America’s Forgotten Genocides

  The United States has committed genocide. Why this is a controversial statement, I do not know, although a blatant, nationalistic, ignorant pride may have something to do with it. This is not intended to cause shame, but to expound upon that basic principle that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. Rather than living in denial, we must work to ensure that the future is nothing but equal for these groups.

When the United States was settled, clashes with Native Americans were frequent and violent. Under Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, the United States removed various tribes from their ancestral and cultural lands to unsettled, barren lands west of the Mississippi. As whites moved westward and conflicts grew, clashes became more violent, resulting in massacres of hundreds of men, women and children. Notable people like William Tecumseh Sherman and Henry Clay favored or were indifferent to complete elimination of Native tribes. A move favored by liberal reformers that later proved detrimental was the policy of assimilation laid out by the Dawes Act, signed by Grover Cleveland in 1887. Children were taken away from their homes and placed into boarding houses that erased their languages and culture in an attempt to "civilize them." Alcoholism remains rampant on reservations, and many tribes have yet to fully recover.

From 1899 to 1902, the United States "participated" in the Filipino-American "War" in its quest for more territory. Between 200,000 to a million civilians died of famine, disease, and direct killing, and an occupation that lasted decades saw the rise of Protestantism, the use of English as their primary language, and an overall change in cultural aspects. Since then, the Philippines has remained a relatively crime-ridden and poor country.

What more need be said?