Columbus and the Beginning of Genocide in the "New World"

It has been contended by those who would celebrate Columbus that
accusations concerning his perpetration of genocide are distortive
"revisions" of history. Whatever the process unleashed by his
"discovery" of the "New World," it is said, the discoverer himself
cannot be blamed. Whatever his defects and offenses, they are surpassed
by the luster of his achievements; however "tragic" or "unfortunate"
certain dimensions of his legacy may be, they are more than offset by
the benefits even for the victims of the resulting blossoming of a
"superior civilization" in the Americas. Essentially the same arguments
might be advanced with regard to Adolf Hitler: Hitler caused the
Volkswagen to be created, after all, and the autobahn. His leadership
of Germany led to jet propulsion, significant advances in rocket
telemetry, laid the foundation for genetic engineering. Why not
celebrate his bona fide accomplishments on behalf of humanity rather
than "dwelling" so persistently on the genocidal by-products of his
policies? To be fair, Columbus was never a head of state. Comparisons
of him to Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler, rather than Hitler, are
therefore more accurate and appropriate. It is time to delve into the
substance of the defendants' assertion that Columbus and Himmler, Nazi
Lebensraumpolitik (conquest of "living space" in eastern Europe) and
the "settlement of the New World" bear more than casual resemblance to
one another. This has nothing to do with the Columbian "discovery," not
that this in itself is completely irrelevant. Columbus did not sally
forth upon the Atlantic for reasons of "neutral science" or altruism.
He went, as his own diaries, reports, and letters make clear, fully
expecting to encounter wealth belonging to others. It was his stated
purpose to seize this wealth, by whatever means necessary and
available, in order to enrich both his sponsors and himself. Plainly,
he pre-figured, both in design and by intent, what came next. To this
extent, he not only symbolizes the process of conquest and genocide
which eventually consumed the indigenous peoples of America, but bears
the personal responsibility of having participated in it. Still, if
this were all there was to it, the defendants would be inclined to
dismiss him as a mere thug along the lines of Al Capone rather than
viewing him as a counterpart to Himmler.

The 1492 "voyage of discovery" is, however, hardly all that is at
issue. In 1493 Columbus returned with an invasion force of seventeen
ships, appointed at his own request by the Spanish Crown to install
himself as "viceroy and governor of [the Caribbean islands] and the
mainland" of America, a position he held until 1500. Setting up shop on
the large island he called Espa–ola (today Haiti and the Dominican
Republic), he promptly instituted policies of slavery (encomiendo) and
systematic extermination against the native Taino population.
Columbus's programs reduced Taino numbers from as many as eight million
at the outset of his regime to about three million in 1496. Perhaps
100,000 were left by the time of the governor's departure. His
policies, however, remained, with the result that by 1514 the Spanish
census of the island showed barely 22,000 Indians remaining alive. In
1542, only two hundred were recorded. Thereafter, they were considered
extinct, as were Indians throughout the Caribbean Basin, an aggregate
population which totaled more than fifteen million at the point of
first contact with the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, as Columbus was known.
This, to be sure, constitutes an attrition of population in real
numbers every bit as great as the toll of twelve to fifteen million
about half of them Jewish most commonly attributed to Himmler's
slaughter mills. Moreover, the proportion of indigenous Caribbean
population destroyed by the Spanish in a single generation is, no
matter how the figures are twisted, far greater than the seventy-five
percent of European Jews usually said to have been exterminated by the
Nazis. Worst of all, these data apply only to the Caribbean Basin; the
process of genocide in the Americas was only just beginning at the
point such statistics become operant, not ending, as they did upon the
fall of the Third Reich. All told, it is probable that more than one
hundred million native people were "eliminated" in the course of
Europe's ongoing "civilization" of the Western Hemisphere.

