American Holocaust: The Destruction of America's Native Peoples

tonight speaker will be introduced by professor Daniel Zener he's the Holland McTeer professor of history of Vanderbilt Professor Osler is the author of Indian settlers and slaves in a frontier exchange economy the Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 it's my pleasure to call upon Professor Osler to introduce our guest speaker thank you show tonight speaker in Vanderbilt University's Holocaust lecture series is David a standard chair of the American Studies department at the University of Hawaii in 1992 professor standard published a book entitled American Holocaust Columbus and the conquest of the new world which undoubtedly qualifies him for this year's theme over sites of memory while speakers and writers across this nation were celebrating the so-called discovery of America with token recognition of Native Americans suffering and loss standard had the audacity to show how Columbus's voyages actually launched the violent destruction of indigenous peoples for centuries to come while American Holocaust is perhaps standards best-known book to date his publication record reflects a career that is as versatile as it is provocative David standard received his PhD in American Studies from Yale University in 1975 only two years later his first book was published in the Puritan way of death a study in religion culture and social change Stannard took on nothing less than the theology of colonial New Englanders then in 1980 came his next book shrinking history on Freud and the failure of psycho history where he confronted this time the efficacy of psychoanalysis as well as that of psycho history published in 1989 before the horror the population of Hawaii on the eve of Western contact is a sophisticated demographic analysis of the depopulation of native hawaiians caused by European which had been underestimated and even minimized for all too long in American Holocaust appearing three years later professor standard masterfully synthesized huge amounts of historical and archaeological material that had already been revising what we know and how we think about conquest of the Americas but it took someone with extraordinary vision and passion to translate all of that scholarship into a compelling narrative with contemporary significance since then another book written by standard further demonstrated the wide range of his inquiry in honor of killing how the infamous Massey affair transformed Hawaii published in 2005 he explored a relatively unknown murder case in order to examine white supremacy in mid 20th century America and to explain how resistance against it shaped a political revolution in Hawaii David standard has taught at Yale University Stanford University and the University of Colorado and has been on the faculty of the University of Hawaii since 1979 he is the recipient of many honors and awards including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Council of learned societies throughout his bold ventures into comparing and connecting the most horrible of human experiences professor standard has impressively endured turf wars with early American historians from my field as well as Jewish Holocaust scholars among others in my own teaching of American Indian history I emphasize how although teetering on the brink of total destruction in different places at different times American Indians have managed to survive disease defeat disdain and despair by preserving their cultural traditions even political autonomy in some cases and their continuing struggles against impoverishment and marginalization against assimilation ISM and racism hold great significance in American history as well as in global history but it takes a scholar like David Standard to enrich what he calls our necessary comprehension as he wrote in the preface to American Holocaust all the ongoing violence against the world's indigenous people in whatever form as well as the native peoples various forms of resistance to that violence will persist beyond our full understanding and beyond our ability to engage and you mainly come to grips with it until we are able to comprehend the magnitude and the causes of the human destruction that virtually consumed the people of the Americas and other people and others subsequently colonised parts of the globe please join me in welcoming professor David Standard [Applause] well Thank You Daniel that's the most extraordinary introduction I think I've ever had not only is it wonderfully generous but it's so complete I had almost forgotten about some of those things that I wrote it a long time ago let me take a quick for para Tory sip of water so I don't have to do it so much while I'm talking it's good to be here despite the weather I'm very different from the world that I live in I was telling Daniel and Shia bear that earlier that I had had to do some research for a book I'm working on now and so I had planned this trip with a first stop in Madison Wisconsin where I had to go to the archives to look at some stuff because I figured Madison will be cold by this time and it would be warm there and I sort of worked my way to the south where it would be warm and Madison was beautifully warm and here I am I guess we could be in Philadelphia I don't know but anyway um again thank you very much and thank all of you for being here last spring Shaya bear called to ask me if I might be interested in speaking at Vanderbilt's holocaust lecture series this fall I said that I would be honored and we then discussed possible topics he suggested that I revisit a book that I had published 16 years ago a book that you've just heard about entitled American Holocaust well 16 years is a long time so I asked Shia what specifically he was looking for he said he thought I should address some other things what he called the controversial nature of the book's title specifically my use of the word Holocaust to describe the destruction of tens of millions of lives in North and South America that occurred as a consequence of European and American conquest and settlement between the 15th and the 19th centuries I agreed and then after we hung up I recalled that the exact same question first came up almost 20 years ago almost exactly 20 years ago in fact in the fall of 1988 when I sat down over lunch with my editor at Oxford University Press to discuss their publishing that same book although at the time it was nothing more than a 10 or 15 page proposal Oxford had published two of my previous books and my editor Sheldon Meyer told me he was eager to publish this one as well the only problem he said might be my tentative title American Holocaust I told Sheldon that I wasn't insistent on title it was one of several that I had in mind although it did seem to me to be appropriate as he knew I was just then finishing a monograph that you've just heard about it I called before the horror a monograph for another publisher on the massive population collapse suffered by Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders in the wake of European and American contact and colonization those demographic disasters had been the result almost entirely of introduced disease in researching that book I had of necessity done some comparative work on the conquest of the Americas focusing especially on the devastating impact of introduced diseases such as smallpox influenza measles mumps and much more among American Indian populations with no previous exposure to them what I inadvertently had found however was much more disturbing and that was the horrifying level of deliberate and widespread mistreatment enslavement ethnic cleansing an outright mass slaughter of native peoples that was recorded on page after page in volume after volume of the settlers own historical recollections and records to me it appeared to be nothing less than a Holocaust and that was what I now wanted to write about in this new book but to make this already too long story a little bit shorter Sheldon Meier and I agreed to sign a book contract that day with the understanding that the title would be subject to negotiation once the work was complete three years later as scheduled I submitted the man you script in a cover letter I listed some possible alternative titles a week or so later I received a phone call from Sheldon a letter was on its way he said detailing some suggested changes in the manuscript but one thing was settled the title would be American Holocaust there was no question he said that what I had described did indeed constitute a Holocaust I'd like to add something here a little digression because that probably isn't sufficient for some of you I would think and what I'd like to do is talk a little bit about something that I think was probably implicit in my conversation with Sheldon which is why we didn't pursue it but something that addresses Jaya's question to me more directly Holocaust is a very old word dating back to at least the 13th century and originally meaning a sacrifice consumed by fire or a burnt offering later around the 15th century it began taking on a more general and secular meaning specifically a great slaughter or sacrifice thus in the early 16th century the famous Spanish friar Bartolome de las casas used the word Holocaust to describe the Spaniards ongoing destruction of immense numbers of native people in the Caribbean and Latin America Holocaust also was used on various occasions from the 16th through the 18th centuries in reference to the massacres of Irish civilians by English soldiers and colonists and among other instances in the late 19th century the word Holocaust appeared in the New York Times headline above a story describing the slaughter of more than 5,000 Armenians in eastern Turkey part of an ongoing mass killing campaign their Holocaust again appeared repeatedly during World War two as historian Peter Novick has observed in reference and I'm quoting of ik2 the totality of destruction wrought by the axis not to the special fate of the Jews in fact Novick points out only in the 1960s in the aftermath of the trial in Israel of the Nazi criminal Aikman did english-language publications begin referring to the Holocaust a loosely translated reference to the Hebrew word sha like most people I commonly refer and speaking and writing to the Holocaust with exclusive reference to the