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For four hundred years - from the first Spanish assaults against the Arawak people of Hispaniola in the 1490s to the U.S. Army's massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in the 1890s - the indigenous inhabitants of North and South America endured an unending firestorm of violence. During that time the native population of the Western Hemisphere declined by as many as one hundred million people. Indeed, as historian David E. Stannard argues in this stunning new book, the European and white American destruction of the native peoples of the Americas was the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. Stannard begins with a portrait of the enormous richness and diversity of life in the Americas prior to Columbus's fateful voyage in 1492. He then follows the path of genocide from the Indies to Mexico and Central and South America, then north to Florida, Virginia, and New England, and finally out across the Great Plains and Southwest to California and the North Pacific Coast. Stannard reveals that wherever Europeans or white Americans went, the native people were caught between imported plagues and barbarous atrocities, typically resulting in the annihilation of 95 percent of their populations. What kind of people, he asks, do such horrendous things to others? His highly provocative answer: Christians. Digging deeply into ancient European and Christian attitudes toward sex, race, and war, he finds the cultural ground well prepared by the end of the Middle Ages for the centuries-long genocide campaign that Europeans and their descendants launched - and in places continue to wage - against the New World's original inhabitants. Advancing a thesis that is sure to create much controversy, Stannard contends that the perpetrators of the American Holocaust drew on the same ideological wellspring as did the later architects of the Nazi Holocaust. It is an ideology that remains dangerously alive today, he adds, and one that in recent years has surfaced in American justifications for large-scale military intervention in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. At once sweeping in scope and meticulously detailed, American Holocaust is a work of impassioned scholarship that is certain to ignite intense historical and moral debate.… (more)
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Part I: Before Columbus
Chapter 1
Stannard opens his first chapter with an account of the cities of the Aztec empire before their conquest by Cortez. The conquistadors themselves marveled at the feats of engineering performed by the natives, their cleanliness and the health of the population. All this was soon to be destroyed.
After a brief discussion of Berengia and the assumed origins of native populations in this hemisphere, he gives a nod to the diversity of native peoples and then turns his ire against Oscar Handlin and Bernard Bailyn for their ethnocentrism. Recognizing his debt to Francis Jennings, he ends the chapter with a note on Jennings' demographic demographic revelations and a tilt of the hat to Edward Said's critique of Orientalism.
Chapter 2
In an introductory account that covers the pre-contact Indians that ranges from a treatment of Mississippian to Anasazi cultures and up to California, Stannard impresses the reader with the diversity of native civilizations. He is also at pains to show how "advanced" Indian civilizations were in their child rearing techniques and in the empowerment of women. He then moves south to Mesoamerica and recounts the history of Mayans and later Aztecs. Next in line are the great accomplishments of Incan civilization and finally a discussion of the Arawaks of Northern Brazil, which provides a lead in to the discussion of the Arawaks of Hispaniola, which Columbus encountered on his voyages. In concluding his account, Stannard wants to strike a note of balance. He insists that it would be wrong to idealize the native populations, for they did indeed perform human sacrifices and in some cases practice ritualistic cannibalism. But, we must keep in mind the brutality of Medieval and even Reformation and Renaissance Europe.
Pestilence and Genocide
Chapter 3
Relying largely upon the work of Lawrence Stone regarding conditions in Early Modern Europe, Stannard paints a horrific picture of life in Europe at the time when Columbus sailed for the Indies. Dirty, disease and crime ridden and full of class antagonisms, the cities of Europe were breeding grounds for the plagues. Poverty, starvation and warfare were the lot of many and wealth the lot of a very few. Great quote on p. 58!
From the perspective of this world, it is not surprising that Columbus and other explorers viewed this "new" world as a paradise of edenic proportions. When combined with their massive greed, the belief that the peoples of these regions were savages lead the explorers to commit atrocities of gargantuan proportions. This all began with Columbus kidnapping Arawaks and taking them back to Europe as slaves. Most died on the way.
With the second voyage of Columbus, the true conquest began. Columbus himself soon fell ill, but his troops committed huge atrocities. Forcing the natives to hunt for gold and cutting off their hands if they returned with any. Las Casas recorded sickening scenes of wanton cruelty. Failing to find gold, the Iberians instead set up encomienda plantations on Hispaniola and enslaved the natives to provide a labor force. By 1535, the native population (which at 1492 may have numbered as many as 8 million) had been exterminated.
Next he recounts Cortez's conquest of the Aztec's city of Tenochtitlan. Tricking Montezuma into believing they came in peace, Cortez and his soldier's killed the ruler and attacked the city. Though initially driven out of the city, they regrouped and attacked again. By this time smallpox was taking its toll. The fighting, dubbed pacification, went on for months. Once the city was taken, the cruelties and depredations did not cease. Survivors were made into slaves and the city was burned and all the gold looted. The same pattern of behavior was repeated throughout Mesoamerica.
Moving further south to the kingdom of the Incas, the Conquistadors continued their search for gold and other precious metals. Some were enslaved to work as beasts of burden as the Spaniards pushed into the Amazon in search of the gold of Eldorado, while others were forced to labor in the Andean silver mines. In these regions, as with that north of the Rio Grande, Stannard points to an overall population reduction of 90-95%.
Chapter 4
In this chapter, Stannard takes on the Black Legend. He shows that the barbarity and cruelty of other Europeans was as bad as the Spaniards. Turning first to the English in Virginia, he recounts the ways in which the members of the new Jamestown colony made war on the local Indians, destroying men, women and children. Describing the differences between the ceremonial warfare of the Indians, with its limited casualties, and the total warfare of the Europeans, he then turns to the examples of New England's Puritan leaders warfare with the local Indians, first on Block Island to avenge John Oldham's murder and then in a war declared on the Pequots. The Pequot War witnessed the massacre of women and children and the virtual obliteration of the Pequot tribe. The Pequot War was followed shortly thereafter by King Philip's War in 1675-6, in which thousands of Indians were killed, their crops and villages burned to the ground.
Stannard argues that by targeting women and children, the Europeans were conducting genocidal warfare. He follows this charge up with discussion of the Cherokee Wars in the American Southeast, which were eventually followed up by Cherokee Removal west of the Mississippi. This was the "Trail of Tears" which Stannard refers to as a "death march." Then came the massacre of the Lakota people at Wounded Knee, South Dakota and the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado. Colonel Chivington, commander at the Sand Creek Massacre, was the subject of an inquiry from the federal government - but nothing came of it. Indeed, Teddy Roosevelt was to speak approvingly of the Sand Creek Massacre calling it a "righteous" and "beneficial" deed. The story of California's Indians proves instructive in denying the Black Legend. Spanish missions were cruel and inhuman places, but so too were the settlements set up by the U.S. once California became a US possession. Indians we hunted down, killed or sold into slavery with government sanction. The carnage finally began to slow down in California as the 19th C wore on. There was simply no one left to kill.