I guess I have to pull out my book collection to offer some good examples, but I do know that in California natives were not citizens and were not legally people and were openly hunted in campaigns of extermination in the bay area. There is a lot of political nonsense around words like genocide and holocaust.
In some cases retributive violence was used to excess. In limited cases tribes were hunted to extinction or driven to extinction through public policy written with full knowledge of the effects. History is tragic, but the extermination of natives wasnt a fair, nice, justified affair. It was a bloody mess, we won this territory by force of arms. America became an empire. We can acknowledge those facts and still salute our flag. We are humans, not perfect like God. Our creatioms always include the good with the evil.
I understand that there was bloodshed perpetuated by both sides. I do NOT agree that there was "genocide."
Many Indian tribes gratuitously killed Indians from other tribes long before whites arrived, and Indians also attacked and killed whites.
Indians weren't "natives" to America either. They also migrated to this land, and there were other people here before them.
Indian tribes lived on some isolated spots of land in this vast area we now know as the U.S. They never took ownership of the whole area, the tribes were not unified, they had no central government, the Indians, as a people, had no established borders, they had no claim to the whole area of the U.S., they never developed anything in this vast land that remotely indicated that this whole area was "taken," and they did nothing to make this land into a country. Furthermore, it was still a time of exploration, settlement, and development in this planet, and the strongest, the most capable, and most effective took over every land they could. The truth is that the Indians did NOT have a country, did NOT have borders, and this land was completely undeveloped, which suggested that it was NOT taken. If it hadn't been the Europeans to settle in America (reserving land for the Indians), to develop it, and turn it into a country with borders, it would have been the Chinese or the Arabs, and then there would indeed have been genocide, the Indians would either have all been killed, or the few left would have no land for themselves and would all be forced to be Muslims.
White people have recognized the Indian's rights to some of the land since the beginning, and this is still true today. There was conflict with some tribes and whites attacked Indians who attacked them and were dangerous to them. I'm sure there were some white people who hated Indians just for existing and/or who were particularly cruel to them, but they don't represent the attitude of most white people at any time, don't represent government policy at any time, and don't qualify to say that whites, in general, committed genocide of Indians in general.
I guess I have to pull out my book collection to offer some good examples, but I do know that in California natives were not citizens and were not legally people and were openly hunted in campaigns of extermination in the bay area. There is a lot of political nonsense around words like genocide and holocaust.
In some cases retributive violence was used to excess. In limited cases tribes were hunted to extinction or driven to extinction through public policy written with full knowledge of the effects. History is tragic, but the extermination of natives wasnt a fair, nice, justified affair. It was a bloody mess, we won this territory by force of arms. America became an empire. We can acknowledge those facts and still salute our flag. We are humans, not perfect like God. Our creatioms always include the good with the evil.
I understand that there was bloodshed perpetuated by both sides. I do NOT agree that there was "genocide."
Many Indian tribes gratuitously killed Indians from other tribes long before whites arrived, and Indians also attacked and killed whites.
Indians weren't "natives" to America either. They also migrated to this land, and there were other people here before them.
Indian tribes lived on some isolated spots of land in this vast area we now know as the U.S. They never took ownership of the whole area, the tribes were not unified, they had no central government, the Indians, as a people, had no established borders, they had no claim to the whole area of the U.S., they never developed anything in this vast land that remotely indicated that this whole area was "taken," and they did nothing to make this land into a country. Furthermore, it was still a time of exploration, settlement, and development in this planet, and the strongest, the most capable, and most effective took over every land they could. The truth is that the Indians did NOT have a country, did NOT have borders, and this land was completely undeveloped, which suggested that it was NOT taken. If it hadn't been the Europeans to settle in America (reserving land for the Indians), to develop it, and turn it into a country with borders, it would have been the Chinese or the Arabs, and then there would indeed have been genocide, the Indians would either have all been killed, or the few left would have no land for themselves and would all be forced to be Muslims.
White people have recognized the Indian's rights to some of the land since the beginning, and this is still true today. There was conflict with some tribes and whites attacked Indians who attacked them and were dangerous to them. I'm sure there were some white people who hated Indians just for existing and/or who were particularly cruel to them, but they don't represent the attitude of most white people at any time, don't represent government policy at any time, and don't qualify to say that whites, in general, committed genocide of Indians in general.