slaughter of 6 million Jews in the Nazis massive extermination campaign but I don't believe it makes sense to expect the word Holocaust suddenly to disappear from the English language following World War 2 except with reference to the Nazi Judea side by this same logic we should be prohibited from using the word calamity except with reference to the Armenian Genocide or the 19th century Irish Famine each of which killed at least a million people and Eve each of which has been designated in capital letters and in quotes the great calamity by their victims the same logic would suggest that we strike the word devouring from everyday speech since that is the English translation of paramus the capitalized drama word for the genocide perpetrated against gypsies by the Nazis other examples of genocide victims using a particular word to memorialize their suffering of course abound it just doesn't make sense to banish a word from everyday usage because one group or another has adopted it in reference to their victimization and no doubt that's why my use of the word Holocaust not the Holocaust and referring to the destruction of the indigenous peoples in the Americas actually was very little remarked upon following the publication of my book much more controversial was my use of another word and that word was genocide one of the reasons that became controversial is that by employing it I was joining an ongoing debate about the uniqueness of the Holocaust I'll talk about that debate and I actually I should as I'm side here I didn't I'd really didn't discuss that very thoroughly in American Holocaust but I did in a subsequent lengthy essay which I'll get to later I'll talk about that debate the uniqueness debate shortly but first it's important to have some sense of why many people who knew nothing about that debate were still instantly resistant to my use of the word the word genocide American Holocaust was published on Columbus Day 1992 earlier that same year Oxford University Press also published a book by the prominent literary scholar and cultural critic Jane Tompkins then of Duke University her book was entitled West of everything with the West referring to the American West it was a sweeping and a wide-ranging book that included discussions of women in the West white women at least popular Western fiction Buffalo Bill and much else even had a separate chapter on horses another separate chapter on cattle only one thing was missing Indians the native people of the West how could that happen Tompkins addressed the question in her preface I forgot is what she wrote that's what she said I forgot although to be fair she did express regret for forgetting as she put it and I'm quoting her the Indians had been decimated by disease removal and conquest and now I had ignored them so she wrote I cried and then she returned to putting the final touches on her manuscript I don't recount this story to be critical of Jane Tompkins but rather to suggest that her self-confessed memory loss was representative and in some ways perhaps symbolic of the attitudes of most Americans and understandably so that's the way it's supposed to be consider this in the late 1940s following almost three centuries of colonial and then federal assaults on Indians from mass murder land confiscation ethnic cleansing by way of forced removal and then confinement of the small remnant of survivors to what were often barren enclaves known as reservations the American government decided to establish an Indian policy it officially called liquidation when some people pointed out that in the immediate aftermath of World War two that term might suggest unsavory connotations the government changed it to termination whatever the allegedly fine distinction between those two words the specific words themselves don't matter either one was fully appropriate to what was planned the idea behind the new policy was to extinguish once and for all everything that was Indian about Indians by abolishing their tribes and their treaty relationships while seizing what was left of their land it was to be an extermination campaign not one aimed at individual lives but at the entirety of these indigenous peoples greatly varied and distinctive ethnicities nationalities cultures and religions all of which are tied to tribal identities and ancestral land bases the Indians of course resisted this extermination campaign just as they had resisted invasion and conquest and annihilation for centuries but in just a dozen years between 1954 and 1966 when the policy itself finally was terminated more than a hundred tribes and bands had been dissolved and more than 1.3 million acres of Indian land had been taken this was on top of the countless other tribes millions of lives and two billion acres of land that had been destroyed lost or seized from Indians before the end of the 19th century so perhaps is not surprising that Jane Tompkins forgot about the Indians that was the whole idea and actually by 1992 when American Holocaust was published such forgetfulness was a comparatively benign attitude considering how many other historians and pundits preferred to figuratively dance on the Indians graves one culprit among many was someone whose name you may know because he's still writing today christopher hitchens i singled him out only because he was not at that time a predictable reactionary but was in one of his self-proclaimed leftist phases and still writing as a columnist for the nation as Columbus Day drew near Hitchens briefly acknowledged in his column that American Indians had indeed suffered as the Euro American Empire rolled over them and then he celebrated that historical fact charging that those who might lament the horrors of the Indians experience were and I'm quoting his words here self-hating ridiculous ignorant and sinister people unable to face the simple fact that the massive destruction of technologically backward peoples quote happens to be the way history is made Hitchens announced that he for one would celebrate those centuries of horror with great vim and gusto well this is an attitude with a long history and unfortunately a widespread and indeed international presence even today perhaps some of you know the name Benny Morris professor of history at ben-gurion University in Israel and a prominent author of books on the israeli-palestinian conflict a few years ago he decided to bring American Indians into that discussion in an interview with the distinguished Israeli newspaper Haaretz a piece that was entitled survival of the fittest Morris was discussing how he recently had come to justify what he openly called and who knows I'm quoting him here ethnic cleansing during the 1948 uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians to establish the Jewish state unquote after all he explained and let me quote him again you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians there are cases in which the overall final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history the high rates interviewer described Martha's words as chilling terrible hard to listen to he was shocked but he shouldn't have been murderous immorality of this sort and the racism that is routinely interlaced with it are commonly encountered in this particular intellectual territory they are part of its context and that is because as the old cliche has it history is written by the victors however it's quite a different story on those rare occasions when the perpetrators of genocide lose take the most infamous case of all Germany in the 1930s and 40s when to adopt Benny Morris's own self-justifying terminology the ideology of the Nazi regime perceived an overall final good to be derived from what it regarded as the justifiable annihilation of Jews Gypsies and others today in Germany because the Nazis lost there is no equivalent of Christopher Hitchens celebrating the destruction of Jews with great vim and gusto at least not in the pages of one of that country's oldest and most liberal and respected magazines on the contrary to deny the very existence of the Holocaust in Germany is a criminal offense that can lead to imprisonment as it can in other European countries as well moreover Germany is home to at least eight major Holocaust memorials or museums among more than 60 similar institutions throughout the world including a dozen or so in the United States and this is as it should be but where in Germany is the memorial to say the Herero people the Herero are one of several national and ethnic groups in south-west africa who also felt germany's genocidal wrath but decades before the holocaust at the turn of the 20th century by the time the killing ended 2/3 of the natives of that region had been wiped out by the germans exterminated although the total number killed was far lower than the Holocaust this was roughly the same rate of exact extermination as the one suffered by European Jews during the 1930s and 40s moreover in the midst of the killing in 1906 a german military commander published a book that justified the slaughter as necessary for attainment of what been amorous so cheerfully later called the overall final good and like Morris a century later he used the United States treatment of American Indians as a touchstone this process he wrote referring to the extermination of what he called the weak and purposeless Africans and I'm quoting him here is played out elsewhere and in a variety of ways such as for example in the elimination of the American Indians because they were without purpose in the continued development of the world unquote they were without purpose note the casual past tense in referring to the millions of native people who once lived in North America alone to say nothing lavash the greater numbers who had lived in Mexico and Central and South America but who by that time in North America had been reduced in number by more than 90 percent to several hundred thousand an American president of that same era expressed much the same sentiment and with equal satisfaction he began with a comment about one particular unprovoked late 19th century raid by US soldiers on an Indian community in Colorado a raid planned specifically for a time when all the young Indian men would be away hunting so they would eel only be unarmed women children and old men in the village as the troops approached on horseback the