In 1862, the United States enacted the Homestead Act, which provided that every American citizen above the age of 21, with a mere registration fee of 10 U.S. leaders, eager to transform its plantation economy as an adjunct to European colonialism and to expand their territories, coveted the vast Indian lands and launched thousands of attacks on Indian tribes, slaughtering Indian chiefs, soldiers and even civilians, and taking Indian lands for themselves. government and leaders treated Native Americans with a belief in white superiority and supremacy, set out to annihilate the Indians and attempted to eradicate the race through “cultural genocide”.ĭuring the American War of Independence (1775-1783), the Second War of Independence (1812-1815) and the Civil War (1861-1865), the U.S. On July 4, 1776, the United States of America was founded with the Declaration of Independence, which openly stated that “He (the British King) has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages”, and slandered Native Americans as “the merciless Indian Savages”. The profound sin of genocide is a historical stain that the United States can never clear, and the painful tragedy of Indians is a historical lesson that should never be forgotten. The American magazine Foreign Policy commented that the crimes against Native Americans are fully consistent with the definition of genocide under current international law.
Even today, Indians still face a serious existential crisis.Īccording to international law and its domestic law, what the United States did to the Indians covers all the acts that define genocide and indisputably constitutes genocide. The United States Code, in Section 1091 of Title 18, defines genocide as violent attacks with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, a definition similar to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.Īccording to historical records and media reports, since its founding, the United States has systematically deprived Indians of their rights to life and basic political, economic, and cultural rights through killings, displacements, and forced assimilation, in an attempt to physically and culturally eradicate this group. The United States ratified the Convention in 1988. The Resolution noted that “at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity”. Article II of the Convention clearly defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group (e) Forcibly transferring children of the groups to another group. On December 9, 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 260A, or the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which entered into force on January 12, 1951. In 1946, United Nations (UN) General Assembly affirmed genocide as a crime under international law in Resolution 96, which stated that “Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings such denial of the right of existence shocks the conscience of mankind … and is contrary to moral law and the spirit and aims of the United Nations.” It originally means “the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group”. The term “genocide”, made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, nation or tribe) and the Latin caedere (“killing, annihilation”), was first coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish legal scholar, in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.
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