SUKUMARAN C.V.
The indigenous death toll during U.S. continental expansion was quite substantial... the native population of the State of California alone was reduced from approximately 300,000 in 1800 to less than 20,000 in 1890, chiefly because of the cruelties and wholesale massacre perpetrated by miners and the early settlers. In Texas, to take another example, a bounty was paid for the scalp of any Indian brought to a government office, no questions asked. Most Texas Indians [once the most diverse population in North America] were exterminated or brought to the brink of extinction by Euroamerican civilians who often had no more regard for the life of an Indian than they had for that of a dog, sometimes less.—Ward Churchill (Since Predator Came, Chapter 3—A Survey of Native North America Since 1492)
Five months have passed since the Capitol attack. On Jan.6, 2021, a violent mob comprising thousands of Trump supporters, allegedly incited by his tweets, stormed the Capitol building where a joint session of the U.S.Congress was counting the electoral college ballots that would formally seal Joe Biden's victory over the incumbent president Donald Trump. The rioters have occupied and vandalised the Capitol for several hours and they even tried to break down the doors of the U.S. Senate chamber where the Senators were locked down by the security personnel. The senators and staff had to be evacuated and five people including the police officer Brian Sicknick, were killed.
Joe Biden was reported to have said: "Don't dare call them protestors. They were a riotous mob. Insurrectionists. Domestic terrorists. It's that basic. It's that simple."
Did the American ‘democracy’ punish Mr. Donald Trump for ‘tarnishing’ the so-called greatest democracy by invoking the Capitol insurrection? It is said that he was impeached. But was he punished? He virtually incited the attack and it resulted in the death of five people.
The Capitol attack (or insurrection, as Biden described it) by the followers of Trump is a repulsive incident and I believe Joe Biden will of course be a better President of the U.S. than Mr. Donald Trump. But the statements like that of the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson who said, in the wake of the Capitol attack, that "the United States stands for democracy all around the world" are quite problematic. America’s track record of human rights violations and sabotaging democratically elected governments all over the world is voluminous. The dropping of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki even when Japan was on the verge of surrender; the killing of Salvador Allende's people's government in Chili and the subsequent assassination of Allende in 1973; the prolonged Vietnam war to sabotage Ho Chi Minh's people's government; supporting the autocrats in the African nations and the Gulf; the continuous interference in the internal affairs of Iran; creating Islamic terrorism to destabilize the erstwhile Soviet Union; all tell that the U.S. seldom defends democracy/human rights around the world.
And the atrocities the forefathers of the U.S. have committed on the Native Americans whom Columbus called Red Indians are bone chilling. In his famous speech, The Strenuous Life, Theodore Roosevelt says: “Our whole national history has been one of expansion…That the barbarians recede or are conquered, with the attendant fact that peace follows their retrogression or conquest, is due solely to the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost their fighting instinct…” It is the peaceful indigenous people who were called ‘barbarians’ by a 'great' American President! And they are called barbarians by those who reached America as invaders and settlers, the real barbarians!
Almost all the so called great American Presidents—George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, etc.—are subscribers of white supremacy and helped eliminate the Native American population.
One of the Native Americans (Pont de Numours) wrote to Thomas Jefferson on December 17, 1801: “The inhabitants of your country districts regard—wrongfully, it is true—Indians and forests as natural enemies which must be exterminated by fire and sword and brandy, in order that they may seize their territory.” (Quoted from Ward Churchill’sSince Predator Came, Chapter 6—The Earth Is Our Mother: Struggles for American Indian Land and Liberation in the Contemporary United States.)
Colonel R.I.Dodge said in 1867: "Kill every buffalo you can, for every buffalo dead is an Indian gone." (Quoted from Derrick Jensen's Endgame, Volume I, Chapter 12—Predator and Prey).
The Euro-centric knowledge systems—education, history, science—spread the belief that the world has been developed because of Europe and Europeans. Even Karl Marx subscribes to this Eurocentric intellectual blindness. But, as Howard Zinn tells, ‘…it is enough to make us question, for that time and ours, the excuse of progress in the annihilation of races, and the telling of history from the standpoint of the conquerors and leaders of Western civilization.’ (A People’s History of the United States, Chapter 1—Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress).
