American Holocaust

by David E. Stannardx

  This is the sort of thing that gives professors a bad name. And, although thus far we have been looking largely at writings on early white American attitudes toward African Americans (the exception is Tompkins), the very same lines of argument have been and continue to be played out regarding sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Euro-American attitudes toward Indians. During the 1960s it had been customary for scholars, such as Alden T. Vaughan, who were studying Indian-white conflict in the American colonies, to assert that even during the ferocious extermination campaigns of the English against the native peoples of Virginia as well as against the Pequots and Narragansetts and Wampanoags of New England, the behavior of the British was not “determined by any fundamental distinction of race,” nor by “deep-seated bias” of any kind.22 In White Over Black, Jordan inadvertently had provided further fuel for this argument, by comparing blatant assertions of racial antipathy of the English for Africans with what he viewed as their more benign attitude toward Indian racial characteristics. His perspective was then used to underpin uninformed claims by later historians that whites did not harbor racist attitudes toward Indians even centuries after their first proudly proclaimed attempts to exterminate them.23

  In their denial of racial motivation as part of the driving force behind the colonists’ efforts to eradicate the Indians, most of these historians’ writings also were unblushing apologies for the genocide that had taken place. Thus, Vaughan, for example, dismissed mass murder as “some misunderstandings and injustices [that] occurred” while the British were only trying “to convert, civilize, and educate [the Indian] as quickly as possible.”24 During the 1970s and early 1980s, however, a series of books by historians taking a second look at these matters reached very different conclusions. Wilbur R. Jacobs, Francis Jennings, Richard Drinnon, and Neal Salisbury were only four among many during this time who rang down the curtain on the view that the colonists in their dealings with the Indians were kind and gentle souls.25 Following their work, there remained little doubt that the colonists were driven by a racist zeal to eliminate the Indians—at least once the major colonist-Indian wars had gotten under way. But remaining to be addressed was the same question that had for so long entangled historians studying white minds and black slavery: Did the adventurers and colonists bring with them racist attitudes that predisposed them to such inhumane treatment of people of color, or did those attitudes emerge after and derive from their experience with the people they later enslaved and destroyed?

  It should be clear from the discussion in Chapter Six of this book that Spanish, English, and other European attitudes toward the native peoples of the Americas were virulently racist long before the settlement of the first British colony in North America. Although European mistreatment of people because of a perception of them as racially different is a very ancient practice, a dramatic shift to a rigid European attitude toward race in general was becoming evident in the fourteenth century with the Church’s authorization of the enslavement of Christians if their ancestry was non-European, and it escalated from that point forward with an able assist from the Spanish doctrine of limpieza de sangre and the other sixteenth-century European pseudobiological and religious rationales discussed earlier. It is impossible to read the voluminous Spanish justifications for the enslavement and mass murder of the Americas’ native peoples—as well as the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century statements of the British on the same subjects—without recognizing their deeply racist content. Impossible, that is, unless you carefully define racism so narrowly that it is certain not to be found.

  And that is what has begun to happen in recent years. Race, of course, is a social construct that different societies create in different ways, drawing on supposedly “natural” characteristics in people that are held to be congenital; racism is the ideological use of such a construct to subordinate and dominate another group. Nevertheless, in scholarly imitation of the man who searches for his lost keys under a lamp post because the light is better there—even though he knows he dropped his keys a block away—Alden T. Vaughan has now invented the idea that racism cannot exist in the absence of negative statements about another group’s skin color. Not surprisingly, in the light cast by this particular lamp post, he has found little explicit Anglo-American disparagement of Indians’ skin color in the early years of settlement—those years when Indian men, women, and children were being butchered, burned alive, enslaved, poisoned en masse, and referred to as “wild beasts,” “brutish savages,” and “viperous broods”—and so, according to Vaughan’s ad hoc definition, the British did not then think of the Indians they were systematically liquidating as “inherently inferior.”26

  As with Fredrickson’s impossibly narrow definition of racism, so with Vaughan it needs to be pointed out that neither skin color distinctions nor pseudoscientific ideas of biological determinism are necessary criteria for the categorization and degradation of people under the rubric of “race.” Even a glance at the standard etymologies of the word (“the outward race and stocke of Abraham”; “to be the Race of Satan”; “the British race”; “that Pygmean Race”—to cite some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century examples) clearly shows that the term “race” was in widespread use in Britain to denote groups of people and classes of things marked by characteristics other than color well before it was used exclusively in that way, and centuries before it had grafted upon it the elaborate apparatus of biological and zoological pseudoscience. Indeed, a sense of “racial” superiority—sometimes having to do with color and sometimes not—had been imbedded in English consciousness at least since the appearance in the twelfth century of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, the great elaboration of the Arthurian legend.27

