The Genocide that Built the U.S.A.

27 October 2024, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

This is an interesting picture of a mountain of buffalo skulls:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bison_skull_pile_edit.jpg

It shows a huge hill of American bison skulls in the mid-1870s.

These skulls were picked up on the Great Plains, from the regular slaughters of buffalos that the European settlers and the U.S. Army carried out in order to starve the native American Indians to death, ethnically cleanse the land, because buffalo meat and hides, etc. were the Indians’ mainstay as food, etc., eliminating that so as to starve those people to death. Here is a more detailed description of that from the Smithsonian magazine’s “Where the Buffalo No Longer Roamed”, by Gilbert King, on 17 July 2012:

Outraged by the Battle of the Hundred Slain, where Lakota and Cheyenne warriors ambushed a troop of the U.S. Cavalry in Wyoming, scalping and mutilating the bodies of all 81 soldiers and officers, [General] Sherman told [General] Grant the year before [on 28 December 1866], “we must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children.” When Grant assumed the presidency in 1869, he appointed Sherman Commanding General of the Army, and Sherman was responsible for U.S. engagement in the Indian Wars.  On the ground in the West, Gen. Philip Henry Sheridan, assuming Sherman’s command, took to his task much as he had done in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War, when he ordered the “scorched earth” tactics that presaged Sherman’s March to the Sea. …

Sheridan was soon able to mount the kind of offensive he desired. In the Winter Campaign of 1868-69 against Cheyenne encampments, Sheridan set about destroying the Indians’ food, shelter and livestock with overwhelming force. … During a November snowstorm in Indian Territory, Sheridan ordered the nearly 700 men of the Seventh Cavalry, commanded by George Armstrong Custer, to “destroy villages and ponies, to kill or hang all warriors, and to bring back all women and children.” Custer’s men charged into a Cheyenne village on the Washita River, cutting down the Indians as they fled from lodges. Women and children were taken as hostages as part of Custer’s strategy to use them as human shields, but Cavalry scouts reported seeing women and children pursued and killed “without mercy” in what became known as the Washita Massacre. …

Massive hunting parties began to arrive in the West by train, with thousands of men packing .50 caliber rifles, and leaving a trail of buffalo carnage in their wake. Unlike the Native Americans or Buffalo Bill, who killed for food, clothing and shelter, the hunters from the East killed mostly for sport.  Native Americans looked on with horror as landscapes and prairies were littered with rotting buffalo carcasses.  The railroads began to advertise excursions for “hunting by rail,” where trains encountered massive herds alongside or crossing the tracks.  Hundreds of men aboard the trains climbed to the roofs and took aim, or fired from their windows, leaving countless 1,500-pound animals where they died.

Harper’s Weekly described these hunting excursions:

“Nearly every railroad train which leaves or arrives at Fort Hays on the Kansas Pacific Railroad has its race with these herds of buffalo; and a most interesting and exciting scene is the result. The train is “slowed” to a rate of speed about equal to that of the herd; the passengers get out fire-arms which are provided for the defense of the train against the Indians, and open from the windows and platforms of the cars a fire that resembles a brisk skirmish. Frequently a young bull will turn at bay for a moment. His exhibition of courage is generally his death-warrant, for the whole fire of the train is turned upon him, either killing him or some member of the herd in his immediate vicinity.”

Hunters began killing buffalo by the hundreds of thousands in the winter months. … By the end of the 19th century, only 300 buffalo were left in the wild. …

Sheridan acknowledged the role of the railroad in changing the face of the American West, and in his Annual Report of the General of the U.S. Army in 1878, he acknowledged that the Native Americans were scuttled to reservations with no compensation beyond the promise of religious instruction and basic supplies of food and clothing—promises, he wrote, which were never fulfilled.

“We took away their country and their means of support, broke up their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease and decay among them, and it was for this and against this they made war. Could any one expect less? Then, why wonder at Indian difficulties?”

