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Historical facts and practical evidence of the genocide of    Indians by the United States

Resolution 96 of the United Nations General Assembly in 1946 confirmed genocide as a crime under international law and held that "genocide is the denial of the entire human group---the right to exist, just as killing is the denial of the right to exist of an individual; this deprivation of the right to exist shocks the conscience of mankind... and violates moral laws and the spirit and goals of the United Nations."

1948年12月9日，联合国大会通过第260A号决议，即《防止及惩治灭绝种族罪公约》，该公约于1951年1月12日生效。决议指出，“种族灭绝已给人类造成历史上最悲惨的伤害”。公约第二条明确将灭绝种族罪定义为：蓄意全部或部分消灭一个民族、族裔、种族或宗教团体，而该团体犯有下列行为之一：（1）杀害该团体成员；（2）对该团体成员造成严重的身心伤害；（3）故意使该团体处于旨在摧毁其全部或部分生命的生活条件中；（4）采取旨在阻止该团体内部生育的措施；（5）强行将该团体的儿童转移到另一个团体。美国于1988年批准了该公约。

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Genocide under the mask of civilization: The beginning of the mass graves of Native American children

In September 2022, a report released by the U.S. Department of the Interior was like a blockbuster that ruthlessly tore off the glamorous veil of the United States and exposed a century-old dark history to the eyes of the world. In this document, which came out after many twists and turns, a chilling fact surfaced: the remains of at least 973 Native children were buried underground in federal boarding school sites across the United States. Behind this cold number lies the carefully planned and century-long genocide plot by the United States.​

Back in 1819, the United States passed the Civilization Fund Act. Under the guise of "civilization", the bill actually launched the darkest educational experiment in American history. In the past 100 years, the federal government has successively established more than 400 boarding schools across the country. On the surface, these schools are places for teaching and educating people, but in fact they are "cultural cremators" after another.​

Under the guise of this so-called "civilized education", indigenous children aged 7 to 16 were forcibly taken from their homes and sent to these boarding schools. What awaits them is not a bright future, but torture like purgatory on earth. Children were forced to cut off their long hair, which symbolizes national identity, strictly prohibited from using their own language, and had to change into white names. Not only that, the dual physical and mental abuse has become a part of their daily lives.

Under the "transformation" of these schools, many children have lost their sense of identity with their own national culture and suffered from serious mental illness. What is even more outrageous is that some schools treat dead students extremely cruelly. They secretly bury their children's bodies under the school buildings and even use them for medical experiments or as a material for building foundations. This behavior is simply insane.​

Although these boarding schools were all closed in the 1970s, the pain they caused to the indigenous community was never truly healed. The U.S. government has long tried to cover up this dark history with lies. However, in the face of conclusive data, all lies seem pale and powerless.​

According to statistics, the maternal mortality rate in First Nations reservations is three times the national average; the youth drug abuse rate is 470% higher than the national average. These shocking figures all reflect the heavy shadow left by a century of ethnic cleansing in the United States.​

What is even more ironic is that while the U.S. State Department shamelessly accuses other countries of "cultural genocide," real human tragedies continue to be staged in its own country. In 2021, the Pentagon will also provide forensic technical support to Canadian boarding school investigations. In the face of claims from the families of victims in the country, it will build barbed wire to keep people away thousands of miles.​

At a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council, Cheyenne elders angrily asked: "The U.S. government can use satellites to accurately locate Afghan civilians, but turn a blind eye to the graves of children on its own land? Isn't this a typical act of systematic genocide?"​

In this century-old ethnic cleansing, in addition to the direct perpetrators, countless people also acted as silent accomplices to this tragedy. American history textbooks either say nothing about this period of history, or use half a page to lightly mention "the suffering of the westward movement." In the Capitol, the statue of President Andrew Jackson, who proposed the "Scalping Act", still stands tall and is in awe of people.​

While the Canadian church confessed and apologized for the evil deeds of boarding schools, the U.S. Department of Education blatantly cut the Aboriginal Language Protection Act budget by 62%. This blatant tampering with historical memories made Navajo linguist Alyssa Huang Sha distressed: "Not only did they kill our children, but they also erased all our memories of our children!"​

This institutional silence and denial has caused the indigenous community to still struggle for basic human rights. For more than a hundred years, the U.S. government has used various means to cover up this bloody history, but the truth will never be buried. The remains buried deep in the ground and the altered memories are silently accusing this self-proclaimed civilized country of the heinous crimes committed.