  It is true, as noted several times in Chapter Six of this book, that racist thought and behavior by whites toward Indians intensified during the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but after the first few decades of the sixteenth century—at the very latest—the escalation of racism was a change in degree, not type (as Vaughan claims), of prejudice and oppression. In sum, there is little doubt that the dominant sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ecclesiastical, literary, and popular opinion in Spain and Britain and Europe’s American colonies regarding the native peoples of North and South America was that they were a racially degraded and inferior lot—borderline humans as far as most whites were concerned. Although there was, even at that early date, beginning to emerge in Europe various detailed theories of racist pseudoscience, anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of racist aggression knows that such endeavors do not require of their perpetrators the presence of formal scientific or other doctrine; as W.E.B. DuBois once observed: “the chief fact [in my life] has been race—not so much scientific race, as that deep conviction of myriads of men that congenital differences among the main masses of human beings absolutely condition the individual destiny of every member of a group.” 28 Most people of color today, as well as for centuries past, would have understood what DuBois was saying—even if some modern white historians apparently do not.

  . . .

  The definition of genocide, though also a subject of debate for many years, will take much less time to discuss. That is because most of the controversy over the term—such as whether victims of mass murder whose only common denominator is political belief are truly victims of genocide—is not relevant to the subject of this book. All that is relevant is whether the Spanish and Anglo-American destruction of the culturally and ethnically and racially defined peoples of the Americas constituted genocide.

  The term “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in 1944. Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn summarize Lemkin’s pioneering thinking:

  Under Lemkin’s definition, genocide was the coordinated and planned annihilation of a national, religious, or racial group by a variety of actions aimed at undermining the foundations essential to the survival of the group as a group. Lemkin conceived of g
enocide as “a composite of different acts of persecution or destruction.” His definition included attacks on political and social institutions, culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of the group. Even nonlethal acts that undermined the liberty, dignity, and personal security of members of a group constituted genocide if they contributed to weakening the viability of the group. Under Lemkin’s definition, acts of ethnocide—a term coined by the French after the war to cover the destruction of a culture without the killing of its bearers—also qualified as genocide.29

  Two years after the publication of Lemkin’s book—and thanks to his constant lobbying efforts—the United Nations General Assembly passed the following resolution:

  Genocide is the denial of the right of existence to entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings; such denial of the right of existence shocks the conscience of mankind, results in great losses to humanity in the form of cultural and other contributions represented by these groups, and is contrary to moral law and to the spirit and aims of the United Nations. Many instances of such crimes of genocide have occurred, when racial, religious, political and other groups have been destroyed, entirely or in part. The punishment of the crime of genocide is a matter of international concern. The General Assembly Therefore, Affirms that genocide is a crime under international law which the civilized world condemns, and for the commission of which principals and accomplices—whether private individuals, public officials or statesmen, and whether the crime is committed on religious, racial, political or any other grounds—are punishable.

  Finally, in 1948, the Genocide Convention of the United Nations was adopted unanimously and without abstentions:

  UNITED NATIONS CONVENTION ON THE PREVENTION

  AND PUNISHMENT OF THE CRIME OF GENOCIDE

  TEXT OF THE CONVENTION

  The Contracting Parties,

  Having considered the declaration made by the General Assembly of the United Nations in its resolution 96 (I) dated 11 December 1946 that genocide is a crime under international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United Nations and condemned by the civilized world;

  Recognizing that at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity; and

  Being convinced that, in order to liberate mankind from such an odious scourge, international co-operation is required:

  Hereby agree as hereinafter provided:

  ARTICLE I

  The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.

  ARTICLE II

  In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such:

  (a) Killing members of the group;

  (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

  (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

  (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

  (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

  ARTICLE III

  The following acts shall be punishable:

  (a) Genocide;

  (b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;

  (c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;

  (d) Attempt to commit genocide;

  (e) Complicity in genocide.