It has long been asserted by "responsible scholars" that this
decimation of American Indians which accompanied the European invasion
resulted primarily from disease rather than direct killing or conscious
policy. There is a certain truth to this, although starvation may have
proven just as lethal in the end. It must be borne in mind when
considering such facts that a considerable portion of those who
perished in the Nazi death camps died, not as the victims of bullets
and gas, but from starvation, as well as epidemics of typhus,
dysentery, and the like. Their keepers, who could not be said to have
killed these people directly, were nonetheless found to have been
culpable in their deaths by way of deliberately imposing the conditions
which led to the proliferation of starvation and disease among them.
Certainly, the same can be said of Columbus's regime, under which the
original residents were, as a first order of business, permanently
dispossessed of their abundant cultivated fields while being converted
into chattel, ultimately to be worked to death for the wealth and
"glory" of Spain.

Nor should more direct means of extermination be relegated to
incidental status. As the matter is put by Kirkpatrick Sale in hisrecent book, Conquest of Paradise,

The tribute system, instituted by the Governor sometime in 1495, was a
simple and brutal way of fulfilling the Spanish lust for gold while
acknowledging the Spanish distaste for labor. Every Taino over the age
of fourteen had to supply the rulers with a hawk's bell of gold every
three months (or in gold-deficient areas, twenty-five pounds of spun
cotton); those who did were given a token to wear around their necks as
proof that they had made their payment; those who did not were, as
[Columbus's brother, Fernando] says discreetly "punished"-by having
their hands cut off, as [the priest, Bartolom,, de] las Casas says less
discreetly, and left to bleed to death.

It is entirely likely that upwards of 10,000 Indians were killed in
this fashion alone, on Espa–ola alone, as a matter of policy, during
Columbus's tenure as governor. Las Casas' Brev’sima relaci—n, among
other contemporaneous sources, is also replete with accounts of Spanish
colonists (hidalgos) hanging Tainos en masse, roasting them on spits or
burning them at the stake (often a dozen or more at a time), hacking
their children into pieces to be used as dog feed and so forth, all of
it to instill in the natives a "proper attitude of respect" toward
their Spanish "superiors." [The Spaniards] made bets as to who would
slit a man in two, or cut off his head at one blow; or they opened up
his bowels. They tore the babes from their mother's breast by their
feet and dashed their heads against the rocks...They spitted the bodies
of other babes, together with their mothers and all who were before
them, on their swords.

No SS trooper could be expected to comport himself with a more
unrelenting viciousness. And there is more. All of this was coupled to
wholesale and persistent massacres:
A Spaniard...suddenly drew his sword. Then the whole hundred drew
theirs and began to rip open the bellies, to cut and kill [a group of
Tainos assembled for this purpose] men, women, children and old folk,
all of whom were seated, off guard and frightened...And within two
credos, not a man of them there remains alive. The Spaniards enter the
large house nearby, for this was happening at its door, and in the same
way, with cuts and stabs, began to kill as many as were found there, so
that a stream of blood was running, as if a great number of cows had
perished.

Elsewhere, las Casas went on to recount how
in this time, the greatest outrages and slaughterings of people were
perpetrated, whole villages being depopulated...The Indians saw that
without any offense on their part they were despoiled of their
kingdoms, their lands and liberties and of their lives, their wives,
and homes. As they saw themselves each day perishing by the cruel and
inhuman treatment of the Spaniards, crushed to earth by the horses, cut
in pieces by swords, eaten and torn by dogs, many buried alive and
suffering all kinds of exquisite tortures... [many surrendered to their
fate, while the survivors] fled to the mountains [to starve].

Such descriptions correspond almost perfectly to those of systematic
Nazi atrocities in the western USSR offered by William Shirer in
Chapter 27 of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. But, unlike the
Nazi extermination campaigns of World War II the Columbian butchery on
Espa–ola continued until there were no Tainos left to butcher.