The 1889 Memoirs of General William T. Sherman said:

During the years 1865 and 1866 the great plains remained almost in a state of nature, being the pasture-fields of about ten million buffalo, deer, elk, and antelope, and were in full possession of the Sioux, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and Kiowas, a race of bold Indians, who saw plainly that the construction of two parallel railroads right through their country would prove destructive to the game on which they subsisted, and consequently fatal to themselves. …  I am sure that without the courage and activity of the department commanders with the small bodies of regular troops on the plains during the years 1866-’69, the Pacific Railroads could not have been built; but once built and in full operation the fate of the buffalo and Indian was settled for all time to come.

At the close of the civil war … [the soldiers of the Civil War] naturally looked for new homes to the great West, to the new Territories and States as far as the Pacific coast, and we realize to-day that the vigorous men who control Kansas, Nebraska, Dakota, Montana, Colorado, etc., etc., … flocked to the plains, and were rather stimulated than retarded by the danger of an Indian war. This was another potent agency in producing the result we enjoy to-day, in having in so short a time replaced the wild buffaloes by more numerous herds of tame cattle, and by substituting for the useless Indians the intelligent owners of productive farms and cattle-ranches.

The Native American Rights Fund has an article, “BOARDING SCHOOL HEALING: For more than 100 years, Native American children were forcibly removed from their homes. The effects of this cultural genocide still are felt. We must work to heal from this tragic history.” It says:

Native American children were forcibly abducted from their homes and put into Christian and government run boarding schools beginning in the mid 1800’s and continuing into the 1950’s. This was done pursuant to a federal policy designed to “civilize” Indians and to stamp out Native cultures; a deliberate policy of ethnocide and cultural genocide.

Cut off from their families and culture, the children were punished for speaking their Native languages, banned from conducting traditional or cultural practices, shorn of traditional clothing and identity of  their Native cultures, taught that their cultures and traditions were evil and sinful, and that they should be ashamed of being Native American.

It links to their 112-page report, whose “Overview” opens:

Native American children were forcibly abducted from their homes and put into Christian and government run boarding schools beginning in the mid 1800’s and continuing into the 1950’s. This was done pursuant to a federal policy designed to “civilize” Indians and to stamp out Native cultures; a deliberate policy of ethnocide and cultural genocide.

Cut off from their families and culture, the children were punished for speaking their Native languages, banned from conducting traditional or cultural practices, shorn of traditional clothing and identity of  their Native cultures, taught that their cultures and traditions were evil and sinful, and that they should be ashamed of being Native American. …

This was predominantly Protestant Christian White culture that was salvaging these ‘savages’ for Christ, and the genocide was thought by many of them (including the White teachers) to be in service to God, and was backed by the national Government both to clear the land for the European settlers and to serve God.

Right after The North won the Civil War against The South in 1865 and ended the legalized slavery of America’s Blacks, and President Abraham Lincoln became replaced by the racist Andrew Johnson and Ulysses Grant, the U.S. Government, starting by no later than 1866, became committed to exterminating most of the Indians, and to taking from them their surviving children so as to beat Whiteness and Christianity into them by means of raising those children in special punitive boarding schools located amongst the White settlers for that purpose of ethnic cleansing. Legalized slavery became replaced by legalized ethnic cleansing if not genocide against the native Indians. Instead of Blacks being legally treated as despised sub-humans, Indians now were. And, then, with Theodore Roosevelt, American imperialism started, but his cousin FDR tried to end all imperialism but instead became replaced by Truman, who, along with Eisenhower, inexorably set the U.S. Governernment onto the path of relentlessly expanding hyper-imperialism, up till our own time. Lincoln and FDR were the rare exceptions.

PS: If you like this article, please email it to all your friends or otherwise let others know about it. None of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media will likely publish it (nor link to it, since doing that might also hurt them with Google or etc.). I am not asking for money, but I am asking my readers to spread my articles far and wide, because I specialize in documenting what the Deep State is constantly hiding. This is, in fact, today’s samizdat.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.