The concept of genocide and settler colonialism in North America

This is a good article by Jeffrey Ostler, a historian who seriously researches  American Indian policy in the context of genocide studies: Ostler, Jeffrey, Trump thinks Andrew Jackson’s statue is a great monument — but to what? Washington Post 06/24/2020

He does an impressive job here of identifying some of the issues without dumbing it down. It's a lot more complicated than a lot of people may assume - and of course it's always a downer subject. Ostler has a recent book called Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas that, despite the title, really digs into the weeds of how challenging it can be to apply the current international law concept of genocide to the 19th century or earlier. In this case, applying it to the case of settler colonialism, which pretty much characterized the entire European colonial project in all of North and South America over centuries.

Identifying genocide in history

Genocide studies can be a minefield. As one example from serious work on the topic of the Holocaust would be the very different views of the "Jewish Councils" (Jüdenräte) taken by Hannah Arendt, Raul Hilberg, and Lucy Dawidowicz.

And ideological hacks of various kinds are happy to muddy the waters where they can. Of course.

When it comes to the question of settler colonialism and genocide, the actual field, as Ostler's book shows in detail, has some genuinely tangled question. In the case of European colonialism in the Americas, one huge question is the actual number of native inhabitants in the late 15th century, when Columbus famously "discovered" America. There is no real question that European diseases spread to the Americas with deadly consequences. But exactly how deadly they were depends on how many people were there in "precolumbian" times. If the higher estimates are accurate, it would be hard to escape the conclusion that European germs and viruses (although no one knew what either was at the time!) had by far the most devastating effect on native societies, both in terms of the number killed and in terms of the crippling devastation to social organization that such a massive, rapid number of deaths would imply.

And that's an empirical, factual question, not just a matter of historical interpretation.

Genocide as now defined in international law is not a war crime but a distinct crime, and even deliberate mass cruelty with deadly consequenes does not meet the genocide definition. The UN's 1948 Genocide Convention does not include the targeting of a political minority or even a social class of people for death. The notorious mass killing of Communists (real and alleged) by the Suharto regime in Indonesia after his 1965 coup, to take only one example among far too many, does not fall under the definition of genocide.

The international law specialist Raphaël Lemkin, who is credited with coining the word "genocide", included the concept of "cultural genocide", which is a familiar concept for the contemporary left, in his definition. But the UN Genocide Convention does not.

And like other crimes, genocide is also defined by intent. In American criminal law, killing someone by reckless driving is defined as a different crime than deliberately targeting someone and running them down with a car, although the victim is just as dead in both cases. Ostler mention the role of intent and how to establish it with genocide in the Post column.

So, in the case of settler colonialism in the Western Hemisphere, the role of disease matters but also whether the colonists had the intent to spread diseases with the goal of killing off native populations.

So, for serious history, there are important and difficult issues in applying the concept of genocide to settler colonial situations, which includes the treatment of native peoples in the Americas by European colonialists and their predominately white descendants. And not only in the Americas. Historians, for instance, also discuss whether cases like the war against the Hereros by Imperial Germany in their German South West Africa colony, now Namibia. (See: Germany regrets Namibia 'genocide' BBC News 01/12/2004.

American Indians in far-right American propaganda

Lots of white Americans tend to code anything they perceived ethnic-pride movements as "left."

And in the world of small political sectarian groups, there are a lot of weird variations. And there is a strain of far-right ideology that celebrates a romanticized image of the native inhabitants of North America as primordial Americans, extending to the weird schtick of a kind of American Indian Nazism. If that sounds bizarrely eccentric, that's because it is. Like so much on the far right.

Why do I bring that up in this context? Because part of the Holocaust-denier strategy is to minimize, "relativize", and distract from the Holocaust carried out by the German Nazis. And similar arguments can be tempting for ethnic-nationalist movements.

Dave Neiwert wrote 15 years ago about the weird nexus of some American Indians with the far right in The Succubus Orcinus 03/23/2005.

