Genocide of Native Americans

Marianne Hall

HST1620 American History

Andrew Klosterman

January 15, 2013

The Genocide of Native Americans

The purpose of this article is to prove without a doubt that the American government did in fact perform a genocide on the Native Americans. The definition wasn’t agreed upon until 1948, and even then it took until 1988 for the United States to accept it. The author argued that what the United States government was inhumane and against the law. According to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide the definition is, “Any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” including: 1 (a) killing members of a group; 2 (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; 3 ( c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; 4 (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; 5 (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group (United Nations). This exactly describes what our government did to the Native Americans. All five of these points have been told again and again in our history. I agree that the pain inflicted on the Native Americans is in fact genocide. This is a part of our culture that we should be legitimately embarrassed about. It proved our Nation to be that of greed and selfishness. We wanted complete control over everything, and no one was going to stand in our way. We purposely attacked the Native American Tribes with the intent of ethnic cleansing. We did just want their land; we wanted them totally extinct.