An 1888 drawing of a massacre by Queensland's police at Skull Hole, Mistake Creek, near Winton, Australia.
In 1948, the Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". These five acts include killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group.[28][29]Additional scholarly definitions have been used to examine the diverse history of genocide,[30] including those that include cultural and ethnic genocide as per Raphael Lemkin.[31]
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky have argued that definitions of key terms, as well as the attention a society provides to a specific issue, such as genocide, is the product of mass media, as they mention in Manufacturing Consent: "A propaganda system will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy".[32] Thus, Chomsky views the term genocide as one that is used by those in positions of political power and media prominence against their rivals, but people in positions of power will avoid using the term to describe their own actions, past and present.[33]
Bradley Campbell has proposed a theory of genocide as a function of minority status, social segregation, low population size, and lack of visibility. Further factors include marginalization, the lack of political representation, and lower economic or social status.[34]
In the latter part of the 20th century, the genocide of Indigenous peoples attracted more attention from the international community, including scholars and human rights organizations.[35]
Rationalization
American academic and activist Gregory Stanton has described ten stages of genocide, in which the ninth stage is extermination and the tenth is denial. During this final stage, Stanton argues that individuals and government may "deny that these crimes meet the definition of genocide", "question whether intent to destroy a group can be proven", and "often blame what happened on the victims".[36] The concept of denial as the final stage of genocide has been discussed in more detail in the 2021 textbook Denial: The Final Stage of Genocide?[37] Stanton also indicates that stages often co-occur; the first eight stages include classification, symbolization, discrimination, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, and persecution.[36] Early denial of genocide often occurred through these stages. For instance, American historian David Stannard explained that European colonizers "purposefully and systematically dehumaniz[ed] the people they were exterminating".[38]
Further, South African sociologist Leo Kuper has described denial as a routine defense, referring to it as a consequence of the Genocide Convention. He argues that denial has become more prevalent because genocide is considered "an international crime with potentially significant sanctions by way of punishment, claims for reparation, and restitution of territorial rights".[39]
Denial examples
According to Robert K. Hitchcock, editor of Modern Genocide, "the destruction of Indigenous peoples and their cultures has been a policy of many of the world's governments, although most government spokespersons argue that the disappearance or disruption of Indigenous societies was not purposeful but rather occurred inadvertently."[40] Despite this, in 2013, Colin Leach et al. found that perpetrator groups denied their group's responsibility, showed low levels of collective guilt, and had low support for reparation policies.[41]
North America
According to a survey conducted between 2016 and 2018, "36% of Americans almost certainly believe that the United States is guilty of committing genocide against Native Americans."[42] Indigenous author Michelle A. Stanley writes that "Indigenous genocide is largely denied, erased, relegated to the distant past, or presented as inevitable". She writes that Indigenous genocide is depicted broadly, without touching on the pattern of a series of separate genocides against multiple distinct tribal nations.[42] Seneca scholar Melissa Michal Slocum said that Native American genocide has been denied by the United States.[43]
According to North American Genocides, edited by Clarke et al., many American scholars deny Indigenous genocide in the Americas, despite agreement from international scholars that it occurred.[44] American historian Ned Blackhawk said that nationalist historiographies have been forms of denial that erase the history of destruction of European colonial expansion. Blackhawk said that near consensus has emerged that genocide against some Indigenous peoples took place in North America following colonization.[45]
Some historians do not consider that genocide of Indigenous peoples took place in North America, including James Axtell, Robert Utley, William Rubinstein, Guenter Lewy and Gary Anderson, although some call the atrocities another name such as ethnic cleansing.[46][47] Other scholars, including Elazar Barkan and Walter L. Hixson agree with the sentiment that those in the Americas deny the genocide of the regions' Indigenous populations.[48][49]
On the Columbus Quincentenary, American historian David Stannard highlighted the numerous celebrations and festivities surrounding Columbus alongside "American and European denials of culpability for the most thoroughgoing genocide in the history of the world have assumed a new guise."[50] A similar issue arose when Lynne Cheney, then chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, rejected a television project celebrating the anniversary, highlighted the proposal's use of the word "genocide". Cheney stated, "We might be interested in funding a film that debated that issue, but we are not about to fund a film that asserts it. Columbus was guilty of many sins, but he was not Hitler."[51]
This particular issue, the comparison to The Holocaust, has been raised by others, as well, with American historian David Stannard pointing to The Holocaust's prominent position in the public eye compared to the global ignorance of atrocities in the Americas.[52]
Howard Zinn,[53] Susan Cameron,[54] and Kirsten Dyck[55] have claimed that in American history textbooks, America's history of abuse against Indigenous peoples is mostly ignored or presented from the state's point of view.
