genocide – U.S. to 1877

November 4, 2013

You Can’t Take It With You

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I found Wolfe’s article intriguing but not entirely convincing. I did not necessarily agree with his assessment of native lands as their lives. While an integral part of where a person comes from is where they are from, this does not die with removal. Rather, when a person or group of people leaves their home, they take that with them. The Native Americans that were removed from their land were not stripped of their heritage. They were robbed of the land that they grew up on, the land that raised them, but not of the heritage that was their tribe. The natives, at this point in history, would not grow up, go off to college, and then go get a job. However, that is the twenty first century lens with which I glance at this. We, in today’s culture, move around a lot. From college to jobs to traveling, we are constantly on the move. While this was not the case for them, my perspective says that you are how you were raised and you take that with you no matter where you go.

NAKINDIG mentions in his blog post that Wolfe “explains how the views of the Europeans towards the American Indians included a nomadic, landless view of the native peoples.” My belief may stem from that belief. While it is true that some natives were nomadic, the vast majority was not and settled in specific locations based on their needs. While I do not agree with the Indian removals of years past, I do not see the argument for a cultural loss. Slaves were brought in from Africa, and while they did not necessarily flaunt their African culture to their owners, it was definitely present. Eastman Johnson’s painting, My Old Kentucky Home or Negro Life at the South, shows this African culture hidden behind the walls of the slave quarters. To that same end, the natives had a culture that whether enslaved or moved or not, should have been able to continue on.

While I disagree with Wolfe on movement, I appreciate his distinction between genocide and a disruption and thieving of lands. While a vast number of natives were killed as a direct product of Europeans weapons, diseases, etc. A good number were indirectly killed by a forced relocation of sorts. This was not an intentional annihilation, but rather an opening up of the frontier will consequences that went south. I am in no way defending the Indian removal, but I do see in a difference in genocide and an indirect annihilation.

November 4, 2013

Settler Colonialism: If Not Genocide, Then What?

The settlement of Western America was a long and harsh process in the history of the United States. During this time, settlers displaced thousands of native tribes while attempting to establish new civilizations in relatively unknown places. Although the frontiersman committed countless inhumane acts, Patrick Wolfe states in his essay that this process cannot be categorized as genocide. Instead, he makes the point that the actions performed during colonization were in fact “contests for land” and not the direct targeting for the extinction of a certain group (1).

Wolfe uses the Indian Removal Act in the early 1800s to exhibit his point. He explains that the fact that settlers first turned to removal policies shows a stress for the advancement of modernity within their nation and not a genocidal course of action. While reading this, I could not help to notice a correlation between both Wolfe’s and Willentz’s categorization of Jackson’s policies. Both sided with Jackson’s reform measures and strayed away from placing the blame of the cruel measures on the administration. Wolfe does state that the removal was “brutal” but that “it did not affect each member equally” in that many natives were able to find refuge within the United States (396). Similarly, Jacob Newton’s post on 10/30 quotes Willentz of saying Jackson was a “benevolent, if realistic paternalist” in his view of natives. Jacob goes on to refute Willentz’s description of Jackson. I agree with this claim, and in doing so, disagree with both Wolfe’s and Willentz’s account of Indian removal. Although it was probably the best option for citizens of the United States at the time as they attempted to modernize their civilization, settlers had no right to treat these people like mere objects. Although it may not be categorized as genocide in Wolfe’s dictionary, that does not take away from it as being as bad or worse than a genocidal procedure.

This essay also made me think of Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis (1893), which stated that the frontier was a defining feature of American democracy and identity and that American procedures would surely change with the closing of the frontier. When the frontier was still intact, settlers focused on the deportation of Indian tribes. But when the frontier was fully settled, “elimination turned inwards” (399). Cruel assimilation processes were put into place to make Indians’ lives harder until civil liberties were realized in the 1920s. But although the lack of a frontier changed the American processes like Turner predicted, both time frames still culminated an overall feeling of resentment and neglect for the Indian tribes in the United States.

November 4, 2013

Settler Colonialism vs Genocide

I definitely liked Patrick Wolfe’s topic on “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native”. He enters academic debate very well in his article, and I think I agree with him after reading the article. Although almost all of the native peoples ended up dying because of European colonization, they Europeans did not actively practice killing the race (in a loosely used form of the word), so they did not practice genocide. He brought in outside examples to explain the difference between genocide, and taking land.

I definitely liked his conjecture of land being life, and how the settlers were taking land, and the byproduct of taking land was taking the lives of the Natives. He even explains how the views of the Europeans towards the American Indians included a nomadic, landless view of the native peoples. Therefore, they did not have a homeland, and if they did not have a homeland, the land was not theirs to be taken from. Although the native peoples actually did have a homeland, the interpretation of the settlers was different from that which was actually accurate, so their mindset did not actually involve killing people in order to take their land; it involved moving people from one place to another (worst case scenario being by force), so that they could settle the land and start the process of modernity. The settlers were killing the natives so passively, that, in the minds of the settlers, they were only taking land that no one owned and not taking lives of the native peoples.