The scholarly debate over the word "genocide"

To a significant extent, disagreements about the pervasiveness of genocide in the history of the post-Columbian Western Hemisphere, in general, and U.S. history, in particular, pivot on definitions of genocide.

for many, perhaps most, scholars in these fields, an overarching indictment of genocide seems too extreme.

many scholars not inclined to see genocide as pervasive in U.S. history have said that what happened in California is exceptional and does qualify.

reveals an expansive view of what Lemkin termed a “Spanish colonial genocide.”

Under a strict definition requiring a federal or state government intention to kill all California Indians and an outcome in which the majority of deaths were from direct killing, genocide does not seem applicable.

Under a less strict, though still fairly conservative, definition requiring only settler intention to destroy a substantial portion of California Indians using a variety of means ranging from dispossession to systematic killing, genocide seems apt

some Native scholars have cautioned that writing indigenous histories as genocide risks reinforcing pernicious ideologies of Indians as vanishing and degraded.

As applied to indigenous people of North America, the term genocide was not used much, if at all, until the mid-1970s.

made the case, as their titles indicate, by arguing for moral and analytical equivalences with the Holocaust, going so far as to accuse those who disagreed with them as deniers.

For the most part, historians ignored these works and their arguments for genocide’s pervasiveness

Scholars have begun referring to Indian removal as ethnic cleansing, a term whose aptness seems incontestable.

Many writers see the massive depopulation of the indigenous population of the Americas after 1492 as a clear-cut case of the genocide. Other writers, however, contend that European and U.S. actions toward Indians were deplorable but were rarely if ever genocidal.

recognized that this absence “comes from the genocidal policies of the colonial power of the United States.”

acknowledge the extremes of violence in our own history by calling it what is was: genocide

Genocide. No other way to describe it, and that's the way it needs to be described in the history books,

The crucial role played by intentionality in the Genocide Convention means that under its terms the huge number of Indian deaths from epidemics cannot be considered genocide.

By contrast, some of the massacres in California, where both the perpetrators and their supporters openly acknowledged a desire to destroy the Indians as an ethnic entity, might indeed be regarded under the terms of the convention as exhibiting genocidal intent.

were as much the victims of the Euro-American genocidal war as were those burned or stabbed or hacked or shot to death, or devoured by hungry dogs

native Americans had undergone the “worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed, roaring across two continents non-stop for four centuries and consuming the lives of countless tens of millions of people.”

It is thought that between 75 to 90 percent of all Indian deaths resulted from these killers.

But the largest loss of life occurred well before this time, and sometimes after only minimal contact with European traders.

after a long delay, it was ratified by the United States in 1986.

an atrocity like the Sand Creek massacre, limited to one group in a specific single locality, might also be considered an act of genocide.

The objective of US authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples—not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide.

Genocide will never become a widely accepted characterization for what happened in North America, because large numbers of Indians survived and because policies of mass murder on a scale similar to events in central Europe, Cambodia, or Rwanda were never implemented.

The convention is not retroactive but is applicable to US-Indigenous relations since 1988, when the US Senate ratified it.

Throughout his lecture, which was punctuated with descriptions of atrocities like the massacre he described at the beginning of his talk, Professor Madley offered evidence that the deaths of California Indians were the result of deliberate, direct, and intentional strategies to eliminate them.

The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can best be described as “cultural genocide.”

can be deemed an act of genocide under Article 2(e) of the un’s Convention on Genocide, but is not a civil wrong

Cultural genocide is the destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue as a group.

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.