American Genocide

             According to the U.N., genocide occurs when at least one of the following occurs: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. In the case of the Native Americans, all of these have occurred. The genocide of the Native Americans started when Christopher Columbus came to the new world, and it did not end until the 20th century.
             When Christopher Columbus came back to America in 1493, he brought 17 ships full of white men. He forced slavery upon the Taino people, and the many who refused were executed. After merely three years of slavery and mass-executions, five million Taino were dead. Fifty years later, in the 1540s there were only about 200 of the Taino people left living in the Caribbean, according to a Spanish census. The Spanish historian, Las Casas, wrote that the Taino people were hung in masses, roasted on spits, and some of the children were hacked up into pieces and given as dog food.
             Biological warfare was also used to wipe out the Native American population. British Agents recovered blankets that had been used by smallpox victims and handed them over to members of the Mingo, Delaware, Shawnee, and other Ohio River nations. Over 100 thousand members of these tribes died in direct correlation with the contaminated blankets. The U.S. army saw how well these worked, and used the same method on the Plains tribal population, and were just as successful as the British.
             The colonists and settlers of America saw the Native Americans as inferior compared to themselves. Most believed that the only way they could live together was if the Natives assimilated to their own culture. Boarding schools were set up where they forced you...

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American Genocide. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 08:07, March 29, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/98621.html