aPriL does feral sometimes 's Reviews > Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

It is very possible you learned in school about the depravities of the Nazis towards the Jews, homosexuals, Russian and Polish prisoners, intellectuals and the mentally disabled before and during World War II. Perhaps you believe the Nazis invented the arts of genocide. We all know, too, that ultimately the Nazis failed, as there are still Jews, Russians and Poles.

Missing or elided over in many of our history textbooks and education, there actually was an American genocide which occurred before the Nazi one, and it can actually be thought as having succeeded, in my humble opinion.

At present, 2017, Native-Americans are 1% of the total population of the United States.

The book, 'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee' tells the story of the genocide White Americans committed against Native-Americans. Native-Americans tried very hard to stop the theft of their lands and the murders of their women and children, but they lost in spite of trying to use the White race's legal mechanisms of Congress and the courts. Actual witness statements from soldiers, politicians, reporters, missionaries, settlers, historians, artists, photographers, and surviving Native-Americans from 1860-1890 were collected by author Dee Brown. He arranged the parts of the memoirs, articles, interviews, statements and reports relating to the various final skirmishes and battles into a chronological history telling the story of how America tricked, lied, and killed in cold blood entire villages of unarmed non-combatants who had been assured they would be safe due to treaties and official surrenders.

Natives sometimes were told if they surrendered peaceably and reported to illegally-built forts on their own land, or to soldiers, they would be ok. Instead soldiers often fired on the unarmed Natives, which included women, children and the old and sick. My edition of Brown's book has actual photos of trenches filled with the bodies of women and children, as well as the bodies of the Native men who had tried to save their wives and children and elders. Clothes and goods were stripped from the bodies and villages in some cases, much like the goods collected by the Nazis, admittedly more systematically by the Nazis.

The Native-Americans sent their leaders to at least three American Presidents at the White House asking for relief of the undeclared war against them. They signed cease-fire treaties with promises of reparations, payment for the lands already robbed from them and punishment for the guilty. They were promised again and again no more Whites would come into their territories. In return, Native-Americans promised to lay down their weapons. Instead, they discovered wagon trains as long as 80 wagons crossing their land without permission or payment, surveyors and workers laying down train tracks, their homes and villages burned down with women and children inside of teepees, and found all of the game rotting in piles of meat or disappeared.

Most Native-Americans could not speak or read English, and had to rely on translators. They signed treaties without knowing what was written on them. They often signed away or 'sold' their lands 'legally'. Then the soldiers often came and murdered them in their homes. When the Native-Americans picked up their bows and arrows and the few old guns they had to fight back, they were slaughtered for 'breaking the treaties'.

In other books I have read, White settlers believed Natives were 'begging' when they asked for food or metal items or weapons when they crossed Native-American land, since the settlers did not know what was in the treaties Washington D.C. politicians had told Native-American people about being paid for accepting the passage of Whites through their lands. Settlers did not know Native-Americans believed the land was theirs since they had lived there for centuries. Missionaries who taught Native-Americans about Christianity unknowingly set up 'their' Native-Americans for slaughter. Christian Native-Americans were often murdered by White settlers scared out of their minds when Natives came up to them expecting the gentle acceptance and equal treatment of fellow Christians, as they were taught by missionaries about Jesus in the New Testament.

Those Native-Americans who survived the planned, if sporadic, genocidal slaughter, were moved by armed soldiers to 'better' homes - reservations that had a scorching hot climate or freezing winters, without potable water or any animals to hunt or land where they could plant food crops. They were assigned White reservation minders from the Bureau of Indian Affairs who embezzled the money sent for their maintenance on which they were dependent, since Native-Americans on many reservations had no resources with which to feed and clothe themselves. If Indians tried to 'escape' the reservations, they were punished (flogged), returned in chains or killed. Many sickened, many more died. Does this sound like the Nazi death camps? It isn't a coincidence.

I read in a book that the Nazis studied the American genocide of the Native-Americans for methods of mass murder which they could use. They had no doubts the Americans committed genocide against the Native-Americans. They also picked up affirmation of their ideas of White Supremacy from published stories and articles from American scientists and academic circles.

From Wikipedia:

"The eugenics movement became negatively associated with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust when many of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials attempted to justify their human rights abuses by claiming there was little difference between the Nazi eugenics programs and the U.S. eugenics programs."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

Whites have believed for a long time they are the only humans worthy of being called human beings and that they are superior to all other life forms on earth.

From Wikipedia on scientific racism:

"Meanwhile, Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), the Swedish physician, botanist, and zoologist, modified the established taxonomic bases of binomial nomenclature for fauna and flora, and was a pioneer researcher in biologically defining human race. In Systema Naturae (1767), he labeled five "varieties"of human species. Each one was described as possessing the following physiognomic characteristics "varying by culture and place":
▪ The Americanus: red, choleraic, righteous; black, straight, thick hair; stubborn, zealous, free; painting himself with red lines, and regulated by custom

"Kant (1724-1804) stated: "The yellow Indians do have a meagre talent. The Negroes are far below them, and at the lowest point are a part of the American people.""

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scien...

My edition had illustrations and drawings from Native-American and White artists alive at the time, photographs of the meetings between Native-Americans and American politicians and military officers, and of the massacres, and copies of maps showing the distribution of the various tribes. There is a Notes section, a Bibliography and an Index, as well as a list of contributors and picture credits. A short biography of the author is also included. Dee Brown was a librarian. I officially love him.