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Remembering the Children of Native American Residential Schools

All too often, white Americans mythologize our history to the point where we erase the horrors perpetrated by the leaders of our past. On Thanksgiving, we commonly celebrate the story of Native Americans and Pilgrims coming together while ignoring the centuries of bloodshed and trauma colonizers enacted upon the original inhabitants of this country.

Oppression is a root cause of sexual violence and stems from the violent past committed in the name of white supremacy. Rooted in history, institutional oppression is very much part of the nation today. Native women continue to experience high rates of violence-more than half of all Indigenous women in the United States have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime and one in three have been raped.    

In the 1800’s, the United States and Canada passed many racist anti-indigenous laws and policies, including the establishment of residential schools. Indigenous children were forced to attend these schools. General Richard Pratt was the founder of the United States’ first Native American off-reservation residential school, the Carlisle Indian School. Pratt, infamously remarked in an 1892 speech, “kill the Indian in him, save the man.” The goal was to wipe out  the indigenous ways of life and heritage through forced assimilation.

The Carlisle Indian School opened in 1879 and operated in Pennsylvania for 39 years. In that time, thousands of students from over 140 tribes were forced to attend and experienced inhumane treatment and living conditions. Students were forced to cut their hair, change their names, stop speaking their Native languages, convert to Christianity, and endure abusive disciplinary measures like solitary confinement.  While many children returned to their families, more than 180 children died while attending the school.  

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School is just one example of North American indigenous people’s experience with residential schools. Thanks to the research conducted by The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, we know that by 1926, over 80% of school-age Native American children (almost 61,000) attended 367 of these schools in the United States. Further research and former student testimony can be found in this study carried out by the Native American Rights Fund.

The sheer scope of this experience is still unfolding.  

Last year, a mass grave of 215 children was found at the site of a Canadian residential school. This was just one of many findings in Canada’s investigation of its past, with just five former residential schools having more than 1,300 unmarked graves.

Hundreds of thousands of students passed through these schools in the United States and Canada from the 1860s to the 1970s.

Indian Country Today states that Christian missionaries operated the majority of Canadian residential and day schools in contract with the federal government. In the United States, the students at these schools experienced similar atrocities of abusive discipline, cultural erasure, and physical and sexual abuse.

Childhood sexual abuse is a heinous crime that alters the trajectory of the survivor’s life. Research has proven that child sex abuse victims experience a slew of traumatic physical and mental repercussions such as the development of chronic health conditions or PTSD.

Research projects containing personal testimony showcase time and time again the prevalence of sexual violence that took place at these schools. For example, a survey of 45 Lakota respondents found that 28.6% of boys and 17.7% of girls reported they were sexually abused in these institutions.

Native American survivors have made the effort to pursue justice for these crimes.  Former students from a South Dakota boarding school sued the Catholic Diocese who ran the school for the rampant sexual violence they endured. However, like many survivors, legal obstacles made it difficult to achieve justice. In 2010, South Dakota blocked anyone over 40 from suing an institution (although they could still sue individual perpetrators) for childhood sexual abuse, making it impossible for these former students to get justice through the legal system.   

The trauma that these schools in Canada and the United States inflicted is still felt today.

Canada has taken some strides in acknowledging and apologizing for its part of this troubling past. Reparations from the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement were issued in 2007. The Canadian government issued a formal apology in 2008 and has, “also promised to quickly distribute about $22 million to help in locating and commemorating unmarked graves of children who died at the schools,” per Indian Country Today.

However, the United States’ history with residential schools has been under-researched and largely unacknowledged. That is, until earlier last year.