Ward Churchill, a Native American activist and academic, says in his book Since Predator Came: “In 1493 Columbus returned with an invasion force of 17 ships, appointed at his own request by the Spanish Crown to install himself as “viceroy and governor of (the Caribbean islands) and the mainland” of America, a position he held until 1500. Setting up shop on the large island he called Espanola (today Haiti and Dominican Republic), he promptly instituted policies of slavery and systematic extermination of the native Taino population. Columbus’ programs reduced Taino numbers from as many as 8 million at the outset of his regime to about 3 million in 1496. Perhaps 100, 000 were left by the time the governor departed. His policies, however, remained, with the result that by 1514 the Spanish census of the island showed barely 22,000 Indians remaining alive. In 1542 only 200 were recorded. Thereafter they were considered extinct, as were Indians throughout the Caribbean Basin, an aggregate population which totaled more than 15 million at the point of the first contact with the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, as Columbus was known.” (Since Predator Came, Chapter 1— ‘Deconstructing the Columbus Myth’).
The Native Americans to whom the two whole American continents belonged have been systematically exterminated through a number of cruelties ranging from killing them with swords and dogs to mass murders or massacres. Churchill says that one of the ‘sports’ of the Spaniards “had to do with wagering on the amount of damage which might be inflicted upon an unarmed Indian, often a child, with a single sword stroke. Another similar entertainment between the earliest Spanish colonists in the Caribbean and their later mainland counterparts was that of massacring entire villages, apparently for the sheer “sport” of it.” (Since Predator Came, Chapter 4—"Genocide in the Americas: Landmarks from “Latin” America Since 1492". Subtitle—"Notes on Genocides as Art and Recreation").
I have never felt reading will be so painful till I read Churchill’s book Since Predator Came. The Native Americans had been destroyed through many unimaginable cruelties since the arrival of Columbus. One such cruelty is setting vicious dogs loose on the hapless people. Have you ever heard of innocent people being ripped apart by dogs unleashed upon them? See what Churchill says about "dogging": “In Central America, a new innovation, “dogging,” made its appearance. This had to do with setting vicious mastiffs and wolfhounds—raised on a diet of human flesh—loose on hapless natives. A properly fleshed dog could pursue a ‘savage’ as zealously and effectively as a deer or a boar. To many of the conquerors, the Indian was merely another savage animal, and the dogs were trained to rip apart their human quarry with the same zest as they felt when hunting wild beasts. In one account, the favourite dog of the noted conquistador Vasco Nunez de Balboa ripped the head completely off the body of Cuna leader in Panama, much to the glee of the entourage accompanying the owner of the "pet.” At another point, Balboa is recorded as having ordered the bodies of 40 of his victims fed to dogs. In Peru, this practice was so common that Cieza de Leon found it not particularly remarkable that a Portuguese named Roque Martin [regularly] had quarters of Indians hanging on his porch to feed his dogs with." (Since Predator Came, Chapter 4).
In the chapter titled “A Survey of Native North America Since 1492”, Churchill says: “Beginning in the early seventeenth century, with the establishment of England’s Plymouth and Virginia colonies, and the Dutch toehold at New Amsterdam, the eradication of North America’s indigenous population assumed much cruder forms. A classic example occurred on the night of May 26, 1637, when the British surrounded the Pequot town of Mystic (Pennsylvania), set it ablaze, and then slaughtered some 800 fleeing men, women, and children, hacking them to pieces with axes and swords. Such “incidents” occurred with ever greater frequency throughout most of the eighteenth century.”
The history of the United States of America is filled with massacre after massacre of Native Americans. Some of the innumerable massacres are: Crow Creek Massacre (1325), Alvarado Massacre (1520), Napituca Massacre (1539), Mabila Massacre (1540), Tiguex Massacres (1541-42), Acoma Massacre (1599), Sandia Mountain Massacre (1601), Paspahegh Massacre (1610), Jamestown Massacre (1622) Kalinago Massacre (1626), Wethersfield and Mystic Massacres (1637), Pavonia and Hutchinson Massacres (1643), Massapequa and Pound Ridge Massacres (1644), Great Swamp Massacre (1675), Turner Falls Massacre (1676), Schenectady Massacre (1690), Candlemas Massacre (1692), Apalachee and Deerfield Massacres (1704), Bath Massacre (1711), Fox Indian Massacre (1712), Bear River Massacre (1863), Wounded Knee Massacre (1890)…
The list is endless. We can't compare the white settlers of the U.S. who have committed unimaginable cruelties and massacres and genocides, even to Hitler, because as Churchill says, “the proportion of indigenous Caribbean population destroyed in a single generation is, no matter how the figures are twisted, far greater than the 75 percent of European Jews usually said to have been exterminated by the Nazis. Worst of all, these data apply only to the Caribbean Basin; the process of genocide in the Americas was only just beginning…” (Since Predator Came, Chapter 1—Deconstructing the Columbus Myth).