Indians waved to welcome them and the elders held a what light a large white flag aloft a short time later hundreds of Indians almost everyone in the village lay dead in the aftermath according to subsequent accounts of the soldiers themselves they went systematically from body to body scalping and mutilating the dead castrating the corpses of old men and small boys let me let me just quote a snippet of one soldier's lengthy testimony before the United States Congress and many of them testified quote the men used their knives said ripped open women club little children beat their brains out in numerous instances men cut out the private parts of females and stretched them over their saddle boughs and wore them over their hats while riding in the ranks one man cut a squaws heart out and stuck it up on a stick when asked about this ghastly event President Theodore Roosevelt a Nobel Prize Peace Prize winner said it was as righteous and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier later referring to the overall long history of the destruction of the American Indians Roosevelt dismissed any possible concerns by saying that the Indians were quote an alien race that held a coveted prize in its feeble grasp unquote that prize was land and the Americans wanted it there for the Indians annihilation the president concluded was both I'm quoting him again beneficial and inevitable today in the post Holocaust era such racist and genocidal boastfulness usually is frowned upon at least in polite company in its place especially on the international stage is the silence of denial the silence of Belgium is an example home to an acclaimed Museum of African history and culture museum that until very recently made no mention anywhere of the horrors of the Congo where more than 8 million Africans perished under the bloodthirsty colonial rule of Belgians King Leopold or the denial of Turkey over complicity in the Armenian Genocide or Japan over culpability for the so called Rape of Nanking and on and on and on there are various reasons and rationalizations behind such efforts to ignore or deny the existence of genocides or to systematically minimize their magnitude national pride and it's flipside potential national shame is one reason of course but one nation's genocide all denial frequently is aided and abetted by a chorus of support from others political allies around the world thus one reason Turkey has been able to remain so adamant in its official denial of the Armenian Genocide is support for this denial by the governments of the United States and Israel both of them fearful of damaging bilateral trade and diplomatic relationships with Turkey in the opposite spirit of denial that is the spirit of never forget there is a wall in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum inscribed with a warning something adult Hitler reportedly said one day in 1939 on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Poland it's a famous phrase who after all speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians more apt then on this day I believe nearly seventy years later is another question who after the crushing of Nazi Germany in 1945 could have imagined that the United States and Israel of all countries would help to perpetuate that convenient forgetfulness about the annihilation of the Armenians and with it Hitler's murderous cynicism on into the 21st century indeed it was only a half dozen years ago that the current President of Israel Shimon Peres declared the Armenian Genocide Armenian Genocide to be historically meaningless this prompted a particularly angry reply from within Israel by a man named Israel Charney the executive director of the Institute on the Holocaust and genocide in Jerusalem in a letter to Paris Charney wrote that Paris had quote gone beyond a moral boundary that no Jew should ever allow himself to trespass adding that specific remarks on the Armenian Genocide being meaningless were comparable to denials of the Holocaust this sort of statement is not unusual for Israel churning for many years he is ferociously fought back against the evil of Holocaust denial while at the same time resisting efforts to set the Holocaust apart as in his words I'm quoting him the ultimate event against which all other tragedies of Jena side a genocide or mass death are to be tested and invariably found wanting for me he writes the passion to exclude this or that mass killing from the universe of genocide as well as the intense competition to establish the exclusive superiority or unique form of anyone genocide ends up creating a fetishistic atmosphere in which the masses of bodies that are not to be qualified for the definition of genocide are dumped into a conceptual black hole where they are forgotten unquote which finally brings me back to the genocide all destruction of North in South America's native people and the strong resistance by some commentators to my use of the word genocide in describing that destruction commentators like the recently convicted felon senator Ted Stevens who threatened to use his considerable power to cut off funding of the Smithsonian Institution if it used the word genocide as it had planned to do in a documentary film on the destruction of the Americas native people commentators in short who would prefer that those millions of bodies remain buried and forgotten in Charney's conceptual black hole for those of you unfamiliar with the story of what happened to the indigenous peoples of the Americas during the course of four long centuries from Columbus's first landing at Hispaniola in 1492 to the massacre at Wounded Knee in December of 1890 or over the course of five centuries if we bring accounts forward to the us-supported genocide in Guatemala during the 1980s and beyond I must confess that it is impossible for me here tonight to describe specific events in any detail that's what I did over the course of several hundred pages in American Holocaust and even then I barely scratched the surface of what in North America alone began with a deliberate calculated extermination of the Indians of Virginia in the 17th century what Yale Genocide scholar Ben Kiernan recently described as a genocide on the Carthaginian model so total was the destruction to the state and federally financed mass killing of 60% of california's Indians in just eight years in the middle of the nineteenth century for what happened on other blood-soaked soil during the two centuries in between these genocides sorry I lost my place I'm afraid you'll have to read American Holocaust or some of the more recent works that I will mention later let me just say for the moment however that the claim of euro-american genocide is one of the primary agents responsible for the deaths of millions of indigenous people throughout the Western Hemisphere was hardly original with me in fact the first person to make that case was the very man who coined the word genocide and who relentlessly and heroically pressed the United Nations to declare it an international crime a law professor and a Polish Jew who had lost 49 members of his family in the Holocaust Raphael Lemkin it's commonly thought that in his efforts to name and define genocide as a crime lumpkin was Fosdick focused exclusively on the then ongoing extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany this is incorrect recent research in the Lemkin Archives in New York's American Jewish Historical Society the New York Public Library and the Marcus center of the American Jewish archives in Cincinnati has revealed the existence of detailed manuscript writings from the 1940s in which Lemkin obviously preparing at least one book on John genocide probably more left numerous folders filed under what he regarded as a variety of genocidal events in history including the titles are his quote Spanish treatment of South American Indians North American Indians : extermination history of genocide projected book on North American Indian research and much more in a 1948 report to a foundation that was supporting his work Lemkin listed what he called ten specific genocide cases as phrase used on which was compiling information and I quote to be made available to the United Nations drafting committee on genocide one of those ten cases is labeled the Indians in Latin America another is the Indians in North America and then finally in the 1950s Lumpkins archives reveals still more folders bulging with information on these subjects including the draft of a 100 page essay on genocide against Indians one that includes sections on their incarceration in what he calls concentration camps he was of course referring to reservations by the late 1950s Lincoln had almost completed a massive book on genocide in world history the entire third section of which was to be given over to genocides in colonial settings with separate chapter titles listed on genocide against the American Indians Latin America genocide against the Aztecs the Yucatan genocide against the Incas and then on to European genocides against the natives of New Zealand Australia Southwest Africa and more but in 1959 Lemkin died of a heart attack in a hotel room in New York City he was not yet 60 years old the book was unfinished but even if it had been completed it probably never would have been published because by then a new orthodoxy was beginning to take hold in the United States and elsewhere one that viewed the Holocaust as a singular unique genocidal event in world history to some proponents of this idea the Holocaust was not only the preeminent genocide it was the only genocide whereas Lemkin apparently felt that acknowledging the suffering of others had no bearing on the recognition of one's own painful experience some among this new generation regarded the Holocaust as moral capital I'm sorry I mumbled that moral capital to cite one representative writer moral capital that risked being plundered by others who sought acknowledgment of their own horrific experiences in this emerging climate of opinion authors who chose to utter even mildly critical comments about aspects of the new orthodoxy including such distinguished Jewish political theorists and historians as Han Arendt and Rahil Berg found themselves being abused in print and blackballed for expressing their points of view for the better part of three decades this sort of exclusivist