Evolution of the Columbian Legacy

Nor was this by any means the end of it. The genocidal model for
conquest and colonization established by Columbus was to a large extent
replicated by others such as Cortez (in Mexico) a Pizarro (in Peru)
during the following half-century. During the same period, expeditions
such as those of Ponce de Leon in 1513, Coronado in 1540, and de Soto
during the same year were launched with an eye towards effecting the
same pattern on the North American continent proper. In the latter
sphere the Spanish example was followed and in certain ways intensified
by the British, beginning at Roanoake in 1607 and Plymouth in 1620.
Overall the process of English colonization along the Atlantic Coast
was marked by a series of massacres of native people as relentless and
devastating as any perpetrated by the Spaniards. One of the best known
illustrations drawn from among hundreds was the slaughter of some 800
Pequots at present-day Mystic, Connecticut, on the night of May 26,
1637.

During the latter portion of the seventeenth century, and throughout
most of the eighteenth, Great Britain battled France for colonial
primacy in North America. The resulting sequence of four "French and
Indian Wars" greatly accelerated the liquidation of indigenous people
as far west as the Ohio River Valley. During the last of these,
concluded in 1763 history's first documentable case of biological
warfare occurred against Pontiac's Algonkian Confederacy, a powerful
military alliance aligned with the French.

Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander-in-chief of the British forces...wrote
in a postscript of a letter to Bouquet [a subordinate] that smallpox be
sent among the disaffected tribes. Bouquet replied, also in a
postscript, "I will try to [contaminate] them...with some blankets that
may fall into their hands, and take care not to get the disease
myself."...To Bouquet's postscript Amherst replied, "You will do well
to [infect] the Indians by means of blankets as well as to try every
other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race." On June
24, Captain Ecuyer, of the Royal Americans, noted in his journal:
"...we gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the smallpox
hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect."

It did. Over the next few months, the disease spread like wildfire
among the Mingo, Delaware, Shawnee, and other Ohio River nations,
killing perhaps 100,000 people. The example of Amherst's action does
much to dispel the myth that the post contact attrition of Indian
people through disease; introduced by Europeans was necessarily
unintentional and unavoidable. There are a number earlier instances in
which native people felt disease, had been deliberately inculcated
among them. For example, the so-called "King Philip's War" of 1675-76
was fought largely because the Wampanoag and Narragansett nations
believed English traders had consciously contaminated certain of their
villages with smallpox. Such tactics were also continued by the United
States after the American Revolution. At Fort Clark on the upper
Missouri River, for instance, the U.S. Army distributed smallpox-laden
blankets as gifts among the Mandan. The blankets had been gathered from
a military infirmary in St. Louis where troops infected with the
disease were quarantined. Although the medical practice of the day
required the precise opposite procedure, army doctors ordered the
Mandans to disperse once they exhibited symptoms of infection. The
result was a pandemic among the Plains Indian nations who claimed at
least 125,000 lives, and may have reached a toll several times that
number.

Contemporaneously with the events at Fort Clark, the U.S. was also
engaged in a policy of wholesale "removal" of indigenous nations east
of the Mississippi River, "clearing" the land of its native population
so that it might be "settled" by "racially superior" Anglo-Saxon
"pioneers." This resulted in a series of extended forced marches some
more than a thousand miles in length in which entire peoples were
walked at bayonet-point to locations west of the Mississippi. Rations
and medical attention were poor, shelter at times all but nonexistent.
Attrition among the victims was correspondingly high. As many as
fifty-five percent of all Cherokees, for example, are known to have
died during or as an immediate result of that people's "Trail of
Tears." The Creeks and Seminoles also lost about half their existing
populations as a direct consequence of being "removed." It was the
example of nineteenth-century U.S. Indian Removal policy upon which
Adolf Hitler relied for a practical model when articulating and
implementing his Lebensraumpolitik during the 1930s and '40s.

By the 1850s, U.S. policymakers had adopted a popular philosophy called
"Manifest Destiny" by which they imagined themselves enjoying a
divinely ordained right to possess all native property, including
everything west of the Mississippi. This was coupled to what has been
termed a "rhetoric of extermination" by which governmental and
corporate leaders sought to shape public sentiment to embrace the
eradication of American Indians. The professed goal of this physical
reduction of "inferior" indigenous populations was to open up land for
"superior" Euro-American "pioneers." One outcome of this dual
articulation was a series of general massacres perpetrated by the
United States military.

A bare sampling of some of the worst must include the 1854 massacre of
perhaps 150 Lakotas at Blue River (Nebraska), the 1863 Bear River
(Idaho) Massacre of some 500 Western Shoshones, the 1864 Sand Creek
(Colorado) Massacre of as many as 250 Cheyennes and Arapahoes, the 1868
massacre of another 300 Cheyennes at the Washita River (Oklahoma), the
1875 massacre of about 75 Cheyennes along the Sappa Creek (Kansas), the
1878 massacre of still another 100 Cheyennes at Camp Robinson
(Nebraska), and the 1890 massacre of more than 300 Lakotas at Wounded
Knee (South Dakota).

Related phenomena included the army's internment of the bulk of all
Navajos for four years (1864-68) under abysmal conditions at the Bosque
Redondo, during which upwards of a third of the population of this
nation is known to have perished of starvation and disease. Even worse
in some ways was the unleashing of Euro-American civilians to kill
Indians at whim, and sometimes for profit. In Texas, for example, an
official bounty on native scalps any native scalps was maintained until
well into the 1870s. The result was that the indigenous population of
this state, once the densest in all of North America, had been reduced
to near zero by 1880. As it has been put elsewhere, "The facts of
history are plain: Most Texas Indians were exterminated or brought to
the brink of oblivion by [civilians] who often had no more regard for
the life of an Indian than they had for that of a dog, sometimes less."
Similarly, in California, "the enormous decrease [in indigenous
population] from about a quarter-million [in 1800] to less than 20,000
is due chiefly to the cruelties and wholesale massacres perpetrated by
miners and early settlers."

Much of the killing in California and southern Oregon Territory
resulted, directly and indirectly, from the discovery of gold in 1849
and the subsequent influx of miners and settlers. Newspaper accounts
document the atrocities, as do oral histories of the California Indians
today. It was not uncommon for small groups or villages to be attacked
by immigrants...and virtually wiped out overnight.

All told, the North American Indian population within the area of the
forty-eight contiguous states of the United States, an aggregate group
which had probably numbered in excess of twelve million in the year
1500, was reduced by official estimates to barely more than 237,000
four centuries later. This vast genocide historically paralleled in its
magnitude and degree only by that which occurred in the Caribbean Basin
is the most sustained on record. Corresponding almost perfectly with
this upper-ninetieth-percentile
erosion of indigenous population by 1900 was the expropriation of about
97.5 percent of native land by 1920. The situation in Canada was/is
entirely comparable. Plainly, the Nazi-esque dynamics set in motion by
Columbus in 1492 continued, and were not ultimately consummated until
the present century.

The Columbian Legacy in the United States

While it is arguable that the worst of the genocidal programs directed
against Native North America had ended by the twentieth century, it
seems undeniable that several continue into the present. One obvious
illustration is the massive compulsory transfer of American Indian
children from their families, communities, and societies to
Euro-American families and institutions, a policy which is quite
blatant in its disregard for Article l(e) of the 1948 Convention.
Effected through such mechanisms as the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs
(BIA) boarding school system, and a pervasive policy of placing Indian
children for adoption (including "blind" adoption) with non-Indians,
such circumstances have been visited upon more than three-quarters of
indigenous youth in some generations after 1900. The stated goal of
such policies has been to bring about the "assimilation" of native
people into the value orientations and belief system of their
conquerors. Rephrased, the objective has been to bring about the
disappearance of indigenous societies as such, a patent violation of
the terms, provisions, and intent of the Genocide Convention (Article
I(c)).

An even clearer example is a program of involuntary sterilization of
American Indian women by the BIA's Indian Health Service (IHS) during
the 1970s. The federal government announced that the program had been
terminated, and acknowledged having performed several thousand such
sterilizations. Independent researchers have concluded that as many as
forty-two percent of all native women of childbearing age in the United
States had been sterilized by that point. That the program represents a
rather stark¾and very recent¾violation of Article I(d) of the 1948
Convention seems beyond all reasonable doubt.

More broadly, implications of genocide are quite apparent in the
federal government's self-assigned exercise of "plenary power" and
concomitant "trust" prerogatives over the residual Indian land base
pursuant to the Lonewolf v. Hitchcock case (187 U.S. 553(1903)). This
has worked, with rather predictable results, to systematically deny
native people the benefit of their remaining material assets. At
present, the approximately 1.6 million Indians recognized by the
government as residing within the U.S., when divided into the
fifty-million-odd acres nominally reserved for their use and occupancy,
remain the continent's largest landholders on a per capita basis.
Moreover, the reservation lands have proven to be extraordinarily
resource rich, holding an estimated two-thirds of all U.S. "domestic"
uranium reserves, about a quarter of the readily accessible low-sulfur
coal, as much as a fifth of the oil and natural gas, as well as
substantial deposits of copper, iron, gold, and zeolites. By any
rational definition, the U.S. Indian population should thus be one of
the wealthiest if not the richest population sectors in North America.

Instead, by the federal government's own statistics, they comprise far
and away the poorest. As of 1980, American Indians experienced, by a
decided margin, the lowest annual and lifetime incomes on a per capita
basis of any ethnic or racial group on the continent. Correlated to
this are all the standard indices of extreme poverty: the highest rates
of infant mortality, death by exposure and malnutrition, incidence of
tuberculosis and other plague disease. Indians experience the highest
level of unemployment, year after year, and the lowest level of
educational attainment. The overall quality of life is so dismal that
alcoholism and other forms of substance abuse are endemic; the rate of
teen suicide is also several times that of the nation as a whole. The
average life expectancy of a reservation-based Native American male is
less than 45 years; that of a reservation-based female less than three
years longer.

It's not that reservation resources are not being exploited, or profits
accrued. To the contrary, virtually all uranium mining and milling
occurred on or immediately adjacent to reservation land during the life
of the Atomic Energy Commission's ore-buying program, 1952-81. The
largest remaining enclave of traditional Indians in North America is
currently undergoing forced relocation in order that coal may be mined
on the Navajo Reservation. Alaska native peoples are being converted
into landless "village corporations" in order that the oil under their
territories can be tapped; and so on. Rather, the BIA has utilized its
plenary and trust capacities to negotiate contracts with major mining
corporations "in behalf of" its "Indian wards" which pay pennies on the
dollar of the conventional mineral royalty rates. Further, the BIA has
typically exempted such corporations from an obligation to reclaim
whatever reservation lands have been mined, or even to perform basic
environmental cleanup of nuclear and other forms of waste. One outcome
has been that the National Institute for Science has recommended that
the two locales within the U.S. most heavily populated by native
people¾the Four Corners Region and the Black Hills Region¾be designated
as "National Sacrifice Areas." Indians have responded that this would
mean their being converted into "national sacrifice peoples"

Even such seemingly innocuous federal policies as those concerning
Indian identification criteria carry with them an evident genocidal
potential. In clinging insistently to a variation of a eugenics
formulation dubbed "blood-quantum" ushered in by the 1887 General
Allotment Act, while implementing such policies as the Federal Indian
Relocation Program (1956-1982), the government has set the stage for a
"statistical extermination" of the indigenous population within its
borders. As the noted western historian, Patricia Nelson Limerick, has
observed: "Set the blood-quantum at one-quarter, hold to it as a rigid
definition of Indians, let intermarriage proceed...and eventually
Indians will be defined out of existence. When that happens, the
federal government will finally be freed from its persistent 'Indian
problem'." Ultimately, there is precious little difference, other than
matters of style, between this and what was once called the "Final
Solution of the Jewish Problem."