In The Other Slavery, American historian Andrés Reséndez compares the thousands of books written about the slavery of Africans to the couple dozen books about Indigenous slavery and argues that the latter has "almost completely erased from our historical memory". He argues that African slavery is more widely accepted because it was legalized and therefore recorded, whereas Indigenous slavery was largely illegal; further, because African slaves needed to be transported, settlers kept record of ship manifests.[56]
Canadian political scientist Adam Jones has said that the historical revisionism has been so thorough that in some cases, the Americas have been depicted as unpopulated before European colonization.[57]
Other claims against the genocide of Indigenous people of the Americas deal with the natural superiority of the European colonizers. For instance, Stannard has argued that British journalist Christopher Hitchens's 1992 essay, "Minority Report", supported social Darwinism.[58]
California
J. Ross Browne, "Protecting the Settlers". 1861. This image accompanied an article by Browne in which he described the killing of Yuki people at Round Valley, California.
Robert K. Hitchcock says that during the California genocide, "California state legislators, administrators, Indian agents, and townspeople denied that a genocide was happening."[46]
Continuing into the 21st century, Benjamin Madley has stated that the California genocide has "too often concealed, denied, or suppressed".[47] This can be evidenced via social science and history textbooks approved by the California Department of Education that ignore the history of this genocide.[59][60][61]
In 2015, English writer and political activist George Monbiot argued that when the Catholic Church canonized 18th-century Christian missionary Junípero Serra, who "founded the system of labour camps that expedited California's cultural genocide", they were, in effect, denying the genocide.[62][63]
Canada
Canada has received many criticisms regarding its denial of participation in Indigenous genocide, particularly in relation to the Canadian Indian residential school system, and the long-term effects of both residential schooling and colonization more generally.[64]
The Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) received criticism upon its opening in 2014 because it did not use the term genocide to describe the history of colonialism in Canada.[65] Two years after its opening, Rita K. Dhamoon critiqued the museum's focus on the Holocaust, frame of residential schools as assimilationist and not genocidal, and denial of the genocidal nature of settler colonialism.[66] In 2019, the museum reversed its policy and officially recognizes genocide of Indigenous peoples in Canada in its content.[67]
In 2021, Senator Lynn Beyak generated controversy and was accused of genocide denial in the Canadian Indian residential school system after she voiced disapproval of the final Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada report, saying that it had omitted the positives of the schools.[68][69][70] Similarly, former Conservative Party leader Erin O'Toole said that the residential school system educated Indigenous children,[71] but then changed his view: "The system was intended to remove children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions, and cultures". Former newspaper publisher Conrad Black and others have also been accused of denial.[83]
In 2022, the Canadian government announced that it would pay C$31.5 billion to reform the foster care system and compensate Indigenous families for its deficiencies.[91] The government has acknowledged the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in the foster care system.[92]
In 2023, politician Leah Gazan has stated that she wants to criminalize the denial of genocide in residential schools.[93]Scouts Canada also issued an apology for "its role in the eradication of First Nation, Inuit and Metis people for more than a century".[94]
South America
Atrocities against the Cinta Larga tribe in Brazil were exposed in the Figueiredo report of 1967. After shooting the head off her baby, the killers cut the mother in half. Survival
According to Nadia Rubaii, the mass atrocities in Latin America have been less visible internationally for three reasons:[95]
Victim groups have frequently been attacked for their ideological or political differences, leading the international community to consider such atrocities as domestic political issues.
Perpetrators who damage ecosystems and means of subsistence argue that they are seeking economic development for common benefit and deny the intention to inflict any harm.
If there is academic attention to the topic, it is documented in Spanish not in English.
In Argentina, the Conquest of the Desert had been interpreted in war terms, silencing the fact of Indigenous genocide.[96][97] In the case of the Napalmi massacre, a judge concluded that the massacre took place in a context of genocide.[98][99] According to Walter Delrio et al. in 2010, "The state still denies the existence of genocide and the existence of crimes against humanity with respect to Indigenous peoples."[100]
South African sociologist and genocide scholar Leo Kuper says that genocide has been denied in Paraguay and Brazil on the basis of alleged lack of intent to destroy.[101] For instance, the case of the Ache in Paraguay has been legally determined to be a case of political persecution.[102]
The Herero genocide is described as the first genocide of the 20th century.[108][109] In 2012, German politician Uwe Kekeritz said Germany needed to move away from "a culture of denial".[110]
According to Hannah Baldry, "The Australian Government appears to have long suffered a form of 'denialism' that has consistently deprived the country's Aboriginal population of acknowledgment of the crimes perpetrated against their ancestors."[112] This includes ongoing debates about the interpretation of history, including calling Australia's national myth as an invasion or settlement.[118]
Former Prime Minister John Howard refused to apologize in the Motion of Reconciliation, claiming that the program had no genocidal intent.[122] Former Tasmanian Premier Ray Groom said that "there had been no killing in the island state".[116]
Between 1838 and 1931, Aboriginal prisoners held on Rottnest Island, Australia were held in deplorable conditions and subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment.