thinking dominated scholarly discussion about the Holocaust so much so in fact then in the early 1990s the distinguished Princeton historian Arnold J mayor himself a Jew found his classes being boycotted by Jewish students and his name placed in a rogue's gallery of so-called Hitler apologists published by the anti-defamation league Hitler apologists why because in a book entitled why did the heavens not darken Mayor had dared to criticize what he saw as two camps of historical extremists in his words and I'm quoting him those two camps were revisionists who categorically deny the Judeo side and dogmatists who seek to reify and sacral eyes the Holocaust in this latter camp were numerous prominent scholars who vigorously condemned anyone who dared to engage in comparative genocide research research wrote one such author that might taint the Holocaust by including it as merely an encoding one among an array of other conflagrations in which innocents were massacred unquote the Holocaust is unique it stands alone nothing can be compared with it so said those scholars professor Mayer had criticized as Holocaust dogmatists indeed according to historian Stephen tcats writing in the 1990s the Holocaust not only is unique it is the only true genocide that has ever occurred thus when asked in 1994 what he thought of the recent and ongoing mass killings in Bosnia and Rwanda Katz replied that the Bosnia situation was merely and I quote a population transfer supported by violence unquote while the slaughter of 800,000 people over the course of three months in Rwanda was he said not genocidal but simply a struggle for tribal domination the strong influence of this line of thinking throughout much of the world of genocide scholarship at that not only served to Sacre lies the holocaust as mayor had put it it also intentionally or not provided a cover of pseudo respectability for those very secular political forces throughout the world including the United States Turkey and elsewhere that were interested in denying genocides that had occurred in their own backyards this was the generally prevailing opinion on the matter when American Holocaust was published in 1992 but by the mid-1990s times we're changing again among other things in the wake of the Columbian Quinn centennial a City University of New York historian named Henry Hutton Bach began to privately publish a small circulation newsletter called the genocide forum Hutton Bach a specialist in the Holocaust Germany and the Soviet Union staked out a position far different from that held by Katz and his supporters if anything in certain respects it appeared more closely aligned with the thinking of such people is as Israel journey and his Jerusalem Institute on the Holocaust and genocide in the very first issue of the genocide forum Hutton Bach wrote that the narrowly exclusive focus on the Holocaust of far too many genocide scholars was inevitably leading to what he called a stifling intellectual parochialism and the dead end of antiquarianism he called instead for a vigorous collaboration among a wide range of genocide scholars to explore what might be learned from an aggressively comparative study of this horrific phenomenon specifically citing as clear examples of genocide deserving of more study the killing of Rama by the Third Reich the slaughter of indigenous people in South America and the recent mass murders in Bosnia and Rwanda all of these were incidents that Stephen Katz and others had flatly rejected as actual genocides then Hutton Bach took direct aim by way of a scathing review of Katz's new 700 page opus a book entitled the Holocaust in historical context that relentlessly advanced the Holocaust exclusivist line Katz did his own reputation no favors by replying immediately with an intemperate and wildly at hominem tack saying that Hutton buck and I'm quoting would have made a good editor of der stürmer unquote the most famous and vile anti-semitic propaganda publication of the Nazis a publication whose actual editor was executed by the Allies after being convicted of crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials clearly by this time if nothing else things were heating up in the little world of genocide scholarship next out of the box in 1995 was a book of essays edited by Alan s Rosenbaum entitled is the Holocaust unique that volume contained pieces on the Nazi Nazi extermination campaign against gypsies the Atlantic slave trade the Armenian Genocide the Stalinist tariff famine the case of the American Indians and others including of course the Holocaust Stephen Katz wrote the essay on the Holocaust and I wrote the one on American Indians the entire affair became something of a colorful if minor academic scandal when one of the authors me received a Mis addressed facts revealing that the editor of the book had been sending the other contributors essays to his friend professor Katz so that he might anticipate and deal with their arguments in his own essay Katz also was serving as something of a ghost editor recommending to Rosenbaum deletions in some essays including mine that were critical of Katz and his work now if all of this sounds to some of you at least some of you who are professors as the sort of academic comedy we all get to get a laugh over when we read about it in The Chronicle of Higher Education perhaps that's because the Chronicle of Higher Education did do a rather large albeit poorly reported story on the controversy for better or worse however this little tempest did bring outside attention to bear on what was becoming an otherwise arcane academic dispute and conveniently a dispute that at that moment finally was reaching consensus on one essential point that consensus the one thing that almost everyone now agreed upon even Stephen Katz and me was that if the Holocaust was to be shown as unique beyond the trivial ways in which all had major historical events possessed unique characteristics it would have to be based on the matter of demonstrated genocidal intent by the perpetrator not on the magnitude of a particular slaughter the percentage of people killed the speed of the killing or anything else because I'd had by that time been fully demonstrated than in each of these categories other groups of genocide victims from the very distant to the very recent past had equal or stronger claim the dubious mantle of most extreme victimhood alas however as by now you might have guessed what happened this consensus only led to some further dispute this time specifically regarding the definition of the word intent now although this may sound to some of you at least those of you who aren't lawyers as legalistic hair-splitting in fact how we define genocide all intent is a very serious matter indeed one that not infrequently in contemporary criminal cases tried before the International Criminal Court involves matters of life and death unfortunately the time available to me tonight I'm already running a little bit over time I think the time available to me tonight doesn't permit a foray into this definitional thicket to do so adequately require adequately would require another entire lecture on such matters as the meanings and in practice limitations of such terms as specific intent general intent and more recently joint criminal enterprise or jce joint means a little aside joint criminal enterprise is an intent related concept that has been proposed as a way of dealing with the extraordinary difficulty to date of getting convictions in the International Criminal Court although some critics regard the concept is so expansive that they suggest the letters jce more properly reflect an attitude of just convict everyone and as an aside something you might think about having somebody to speak here if she's still here I don't know this person but I might add that you have a professor in your own Law School here who's an expert on jce and other weighted matters her name is Alison Marston Danner without the luxury of a second entire lecture on the problems of defining intent then let me simply assure you that the fine points of distinction among various ways of calculating genocidal intent in contemporary human rights cases provide no impediment to the overpowering case that now exists for recognizing genocide as a driving force in the euro murk and conquest of the Americas or other previously disputed genocides for that matter last year even the anti-defamation league which you will recall once called historian arnold mayer a hitler apologist for rejecting the uniqueness of the holocaust even the ADL has now acknowledged that the Armenian the Armenians did indeed suffer a genocide for the any of you suggests interested in pursuing these questions further I have some suggestions some students perhaps might willing to follow up on this first you'll recall a name I mentioned a few minutes ago Henry Hutton Bach who in the early 1990s founded the modest newsletter he called the genocide forum a newsletter that he wrote entirely himself and that took part of its charge as part of its charge the refutation of the concept of holocaust uniqueness or exclusivity while in the late 1990s Hutton back established a much more ambitious publication the Journal of genocide research which is now arguably grown to be the leading journal in its field it has attracted an extraordinarily accomplished array of scholars from though out the world highly sophisticated specialists in the history of genocide on every continent of particular interest many of these scholars even those such as Dirk Moses and Norbert Finch and Dominic Schuyler and Juergen Zimmer whose principal expertise rests in German history and the Holocaust among their interests ISM is also a concern with the legacy of Raphael Lemkin and his interest in the numerous genocides that have been perpetrated against indigenous peoples the matter of genocidal intent I might add is addressed in a number of essays in this journal moreover in a to a decade's worth of extensive collected writings on this topic and others in the Journal of genocide research including a recent special issue on Lumpkin that explores his research on genocide against indigenous peoples and settler colonies in the past four years Dirk Moses at the University of Sydney has edited three major books on this subject carrying the titles genocide and settler society published