed of a series of urban settlements and satellite villages linked together by a loose trading network, the largest city being Cahokia, believed to be a major religious center. The civilization flourished in what is now the Midwestern, Eastern, and Southeastern United States.
Numerous pre-Columbian societies were urbanized, such as the Pueblo peoples, Mandan, and Hidatsa. The Iroquois League of Nations or "People of the Long House" was a politically advanced, democratic society, which is thought by some historians to have influenced the United States Constitution, with the Senate passing a resolution to this effect in 1988. Other historians have contested this interpretation and believe the impact was minimal, or did not exist, pointing to numerous differences between the two systems and the ample precedents for the constitution in European political thought.
Many Indigenous nations shared the belief of collective continuance and systems of responsibility with other humans and the non-human world. According to Citizen Potawatomi philosopher Kyle Powys Whyte, collective continuance refers to a society's ability to adapt to conditions to ensure community survival. Collective continuance begets the creation of systems of responsibility, in which individuals have a moral reciprocal relationship with the non-human world. The Oceti Sakowin belief of Mni Wiconi, for instance, describes a relationship in which the Missouri River nourishes their community, and they have a responsibility to protect it. The idea of collective continuance and systems of responsibility also extend into social structures. For example, for the Anishinaabe, gender was not binary, and women had more leadership roles that included responsibilities to others beyond their marriages.
Colonial massacres
Attempted extermination of the Pequot
The Pequot War was an armed conflict that took place between 1636 and 1638 in New England between the Pequot tribe and an alliance of the colonists of the Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Saybrook colonies and their allies from the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes.The war concluded with the decisive defeat of the Pequots. The colonies of Connecticut and Massachusetts offered bounties for the heads of killed hostile Indians, and later for just their scalps, during the Pequot War in the 1630s; Connecticut specifically reimbursed Mohegans for slaying the Pequot in 1637. At the end, about 700 Pequots had been killed or taken into captivity.
The English colonists imposed a harshly punitive treaty on the estimated 2,500 Pequots who survived the war; the Treaty of Hartford of 1638 sought to eradicate the Pequot cultural identity—with terms prohibiting the Pequots from returning to their lands, speaking their tribal language, or even referring to themselves as Pequots—and effectively dissolved the Pequot Nation, with many survivors executed or enslaved and sold away. Hundreds of prisoners were sold into slavery to the West Indies; other survivors were dispersed as captives to the victorious tribes. The result was the elimination of the Pequot tribe as a viable polity in Southern New England, the colonial authorities classifying them as extinct. However, members of the Pequot tribe still live today as a federally recognized tribe.