Excerpts from American Genocide
by
David Stannard
Prologue
In the
darkness of an early July morning in 1945, on a desolate spot in the New
Mexico desert named after a John Donne sonnet celebrating the Holy
Trinity, the first atomic bomb was exploded. J. Robert Oppenheimer later
remembered that the immense flash of light, followed by the thunderous
roar, caused a few observers to laugh and others to cry. But most, he
said, were silent. Oppenheimer himself recalled at that instant a line
from the Bhagavad-Gita:
"I am
become death, the shatterer of worlds."
There is
no reason to think that anyone on board the Nina, the Pinta, or the
Santa Maria, on an equally dark early morning four and a half centuries
earlier, thought of those ominous lines from the ancient Sanskrit poem
when the crews of the Spanish ships spied a flicker of light on the
windward side of the island they would name after the Holy Saviour. But
the intuition, had it occurred, would have been as appropriate then as
it was when that first nuclear blast rocked the New Mexico desert sands.
In both
instances-at the Trinity test site in 1945 and at San Salvador in
1492-those moments of achievement crowned years of intense personal
struggle and adventure for their protagonists and were culminating
points of ingenious technological achievement for their countries. But
both instances also were prelude to orgies of human destructiveness
that, each in its own way, attained a scale of devastation not
previously witnessed in the entire history of the world.
Just
twenty-one days after the first atomic test in the desert, the Japanese
industrial city of Hiroshima was leveled by nuclear blast; never before
had so many people-at least 130,000, probably many more-died from a
single explosion. Just twenty-one years after Columbus's first landing
in the Caribbean, the vastly populous island that the explorer had
re-named Hispaniola was effectively desolate; nearly 8,000,000
people-those Columbus chose to call Indians-had been killed by violence,
disease, and despair. It took a little longer, about the span of a
single human generation, but what happened on Hispaniola was the
equivalent of more than fifty Hiroshimas. And Hispaniola was only the
beginning.
Within no
more than a handful of generations following their first encounters with
Europeans, the vast majority of the Western Hemisphere's native peoples
had been exterminated. The pace and magnitude of their obliteration
varied from place to place and from time to time, but for years now
historical demographers have been uncovering, in region upon region,
post-Columbian depopulation rates of between 90 and 98 percent with such
regularity that an overall decline of 95 percent has become a working
rule of thumb. What this means is that, on average, for every twenty
natives alive at the moment of European contact-when the lands of the
Americas teemed with numerous tens of millions of people-only one stood
in their place when the bloodbath was over.
To put
this in a contemporary context, the ratio of native survivorship in the
Americas following European contact was less than half of what the human
survivorship ratio would be in the United States today if every single
white person and every single black person died. The destruction of the
Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of
genocide in the history of the world. That is why, as one historian
aptly has said, far from the heroic and romantic heraldry that
customarily is used to symbolize the European settlement of the
Americas, the emblem most congruent with reality would be a pyramid of
skulls.
Scholarly
estimates of the size of the post-Columbian holocaust have climbed
sharply in recent decades. Too often, however, academic discussions of
this ghastly event have reduced the devastated indigenous peoples and
their cultures to statistical calculations in recondite demographic
analyses. It is easy for this to happen. From the very beginning, merely
taking the account of so mammoth a cataclysm seemed an impossible task.
Wrote one Spanish adventurer-who arrived in the New World only two
decades after Columbus's first landing, and who himself openly reveled
in the torrent of native blood-there was neither "paper nor time enough
to tell all that the [conquistadors] did to ruin the Indians and rob
them and destroy the land." As a result, the very effort to describe the
disaster's overwhelming magnitude has tended to obliterate both the
writer's and the reader's sense of its truly horrific human element.
In an
apparent effort to counteract this tendency, one writer, Tzvetan Todorov,
begins his study of the events of 1492 and immediately thereafter with
an epigraph from Diego de Landa's Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan:
The
captain Alonso Lopez de Avila, brother-in-law of the adelantado Montejo,
captured, during the war in Bacalan, a young Indian woman of lovely and
gracious appearance. She had promised her husband, fearful lest they
should kill him in the war, not to have relations with any other man but
him, and so no persuasion was sufficient to prevent her from taking her
own life to avoid being defiled by another man; and because of this they
had her thrown to the dogs.
Todorov
then dedicates his book "to the memory of a Mayan woman devoured by
dogs."
It is
important to try to hold in mind an image of that woman, and her
brothers and sisters and the innumerable others who suffered similar
fates, as one reads Todorov's book, or this one, or any other work on
this subject-just as it is essential, as one reads about the Jewish
Holocaust or the horrors of the African slave trade, to keep in mind the
treasure of a single life in order to avoid becoming emotionally
anesthetized by the sheer force of such overwhelming human evil and
destruction. There is, for example, the case of a small Indian boy whose
name no one knows today, and whose unmarked skeletal remains are
hopelessly intermingled with those of hundreds of anonymous others in a
mass grave on the American plains, but a boy who once played on the
banks of a quiet creek in eastern Colorado-until the morning, in 1864,
when the American soldiers came. Then, as one of the cavalrymen later
told it, while his compatriots were slaughtering and mutilating the
bodies of all the women and all the children they could catch, he
spotted the boy trying to flee:
There was
one little child, probably three years old, just big enough to walk
through the sand. The Indians had gone ahead, and this little child was
behind following after them. The little fellow was perfectly naked,
travelling on the sand. I saw one man get off his horse, at a distance
of about seventy-five yards, and draw up his rifle and fire-he missed
the child. Another man came up and said, "Let me try the son of a bitch;
I can hit him." He got down off his horse, kneeled down and fired at the
little child, but he missed him. A third man came up and made a similar
remark, and fired, and the little fellow dropped.
