Columbus Day & the Question of Native American Genocide
posted 31 minutes ago
Excerpts from Alex Alvarez (professor of Criminology, Northern Arizona Univ., Founding Director, Martin Springer Institute for Teaching the Holocaust), Native America & the Question of Genocide, 2014, Rowman & Littlefield
"One of the things my experience in studying genocide has taught me is that ‘genocide’ is a word and concept that is often uses and misused. The term has a tremendous amount of power, and because of that it has sometimes been applied to highway deaths, abortions, AIDS, slavery, urban planning and family planning among other rhetorical excesses. Unfortunately, many of these assertions seem to be based more on general sense of outrage and horror than on any clear and rigorous understand about what is and is not genocide."
"…it has become somewhat fashionable to assert that American Indians were the victims of genocide, but all too often those comments appear to be more about political activism or attempts to generate a sense of moral outrage than they are about engaging in scholarly discussion. Genocide refer to a specific concept that is itself subject ot various definitions and debates, Scholars and others who study this phenomenon, in other words, interpret the term in multiple ways.”
“… it is important that claims of genocide be examined rigorously and critically. This is not to suggest that Native people in the Americas did not suffer from genocide, but rather that care needs to be taken when applying this label to specific historical events, these assertions are all too often made with sweeping generalizations that seem to suggest the Native experience, and by inference Native peoples, were all the same. This is far from the truth. As we will see, the Americas were and are home to a great many different nations and tribes who have often had dissimilar experiences depending upon their location, the period of contact, who they had contact with, and the various strategies of confrontation and/or accommodation each group adopted.”
"An examination of genocide, therefore, in the context of the Native American experience can reveal much of the complexity of contact and conflict in America after the arrival of the Europeans. Although we often tend to see it as such, it is not as simple as it has often been portrayed. It is more than just a simple morality tale about good and evil, right and wrong, whites versus Natives. The problem with this depiction, aside from being plain wrong, is that it treats all Native people as passive objects who were simple acted upon by those they came into contact with. That is far from the truth. Instead, a closer look reveals that it is a very human story of tragedy and error, missed opportunities and cross-purposes, good intentions and bad, and cruel injustice and violence. Natives sometimes sided with Europeans against other Native tribes,Columbus Day & the Question of Native American Genocide - Musical Media For Education:
