American Genocide: wiping out The Native Americans, one child at a time.

April 6, 2021 2:02 AM

Described as the greatest Holocaust in History, the systematic slaughter of the Indigenous People of the Americas, over centuries, finally culminating in the eradication of their youth. (pdf 1, 2)
posted by hadjiboy (12 comments total)

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posted by mrgroweler at 4:34 AM on April 6, 2021

I always wonder during the reparations coverage what kind of compensation is even possible for what was done to the Native Americans and why it's not part of those discussions.
posted by lon_star at 4:45 AM on April 6, 2021 [9 favorites]

I have a friend who was a victim of the 60s scoop in Canada, where they did just that - scooped in and took thousands of children from First Nations parents. She only reconnected with her band and family in the late 2000s. Other siblings experienced the same fate. She never saw her mother again.

She was offered $30,000 by the government in compensation for what she and her siblings and family had experienced. $30,000
posted by lesbiassparrow at 5:17 AM on April 6, 2021 [8 favorites]

30K, it is literally adding insult to injury. FFS.
posted by Meatbomb at 5:48 AM on April 6, 2021 [5 favorites]

And that amount involved a long process that was very confusing and required people to prove their trauma to a degree that was gross.

The entire way the money was doled out made the entire thing retraumatizing for many.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 6:40 AM on April 6, 2021 [8 favorites]

Doug Ford in Ontario has also removed the still-new Residential Schools mandatory units from the Ontario curriculum - which is appalling. (My oldest completed both and my youngest completed the grade 3 unit and they were really educational for our whole family.) Alberta's new proposed curriculum is an incredible throwback to the colonial-friendly narrative.

Don't mistake these things as part of the past; this is an ongoing fight.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:02 AM on April 6, 2021 [20 favorites]

I was part of a group that watched the film Indian Horse a few months ago. It's the story of a boy who is taken from his family and sent to one of these schools in Canada. It's based on a novel of the same name, which I haven't yet read. The movie is worthwhile. Our group, predominantly white, was studying racism through the medium of film, and though I had known about the schools, I was shocked by how recently the last of them had closed—1996 maybe? Well into my adulthood.

I'm sorry to hear about what Doug Ford is doing, warriorqueen. We also found learning about the residential schools really educational. It feels like a part of our history that we should be teaching.

One of the linked articles has a photo of a mass grave at Wounded Knee. It is identical to images from the Holocaust. There is nothing like an image of a mass grave to tell you that genocide is going on. Even in images from New York of many bodies being buried without funerals early in the pandemic, the dead are afforded individual graves.
posted by Orlop at 8:31 AM on April 6, 2021 [8 favorites]

I always wonder during the reparations coverage what kind of compensation is even possible for what was done to the Native Americans and why it's not part of those discussions.


The Natives I know don't want reparations. They want landback and decolonization.
posted by maxsparber at 11:57 AM on April 6, 2021 [8 favorites]

The city where I grew up has a university specifically for Native Americans but the school has a long, sad history dating back to the 1800s. In those days Native American children were swept up and sent to these schools to indoctrinate them into the ways of the Great Father. They were forbidden from even seeing their loved ones. More than a few were driven to despair and committed suicide. Others would sneak out at night to the land south of the school (a wetlands area) to practice their religious rituals (which were obviously forbidden in their school.) Occasionally they'd meet with family there.

Although the land has sacred spiritual and cultural meaning to the Native Americans and was also environmentally-sensitive, my hometown fell all over itself building not only a 4-lane superhighway through the land they also build another 4-lane street next to that. That's no surprise, though, given that the city also built a sewage treatment plant immediately adjacent to their burial ground.
posted by drstrangelove at 4:22 AM on April 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

You're back!
posted by infini at 4:48 AM on April 7, 2021 [2 favorites]

Hey, infini... it's shocking to know how many of you I can still recall, by name that too (at least your pseudonyms) but as I was telling someone else--just goes to show you what kind of a special place this is.
posted by hadjiboy at 6:14 AM on April 7, 2021 [3 favorites]

In 'Exterminate All the Brutes', Raoul Peck Takes Aim at White Supremacy [archive.is] - "After the success of 'I Am Not Your Negro', HBO gave Peck carte blanche for his next big project. What resulted is a sweeping meditation on colonialism and the nature of truth itself."

The film, they told Plepler in a two-page pitch, would be based on the historian Sven Lindqvist’s 1992 book “Exterminate All the Brutes,” a mix of history and travelogue that used Joseph Conrad’s novella “Heart of Darkness” as a jumping off point to trace Europe’s racist past in Africa. (“Exterminate all the brutes” is a phrase written by Kurtz, Conrad’s ivory trading “demigod.”) It would be about that, but also much more, much of which they hadn’t quite worked out yet.

“There were a lot of ideas in that pitch,” Grellety remembered.

After mining Lindqvist’s book, Peck determined he needed a similar text about the history of genocide in the United States. He came upon “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States,” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s American Book Award-winning examination of this country’s centuries-long war against its original inhabitants, and was “wowed.” Peck and Dunbar-Ortiz talked at length about her book and his film, and how the two might come together.

posted by kliuless at 10:20 PM on April 7, 2021 [2 favorites]