We must
do what we can to recapture and to try to understand, in human terms,
what it was that was crushed, what it was that was butchered It is not
enough merely to acknowledge that much was lost. So close to total was
the human incineration and carnage in the post-Columbian Americas,
however, that of the tens of millions who were killed, few individual
lives left sufficient traces for subsequent biographical
representation...
***
Moreover,
the important question for the future in this case is not "can it happen
again?" Rather, it is "can it be stopped?" For the genocide in the
Americas, and in other places where the world's indigenous peoples
survive, has never really ceased. As recently as 1986, the Commission on
Human Rights of the Organization of American States observed that 40,000
people had simply "disappeared" in Guatemala during the preceding
fifteen years. Another 100,000 had been openly murdered. That is the
equivalent, in the United States, of more than 4,000,000 people
slaughtered or removed under official government decree-a figure that is
almost six times the number of American battle deaths in the Civil War,
World War One, World War Two, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War
combined.'
Almost
all those dead and disappeared were Indians, direct descendants-as was
that woman who was devoured by dogs-of the Mayas, creators of one of the
most splendid civilizations that this earth has ever seen. Today, as
five centuries ago, these people are being tortured and slaughtered,
their homes and villages bombed and razed-while more than two-thirds of
their rain forest homelands have now been intentionally burned and
scraped into ruin.' The murder and destruction continue, with the aid
and assistance of the United States, even as these words are being
written and read. And many of the detailed accounts from contemporary
observers read much like those recorded by the conquistadors'
chroniclers nearly 500 years earlier.
"Children, two years, four years old, they just grabbed them and tore
them in two," reports one witness to a military massacre of Indians in
Guatemala in 1982. Recalls another victim of an even more recent assault
on an Indian encampment:
With
tourniquets they killed the children, of two years, of nine months, of
six months. They killed and burned them all.... What they did [to my
father]
was put a machete in here (pointing to his chest) and they cut open his
heart, and they left him all burned up. This is the pain we shall never
forget ... Better to die here with a bullet and not die in that way,
like my father did."
Adds
still another report, from a list of examples seemingly without end:
At about
1:00 p.m., the soldiers began to fire at the women inside the small
church. The majority did not die there, but were separated from their
children, taken to their homes in groups, and killed, the majority
apparently with machetes.... Then they returned to kill the children,
whom they had left crying and screaming by themselves, without their
mothers. Our informants, who were locked up in the courthouse, could see
this through a hole in the window and through the doors carelessly left
open by a guard. The soldiers cut open the children's stomachs with
knives or they grabbed the children's little legs and smashed their
heads with heavy sticks.... Then they continued with the men. They took
them out, tied their hands, threw them on the ground, and shot them. The
authorities of the area were killed inside the courthouse.... It was
then that the survivors were able to escape, protected by the smoke of
the fire which had been set to the building. Seven men, three of whom
survived, managed to escape. It was 5:30 p.m..
In all,
352 Indians were killed in this massacre, at a time when 440 towns were
being entirely destroyed by government troops, when almost 10,000
unarmed people were being killed or made to "disappear" annually, and
when more than 1,000,000 of Guatemala's approximately 4,000,000 natives
were being displaced by the deliberate burning and wasting of their
ancestral lands. During such episodes of mass butchery, some children
escape; only their parents and grandparents are killed. That is why it
was reported in Guatemala in 1985 that "116,000 orphans had been
tabulated by the judicial branch census throughout the country, the vast
majority of them in the Indian townships of the western and central
highlands."
Reminders
are all around us, if we care to look, that the fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century extermination of the indigenous people of Hispaniola,
brought on by European military assault and the importation of exotic
diseases, was in part only an enormous prelude to human catastrophes
that followed on other killing grounds, and continue to occur today-from
the forests of Brazil and Paraguay and elsewhere in South and Central
America, where direct government violence still slaughters thousands of
Indian people year in and year out, to the reservations and urban slums
of North America, where more sophisticated indirect government violence
has precisely the same effect-all the while that Westerners engage in
exultation over the 500th anniversary of the European discovery of
America, the time and the place where all the killing began.
Other
reminders surround us, as well, however, that there continues among
indigenous peoples today the echo of their fifteenth and sixteenth
century opposition to annihilation, when, despite the wanton killing by
the European invaders and the carnage that followed the introduction of
explosive disease epidemics, the natives resisted with an intensity the
conquistadors found difficult to believe. "I do not know how to describe
it," wrote Bernal Diaz del Castillo of the defiance the Spanish
encountered in Mexico, despite the wasting of the native population by
bloodbath and torture and disease, "for neither cannon nor muskets nor
crossbows availed, nor hand-to-hand fighting, nor killing thirty or
forty of them every time we charged, for they still fought on in as
close ranks and with more energy than in the beginning."
Five
centuries later that resistance remains, in various forms, throughout
North and South and Central America, as it does among indigenous peoples
in other lands that have suffered from the Westerners' furious wrath.
Compared with what they once were, the native peoples in most of these
places are only remnants now. But also in each of those places, and in
many more, the struggle for physical and cultural survival, and for
recovery of a deserved pride and autonomy, continues unabated.
All the
ongoing violence against the world's indigenous peoples, in whatever
form-as well as the native peoples' various forms of resistance to that
violence-will persist beyond our full understanding, however, and beyond
our ability to engage and humanely come to grips with it, until we are
able to comprehend the magnitude and the causes of the human destruction
that virtually consumed the people of the Americas and other people in
other subsequently colonized parts of the globe, beginning with
Columbus's early morning sighting of landfall on October 12, 1492. That
was the start of it all. This book is offered as one contribution to our
necessary comprehension.
reprinted from the Third World Traveler
TOP
comments and letters to comments@ipoaa.com |