The Australian literary and cultural journal Quadrant has been considered "a key locus of genocide denial". They included common arguments regarding the definitional status of genocide, including the idea "that 'half castes' could not claim Aboriginal status since they were half-European" and that Indigenous people were to blame for their fate due to "their own backwardness"; other articles argued that "frontier massacres were based on misinterpreted statistics and falsehoods".[123]
Reactions
A number of states have chosen to take a firm stance against the denial of genocide by enacting laws to criminalize it. The extent of legal coverage varies from one state to another.[124]
Colonialism is the pursuing, establishing and maintaining of control and exploitation of people and of resources by a foreign group of people. The colonizer monopolizes political power and holds the conquered society and its people to be inferior to their conqueror in legal, administrative, social, cultural, or biological terms. While frequently advanced as an imperialist regime, colonialism can also take the form of settler colonialism, whereby colonial settlers invade and occupy territory to permanently replace an existing society with that of the colonizers, possibly towards a genocide of native populations.
During the Age of Discovery, a large scale colonization of the Americas, involving a number of European countries, took place primarily between the late 15th century and the early 19th century. The Norse had explored and colonized areas of Europe and the North Atlantic, colonizing Greenland and creating a short term settlement near the northern tip of Newfoundland circa 1000 AD. However, due to its long duration and importance, the later colonization by the European powers involving the continents of North America and South America is more well-known.
Western European colonialism and colonization is the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over other societies and territories, founding a colony, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically. For example, colonial policies, such as the type of rule implemented, the nature of investments, and identity of the colonizers, are cited as impacting postcolonial states. Examination of the state-building process, economic development, and cultural norms and mores shows the direct and indirect consequences of colonialism on the postcolonial states.
A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present (1997) is a book which was written by Ward Churchill. A Little Matter of Genocide surveys ethnic cleansing from 1492 to the present. Churchill compares the treatment of North American Indians to historical instances of genocide by communists in Cambodia, Turks against Armenians, and Europeans against the Gypsies, as well as Nazis against the Poles and Jews.
The genocide of Indigenous peoples, colonial genocide, or settler genocide is the intentional elimination of Indigenous peoples as a part of the process of colonialism.
Settler colonialism occurs when colonizers and settlers invade and occupy territory to permanently replace the existing society with the society of the colonizers.
The California genocide was a series of systematized killings of thousands of Indigenous peoples of California by United States government agents and private citizens in the 19th century. It began following the American Conquest of California from Mexico, and the influx of settlers due to the California Gold Rush, which accelerated the decline of the Indigenous population of California. Between 1846 and 1873, it is estimated that non-Natives killed between 9,492 and 16,094 California Natives. In addition, between several hundred and several thousand California Natives were starved or worked to death. Acts of enslavement, kidnapping, rape, child separation and forced displacement were widespread. These acts were encouraged, tolerated, and carried out by state authorities and private militias.
Settler colonialism in Canada is the continuation and the results of the colonization of the assets of the Indigenous peoples in Canada. As colonization progressed, the Indigenous peoples were subject to policies of forced assimilation and cultural genocide. The policies signed many of which were designed to both allowed stable houses. Governments in Canada in many cases ignored or chose to deny the aboriginal title of the First Nations. The traditional governance of many of the First Nations was replaced with government-imposed structures. Many of the Indigenous cultural practices were banned. First Nation's people status and rights were less than that of settlers. The impact of colonization on Canada can be seen in its culture, history, politics, laws, and legislatures.
The connection between colonialism and genocide has been explored in academic research. According to historian Patrick Wolfe, "[t]he question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism." Historians have commented that although colonialism does not necessarily directly involve genocide, research suggests that the two share a connection.
Cultural genocide in the United States has manifested through the physical and cultural disintegration of the indigenous people by forcing them to attend boarding schools along with the discrimination against them due to the instrumental use of the law. Cultural genocide comprises the dismantling of a culture and the de-socializing of a people.
Zionism has been described as a form of settler colonialism in relation to the region of Palestine and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Many of the fathers of Zionism themselves described it as colonialism, such as Vladimir Jabotinsky, who said "Zionism is a colonization adventure."
American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World is a multidisciplinary book about the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and colonial history written by American scholar and historian David Stannard.