“The “Columbian Encounter,” of course, unleashed a predatory, five-century-long cycle of European conquest, genocide, and colonization in the “New World,” a process which changed the face of Native America beyond all recognition. Indeed, over the first decade of Spanish presence in the Caribbean, the period in which Columbus himself served as governor, the mold was set for all that would follow. By 1496, the policies of slavery (encomiendo) and wanton slaughter implemented by the “Great Discoverer” had, in combination with the introduction of Old World pathogens to which they had no immunity, reduced the native Taino population of just as many as 8 million to less than 3 million. Six years later, the Tainos had been diminished to fewer than 100,000, and, in 1542, only 200 could be found by Spanish census-takers. Thereafter, the “Indians” of Espaniola were declared extinct, along with the remainder of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean Basin, an overall body which had numbered upward 14 million only a generation before.” (Since Predator Came, Chapter 3—A Survey of Native North America Since 1492).
As Howard Zinn says in A People’s History of the United States, Native Americans ‘were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality and their belief in sharing.’ Columbus himself reported that ‘when you ask for something they have, they never say no.’ And this is how the forefathers of the U. S. dealt with them:
“Among the Arawak Indians, mass suicides began with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250, 000 Indians on Haiti were dead…The English landed (in the Block Island) and killed some Indians, but the rest hid in the thick forests of the island and the English went from one deserted village to the next, destroying crops. Then they sailed back to the mainland and raided Pequot villages along the coast, destroying crops again. …The English developed a tactic of warfare used earlier by Cortes: deliberate attacks on noncombatants…Captain John Mason proposed to avoid attacking the Pequot warriors, which would have overtaxed his unseasoned, unreliable troops. Battle, as such, was not his purpose. Battle is only one of the ways to destroy an enemy’s will to fight. Massacre can accomplish the same end with less risk, and Mason had determined that massacre would be his objective.” (Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States).
While men and children were slaughtered, women were sold to sexual slavery: “Native women—or indias—were gambled away in card games and traded for objects of small value, while stables of them were rented out to sailors who desired sexual accompaniment during their travels up and down the coast. If an india attempted to resist, she was whipped or tortured or burned alive. Even when laws were passed to curb the more extreme of such atrocities, the penalties were a joke. When, for example, an uncooperative Indian woman was burned to death in her hut by a Spaniard who tried to rape her, he was prosecuted by the governor and fined five pesos.” (Since Predator Came, Chapter 4—Genocide in the Americas: Landmarks from “Latin” America Since 1492).
The Native American women were not treated as sexual objects in their communities as women are treated in the so called ‘civilised’ Europe and elsewhere. As Howards Zinn says, “Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world.” (A People’s History of the United States, Chapter 1—Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress). Think about those women who were sold to sexual slavery by the 'civilising' race!
Churchill says that Lord Jeffrey Amherst issued written orders in 1763 to infect the Native Americans ‘by means of smallpox contaminated blankets’. “A few days later it was reported to Amherst that “[W]e gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the smallpox hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.” It did. At a minimum 100000 Indians died in the epidemic brought on by Amherst’s resort to biological warfare. In a similar instance, occurring in 1836, the U.S. Army distributed smallpox-laden blankets among the Missouri River Mandans; the resulting pandemic claimed as many as a quarter-million native lives.” (Since Predator Came, Chapter 3—A Survey of Native North America Since 1492).
Even after more than 300 years of sustained elimination of the native people and robbing of their lands, the U. S. Senate (sitting in the same Capitol building that was attacked on January 6, 2021) passed the Indian Removal Act (in 1830) at the behest of President Andrew Jackson.
Imagine hordes of people coming to our lands from a distant continent and start killing us, our aged ones, our little ones, our wives, our infants, our sisters, our brothers and displace us from our homes and lands in which we have been living since time immemorial, and scalping our beloved ones, who were killed, to earn rewards for killing so many of us. (The Pennsylvania governor Robert Morris, in 1756, offered a reward of 150 British pounds for the scalp of every male Indian and 50 pounds for that of every female Indian). And imagine, these hordes, without satisfying with all this wanton cruelty, displacement, murder and vandalism, passing an Act to remove us from our own lands forever! And imagine that these people keep telling the world that they are the most civilised and the most democratic and they stand for human rights all around the world!
The largest mass execution of the Native Americans occurred during the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. The Sioux Uprising against the encroachment of their territories by the white settlers was brutally oppressed and it is called Dakota War of 1862. A military tribunal sentenced 300 Sioux Indians to death by hanging for fighting for their own lands and the mass hanging of 38 of them took place in Minnesota on December 26, 1862 in the presence of hundreds of (white) onlookers as a sequel to Christmas Celebrations! Imagine the British who came to India to plunder the nation settled here and eliminated us the real citizens of India and when we resist the cruelties of these plundering and land robbing barbarians, we are massacred, terrorized, captured and hanged to death as traitors. This is what happened in the Americas, especially in the United States of America. The continental expansion of the U.S. was nothing but total annihilation of the indigenous populations.