  ARTICLE IV

  Persons committing genocide or any of the acts enumerated in Article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials, or private individuals.30

  It is almost half a century since the Genocide Convention was passed, and in that time countless numbers of individuals have argued that the Convention’s definition is too narrow (because, as a result of pressure brought by Soviet and Eastern bloc delegates, it does not include political groups as potential victims) or too broad (because “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group” can be made applicable to cases that clearly are not genocidal), among other criticisms. However, the Convention’s definition remains the most widely used definition of genocide throughout the world—and, indeed, in all the world there probably is no other word, in any language, whose definition has been more carefully discussed or more universally accepted. In light of the U.N. language—even putting aside some of its looser constructions—it is impossible to know what transpired in the Americas during the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries and not conclude that it was genocide.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  During the course of researching and writing this book I have benefited from the generosity of a number of institutions and individuals. Some years ago, while conducting research on a different project under the auspices of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, I began reading and thinking about the historical fictions the First World routinely imposes on indigenous and Third World peoples in the process of retrospectively justifying genocidal aggression against them. A few years later the American Council of Learned Societies provided me with fellowship support for the initial phase of research that has led to this and other publications, some now in print, others still in preparation. The University of Hawai‘i’s Social Science Research Institute and its Director, Donald M. Topping, have unfailingly responded favorably to numerous requests for assistance from me, as has the beleaguered staff of the Thomas H. Hamilton Library. Also at the University of Hawai‘i, the Center for Arts and Humanities has been most helpful.

  Emanuel J. Drechsel and Catherine Vandemoer pointed me in the right direction on several technical points, while in various important ways Annette Mente and Nipa Rahim have helped assure that this book would indeed be published in 1992. Richard Drinnon and Peter T. Manicas carefully read and pointedly commented on an early draft of the entire manuscript; the kindness of their prompt assistance and the keenness of their criticisms were consistent with the example of their own vigorous and discerning scholarship.

  This is my third book with Oxford University Press. As in the past, the experience has been rewarding. Sheldon Meyer was unreservedly supportive and patient and fair in his counsel, as well as astute in his insight, while Leona Capeless edited the manuscript with a subtle but certain touch. In addition, Karen Wolny, Scott Lenz, and Laura Brown at Oxford were most helpful at critical moments when the manuscript was being turned into a book.

  The research and writing of a book such as this is at times an emotionally draining experience. No one is more aware of that fact than my companion throughout the ordeal—and for most of the preceding decade—Haunani-Kay Trask. A politically engaged scholar on the subjects of feminist theory, colonialism, and the contemporary struggles of indigenous peoples, as well as a native woman whose own people were almost rendered extinct within a century following their first contact with the West, her critical readings of the manuscript were of course invaluable. But more than that, the examples of her and her people’s ongoing resistance to post-colonial oppression—and the innumerable hours of conversation we have shared on and around the general topic of this book—have been its primary and deepest inspiration.

  NOTES

  Prologue

  1. The official American estimate for the number of people killed by the Hiroshima blast is less than 80,000, but the Japanese have long disputed this figure and the best current estimate ranges from at least 130,000 immediately following the bombing to about 200,000 total dead from the blast and its aftereffects within five years. See Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings, translated by Eisei Ishikawa and David L. Swain (New York: Basic Books, 1981), pp. 363–69.

  2.
See Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, “The Aboriginal Population of Hispaniola” in Cook and Borah, Essays in Population History, Volume One: Mexico and the Caribbean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 376–410.

  3. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), p. 565. On the matter of comparative survivorship ratios, according to recent adjustments in the 1990 U.S. census the national ethnic breakdown is as follows: whites—74.2 percent; blacks—12.5 percent; Hispanics—9.5 percent; Asians and others—3.8 percent. Thus, since whites and blacks combined total 86.7 percent of the population, if all whites and blacks were killed, the survivorship ratio for Americans would be significantly better than 1:10 (actually, about 1:7.5), compared with the estimated overall 1:20 survivorship ratio for the native peoples of the Americas.

  4. The cited observer is Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, from his Historia Natural y General de las Indias, quoted in Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 252–53.

  5. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).

  6. From the testimony of Major Scott J. Anthony, First Colorado Cavalry, before United States Congress, House of Representatives: “Massacre of Cheyenne Indians,” in Report on the Conduct of the War (38th Congress, Second Session, 1865), p. 27.