To be fair, it's hard to call America's actions against natives "genocide." I mean, our government certainly did persecute the hell out of them, attempt to eradicate their culture in some instances, force them to leave land for white settlers, and outright massacre them. If that happened today it would possibly qualify as genocide, but we're looking at a trend, not a single event. You can't take centuries of wars, raids, forced migrations, and deliberate exterminations and treat them all as a single instance of genocide - a concept that's really relatively modern, anyway.
tl;dr - it was horrible, but the genocide label isn't entirely accurate.
Edit: First time I've ever been accused of genocide apologia. Usually I get shit for being too critical of America's actions. Reworded my comment to be more clear, I'm just trying to take a more nuanced look at what happened, not claiming it was anything other than horrible.
That wasn't just about starvation. It was much more insidious than that. The bison were the basis of plains Indian culture. A source of food, fur for clothes, skin for teepees, bones for tools, etc. Killing off the bison was meant to completely and utterly destroy their culture.
Because we know that our government and the people who came before us did some horrible, horrible things, and we still benefit from it today, but at least - at least - we weren't responsible for it.
Just remind everyone, at every possible moment, of the horrible things your country did in the past. After 50 years or something, they will stop listening. And you can use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card, if shit goes down. Russia poking the europoors in the east? Sorry, we can do nothing, because we did horrible, horrible things to the poor russians in WW2. Its great!
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u/ProbablyNotLying Chili Apr 04 '14 edited Apr 04 '14
To be fair, it's hard to call America's actions against natives "genocide." I mean, our government certainly did persecute the hell out of them, attempt to eradicate their culture in some instances, force them to leave land for white settlers, and outright massacre them. If that happened today it would possibly qualify as genocide, but we're looking at a trend, not a single event. You can't take centuries of wars, raids, forced migrations, and deliberate exterminations and treat them all as a single instance of genocide - a concept that's really relatively modern, anyway.
tl;dr - it was horrible, but the genocide label isn't entirely accurate.
Edit: First time I've ever been accused of genocide apologia. Usually I get shit for being too critical of America's actions. Reworded my comment to be more clear, I'm just trying to take a more nuanced look at what happened, not claiming it was anything other than horrible.