in 2004 colonialism in genocide 2007 and empire colony genocide just published a few months ago in 2008 collectively they contained dozens of penetrating essays on colonial genocide in North and South America Australia Africa Indonesia and elsewhere as well as extremely important new work on theoretical questions in genocide research including some explorations of whether or not settler colonies may be inherently genocidal at the same time there's been an outpouring of new and path-breaking scholarship by others such as Mark Levine of the University of Southampton on the parks Institute for the Study of Jewish non Jewish relations who in 9 2005 published the first two volumes of a major and still developing project entitled genocide in the age of the nation's state last year meanwhile Ben Kiernan who I mentioned earlier the founding director of the genocide studies program at Yale published his massive book blood and soil a world history of genocide and extermination from Sparta to Darfur a volume which devotes fully 1/3 of its pages to the Spanish conquest of the new world as well as genocides perpetrated against indigenous peoples under regimes of souldn't settler colonialism in such places as 16th century Ireland 19th century Australia and Africa and North America from the dawn of the 1600s to the close of the 19th century there's even an excellent textbook now available entitled genocide a comprehensive introduction by Adam Jones a portion of which explores in detail the theoretical and substantive arguments leading to the inescapable conclusion that the native people of the Americas were indeed victims of genocide in short although it has been a contentious passage publication of American Holocaust 16 years ago down to the present there really is no longer much question as to what the proper term should be for the euphemism of American expansion the phrase that most of us learned in our high school in college history classes it was indeed euro American expansionism that made the United States what it is today but expansionism so bloody that it worked hand in glove with genocide as it made its way across the continent if we are now as a nation edging closer to a widespread recognition of that reality however another critical task lies ahead American Holocaust is a matter of history but the wreckage that it caused remains vividly evident among many of its survivors descendants today from the desert southwest of F of Arizona to the Black Hills of South Dakota and beyond many American Indian communities barely survive mired in poverty and despair that has little equal except in some of the world's most desperately impoverished so-called third world countries alcoholism diabetes and suicide rates are sky high while infant mortality and life expectancy rates at places like Pine Ridge Reservation are as bad as in Haiti and some of the poorest countries of Africa at the University of Hawaii I teach a course on race and racism and one of the central things I try to make clear is that racism kills it's not just American Indians low income black men have a median life expectancy roughly ten years below the national average multiply those ten years by the number of low-income black males in a single generation and the result is the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of lifetimes that should have been lived but that weren't and it's not just the poverty racism as an agent unto itself is a killer recent research initiated by a group of physicians in Chicago is showing that college-educated middle-class black women give birth to premature sure and dangerously underweight babies at almost three times the rate of comparably educated and situated white women in America I should note that preterm birth not only is a leading cause of death in infants but those who survive face a high probability of lifetime's damaged by learning disabilities hypertension diabetes and coronary artery disease so this research since this research controls for differences in education and income all the indicators point to extreme stress as the primary cause of this health crisis the stress of simply living day to day as a black woman regardless of social class in a deeply racist society of course what I'm talking about here regarding african-americans is the pathological residue of centuries of slavery Jim Crow and ongoing institutional racial discrimination today the same imposed pathologies are insidiously at work in many American Indian communities and the damage being done is heartbreaking thus while it is essential that we as a nation faced up to the genocide Allah Allah that's only the beginning the simmering bigotry and malign neglect of the present continued to kill those people among us whose ancestors first settled this land thousands and thousands of years ago it's way past time for the nation as a whole and for all of us to begin repairing that terrible damage thank and that's who the whole thing without water prove it so I guess is it as a historian maybe it's not your it is your job I supposed to document Holocaust and genocide and perhaps not to address the causes but would you come in about that for example some people think that with the world getting more and more populated we may have reached a sensible bound of the number of people that can live with given amount of resources and live in harmony that things could get worse other people think that we've in to some extent overcome our DNA tendencies and things may get better do you have a projection and any comment on the causes well a couple of things one first of all I noticed that in the I got the program for the year and I notice that it indicates and I got this after I had already prepared my talk that refers to the fact that in American Holocaust I talked about Christianity as a driving force I believe Christianity not just not necessarily or not entirely as in its the erratic theoretical form but as it was interpreted and used down through the centuries and as it merged with an emerging Western cultural framework I think was intensely intensely important in the destruction that happened throughout North and South America and all you have to do is read the justifications from by the Spaniards by the Puritans one of the quotations I was going to use in my talk that I left out because the talk was already getting too long was William Bradford the first governor of Plymouth Colony who didn't use the word Holocaust to describe what what the Puritans had done to a group of Indians the Pequots but his description a lush rich description of how wonderfully they had burned them and how the lives of all the people were being extinguished in the fires of the Puritans assault so much so that their blood obviously some literary license here their blood was extinguishing the flames that engulfed them is a is an incredible statement really of Holocaust but a religious interpretation of the genocide that was being perpetrated so I think there is a cultural as well as you're talking really about much more material causes environmental reasons and so on so forth but I think there's a cultural religious design behind a lot of genocides as well I also think and I'm really not buying normies an expert on the the environmental conditions that you're talking about the population statistics and so on and so forth I know the world is being overpopulated and so on and so forth but I can recall the debates in the 1970s between let's see who were they Paul Ehrlich was one who wrote a book called the Population Bomb some of you are old enough to remember this I hope and what was his name Barry commoner who was a critic of Paul Ehrlich who was also a student of the environment and commoners argument was that actually it's not the numbers of people that are the problem it's the distribution of resources that's the problem he felt that actually with a decent distribution of resources we're a long way away from really necessarily being an overcrowded planet which doesn't mean that one in a particular situation cannot interpret the immediate situation as being one in which more land is needed Levens realm in the case the the infamous case or as Theodore Roosevelt said and I mentioned in my talk that the Indians had something that we wanted which was the land so I'm I guess I'm not [Music] III don't think that we are necessarily at a point now or in the near future where overcrowding where simple numbers of people would would generate genocide but any given situations can be interpreted and in which way by people so I'm sure we will see more if we didn't it would be for the first time in a couple thousand years who else's well pull up that microphone okay that's a very unpopular phrase in some circles these days you know right right right yeah well of course the ultimate the ultimate example of that again was the Nazis slave camps working people to death but in the Americas although I mean there's a there's a lot of distinctions from one place to another distinctions from even parts of the Northeast or the Southwest or so on but particularly their clothes as a major clear distinction I think between the Spanish genocide and the British genocide that is the genocide that took place in the Caribbean and in South America and the one that took place in North America in North America if there were no resources there were there were no words there was to be mined really what there was was land and the Indians were to be pushed off of the land not necessarily to be exterminated but if they chose not to go easily then to be exterminated whereas in South America there whether massive resources that the Spanish were after and in Peru for example there were incredible silver mines in which the they simply enslaved thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people drove them off the land and there's used them up life expectancy at one the most infamous of the silver mines was estimated by the Spanish at something around six months once the once the the Indians were enslaved and and put down into the mines to go to work so yeah I'm sure there are many examples of precisely that sort of thing now the justification area again ever since my first book that was mentioned earlier here about pure the Puritan way of death which is really about Protestant theology and the way it played itself out I believe in certain