Colonial sexual violence in North America refers to the systems put in place by Europeans through settler colonialism that enforces gender divides, support sexual exploitation, and use patriarchy as a means to control the Indigenous population. These systems not only affected men, women, and two-spirit people differently, but disrupted traditional ways of living in a negative manner which thus removed their identity. As settler colonialism is an ongoing effort, these systems have remained in place and continue to perpetrate harm today as seen through generational trauma related to the residential school system, MMIW, and the Indian Act. Indigenous scholars emphasize the need for community healing and traditional practices to heal the collective traumas, and experiences of sexual violence, enacted through settler colonialism.
Indigenous response to colonialism has varied depending on the Indigenous group, historical period, territory, and colonial state(s) they have interacted with. Indigenous peoples have had agency in their response to colonialism. They have employed armed resistance, diplomacy, and legal procedures. Others have fled to inhospitable, undesirable or remote territories to avoid conflict. Nevertheless, some Indigenous peoples were forced to move to reservations or reductions, and work in mines, plantations, construction, and domestic tasks. They have detribalized and culturally assimilated into colonial societies. On occasion, Indigenous peoples have formed alliances with one or more Indigenous or non-Indigenous nations. Overall, the response of Indigenous peoples to colonialism during this period has been diverse and varied in its effectiveness. Indigenous resistance has a centuries-long history that is complex and carries on into contemporary times.
Apologies to Indigenous peoples refer to apologies extended by political leaders or representatives, acting on behalf of a political entity or nation, to acknowledge and express remorse for some historical wrong.
The historiography of Indigenous genocide is the study of how these type of genocides have been documented and interpreted by historians throughout the colonial age up to today.
The destruction of Native American peoples, cultures, and languages has been characterized as genocide. Debates are ongoing as to whether the entire process and which specific periods or events meet the definitions of genocide or not. Many of these definitions focus on intent, while others focus on outcomes. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide", considered the displacement of Native Americans by European settlers as a historical example of genocide. Others, like historian Gary Anderson, contend that genocide does not accurately characterize any aspect of American history, suggesting instead that ethnic cleansing is a more appropriate term.
The Canadian genocide of the First Nations is the genocide and systematic destruction of the First Nations people and identity in Canada since its founding as a settler colonial state. Throughout the history of Canada, the Canadian government has committed what has variously been described as atrocities, crimes, and genocide, against the Indigenous peoples in Canada. The crimes which were committed by the Catholic Church and the Canadian government were recognized as a genocide by Pope Francis and the House of Commons unanimously voted to call on the federal government to recognize the residential school system as genocide.
References
↑ Hitchcock, Robert K. (2023). "Denial of Genocide of Indigenous People in the United States". In Der Matossian, Bedross (ed.). Denial of genocides in the twenty-first century. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN978-1-4962-3554-1. Genocide scholars Susan Chavez Cameron and Loan T. Phan see American Indians as having gone through the ten stages of genocide identified by Stanton. Failure to acknowledge genocide has harmful social and psychological impacts on the victims of genocide, and it leaves the perpetrators in positions of power vis-a-vis others in their societies. As Agnieszka Bienczyk-Missala points out, denial or negation relating to mass crimes consists of denying scientifically proven historical facts by deliberately concealing them and spreading false and misleading information. She goes on to say that the consequences of negationism are of ethical, legal, social, and political character.
1 2 Fontaine, Theodore (2014). Woolford, Andrew; Benvenuto, Jeff; Hinton, Alexander Laban (eds.). Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America. Duke University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctv11sn770. ISBN978-0-8223-5763-6. JSTORj.ctv11sn770. Archived from the original on 17 March 2023. Retrieved 24 December 2023. "From Lemarchand's volume, it is clear that what is remembered and what is not remembered is a political choice, producing a dominant narrative that reflects the victor's version of history while silencing dissenting voices. Building on a critical genocide studies approach, this volume seeks to contribute to this conversation by critically examining cases of genocide that have been "hidden" politically, socially, culturally, or historically in accordance with broader systems of political and social power". (p2) ...the U.S. government, for most of its existence, stated openly and frequently that its policy was to destroy Native American ways of life through forced integration, forced removal, and death. An 1881 report of the U.S. commissioner of Indian Affairs on the "Indian question" is indicative of the decades- long policy: "There is no one who has been a close observer of Indian history and the effect of contact of Indians with civilization who is not well satisfied that one of two things must eventually take place, to wit, either civilization or extermination of the Indian. Savage and civilized life cannot live and prosper on the same ground. One of the two must die." (p3) "As such it is important for the peoples of the United States and Canada to recognize their shared legacies of genocide, which have too often been hidden, ignored, forgotten, or outright denied." (p3) "After all, much of North America was swindled from Indigenous peoples through the mythical but still powerful Doctrine of Discovery, the perceived right of conquest, and deceitful treaties. Restitution for colonial genocide would thus entail returning stolen territories". (p9) "Thankfully a new generation of genocide scholarship is moving beyond these timeworn and irreconcilable divisions." (p11)"Variations of the Modoc ordeal occurred elsewhere during the conquest and colonization of Africa, Asia, Australia, and North and South America. Indigenous civilizations repeatedly resisted invaders seeking to physically annihilate them in whole or in part. Many of these catastrophes are known as wars. Yet by carefully examining the intentions and actions of colonizers and their advocates it is possible to reinterpret some of these cataclysms as both genocides and wars of resistance. The Modoc case is one of them" (p120). "Memory, remembering, forgetting, and denial are inseparable and critical junctures in the study and examination of genocide. Absence or suppression of memories is not merely a lack of acknowledgment of individual or collective experiences but can also be considered denial of a genocidal crime (p150). Erasure of historical memory and modification of historical narrative influence the perception of genocide. If it is possible to avoid conceptually blocking colonial genocides for a moment, we can consider denial in a colonial context. Perpetrators initiate and perpetuate denial" (p160).
