The term "genocide" derives from the Latin "genos," race or tribe, and "cide," killing, and means literally the killing or murder of an entire tribe or people (Genocide pp). The Oxford English Dictionary defines genocide as "the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group," and cites the first usage of the term as R. Lemkin's 1944 Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, "by genocide we mean the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group" (Genocide pp). In 1946, the United Nations General Assembly adopted this term and defended it as "a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups" (Genocide pp).

Twenty-one years after Christopher Columbus first landed on the Caribbean island he named Hispaniola, some eight million native people, he chose to call Indians, had been killed (Stannard pp). And

So tractable, so peaceable, are these people,' [referring

world a better nation. They love their neighbors as themselves,

Within seventy-five years following the Europeans' first appearance, the overall population in central Mexico fell by 95 percent, from more than 25, 000,000 in 1519, to barely 1,000,000 in 1595 (Stannard pp). Within a century following their first encounter with the Spanish, the Andean society as a whole fell 96 percent, "along their 2,000 miles of coastline, where once 6, 500,000 people had lived, everyone was dead" (Stannard pp).

The government attacks on the native population in North America are too many to recount, however, they include familiar names such as Kitt Carson, and General Custer, to name but a few. The last and perhaps saddest of these attacks came in 1889 at Wounded Knee.

Ironically, Columbus had written back to the King and Queen of Spain:

Incredibly, it was not enough to genocide an entire race of people and force the survivors to reservations, the government also forced the native children to federal boarding schools, where they were forbidden to speak their own language or practice their own culture, and were forced to adopt the English ways (Reservation pp). The war still continued, only now there were no guns, however, it was a ingenious way of making certain that the culture of these peoples died with the younger generation (Reservation pp). And in fact, by the time most of the children returned to their families they had forgotten their language and their customs (Reservation pp). This silent genocide continued from 1870 to 1928 (Reservation pp).

By 1496, the native population of Hispaniola had dropped from eight million to four million, and by 1508, it had fallen to less than a hundred thousand, and a decade later in 1518, there were less than twenty thousand left, and according to leading scholars, by 1535, "for all practical purposes, the native population was extinct" (Stannard pp). It had taken less than the normal life span of a human being, to exterminate an entire culture of people, millions in number and thousands of years resident in their homeland (Stannard pp). This same fate fell to the native peoples on the surrounding islands and well as the mainland of the Americas (Stannard pp).

David Stannard writes in his book, American Holocaust, that never before in Christian history "had the idea that humankind was naturally corrupt and debased reached and influenced the daily lives of a larger proportion of the lay community than during New England's seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries" (Stannard pp). From the first days of settlement, the British colonists repeatedly expressed enormous feat that they would be "contaminated" by the presence of the Indians (Stannard pp). In fact, less than a decade after the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, it was made illegal to "shoot off a gun on any unnecessary occasion, or at any game except an Indian or a wolf" (Stannard pp).

to the Tainos on the island of San Salvador, so was named by Columbus], 'that I swear to your Majesties there is not in the

The gratuitous killing of the native people throughout the Caribbean and the Americas by the Spanish soldiers amounted no nothing less than outright sadism (Stannard pp). There are numerous accounts of Indians being led into mines, chained together at the neck and decapitated if they faltered, and of women routinely having their breasts cut off and heavy gourds tied to their feet before being tossed into the lakes (Stannard pp). Babies were t

Some common words found in the essay are:
Spanish Andean, Americas Spanish, Native American, San Salvador, South Dakota, stannard pp, Chief Foot, Holocaust Christian, Western Hemisphere's, Thomas Jefferson, Cherokee Nation, massacre-i pp, trail pp, native population, native peoples, reservation pp, ghost dance, genocide pp, native people, 95 percent, race stannard pp,
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