by Annette Hatton

Created on: August 08, 2010

Living Repercussions of the Native-American Genocide Holocaust: America's Four Hundred Year War

The extermination of America's First People began in 1492 with the discovery of the Americas and escalated to unconditional warfare ending in 1890. In 1492 Columbus wrote of the American Natives, “They are the best people in the world and above all the gentlest, but they are an inferior race and could easily be commanded and made to work, to sow and do whatever might be needed, to build towns and taught to adopt our ways.” Subsequent reports were filled with accounts of enslavement, murder and rape of the natives of who resisted.

Successive centuries overflow with accounts of similar aggression and increasing violence toward the Natives.

In June 1524 Florentine explorers captured Native children sending them to France as slaves and brothel prostitutes. Francisco Vasquez de Coronado in 1540 began his march through northern Mexico to the upper Rio Grande raping, pillaging, killing and methodically burning at the stake as many as two hundred natives at one time. No one stood in his gold-thirsty way.

In the summer of 1610, Jamestown Governor, Thomas West De la Warr ordered Powhatan to hunt down runaway Englishmen. Powhatan did not respond to the liking of De la Warr, which he took as reason to order the slaughter of all Powhatan's tribe ordering that none, including women and children be spared. The massacre was complete.

United States Colonists formally won independence from England with the signing and ratification of the 1783 Treaty of Paris. Since 1787 the new American government made and broke over seven hundred fifty (750) treaties, forcibly taking Native American land and segregating Natives into smaller and smaller reservations where they were subsequently starved, brutalized, tortured and raped.

It can be argued there were hostilities on both sides, but like the American anger aroused by the unprovoked December 7, 1941Pearl Harbor massacre, Native Americans were deliberately provoked by treaties, terms of surrender that were offered then deliberately broken. In a letter dated April 1, 1889, General George Cook wrote to General Philip H. Sheridan aptly describing that deliberateness, “If offensive movements against the Indians are not resumed, they will remain quietly in the mountains for an indefinite time without crossing the line. They must be provoked.”

Weapons of American expansionist invaders included manipulation, conspiracy,

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