↑ Totten, Samuel; Hitchcock, Robert K. (2011). Genocide of Indigenous Peoples: A Critical Bibliographic Review. Transaction Publishers. p.2. ISBN978-1-4128-4455-0. In Asia, for example, only one country, the Philippines, has officially adopted the term "Indigenous peoples," and established a law specifically to protect Indigenous peoples' rights. Only two countries in Africa, Burundi and Cameroon, have statements about the rights of Indigenous peoples in their constitutions.
↑ Sengar, Bina; Adjoumani, A. Mia Elise (7 March 2023). Indigenous Societies in the Post-colonial World: Responses and Resilience Through Global Perspectives. Springer Nature. p.318. ISBN978-981-19-8722-9. Archived from the original on 20 December 2023. Retrieved 12 December 2023. Indigenous populations are communities that live within, or are attached to, geographically distinct traditional habitats or ancestral territories, and who identify themselves as being part of a distinct cultural group, descended from groups present in the area before modern states were created and current borders defined. They generally maintain cultural and social identities, and social, economic, cultural and political institutions, separate from the mainstream or dominant society or culture.
↑ Bartrop, Paul R. (2012). "Punitive Expeditions and Massacres: Gippsland, Colorado, and the Question of Genocide". In Moses, A. Dirk (ed.). Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History. Vol.6 (1ed.). Berghahn Books. pp.194–214. doi:10.2307/j.ctt9qdg7m. ISBN978-1-57181-411-1. JSTORj.ctt9qdg7m. S2CID265474265. Archived from the original on 16 March 2023. Retrieved 24 December 2023. Much colonization proceeded without genocidal conflict ... But the effects of colonial settlement were quite variable, dependent on a variety of factors, such as the number of settlers, the forms of the colonizing economy and competition for productive resources, policies of the colonizing power, and attitudes to intermarriage or concubinage ... Some of the annihilations of indigenous peoples arose not so much by deliberate act, but in the course of what may be described as a genocidal process: massacres, appropriation of land, introduction of diseases, and arduous conditions of labor.
↑ Maybury-Lewis, David (15 August 2002). "Genocide against Indigenous Peoples". In Alexander Laban, Alexander (ed.). Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide. University of California Press. p.47. ISBN978-0-520-23029-3. Archived from the original on 5 December 2023. Retrieved 2 December 2023. Imperialist genocide against indigenous peoples was thus of two kinds. It was practiced in order to clear lands that invading settlers wished to occupy. It was also practiced as part of a strategy to seize and coerce labor that the settlers could not or would not obtain by less drastic means.
↑ Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne (2014). An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. Beacon Press. p.9. ISBN978-0-8070-0041-0. Settler colonialism is inherently genocidal in terms of the genocide convention. In the case of the British North American colonies and the United States, not only extermination and removal were practiced but also the disappearing of the prior existence of Indigenous peoples, and this continues to be perpetuated in local histories.
↑ Ginzberg, Eitan (4 September 2020). "Genocide and the Hispanic-American Dilemma". Genocide Studies and Prevention. 14 (2): 122–152. doi:10.5038/1911-9933.14.2.1666. ISSN1911-0359. Archived from the original on 8 December 2023. Retrieved 8 December 2023. The testimonies on which Raphael Lemkin relied led him to conclude that the 'radical accumulation' of the causes of oppression, and the physical, psychological, and spiritual impairment of the Indians–war, so-called 'pacification', robbery, enslavement, exploitation, invasions, feelings of worthlessness, political delegitimization, systematic religious conversion, cultural annihilation, uprooting and displacement–overwhelmed the Indians' entire array of self-protective norms and measures, and ultimately broke their spirits.