social functioning one of the things that always troubled me about studying the Puritans even as a graduate student I don't know how many of you here are students of early American history is the assumption that historians have that in Puritan New England everybody was imbued with and infused with this this theology in fact a relative elite really understood what was going on in the theological teachings people they knew the ritual they knew what they were supposed to be doing so they did learn the the processes the basic things that they had to know but they were not necessarily I don't believe being driven by the same theological intensity that the priesthood was that the elites were and I think that's true all over the place I think it's certainly all we do is look at the rates of legitimacy in Rome around the corner from the Vatican to see that but I think it was certainly true among Spaniards in South America and in Mexico there were they were always accompanied by priests and the priests were justifying in their writings these horrors that were being perpetrated but in fact the men who were doing most of the killing to the extent that they wrote anything at all and some of them did said that no it's the money if we're after the money they had no intention of wanting to stay again unlike the British settlers in New England and Virginia who came most of them at least after the first first few first generation who came to stay and to settle the Spanish had no intention most of those Spanish had an intention of settling they came to get money the money was being the the resources the gold the silver ants all was being shipped back to Spain and then they wanted to return to Spain rich landlords and live their lives there so yeah again the the motivations are different in many cases and the one that you're addressing certainly I think is a common one yeah yeah I don't know let's give it a shot that one I think does ah I like first is I will come back to the the word Holocaust as you defined at the beginning of your talk I want to share with you just a small event I have I had a correspondence about the program of our Holocaust series with person who is in fact cousin of prema levy my friend Vittorio do Saudis are very well known scientist and he was the cousin of criminally he has really oboes to the extension in my correspondence with him to the extension of Holocaust to some of the events with report in his program for instance I was introducing the lecture about Spain and the Holocaust and I was not at ease myself with a tight and I will tell you why with American Holocaust I feel the same as vidura's RT field when you when there is the second title the destruction of America's native people seems much more adapted to me and without going to I would say semantics I want just to ask you the following question am Spanish origin the conquest of the Americas by the Spanish brought with them people like back to Loma de las Casas I think I will not define to the people but certainly you are aware of who was Bartolome de las casas he was a priest he took the site of the Indians to the point that all his life he was fighting for his idea being a little pushed apart by the older itself of I think he wasn't my hands right it was put aside but he continued all his life claiming that there was a destruction of the people by them so what I want to ask you the following can a Bartolome de las casas exist under the Nazi regime was it possible even can we conceive this concern of somebody inside of the Nazi claiming we are too harsh with the Jewish that's where I will push the definition much more than in semantics where you have sated very beautifully what holocaust means exactly it seems to me that Nazi regime who has produced the Jewish Holocaust has been responsible at no possibility to have a battle luminous gases or besar goon if I can use a Jew según was the man fryer again who translated the Aztec to Spanish nowadays we will not know anything about the Aztec language if not of his contribution making a dictionary picture that's what I wanted to share with you in saying of course that I'm fully interested in what you say but maybe forget don't don't leave the microgravity no don't leave the microphone yet because I want to ask how can you stay I just okay one one thing just for the record that's interesting about las casas who is a person and i can't pronounce his name as beautifully as you do who was one of my heroes to some extent on the other hand he did propose that there was there was no necessity for enslaving the indians because we could bring over africans so this was not somebody who in a trance ended who embraced all of the people of the world as people who should not be enslaved and not be oppressed but put that aside that's not the question you asked really I am NOT an expert on the Holocaust I don't pretend to be I'll defer to anybody here who can answer that question my assumption is that your assumption is correct and that is that no I don't think las casas a las casas could have existed in nazi germany and survived we're absolutely correct and not only in nazi germany but within the reach of nazi germany I'm not sure how that specifically addresses the word Holocaust I am not at all soft-pedaling what happened in in Europe in nineteen the 1930s and the 1940s it was ghastly it was horrendous I'm not I'm not somebody who wants to somehow marginalize or reduce the impact of that horror or that terror by speaking of others I'm on the contrary and this is part of what I was talking about here today I'm concerned that a kind of reverse Holocaust denial takes place among people who claim only one genocide really matters in human history and the others well we can find a place for them we can rank them they were terrible maybe they were maybe it was that snick cleansing maybe it was a kind of lower level level genocide or something I along with people like Israel Charney who I I don't know if you know his work any of you is a very controversial person in Israel but I and he and I have correspondent and disagreed about things but I tend overall to agree with him that there really isn't this is not a zero-sum game where there's only so much compassion to go around.we we don't have to elevate one people's experience and seal it off from everybody else in order to maintain compassion and understanding for those Horrors I think I think we're human beings and we were big enough to understand that there were that this is one of the worst things perhaps the worst thing that human beings have ever done to themselves and they do it and do it and do it and they have done it and have done it have done it I as I said in my talk referred to a D Holocaust only with reference to the Nazis destruction of the Jews I don't refer to the Holocaust in any other way but I just I just don't believe that we can take the word out of circulation with a lowercase H that's all sorry what no I thought in what we interrupt you once certainly can add in the in the 1940-1945 Holocaust the yes because it was the same idea to eradicate the community of gypsies less abundant but this doesn't make a difference but but again yeah the gypsies have their own name for that right and so and and and and they tend and I just I don't you know again I only know one or two ramaa people who write about this and we think about this but they tend not to associate themselves under the Holocaust they also essentially difference a the Holocaust is what happened to the Jews we have our own term for that I agree with you however and I must say and this is a judgement call on a lot of things that the word Holocaust is used to the point of true reality in many many many cases and where we draw the line and whether I was correct or incorrect in draw a line where I did is something we can maybe agree to disagree about No so you said at one point that that the American Holocaust is as an event of the past but the wreckage from it is something that we're still dealing with today and I'm just wondering if maybe I can like push you on that little bags I'm wondering if maybe it's it's the case that it actually is something that still persists in the sense that not you know we don't see government forces going out and slaughtering in a physical sense indigenous communities but in a way we we've seen colonialism work so well that now there doesn't need to be the forces going out and doing it we've actually made it so that communities are very very good at kind of exterminating themselves especially I'm thinking in terms of North American reserve communities that have the highest rates of violence and also aside alcoholism drug dependency incredibly low literacy rates and also kind of just the widespread ability of like mainstream political society to make all of those things invisible to us so that they don't come up so that we don't actually talk about them so that we can talk about race and racism without actually talking about indigenous people at all and so I'm wondering if maybe you'd be willing to say that it's still going on if there's a particular reason why you okay and yet Haupt um again feel free to stay with the microphone if you want I don't know if everybody's wants to leave one here this conversation but um I would take issue just with one thing that you said and it may have just been a term that you you would not maybe perhaps have wanted to use or maybe you do you suggested that somehow or other the system had become so efficient I think that's not your work or your phrase but that the people were doing it to themselves that we're destroying themselves and to me that's edging very close to blaming the victims ultimately they're not doing it to themselves even those who are committing suicide I think are not doing it to themselves so there's again that's a fine point I think but in saying that what I'm really saying is that I agree with you that yes this has become a kind of machine that goes of itself in the same way that we can have deeply racist society without any overt evidence of hate speech and and racial hatred apparent on the surface of the society because we've created institutions that that are institutionally racist and simply take care of business on their own with a lot without all the rhetoric that was associated with racism in the past so I agree with that I guess