It may indeed be unpleasant and certainly not for all tastes but a fair appraisal of the treatment of our native population by our government and citizens is certainly not boring. I don't think their is any dispute that the official and unofficial American treatment of its native population during much of the 18th and 19th Centuries was abhorent. It has been justified as revenge, necessity and expediency but there can be little doubt it was systematically oppressive and frequently brutal and conducted with a contemptuous disregard for the well being of the native American population. Certainly it cannot be regarded as moral by any reasonable standard then or now. The question of whether it was genocide is more complicated, not only because that term did not exist then as it does now but because here it is necessary to separate the acts of the population from its government.
Under current International Law, genocide is defined as acts "
committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such." Note that percentage of a group that must be affected in order to qualify as genocide has never been well defined but it has been applied to "
a reasonably significant number, relative to the total of the group as a whole," and a group has been considered in the context of a specific geographic area within the sphere of a offender's control, and not in relation to the entire population of the group in a wider geographic sense. This is rather significant for the American Indian Wars since all of the most egregious acts of slaughter of native Americans were essentially confined to relatively local areas. It is also interesting to note that, despite much argument to the contrary, there is little if any accepted evidence of any national policy toward such conduct, although there is much evidence of local support for many such actions. It is indeed well established that these acts did include intentional efforts to kill entire populations of native Americans in certain local areas so since genocide is a personal crime and not a crime of governments, to those particular events, it is fair to apply the term since there is little doubt of the intent.
It is also interesting to note that very few of the acts of slaughter against native Americans were conducted by regular army troops. Thus despite the reckless and reprehensible statement of General Sherman to the effect ""the only good Indians I ever saw were dead.", the systemic elimination of native populations was never official US policy. That said, Sherman's remarks, however popular with the settlers of the time, probably did more to encourage such atrocities than any other singe event of the period.
As deplorable as I find much of our history in dealing with the native Americans, I find myself agreeing with the conclusion of Guenter Lewy, an author and former Political Science professor at the University of Massachusetts
In the end, the sad fate of America's Indians represents not a crime but a tragedy, involving an irreconcilable collision of cultures and values. Despite the efforts of well-meaning people in both camps, there existed no good solution to this clash. The Indians were not prepared to give up the nomadic life of the hunter for the sedentary life of the farmer. The new Americans, convinced of their cultural and racial superiority, were unwilling to grant the original inhabitants of the continent the vast preserve of land required by the Indians’ way of life. The consequence was a conflict in which there were few heroes, but which was far from a simple tale of hapless victims and merciless aggressors.
I would only add that the collision produced no small number of crimes, including acts of genocide by some, and there is no doubt that our ancestors could and should have done better but that fact that they did not is as understandable as it is tragic.
I sincerely do hope we have learned something from that.
