The American Genocide Begins

In 1492, the wider European community made their first formalized contact with the indigenous peoples of North America. In a ridiculous and slightly arrogant misunderstanding, they decided to call them "Indians." Europe benefited greatly, absorbing turkeys, potatoes, tomoatoes, and the like. The Americans were badly damaged, gaining shiny trinkets, smallpox, measles, and facing invaders with weapons never before dreamed of.

In 1776, the United States of America was formed -- a melting pot for European people, European ideas, and European customs.

This is well-known history; and, although certainly sad, is not particularly different or any worse than every other colonial story throughout history. When two cultures clash, one becomes dominant. The other undergoes great hardships and becomes either extinct or a minority. It's not a pretty process.

Here's where this story becomes horrific: by the 1820s, some balance had been reached. The Indians were uprooted, dispossessed, and hurting, but there seemed to be some chance that coexistence on the same continent was possible.

Manifest Destiny destroyed any thought of peace and incited a protracted secret war whose effects are visible today. Manifest Destiny was a prevailing American spirit that the United States had a glorious destiny to spread from sea to shining sea. Anyone who got in our way was obstructing our good work and would need to be eliminated.

The open military actions are well documented, if rarely brought up anymore. They were ultimately too slow, expensive, and dangerous for our soldiers. Some actions are less documented. For example, the California state legislature passed a law formally recognizing Indians as dangerous animals. The state government would pay a staggering $5 for the body of a dead Indian man. The reward for a live Indian was only $3. A woman, alive or dead, was worth $2. A dead child was worth $0.75. The problem with this policy was twofold: the Indians kept having children, and it was too expensive. By the late 1860s, California was out over $12,000 in money paid to ordinary citizens dropping corpses off at the local government office. To try to offset the cost (which was substantial in 1860s money), the government took to selling the bodies of infants back to ordinary citizens, with the expectation that they would be used for bear bait.

This happened. This happened.

In 1879, the government finally hit upon the winning formula for eliminating the inconvenient red man, clearing the path for collection of endless resources, land for new states, and worry-free expansion. The problem, it turned out, was that no matter how many Indians were killed by soldiers or private citizens, there would always be a few more left who would grow increasingly stronger in defiance and rejection of white values. Savages are like that. They believed in their culture and it gave them the backbone to stand up to white society, no matter how few of them there were left alive.

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was given a one-year probabationary period to see if it could successfully sever Native children from their culture. If all went as planned, the Native population would have nothing to fall back on after a single generation. The first boarding school was born. It would prove successful beyond expectation. The next year, Congressional funding was given to create 500 boarding schools across the nation. This happened.

The plan was simple: first, remove children from their parents, as young as possible. There was no formalized means of doing this. At gunpoint was the simplest. Positive or negative reinforcement was sometimes used, offering money for children, or jailing those who did not give up their kids immediately. One of the most intricate and effective methods was the planned elimination of the natural food-animals and terraforming of the land for strange crops. Then, Indians became dependent on government "assistance" for food. You keep your children, you and your children starve.

I had always heard stories of people shooting buffalo out of trains for fun and for bounty. It never occured to me to ask why anyone would offer a bounty -- I focused more on the "fun" aspect and shook my head with disappointment at their shortsightedness. The reason this practice was supported was that it made the Natives starve. It was a clear, fully thought out, and officially executed plan.

Now, children were loaded up by the trainloads and shipped, sometimes great distances, to the nearest school. The goals were threefold.

1. Eliminate any opportunity for exposure to their parents' culture, language, or customs.
In a short amount of time, the hope was for a Native population that had no reason to resist the dominant traditions.

2. Break the childrens' will, and make them subservient.
Their parents were too... difficult. It would be better to raise a people who would cave at the first sign of opposition.

3. Train them for menial jobs.
This was the only excuse for "education" the schools offered. As long as they're here, we might as well shape them into a work force for the jobs we don't want. No one learned math. Classes were in things like "sweeping."