↑ Rosenbaum, Ron (March 2013). "The Shocking Savagery of America's Early History". Smithsonian Magazine. Archived from the original on 15 April 2023. Retrieved 15 April 2023. It's a grand drama in which the glimmers of enlightenment barely survive the savagery, what Yeats called "the blood-dimmed tide", the brutal establishment of slavery, the race wars with the original inhabitants that Bailyn is not afraid to call "genocidal", the full, horrifying details of which have virtually been erased.
↑ Gigoux, Carlos (2 January 2022). ""Condemned to Disappear": Indigenous Genocide in Tierra del Fuego". Journal of Genocide Research. 24 (1): 1–22. doi:10.1080/14623528.2020.1853359. ISSN1462-3528. S2CID230565181. Archived from the original on 2 October 2023. Retrieved 18 September 2023. Nation state building, competing sovereign claims, the capitalist drive for land and resources fuelled by international market forces and prevalent racial ideologies can be identified as major structural factors that leads to the dispossession of indigenous lands and in many cases to the physical destruction of indigenous peoples. In this context settler colonial studies continues to work towards a theory of settler colonialism.
↑ "Genocide Background". United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. Archived from the original on 17 April 2023.
↑ White, Richard (17 August 2016). "Naming America's Own Genocide". Archived from the original on 15 January 2023. Retrieved 29 March 2023. In defining genocide, Madley relies on the criteria of the United Nations Genocide Convention, which has served as the basis for the genocide trials of defendants from Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and has been employed at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
↑ Charny, Israel W. (February 1997). "Toward a Generic Definition of Genocide". In Andreopoulos, George J. (ed.). Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions. University of Pennsylvania Press. pp.74–76. ISBN978-0-8122-1616-5. Charny offeres a definition of colonial genocide: "Genocide that is undertaken or even allowed in the course of or incidental to the purposes of achieving a goal of colonization or development of a territory belonging to an indigenous people, or any other consolidation of political or economic power through mass killing of those perceived to be standing in the way."{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
↑ Herman, Edward S.; Chomsky, Noam (1988). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books. p.37. ISBN978-0-394-54926-2.
↑ Campbell, Bradley (June 2009). "Genocide as Social Control". Sociological Theory. 27 (2): 150–172. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9558.2009.01341.x. ISSN0735-2751. Archived from the original on 12 December 2022. Retrieved 24 December 2023. [G]enocide varies directly with immobility, cultural distance, relational distance, functional independence, and inequality; and it is greater in a downward direction than in an upward or lateral direction. This theory of genocide can be applied to numerous genocides throughout history, and it is capable of ordering much of the known variation in genocide - such as when and where it occurs, how severe it is, and who participates.
↑ Jones, Adam (2010). Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction. Routledge. p.224. ISBN978-1-136-93797-2.
↑ Stannard, David E. (1993). American Holocaust: the conquest of the New World. Internet Archive. New York: Oxford University Press. p.218. ISBN978-0-19-508557-0. If the assertions of Ortiz and others regarding the habits of the Indians were fabrications, they were not fabrications without design. From the Spaniards' enumerations of what they claimed were the disgusting food customs of the Indians (including cannibalism, but also the consumption of insects and other items regarded as unfit for human diets) to the Indians' supposed nakedness and absence of agriculture, their sexual deviance and licentiousness, their brutish ignorance, their lack of advanced weaponry and iron, and their irremediable idolatry, the conquering Europeans were purposefully and systematically dehumanizing the people they were exterminating.
↑ Blackhawk, Ned; Kiernan, Ben; Madley, Benjamin; Taylor, Rebe, eds. (2023). Genocide in the Indigenous, Early Modern and Imperial Worlds, from c.1535 to World War One. Pp 38,44. The Cambridge World History of Genocide. Vol. II. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-48643-9.
1 2 Hitchcock, Robert K. (2023). "Denial of Genocide of Indigenous People in the United States". In Der Matossian, Bedross (ed.). Denial of genocides in the twenty-first century. [Lincoln]: University of Nebraska Press. pp.33, 35, 36, 43, 44, 46, 47. ISBN978-1-4962-3554-1. OCLC1374189062. Genocide scholars Susan Chavez Cameron and Loan T. Phan see American Indians as having gone through the ten stages of genocide identified by Stanton. Failure to acknowledge genocide has harmful social and psychological impacts on the victims of genocide, and it leaves the perpetrators in positions of power vis-a-vis others in their societies. As Agnieszka Bienczyk-Missala points out, denial or negation relating to mass crimes consists of denying scientifically proven historical facts by deliberately concealing them and spreading false and misleading information. She goes on to say that the consequences of negationism are of ethical, legal, social, and political character.