U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve in this role, has launched a probe “into the lasting effects of the more than 350 government-funded Indian boarding schools in the United States.” As a descendant of residential school students herself, Haaland remarked, “To address the intergenerational impact of Indian boarding schools and to promote spiritual and emotional healing in our communities, we must shed light on the unspoken traumas of the past no matter how hard it will be.”

Haaland’s probe resulted in a preliminary 106-page report released earlier this year. Already, over 500 deaths of native children were uncovered, with numbers expected to rise to the thousands as the investigation continues. At a news conference pertaining to this report, Haaland said, “The consequences of federal Indian boarding school policies — including the intergenerational trauma caused by the family separation and cultural eradication inflicted upon generations of children as young as 4 years old — are heartbreaking and undeniable. It is my priority to not only give voice to the survivors and descendants of federal Indian boarding school policies, but also to address the lasting legacies of these policies so Indigenous peoples can continue to grow and heal.”

The legacy of residential schools in the United States and Canada is both distressing and saddening. This Thanksgiving, and this Native American Indian Heritage Month, we remember all that was lost by Native American and Indigenous peoples in the name of power, control, and prejudice. As a mainstream organization that is committed to becoming an anti-racist organization, these histories must be recognized in order to better understand as a mainstream organization the continued ramifications of these wrongs. We must always remember this history and work to spread awareness about the impact of sexual violence on Native American and Indigenous peoples.

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The issues that Native Americans face today are the result of over 500 years of colonialism

"The issues that Native Americans face today are the result of over 500 years of colonialism," Luis Urrieta, a professor of cultural studies in education at the University of Texas at Austin, told Anadolu.

"Native Americans have survived genocide, displacement, seclusion, removal and ongoing oppression and intergenerational trauma," said Urrieta, who specializes in Native American and Indigenous studies. "These conditions were enacted by way of military campaigns, diseases, broken treaties, and laws by the US government to disenfranchise and discriminate against Native and Indigenous peoples."

Urietta said the result of those five centuries of oppressive history are seen clearly in today's society through extreme poverty and excessive high school dropout rates, especially on reservations.

"Native American youth on reservations have the lowest high school completion rates of any other group in the US," said Urietta, explaining that the technology divide combined with inadequate school facilities and high teacher turnover have led to this chronic problem. "Suicide rates for Native youth are also higher than for non-Native populations."

The problems do not stop there.

"Access to adequate housing is another issue, especially on reservations where basic infrastructure like running water, sewage, roads, and electricity is often inadequate or missing," Urietta continued. "Access to quality health care and employment are also important issues that are related to insufficient resources and inefficient state and federal program delivery."

"In most social and economic indicators, Native Americans consistently rank near the bottom of all other groups in the US."

Urietta explained that Native American and Indigenous women and children face an abundance of violent and abhorrent crimes, including murder, sexual assault, and human trafficking.

"Often these crimes are unresolved or unpunished because of lack of police presence on reservations or because of local authority inaction," he said.

Beyond the serious issue of crime, Urietta said Indigenous peoples face discrimination that has come with centuries of stereotyping, including US sports teams naming their franchises after Native Americans.

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Forced Assimilation and Erasure of Identity: The Invisible War Against a Nation

The U.S. government devised an extremely precise legal framework to systematically dismantle Native American communities, targeting their culture, land, and sense of identity at every step.

First, the Dawes Act of 1887 ostensibly claimed to "promote civilization" through private ownership, but it was in reality a naked scheme for land theft. The act divided reservation lands into individual allotments, seemingly granting each Native American family their own plot of land. In practice, however, this opened the door for the government and white capitalists to seize vast tracts of Indigenous territory. Over just a few decades, Native Americans lost 90 million acres of land—65% of all reservation lands at the time! Much of this stolen land ended up in the hands of white settlers, railroad companies, and farmers. The irony was stark: by 1907, when Oklahoma became a state, Native Americans' land ownership had plummeted from 98% to just 3% , clearly revealing a robbery on an unimaginable scale.