Dale Van Every says in his book Disinherited: The Lost Birthright of the American Indian: “The Indian was peculiarly susceptible to every sensory attribute of every natural feature of his surroundings. He lived in the open. He knew every marsh, glade, hill top, rock, spring, creek...He had never fully grasped the principle establishing private ownership of land as any more rational than private ownership of air but he loved the land with a deeper emotion than could any proprietor. He felt himself as much a part of it as the rocks and trees, the animals and birds. His homeland was holy ground, sanctified for him as the resting place of the bones of his ancestors and the natural shrine of his religion. It was from this rain-washed land of forests, streams and lakes, to which he was held by the traditions of his forefathers and his own spiritual aspirations, that he was to be driven to the arid, treeless plains of the far west, a desolate region then universally known as the Great American Desert....The passage of the exiles could be distinguished from afar by the howling of trailing wolf packs and the circling of buzzards.”
In late 1831, ‘marshaled by guards, hustled by agents, harried by contractors,’ 13,000 Choctaw Indians ‘were being herded on the way to an unknown and unwelcome destination like a flock of sick sheep…’ By midwinter 1836, more than 15,000 Creek Indians were forced to migrate. Starvation and sickness began to cause large number of deaths.
In their own vast and fertile continent, the American Indians confronted the white settlers—‘looters, land seekers, defrauders, whiskey sellers, thugs’ (in the words of Howard Zinn)—everywhere and they (the Indians) were either killed or driven out. They were allowed to live only on ‘land too barren for white settlers.’
In the words of Chiksika, a Native American warrior who died in 1792 fighting against the American expansion, we can see the cruelty of the so called ‘civilsed’ race and the ‘civilsation’ they represent, and the misery and agony of those who were displaced and disinherited. Chiksika says:
“When a white man kills an Indian in a fair fight it is called honorable, but when an Indian kills a white man in a fair fight it is called murder. When a white army battles Indians and wins it is called a great victory, but if they lose it is called a massacre and bigger armies are raised. If the Indian flees before the advance of such armies, when he tries to return he finds that white men are living where he lived. If he tries to fight off such armies, he is killed and the land is taken away. When an Indian is killed, it is a great loss which leaves a gap in our people and sorrow in our heart; when a white is killed three or four others step up to take his place and there is no end to it. The white man seeks to conquer nature, to bend it to his will and to use it wastefully until it is all gone and then he simply moves on, leaving the waste behind him and looking for new places to take. The whole white race is a monster who is always hungry and what he eats is land.” (Quoted from Endgame, Volume 1, Chapter 1—Apocalypse)
After four hundred and fifty years of elimination, when the still remaining Native Americans, who were forced to live in lands ‘too barren for white settlers’, organised themselves for their rights, “the nature of the federal response to organised agitation for native rights was such that by 1979 researchers were describing it as a manifestation of the U.S. government’s “continuing Indian Wars.” For its part, in internal documents intended to be secret, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)—the primary instrument by which the government's policy of anti-Indian repression was implemented—concurred with such assessments.” (Since Predator Came, Chapter 8—The Bloody Wake of Alcatraz: Political Repression of the American Indian Movement During the 1970s).
And we know what happened to the Native Americans' protest in 2016 against the North Dakota Access Pipeline project that destroys the ancient burial grounds and cultural sites of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Even attack dogs were unleashed against the protesting Native Americans and the dogs bit six protesters! The same old savagery of the ‘civilized’ and ‘civilizing’ race.
This is the nation that stands for human rights all over the world. And this is the nation that is praised as the greatest democracy.
The Capitol attack the world saw on January 6, 2021 can't be seen as a blemish on the image of the United States. It reflects the real spirit of the U.S. that is inherently racist; that disrespects the rights of the indigenous people and the African Americans; that toppled democratically elected and people friendly governments in Vietnam and Chili; that bolstered/bolsters autocrats in the African and Gulf nations; that devastated Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria; that created Islamic terrorism and Islamophobia, that killed thousands of innocent people in Iran and Afghanistan. The list of the anti-democratic deeds and human rights violations of the U.S. is endless.
The U.S. history is the history of attacks and murders and massacres. The only difference in the Capitol attack is that both the attacked and the attackers are whites, that is all. Till date, the Americans, whether they are the followers of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, targeted the Native Americans, the African Americans, the Asians, the Africans and every other people in the world. Now, for the first time in history, they target themselves. It may be poetic justice, I presume. If the Capitol attack was perpetrated by the Native Americans or the African Americans, mass executions must have been the result. What we witnessed on January 6th 2021 in the form of the Capitol attack is the inherent violence that is the lifeblood of the U.S. which was born in violence and grew with violence.