↑ Barkan, Elazar (2003). "Chapter 6. Genocides of Indigenous Peoples". In Gellately, Robert; Kiernan, Ben (eds.). The specter of genocide: mass murder in historical perspective. Internet Archive. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp.131, 138–139. ISBN978-0-521-82063-9. The United States had its own long-standing boarding schools for Native American children with a similar extent of abuse. However, the term Education for Extinction is yet to capture public attention as a human rights issue. The American indigenous dilemma is far less central to U.S. mainstream politics than in any of the other ex-British colonies. The notion of genocide, while warranted as much or more than in those other countries, is still confined to radical writers. It is intriguing, indeed, that no mainstream American historians have written about the fate of the Native Americans as genocide. (p131) Thus, the European guilt was at least a collective myopia, a deep failure to acknowledge the equality of indigenous people and the vast number and varied array of atrocities and genocides inflicted upon them. More likely this has been a willful denial of responsibility and guilt, hiding behind the structural explanation of biological agents. It is time to reverse course and acknowledge the responsibility and extent of the destruction purposefully inflicted by colonialism, although not upon all indigenous peoples, and not in similar fashion. (p138-139)
↑ Hixson, Walter L. (5 December 2013). American Settler Colonialism: A History (1sted.). New York: Springer. pp.8, 11, 12, 62. ISBN978-1-137-37426-4. Archived from the original on 22 December 2023. Retrieved 2 December 2023. Historical distortion and denial are endemic to settler colonies. In order for the settler colony to establish a collective usable past, legitimating stories must be created and persistently affirmed as a means of naturalizing a new historical narrative. A national mythology displaces the indigenous past...Becoming the indigene required not only cleansing of the land, either through killing or removing, but sanitizing the historical record as well.
↑ Stannard, David E. (1992). "Genocide in the Americas". The Nation. 255 (12): 430–434.
↑ Stannard, David (2009). Rosenbaum, Alan S; Charny, Israel W (eds.). Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide. Abingdon, England: Routledge. pp.330–331. doi:10.4324/9780429495137. ISBN978-0-8133-3686-2. The willful maintenance of public ignorance regarding the genocidal and racist horrors against indigenous peoples that have been and are being perpetrated by many nations of the Western Hemisphere, including the United States—which contributes to the construction of a museum to commemorate genocide only if the killing occurred half a world away—is consciously aided and abetted and legitimized by the actions of the Jewish uniqueness advocates we have been discussing....and so all people of conscience must be on guard against Holocaust deniers who, in many cases, would like nothing better than to see mass violence against Jews start again. By that same token, however, as we consider the terrible history and the ongoing campaigns of genocide against the indigenous inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere...
↑ Zinn, Howard (2005). A People's History of the United States. Internet Archive. HarperPerennial Modern Classics. ISBN978-0-06-083865-2. From first grade to graduate school, I was given no inkling that the landing of Christopher Columbus in the New World initiated a genocide, in which the indigenous population of Hispaniola was annihilated. Or that this was just the first stage of what was presented as a benign expansion of the new nation (Louisiana "Purchase," Florida "Purchase," Mexican "Cession"), but which involved the violent expulsion of Indians, accompanied by unspeakable atrocities, from every square mile of the continent, until there was nothing to do with them but herd them into reservations. (Afterword)
↑ Dyck, Kirsten. (2016) Confronting genocide denial in US history textbooks. In History Can Bite : History Education in Divided and Postwar Societies. Denise Bentrovato / Karina V. Korostelina / Martina Schulze (eds.) pp 201. V&R unipres. "Minimizing the violence of the European conquest, as some of these textbook authors do, is simply genocide denial."
↑ Jones, Adam (2008). Crimes Against Humanity: a Beginner's Guide. Oxford: Oneworld. p.33. ISBN9781851686018. Through a devastating combination of genocidal massacre, disease, malnutrition, and slave labor, perhaps ninety-five percent of the indigenous population of the Americas was wiped out following the arrival of Spanish, Portuguese, British, French, Danish, Dutch, and Russian forces. In some places, such as Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), the obliteration of the native population – partly purposive, partly unexpected via infectious disease – was nearly total. The killing was rationalized by myths of civilizational superiority and the inevitability of indigenous peoples' disappearance. Sometimes the historical revisionism was so radical as to depict colonized territories as virgin lands, effectively free of indigenous populations at the time of Western 'discovery'.