Around that same time, Republican were foaming at the mouth over Ward Churchill, a Native American scholar who had said something they took to be sacrilegious about the 9/11 attacks. When I dug into Churchill's background a bit, it became obvious that he had a quirky, ethnic-nationalist argument and argued at least in part in the language of Holocaust deniers:

• Chuckie Watch 85: Ole Chuckie shore is smarter than them professers 02/01/2005
• What have the Republicans done for us lately? 02/10/2005
• More on Ward Churchill, who's already gotten way more attention than he deserved 04/11/2005

I revisited him four years later. (Remember Ward Churchill? 04/12/2009)

Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons wrote about far-right use of American Indian imagery in Right-wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (2000):

Nazi cultural pluralism took an added twist when Hitler's government declared that American Indians were members of the Aryan race. The Bund made serious (but virtually fruitless) efforts to recruit Indians as members. In 1937,  [far-right leader William Dudley] Pelley, calling himself "Chief Pelley of the Tribe of Silver," promised American Indians that he would free them from reservations and place Jews in reservations instead. The emblem of the tiny American National-Socialist Party was "an American Indian, arm outstretched in salute, poised against a black swastika." These moves combined White Americans' traditional parasitic use of the American Indian as political symbol. as in the Boston Tea Party, with German Nazism's romanticist cult of nature and of "savagery" as the antithesis of corrupt Jewish civilization. (Hitler was an avid fan of Karl May's novels, in which noble Indians figured prominently.) U.S. fascist groups also made common cause with the right-wing American Indian Federation (AIF) against the Roosevelt administration's 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, which replaced naked colonialism with more sophisticated federal control through elected tribal governments. The AIF, which advocated full assimilation of Americans Indians into White society, opposed the 1934 act as communistic. [my emphasis]

Allison Schottenstein writes in Could It Happen in America? The Rise and Fall of Fritz Kuhn’s German-American Bund Pop Matters 09 Dec 2014

The most unexpected aspect of the book is Bernstein’s revelation that there was a connection between the American Indian Federation and the German-American Bund. This is particularly surprising, considering that Native Americans would never fit the Aryan ideal. But Bernstein explores the ways that AIF embraced and perpetuated anti-Semitism within the organization. Bernstein provides the example of the American Nation Conference in Asheville, where AIF activist Alice Lee Jemision and anti-Semitic leader of the Silver Legion, William Dudley Pelley, shared a stage and “Native Americans sporting swastika armbands worked the audience, handing out pro-Nazi pamphlets” (97). As Bernstein observes, “Native Americans, while not viewed as racially pure, were a unique market for Bundist manipulation” (98). What does this peculiar relationship tell us about race, ethnicity, and the position of Native Americans in the United States in the '30s?

Knute Berger looks at Nazi use of the Noble Savage concept in The strange case of the Northwest's Native American Nazi Cross Cut 12/15/2016:

The image of the “noble savage” embodied by Sioux warriors was embedded in Nazi cultural studies — they admired their “warrior” culture, and Hitler’s fascination with the Western novels of Karl May was well known. The Nazis even declared the Sioux to be Aryan — thus American Indians were acceptable in the Nazi’s tent. The Bund touted its connections with Native Americans, noting the swastika was an ancient native symbol, and running editorials in their publications claiming a role as “wards” of the American Indians to protect them from “anti-Christian Communism.”

Karen Goodluck also reports on Nazi use of American Indians in propaganda ( Far-right extremists appropriate Indigenous struggles for violent ends High Country News 08/27/2019):

Before and during World War II, Nazi propaganda declared American cultural imperialism a threat to German culture, noting that it had destroyed the Native American way of life and comparing U.S. bombing campaigns in German cities to American frontier massacres. Usbeck calls this “co-victimization” — an invented affinity with the Native American experience of genocide and cultural loss, rhetorically linked to ideas of German victimhood. The Nazis thereby used Indigenous people to create a myth of survival, of a people fighting heroically for their homeland.

Bottom line: don't fall into the trap of thinking it's easy to apply the concept of genocide to countries like the United States with a settler-colonial past. And there are lots of ideological booby traps on the way to thinking it through.