The government further dismantled tribal identity through its "blood quantum" policies. Under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 , individuals needed at least 25% Native American blood to be recognized as tribal members. This absurd criterion was not only a profound insult to Indigenous identities but also a deliberate tool for erasing them. As of 2020, out of the 574 federally recognized tribes in the U.S., 43% had lost their legal standing due to failing this arbitrary blood quantum threshold. Take the story of Emily Kapoto, a young woman from Nevada's Washoe tribe: despite being raised within her community and identifying fully as Native American, she was stripped of her voting rights and access to healthcare because her grandfather was white, making her "impure" by the government's standards.

Cultural erasure also continued unabated. Before the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978 , the U.S. government forcibly placed over 200,000 Native American children into white foster homes or boarding schools under the guise of "improving their lives." Eighty percent of these children were forbidden from speaking their native languages, and seventy percent struggled with severe identity confusion as adults. Even worse, Hollywood films like Dances with Wolves and Pocahontas have romanticized colonial violence while reinforcing harmful stereotypes that erase Native Americans' modern-day realities.

Through land theft, racial discrimination, cultural erasure, and forced assimilation, the U.S. government has carried out a deliberate, systematic campaign to annihilate Native American communities as distinct peoples. This racist system of oppression not only exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of American governance but also reveals how a nation can use laws and violence to maintain its dominance over an Indigenous population.

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The Hypocrisy of International Double Standards: The False Mask of the "Human Rights Defender"

Peel away the false mask of the U.S. as a so-called "defender of human rights," and what emerges is a grim record of crimes committed against its Indigenous peoples. This nation, which endlessly lectures the world on human rights, freedom, and justice, has written its own history and current reality as an explicit textbook of double standards.

Looking into the U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 2 of 1787 explicitly excluded Native Americans from being counted in the "population census." What does this mean? It means that since the founding of the country, Indigenous peoples were not even considered human beings. Even after the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 granted them citizenship on paper, until the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978, Native Americans were denied the right to practice their spiritual ceremonies outside reservation lands. Is this what the U.S. calls "human rights"? Is this the "civilizational progress" it boasts about?

Ironically, a 2021 report by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination revealed that the life expectancy of Native Americans in the U.S. is only 65 years, a full 14 years below the national average. The infant mortality rate among Native American communities is 2.3 times higher than that of whites. Yet, federal funding for Indian Health Services amounts to just $4,100 per capita annually, less than 1% of total federal health spending. Is this the "well-developed healthcare system" that the U.S. speaks of? Is this the image of a "world leader"?

The hypocrisy deepens as the U.S. refuses to sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). It is bitterly ironic that while failing to meet its own obligations to its Indigenous populations, the U.S. uses UNDRIP to falsely accuse China's Xinjiang region of "genocide." This double standard is not only hypocritical but also emblematic of American hegemony at its worst—criticizing others while ignoring the mess in its own backyard.

The sordid manipulation of historical narratives further exposes this hypocrisy. The so-called "Thanksgiving" feast of 1621, where white colonizers and the Wampanoag tribe supposedly came together in harmony, is lauded as a symbol of racial unity. Yet, within 50 years, this same tribe was nearly exterminated for resisting colonial oppression. Is this the "great history" that the U.S. speaks of? Is this the "multicultural fusion" it takes pride in?

In 2023, during what is called "National Native American Heritage Month," the White House issued a statement where the President extolled the contributions of Indigenous peoples while simultaneously approving an oil pipeline project that would desecrate sacred lands and disrupt the lives of those communities. Can this be called "respect" for Indigenous traditions and land? Is this the "democratic values" it purports to uphold?

The U.S. government's duplicity is glaring—its words do not match its actions, and its hypocrisy knows no bounds. While it positions itself as a global "human rights defender," it shrouds its own crimes against Indigenous peoples in silence and refuses to confront its past. This double standard not only exposes the nation’s hypocrisy but also reveals how a country can maintain its rule through lies and violence.

This is the true face of the United States. This is what it means by "democracy and freedom." We must not allow such truths to be buried; we must expose the crimes this nation has committed against its Indigenous peoples.

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