On June 30, I posted details about Thomas Jefferson who authored the long standing U.S.policy toward Native people known as "Move or Die." I included this quote: "If we are to wage a campaign against these Indians the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes of the Illinois River. The same world would scarcely do for them and us."
I was asked which Indians was Jefferson referring to when he made that quote.
My instinct is to say "all Indians" and leave it like that, the Europeans ravished this continent by dividing and conquering. But the truth is it was all Indians that were left, some had already been exterminated.
The Shawnee were the major nation resisting Virginia's murderous invasion in 1780 just as the Cherokee were resisting North Carolina's and Georgia's invaders. But it would have been "first they came for the Shawnee, and then they came for the rest." By 1780 Virginia had already wiped out several nations. Jefferson was a national leader, the author of the Declaration of Independence, the former ambassador to France, when he spoke as Governor of Virginia he was not referring to a local state problem. The Illinois River was a long way from Williamsburg.
I have been able to compile a short list of known victims of this policy which was continued until the indigenous people were no longer in possession of any ancestral land, continued even after Wounded Knee, continued even after the people had been humiliated and reduced to dependency. Jefferson's policy affected these Indians.
Abenakis, Accochannock, Alabama Coushatta, Abanki, Alaska Natives, Apache,* Arapaho, Arikara, Assiniboine Sioux, Blackfeet,* Caddo, Carrier, Catawba, Cayuga , Cheyenne, Chickasaw, Chicora, Chilcotin, Chippewa, Chippewa Cree, Chitimacha,
Chocataw, Cherokee*, Chumash, Coharie, Comanche,* Costanoan, Cowlitz, Cree, Creek, Crow, Dakota, Delaware, Dene, Edisto, Essellen, Goshute , Gros Ventree, Gwitch'In , Haida, Haliwa-Sponi, Hidatsa, Ho Chunk , Hohokam, Hopi,Houma, Hupa, Huron, Illinois, Innu, Inuit, Inupiaq, Iowa, Iroquois, Kalispel, Kaw, Kiowa, Klallam, Klamath, Kootenai, Lakota, Lumbee, Maidu, Makah, Mandan, Mattaponi, Meherrin, Menominee, Metis, Miami, Mingo, Miwok, Mohawk, Mohegan, Monacan, Montaucketts, Munsee Delaware, Nansemond, Navaho *, Nez Perce, Nisga'a, Nootka, Ohlone, Ojibwe, Omaha, Oneida, Onondaga, Osage, Ottawa, Paiute, Pamunkey, Pawnee, Peoria, Pequot, Pima, Potawatomi, Powhatan, Pueblo, Quapaw, Quinault, Ramapough, Sac and Fox , Salish, Saponi, Secwepemc, Seminole,
Seneca, Shawnee, Shinnecock, Shoshone, Shuswap, Siletz, Sioux, Spokane, Steilacoom, Suquamish, Susquehanna Tlingit, Tonkawa, Tsilhqot'In, Tuscarora, Umatilla, Umpqua, Ute,* Wabanaki, Waccamaw-Sioun, Wampanoag, Warm Springs Indians, Washoe, Wea,
Wendat, Wichita, Wiyot, Wyandot.
I am sure there are some I couldn't find. Some of the peoples on the above list have been reduced to populations smaller than one of our average sized congregations, they were hundreds of thousands in 1491.
Was the removal policy an alternative to Genocide? In other words if the Indians choose to move, rather than die, isn't it true that there was only the threat of genocide, not the reality of genocide?
If individuals are moved from a land where they ancestors lived, if their children are forcefully removed and sent to English Christian schools, if the land they are resettled on is incapable of sustaining them agriculturally and they are put on the dole they have been destroyed as a people. When armed men keep them in their "reserve," they are in concentration camps. Genocide is when a people's culture and way of life has been destroyed. The native people were destroyed as an indigenous people and turned into the underclass known as Indians. The survivors are victims of genocide just as much as those who ended up in a mass grave.
Ask the Armenians. Ask the Jews. One doesn't have to get every last individual for a genocide to have taken place. Genocide is the destruction of a particular community of people, survivors of transported Indians were able to recreate some community, but Oklahoma isn't the Great Smocky Mountains.
Native people are resurgent, more and more individuals are learning their language and working with others to overcome shame and become autonomous and self determining. But native people live with the awareness of holocaust. To heal this nation the children of the conquerors must share that awareness.
In my original post I wrote "Arminians" rather than "Armenians," see the comments below.
Clyde, this is a wonderful post and I hate to have to do this, but you said "Arminians" instead of "Armenians." Very few people -- and you're one of them -- would understand why I had to smile at that.
It's hard for me to believe that anyone would dispute using the term genocide to describe the policies around and treatment of Native Americans. But I know they do.
I am reading Jill Lepore's book "In The Name of War" about King Phillip's War right now.
Thank you Peacebang, arminians were not exterminated, rather they have neglected to exercise their freedom to do theology. We need some probing about free will just now.
Arminians are those who agree with Jacob Arminius, one of the major voices of the Reformation. They are associated with notion that we freely decide to sin, or not, and have some responsibilty for our salvation, and stand in opposition to the double predestination associated with calvinists. (God predetermines who will sin, and who will be redeemed.)
Armenians are an ancient nation in what was once Asia minor. east of the Black Sea and into the Western Caucasas. The Ottoman Turks tried to exterminate the Armenians in 1915.
Clyde, I'm in full agreement with your broader point. There's no reason to suspect that Jefferson did not carry the same attitudes into the national annexation of Louisiana tha he had previously shown toward the Shawnee when he was governor of Virginia. I had merely misunderstood your previous quote of Jefferson's to be contemporaneous with the annexation of Louisiana, not from a previous incident.
Me, I lament that today we are squandering our national treasure and honor in an amoral and probably unwinnable conflict for yet more empire in Iraq and Afghanistan, when instead we could be using the same resources (probably with far greater success) to atone for past sins by trying to end another unfolding genocide in Darfur.
PB, Jefferson attended the Synod of Dort, I'm sure of it. He was among the first to call for death to Arminians. The Ottomans learned of Jefferson's ideas through the Barbary pirates, and the Armenians were only the hapless victims of a spelling error in transcribing English into Arabic. (Pirates aren't well known for their literacy, arrh.)