Reply #11: The Spanish pretty much wiped out the Aztecs of Mexico and .... [View All]

[whistle]

...the Incas of Peru. Mexico had a 25 million and Perus and Chile had some 14 million people spread across their empires. Between war and diseases they wiped out over than 95%. The Portuguese were ruthless against the natives in the Amazon rain forest areas and river basin. There were also natives living in the islands of the Caribbean which were reduced and exterminated. Perhaps as many as 5 million or more of these people were killed.

Then the American settlements by the British and French began their push against the coastal tribes on the east coast and into the Upper and Lower Canada regions around the St Laurence River and the Great Lakes. Where there was resistance from the Iroquois and Mohican's the white Europeans slaughtered and subdued and starved the natives. But it was the Americans who committed the greatest acts of genocide. The great push westward resulted in the resettlement of whole nations on special reservations where they were exploited, starved and subjected to wholesale murder.

<snip>
Native American Genocide Still Haunts United States
By Leah Trabich
Cold Spring Harbor High School
New York, USA

In the past, the main thrust of the Holocaust/Genocide Project's magazine, An End To Intolerance, has been the genocides that occurred in history and outside of the United States. Still, what we mustn't forget is that mass killing of Native Americans occurred in our own country. As a result, bigotry and racial discrimination still exist.

"In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue" . . . and made the first contact with the "Indians." For Native Americans, the world after 1492 would never be the same. This date marked the beginning of the long road of persecution and genocide of Native Americans, our indigenous people. Genocide was an important cause of the decline for many tribes.

"By conservative estimates, the population of the United states prior to European contact was greater than 12 million. Four centuries later, the count was reduced by 95% to 237 thousand.

In 1493, when Columbus returned to the Hispaniola, he quickly implemented policies of slavery and mass extermination of the Taino population of the Caribbean. Within three years, five million were dead. Las Casas, the primary historian of the Columbian era, writes of many accounts of the horrors that the Spanish colonists inflicted upon the indigenous population: hanging them en mass, hacking their children into pieces to be used as dog feed, and other horrid cruelties. The works of Las Casas are often omitted from popular American history books and courses because Columbus is considered a hero by many, even today.

<more>
<link> http://www.iearn.org/hgp/aeti/aeti-1997/native-americans.html

<other link> http://www.millersv.edu/~columbus/data/art/STANN-01.ART