that the distinction that I would make because I did conclude American Holocaust at the end of the 19th century although I did make references to the killing in Latin America in the nineteen the horrible horrible genocide were killing in Latin America in the 1980s comes back to the question of the word genocide and this is a long discussion that I'll try to keep short because people are already trying to get up and leave but historians over the many years have tried to figure and some historians just made up definitions of genocide and the reason they made up Jeff edition is because the Genocide Convention of the United Nations was cobbled together by a group of Nations to somehow make sense of and to to institutionalize a law that would say this is we cannot have this anymore this is illegal and nations must act against it so in order to do that they had to define it the problem is who is sitting around defining this people who represent countries that in the past and at that time were committing genocide I mean it was like having the thieves sit around the table right writing the law on so for example Lemkin had always had in his definition of genocide among the potential victim groups political victims people who were be whole groups of political people who would who were being exterminated because of their politics the Soviet Union had would have nothing to do with that because they had how many people in the gulags at the moment that they're sitting down writing this this genocide convention they had they had they had exterminated people for political reasons so they wouldn't they simply could not have that so the Genocide Convention does not include political groups as groups that are subject to to it to a perpetrator group being brought to the bar because they kill those people as a result technically the genocide in Cambodia was not genocide and there are very very few genocide scholars who will say that it was genocide been Kiernan who's a specialist I mentioned him twice in my talk who's a specialist actually in Southeast Asia and Jenna and and and Cambodia originally agreed with that knee subsequent has changed his mind but most of the genocide scholars in the world today would say it it was horrible but the victims were political victims and that's why it's not a genocide the same thing with the killing of Indians in Paraguay the the killers were able to extricate themselves by saying yes we killed all of those people almost exterminated entire people but it wasn't because of the fact that they were Indians which would have made them a protected group but because their political activities were such that we they deserved being exterminated and therefore yes maybe that was not very humanitarian and maybe it was a crime against humanity and so and so forth but it's not genocide anyway that's one of the reasons why historians have tried many historians and sociologists write about genocide have tried to create their own definitions of genocide the problem with that is your definition includes this group my definition includes that group that person's definition and groups it group includes one kind of activity such as taking children as the United Nations Convention does taking children away from families and putting them among others as has happened in Australia most famously and so on and others don't so therefore then you've lost everything so I think that really what we need to do and I hate I don't like this because I think the Genocide Convention is real problems is that we just simply have to hold to the UN Genocide Convention it's the only one the only thing that the definition that exists that most people have bought into now even then there are arguments that can take place and one of them has to do with this question of intent I'm getting I'm just I'm going to get back to your point right about now my question of intent and again there are within everyday criminal law in the United States there are distinctions between specific intent and general intent that are very important actually it that question was debated internally in the Bush administration when they were when what's-his-name John you was leading that group of attorneys in trying to justify torture and if you look at the memoranda that were the famous memorandum and particularly was written by them their struggle over the use of general intent and specific intent because they decided one group had tried to hide behind specific intent saying we did not we in the torture that we're about to commit we don't intend to torture it's just that we're going to behave in such a way and do certain things yes it's true torture is likely to result from that but that's general intent that's not specific intent specific intent means you have to intend the thing itself not just behave inside of trying to give you a simple example somebody drives it takes a car and drives down there's a Broadway here right drives down Broadway and turns the steering wheel and drove drives up on the sidewalk and kill somebody okay now the law stands takes a very different position on whether they can determine that me the driver of that car wanted to kill that person and therefore drove the car to kill that person or whether I simply drove the car knowing I would kill people and knowing that person would probably be killed but not intending to kill that person there's a distinction and the punishment is different so anyway those are the those are the kinds of things that international human rights people get into in their prosecutions of cases such as the Rwanda case and so on and so forth and I guess what I'm saying to come back to your point which i think is a very good one is that I think we should stay within the UN definition and fight about issues within that and in that case then we have to accept the word intent however we define it as as part of the justification for our use of the term genocide so I think that maybe we you and I could probably still disagree about this but that what's happening today may not quite involve intent the way it involved in 10 2004 Nia in his inauguration speech in 1852 or 1850 said we must exterminate those Indians and then put together troops to go out and exterminate them and got money from the federal government to support that extermination campaign that's different from driving people into a situation where their lives simply cannot be led and and and then backing away and just letting it happen it's a tricky it's a fine point so I generally agree with your sentiment but I I'm not sure I disagree with the whether the use of the term Holocaust should or should not extend to the present super-quick like I think that um so I agree with you about the intent but I I just want to like sue that I think that the intent to exterminate has been replaced in a really large way by the intent to assimilate which I am not sure is all like if you look at their residential school policy I'm Canadian so I know the residential school groups schools system in Canada a lot better but if you look at the residential school policy I'm not sure that that you can pull apart the intent to exterminate with the intent to assimilate in that kind of in that kind of example so yeah and actually the case can be made that the Genocide Convention does cover that and and people have written about that in Canada and again in Australia in particular well as as somebody who is Native American I'm Cherokee and Muscogee got five six other tribes basically my family all ran off during the removal and hit out I've lived on three different reservations and my kids are all members of fairly recognized tribes the when you're looking at genocide as a native person there was the physical genocide there is the de facto genocide a lot of people don't know that during the 1950s President Eisenhower with a stroke of a pen extinguished more than 50 tribes and a lot of those tribes been trying ever since to get their federal recognition back because when they lost their federal recognition they lost their land they lost the resources it was the same thing that had been going on it was legislating extinction the policy under Eisenhower was if we take them their reservations away they have to move into general society and then within a generation or two they won't exist and then there's no more Indian problem I grew up right here in Nashville and I grew up around mainstream society being a person from a completely separate culture and having to deal with why can't you just be an American why are you still speaking that language why don't you do what we want to do and I fought with the Methodist Church I grew up in the this church in fact there's group of us that we call ourselves a flying finger fellowship because we deduced after fighting with the church over being able to be a traditional native person and be a Christian and function within the church as a native person we spent most of our time basically with our middle finger in the face of the church because we were always having to fight with them over doctrines that had absolutely nothing to do with the scripture it had to do with their discomfort with our difference and the school's still do this my kids have had to fight the very same fights in school that I had to fight that my mother had to fight and so forth and so on where you get one little chapter of maybe four pages and a few paragraphs and it's so general it's useless it talks about the Aztecs it talks about the southeastern people and may it may mention the Cherokees and the creeks it talks about the northeastern people and it usually mentions the Mohawks and it mentions Lakotas and it's just useless it's not taught people don't understand that three fifths of all the world's food crops were developed right here in the Western Hemisphere most of the medicines that most people use came from here we were not only the greatest agriculturalists on the face of the earth we were also the greatest pharmaceutical botanists we had medicines for everything the only thing we didn't have medicines for were European diseases because we had no familiarity with them if we'd had them we would have had something to cure them and we don't get any credit for that they'll say oh Sir Alexander Fleming invented penicillin how could he invent something that my people had been using for thousands of years