Michael Medved: Native American “Genocide”

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Guilty Germs

No one disputes that the first four centuries after European contact brought a devastating decline in the number of Native Americans.  By the beginning of the twentieth century, government officials found only 250,000 Indian survivors in the territory of the United States… Meanwhile, scholarly estimates of pre-Columbian North American population range from 1.2 million all the way to 20 million…
     Beyond all arguments about the levels of native population at its peak, historians have reach unanimity on the prime cause of its rapid decline:  infectious disease brought about between 75 and 95 percent of Indian deaths after European settlement began.  In his critically acclaimed best seller Guns, Germs, and Steel:  The Fate of Human Societies, UCLA professor Jared Diamond observes that “throughout the Americas, diseases introduced with Europeans spread from tribe to tribe far in advance of the Europeans themselves, killing an estimated 95 percent of the pre-Columbian Native American population… The main killers were Old World germs to which Indians had never been exposed, and against which they therefore had neither immune nor genetic resistance.  Smallpox, measles, influenza, and typhus rank top among the killers.”
     Diseases spread far more rapidly than European settlement and decimated even those Indian societies that had minimal contact with the newcomers… Contrary to the popular image, “conquistadors contributed nothing directly to the societies’ destruction; Eurasian germs, spreading in advance, did everything”…
     The decimation of native populations by microbial invaders represented an enormous human tragedy, but in no sense did it constitute a crime.Constant Battles:  The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage shows that genocides and land raids among regional and ethnic groups had always been the norm for native peoples…

“Smallpox Blankets” and Biological Warfare

But didn’t British authorities, and later the Americans, show criminal intent when they deliberately infected innocent tribes with the deadliest of eighteenth-century diseases?  Whenever callers to my radio show begin talking about the premeditated mass slaughter of Native Americans, it’s only a matter of seconds before they invoke the diabolical history of “smallpox blankets” — the bedding and clothing cunningly provided to unsuspecting tribes in order to infect them with the variola major virus…
     Amazingly, the notion persists that the unimaginable devastation brought about by this disease stemmed from elaborate and brilliantly executed schemes devised by mass murderers — at a time when even the most sophisticated physicians possessed no real understanding of germ theory…
     The horribly misleading charges about germ warfare have achieved a monstrous life of their own, leaving many (if not most) Americans with the impression that diseases that decimated native populations resulted from a conscious, long-standing policy of the U.S. government.  No such master plan for mass murder ever existed, of course, so that all efforts to scour abundant bureaucratic records have produced only a few nasty postscripts in letters from British — not American — officials in 1763, and the largely exculpatory evidence concerning an epidemic in Mandan territory in 1837…

Bury the Truth at Wounded Knee

…The original confrontation at Wounded Knee Creek occurred after Big Foot’s band of 120 warriors and 230 women and children gave up fleeing from the authorities who wanted to restrict them to a reservation.  The Indians surrendered to the troops of the Seventh Cavalry, but when the soldiers ordered them to disarm, some of the Miniconjou tried to hide the rifles they considered essential to their suvival and dignity.
     Before nine in the morning on December 29, two soldiers began to struggle with an Indian named Black Coyote, who demanded that he be paid for his rifle.  One of Black Coyote’s fellow tribesman described him as “a crazy man, a young man of very band influence and in fact a nobody,” while two other Miniconjou suggested that he was also deaf, which might explain his behavior.  As the two troopers tried to wrestle him to the gound he managed to fire a shot into the air.
     In response to the single shot, a medicine man named Yellow Bird threw a handful of dirt into the air — an important symbol to his fellow members of the Ghost Dance cult, who believed that their rituals would bring dead warriors and dead buffalo back to life and rid the world of all white men.  Five or six of Yellow Bird’s followers then stood up, threw off their blankets in the bitter cold, produced the rifles they’d been concealing, and began firing directly toward K troop.
     The melee that followed, like most other purported “massacres” of Native Americans, featured fierce fighting and losses on both sides.  The battle raged for hours, with the Indians demonstrating expert handling of their well-maintained, repeating Winchester rifles and also engaging in fearless hand-to-hand combat.
     By the end of the day, the overwhelming majority of Big Foot’s band of 350 had been killed or wounded; at least 153 died (including at least 44 women and 18 children too young to fight).  Among the U.S. soldiers, 25 died and 39 were wounded.
     The statistics indicate the one-sided nature of the fight, but it was a fight, not an unprovoked slaughter of unarmed innocents.  Neither the soldiers nor the government that commanded them had any intention of killing Indians that day, despite the mythology that’s grown up around the tragedy.  With true genocidal intent, the soldiers could have simply used the artillery they brought with them…

Tribe Against Tribe

In recent years nearly all pop-cultural accounts of pre-Columbian North America feature potent elements of nostalgia, stressing the supposed dignity and gentleness of native societies in order to emphasize the tragic aspects of purported genocide by white invaders.  For instance, the lavish Pocahontas–Captain John Smith movie The New World (2005) arrived with a handsome promotional brochure explaining that the Jamestown settlers of 1607 found a “noble civilization” that “had lived in peace for hundreds of years.”
     For ranchers, miners, farmers, and soldiers who lived their lives in constant and legitimate fear of Indian attack, however, the indigenous cultures seemed neither noble nor peaceful; their regular description of Indians as “savages” reflected an observed pattern of terrifying brutality.  Moreover, most of the white newcomers to the West understood that the bloodthirsty habits that so frightened them unquestionably predated the arrival of Europeans in North America.  Even while directing their rage at white intruders, the natives continued their age-old tradition of withering intertribal warfare, constributing mightily to the failure of all efforts at resistance.
     The various tribes never lived together in harmony and mutual respect, no more than the Neolithic cultures of Europe, Asia, or Africa coexisted without desperate and punishing conflict.  Societies among the Indians and all other aboriginal peoples conducted devastating wars against one another, that at times became struggles for domination, conquest, replacement, or even extermination.
     Harvard anthropologist Steven LeBlanc spent years studying the Anasazi Indians of the American Southwest and only gradually came to reject the popular notion that North American tribes had once composed a gorgeous mosaic of diversity, living side by side in peace and dignity.  In his research, he discovered pueblos built on mesas from the years 1275 to 1325 — long before Europeans had arrived in the New World — that housed more than a thousand residents each, designed to be impregnable to inevitable attack.  LeBlanc’s book Constant Battles:  The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage shows that genocides and land raids among regional and ethnic groups had always been the norm for native peoples…

Michael Medved
“America Was Founded on Genocide Against Native Americans”
The 10 Big Lies About America