↑ Stannard, David (2009). Rosenbaum, Alan S; Charny, Israel W (eds.). Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide. Abingdon, England: Routledge. p.298. doi:10.4324/9780429495137. ISBN978-0-8133-3686-2. To Hitchens, anyone who refused to join him in celebrating with "great vim and gusto" the annihilation of the native peoples of the Americas was (in his words) self-hating, ridiculous, ignorant, and sinister. People who regard critically the genocide that was carried out in America's past, Hitchens continued, are simply reactionary since such grossly inhuman atrocities "happen to be the way history is made". And thus "to complain about them is as empty as complaint about climatic, geological or tectonic shift". Moreover, he added, such violence is worth glorifying since it more often than not has been for the long-term betterment of humankind, as in the United States today, where the extermination of the Native Americans has brought about "a nearly boundless epoch of opportunity and innovation".
↑ Fenelon, James V.; Trafzer, Clifford E. (4 December 2013). "From Colonialism to Denial of California Genocide to Misrepresentations: Special Issue on Indigenous Struggles in the Americas". American Behavioral Scientist. 58 (1): 3–29. doi:10.1177/0002764213495045. S2CID145377834.
↑ Logan, Tricia E. (2014). "Memory, Erasure, and National Myth". In Woolford, Andrew (ed.). Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America. Duke University Press. p.149. doi:10.2307/j.ctv11sn770. ISBN978-0-8223-5763-6. JSTORj.ctv11sn770. Canada, a country with oft-recounted histories of Indigenous origins and colonial legacies, still maintains a memory block in terms of the atrocities it committed to build the Canadian state. There is nothing more comforting in a colonial history of nation-building than an erasure or denial of the true costs of colonial gains. The comforting narrative becomes the dominant and publicly consumed narrative.
↑ Kaur Dhamoon, Rita (March 2016). "Re-presenting Genocide: The Canadian Museum of Human Rights and Settler Colonial Power". Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. 1 (1): 5–30. doi:10.1017/rep.2015.4. I contend that the curatorial decision of the CMHR to not use the label of genocide in the title of the core gallery on Indigenous perspectives was specifically a form of interpretive denial.
↑ MacDonald, David B. (2015). "Canada's history wars: indigenous genocide and public memory in the United States, Australia and Canada". Journal of Genocide Research. 17 (4): 411–431. doi:10.1080/14623528.2015.1096583. S2CID74512843.
↑ Kuper, Leo (1982). Genocide: its political use in the twentieth century. Internet Archive. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp.33–34. ISBN978-0-300-02795-2. In contemporary extra-judicial discussions of allegations of genocide, the question of intent has become a controversial issue, providing a ready basis for denial of guilt.
↑ Tomuschat, Christian (2001). "Clarification Commission in Guatemala". Human Rights Quarterly. 23 (2): 233–258. doi:10.1353/hrq.2001.0025. ISSN0275-0392. JSTOR4489334. S2CID143885550. The coordinator of the Guatemalan Commission for Historical (also the author of this article) held the responsibility of presenting the main findings of the report to the public. For the first time in the history of the country, an official body stated that, according to its judgment, genocide had been perpetrated at certain times in certain places during the civil war.
1 2 Manne, Robert (18 November 2014). "In Denial, The stolen generations and the Right". Quarterly Essay. Archived from the original on 1 April 2023. Retrieved 1 April 2023. ...the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, seized his opportunity. He told a commercial radio audience in Melbourne that the revelation that Lowitja O'Donoghue was not stolen was a "highly significant" fact, one, he implied, which vindicated his government's famous denial of the existence of the stolen generations and his even more famous refusal to apologize... It was the magazine Quadrant, however, under the editorship of Padraic McGuinness, that marshalled the troops and galvanised the disparate voices of opposition to Bringing them home into what amounted to a serious and effective political campaign.
1 2 Lemarchand, Rene (2011). Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial, and Memory. University of Pennsylvania Press. pp.12, 88. doi:10.2307/j.ctt3fhnm9. ISBN978-0-8122-2263-0. JSTORj.ctt3fhnm9. S2CID266296715. The colonial genocide perpetrated against Aborigines produced within the colonial society a deep and enduring ambiguity about the fate of the original Aborigines and the role of colonists in generating that fate. This ambiguity consisted of a deep-seated moral unease about what had occurred and a culture of denial that was expressed in numerous ways, but most obviously in the myth of inevitable extinction.
↑ [119][115][120] Former Labour Minister Gary Jones also portrayed colonialism as a gift to Indigenous nations. Australian Aboriginal senator, Jana Stewart, called such views a denial of First Nations' historical experiences.[121]
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