I still know how to make penicillin because my great grandma taught me how to in fact I've got the little crock jar that she used that she got from her grandmother that she got from her grandmother and I have no idea how old this thing is but it's always been used to make penicillin I was taught as a child how to make various medicines I was also taught our traditional ways and I had an understanding even as a little bitty kid we didn't talk about that stuff with non-indians because if we did somebody was going to come down on us or they were going to twist it around and make it something that it wasn't and we have you know that kind of genocide that goes on to now some of it the the alcoholism the drug abuse the dysfunction that exists within families a lot of people wouldn't know it and I hate to admit it but sexual abuse amongst Native Americans is astronomically higher than it is for the rest of population it started with the boarding schools or residential schools because you had kids that were taken at the age of five they didn't see their families for seven or eight years their families were not permitted to raise their children how can you be a parent when you're not allowed to raise your child how can you be normal when you're not raised in a family when you're put into boarding school and you are beaten for speaking your native language you're mistreated you're sexually abused every time they go to an old boarding school site and they start excavating because somebody's going to build something else they start finding skeletons probably 25% of Native American children who went into the boarding schools disappeared and they were never found those are people who never got to grow up who never got to contribute and we weren't put in those boarding schools to make us doctors or lawyers or leaders we were put in there so that the girls could become domestic servants and the boys could become manual laborers that was the only purpose it was to make us servants and there were some very there were some examples where that where you had someone exceeded dr. Charles Eastman Adam beech played him in a movie they're also the Suzanne Pleshette who was also not only one of the first female doctors she was also the first native female doctor so you had people who did succeed but they were still Indian and they still had to deal with the same old me succeed in which they succeeded in western terms but they still had to feel the same old crap I've you know can I don't interrupt I'd love to talk to you about this but I'm wondering if in case somebody else does have something to say I was getting some signals maybe we should wrap up soon so I don't interrupt you but if you can just sort of wrap up and then but the thing is the genocide is still going on because of the cultural pressures that are on native people are still forget who you are become who we say you are and that's not just the blend into society that's the fit into our little mythology that we have about you people which actually to me is a lot more insulting than somebody saying watch why can't you just be an American you know I'm not I didn't live in tepee my people never lived in teepees we were farmers and if I don't fit into your stereotype of how I'm supposed to be I try to be nice about it but sometimes it's just like you know well that's just tough for you if you can't accept that there's other ways I put it that are not really appropriate for use in public but you know that's how it goes okay can I make one comment on what you said one of the things you said the word reminded me to mention it's very common I think for Americans and most people around the world to think of American Indians as somehow a singular people and and of course that's a conventional thing that people from afar do to other people was it George Bush who referred to the country of Africa at one time that many people think of Africa as a single place the people who are there they're Africans people of Asia people of Asia try telling that to a room that's got some Koreans here and some Japanese here and so on and so forth that somehow you're all the same it's a very common and actually in a kind of I unintentional I think way racist way of of making everybody the same John and American Indians are not all the same there are hundreds of different original Native Nations each of which had distinctive religious traditions cultural traditions and ways of doing things ways of living and physiological differences they did not American Indians don't all look the same they're very different and the reason this is relevant to the question of genocide is because if there's one thing that I wish I hadn't said in American Holocaust was may I made at the beginning of the book and I probably more than once okay I haven't reread the book for some time reference to genocide in the singular and really what happened was a succession I did say this in the book tour but the two sort of I guess I was unthinkingly assuming they could live together what really happened was serial genocide that took place over and over and over and over again over the course of four hundred years in some cases which the entire people were obliterated nothing remained in other cases not every not all Indian groups suffered genocide some didn't but but the variations are tremendous and I think in all explorations of discussions about American Indians and again just as I said about the Holocaust I'm not an expert on American Indians I don't claim to be well when I when I when I when I was in entered graduate school I was going to study slavery and racism but mostly slavery in the United States and I chose not to this was in the early 70s because I decided that a white guy should not be studying slavery that was a it just remember this was the 70s there was a their political moment in relationships between white people black people what other whites very successfully did study slavery Herbert Guttman various other people but I decided not to do that for that reason in the same way that when I've written about native peoples in the Pacific and about American Indians I don't claim to really be writing about Indians I'm writing about what white people have done to those people so I don't really claim to know much about American Indians but I but from what little I do know I think it's important for us to recognize how incredibly varied those groups of people are continue to be but at one time astonishingly were when the numbers in North America nobody knows what they were the lowest estimates probably we have more experts here than I am and this would whatever the latest numbers are have ranged anywhere from five million to 15 million but within those five hundred nations that existed there was extraordinary variability and difference anyway that's all I'm glad you brought that up and also about the boarding schools both of you bring him any other questions what is it time I don't know I was getting a little high sign over here I'll make it quick um so I think that um I think one of the important things that I've gathered from the examples that you gave which is like how much these multiple genocides have been glorified or justified and kind of you know brushed under is not really being um actually as horrible as we know they are so I was just sitting here thinking like if history were to be rewritten in a way that's more truthful to these horrors these tragedies how would that impact especially for young people who are so often given a very glossy version of what you know history is in this country or given at least you know from the perspective of like you said the victors how would that impact their their relationship to this nation as citizens or you know just how they kind of contribute as members of society how do you think that would impact young people if they began to really know like what the history of this country like that they're a member of has done well I think it would be immensely beneficial in the same way that I think it's immensely beneficial that the history of african-americans is finally before some years now has been taught and taught reasonably well I guess in some schools and that there's an outpouring of writing and so on so forth by and about African Americans but specifically about genocide I think a terrible disservice is done to let's say the Japanese by the concealment and denial of the horrors perpetrated by the Japanese against Koreans and against the Chinese and there's tremendous resistance among some pockets in Japan to this there is a documentary film made in Japan it's a kind of underground film about the rape of what's called The Rape of Nanking that killing the horrendous horrendous brutal killing of hundreds of thousands of Chinese by Japanese soldiers it's causing all sorts of trouble this tremendous fighting about textbooks high school textbooks in Japan about whether or not that should be concealed on the cover on the other hand in Germany and Germany's got its problems it's going to continue to have his problems it's got neo-nazis all over the place it's got all sorts of bombs but I think Germany has actually shown the way that you can you can deal with the horrors perpetrated by your own people by coming to terms with it by having Holocaust memorials and museums by I we can argue about whether or not denial of the whole should be a criminal offense that's not something that Americans buy into very easily Canada at one time did have I believe it was it was a criminal offense and the Supreme Court of Canada said it was not compatible with free speech and overruled but but in any case Germany to the extent that any country has has tried to come to terms with the horrors of its own history and I think it's been beneficial so I would say that it has been it's not easy but I would say in the long term it's incredibly beneficial to a population to come to terms with the reality of what what it's people have done so that they don't do it again okay anything else oh yeah okay well I'm getting to people waving me to wrap up I'm free to talk a little bit if you want afterwards any individual you want thank you

Channel: Vanderbilt University

Views: 156,731

Keywords: vanderbilt, university, holocaust, history

Id: Qra6pcn4AOE

Length: 102min 28sec (6148 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 30 2008