USANews版 - Yes, Native Americans Were the Victims of Genocide |
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发帖数: 1 | 1 Yes, Native Americans Were the Victims of Genocide
US policies and actions related to Indigenous peoples, though often termed
“racist” or “discriminatory,” are rarely depicted as what they are:
classic cases of imperialism and a particular form of colonialism — settler
colonialism. As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe writes, “The question of
genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life
— or, at least, land is necessary for life.”i The history of the United
States is a history of settler colonialism.
The extension of the United States from sea to shining sea was the intention
and design of the country’s founders. “Free” land was the magnet that
attracted European settlers. After the war for independence but preceding
the writing of the US Constitution, the Continental Congress produced the
Northwest Ordinance. This was the first law of the incipient republic,
revealing the motive for those desiring independence. It was the blueprint
for gobbling up the British-protected Indian Territory (“Ohio Country”) on
the other side of the Appalachians and Alleghenies. Britain had made
settlement there illegal with the Proclamation of 1763.
In 1801, President Jefferson aptly described the new settler state’s
intentions for horizontal and vertical continental expansion, stating: “
However our present interests may restrain us within our own limits, it is
impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid
multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover the whole
northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same
language, governed in similar form by similar laws.” This vision of
manifest destiny found form a few years later in the Monroe Doctrine,
signaling the intention of annexing or dominating former Spanish colonial
territories in the Americas and the Pacific, which would be put into
practice during the rest of the century.
#Mass Grave
#RacialDiscrimination
#Native American
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/162804 |
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