Reference no: EM131834224
What would be a good response to this?
The legal definition of Genocide is "acts committed with intent to partially or wholly destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group; also: the crime of committing such an act" (Genocide, n.d.). I am here to discuss the fact that violent actions taken by the Europeans against Native Americans were in fact genocidal. I will be discussing various situations that have to deal directly with European influence when it comes to illness and war efforts to remove Native Americans.
The "massively devastating inadvertent virgin soil epidemic" (Ostler, 2015) that occurred between 1830 and 1841 was not planned by the Europeans. They needed the help of Native Americans. Europeans had no idea how to go from nothing to colonization. They utilized the knowledge of Native American survival tactics for a time until they were self-sustaining.
"Although missionaries offered Christian conversion, as historian Gray Whaley has argued, they saw colonization as a progressive development that might allow for the salvation of a few individual Indians but would otherwise result in their general dispossession and extermination. Once settlers arrived, they forced Indians off their land, often sqatting on native land in advance of treaties, which eventually legalized dispossession. Indians sometimes forced treaty negotiators to make concessions and thereby gained certain advantages, but this does not mean that Indians "voluntarily" ceded their land. Instead, the on-the-ground facts of squatter occupation combined with sever material deprivation and the threat and actual use of violence constituted powerful means of coercion. Violence was especially pronounced in southwestern Oregon in the early 1850s when gold rush settlers waged a war of extermination against Indians, a clear-cut case of genocidal intent" (Ostler, 2015).
"It is true enough that U.S. policymakers regularly expressed a preference for assimilation, but this does not mean that they rejected physical elimination under all circumstances. To fully comprehend U.S. policy toward Indians it is important to realize that policy was grounded in the nation's fundamental commitment to territorial expansion. This commitment arose not just from the aggregation of individual settlers' and speculators' pursuit of wealth, but also from the premise-central to Americans' republican political philosophy-that liberty depended on widespread ownership of private property. To build what Thomas Jefferson described as an "empire for liberty," then, mandated obtaining Indian lands. How would this be done? Policymakers envisioned an ideal scenario in which Indians would willingly sign treaties ceding their lands in exchange for assistance in becoming civilized. But what if Indians refused to cede their lands? What if they rejected the "gift" of civilization? At that point, U.S. policymakers consistently stated, Indians would be subject to war-not the limited warfare that European legal theorists had agreed was acceptable between civilized nations but a war of extermination. In 1790 Secretary of War Henry Knox sanctioned such a war when he ordered the U.S. Army to "extirpate, utterly, if possible" a confederacy of Indians centered in Ohio that had rejected U.S. demands for a land cession. Facing similar opposition seventeen years later, President Jefferson sent word to Indians near Detroit that "if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi," adding that should Indians go to war, "they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them." Genocidal war, then, was not just an option, it was necessary in situations of Native resistance" (Ostler, 2015).
As previously stated, that even though there is speculation that illnesses that swept Native Americans were brought on intentionally by Europeans, it is hard to point to a genocidal intent. However, in these few examples, out of many, it is clear that Europeans set to destroy Native Americans if they refused to accept their treaties and to conform to their ways. With that being said, I believe Europeans did have genocidal intentions on numerous occasions with no regard for anything other than their agenda to free the land for their intended colonization.