> There is no question for me that the net effect of
>what has happened to Indians has been genocidal. But a
>significant portion of this was pretty unconscious and
>essentially accidental, if "convenient" for the invaders.
>Barkley Rosser
Ward Churchill, "A Little Matter of Genocide," pp. 151-157:
If there are any lingering doubts as to whether the invaders deliberately
spread disease among North American Indians, it is time to lay them to rest
once ad for all. Contrary to the orthodoxy that the Europeans who came to
the New World were ignorant of how disease spread, it had been a practice
at least as early as Tamerlane (Timur), circa 1385, to catapult the corpses
of plague victims and the carcasses of diseased animals into besieged
cities. While such early experiments in biological warfare were generally
unsuccessful, they do demonstrate unequivocally that the Old World, or at
least its military leadership, had learned the mechanics of rudimentary
epidemiology well before 1492.
In North America, where wave after wave of epidemics, and several
pandemics, wracked native populations, often with a timing uncannily
convenient to those who had set out to conquer or eradicate them, the first
instance in which there is clear reason to suspect these lessons were being
applied occurred in 1636. This came with the execution of Captain John
Oldham, an officer/diplomat for Massachusetts Colony, by the Narragansetts.
The Indians apparently believed--rightly or wrongly--that Oldham had
deliberately infected them with smallpox in 1633, probably by dispensing
contaminated "gifts," unleashing an epidemic which claimed more than 700 of
their people and numerous of their allies. He was therefore brought before
the council of Narragansett sachems on Block Island, tried for this and
possibly other offenses, and paid the price.
There is considerable duplicity involved in what happened next. While they
were certainly aware of who had killed Oldham (and why), both Massachusetts
Governor John Winthrop and William Bradford, his counterpart on the
Plymouth Plantation, publicly blamed the Pequots for the "murder;" thus
predicating the almost total annihilation of that people in 1637. Since it
was actually the more powerful Narragansetts, not the Pequots, who were
convinced the colonists might be seeking to reduce their numbers through
intentional contamination, the idea must be considered a contributing
factor to the outbreak of "King Philip's War" some forty years later. Such
suspicions are known to have been harbored by several of the lesser
nations--the Eastern Niantics, for example, and the Nipmucks--who, along
with the larger Wampanoag confederation under Metacom ("King Philip"),
aligned with the Narragansetts against the English in the fighting.
It is not until another ninety years had passed, however, during the last
of the so-called "French and Indian Wars" before positive proof emerges
that England was indeed using biological techniques, as such, to eradicate
native populations. In 1763, having been fought to a humiliating stalemate
in the Ohio River Valley by a French-aligned indigenous military alliance
organized by the Ottawa leader Pontiac, Lord Jeffrey Amherst, the English
commander-in-chief, wrote a letter to a subordinate, Colonel Henry Bouquet,
suggesting that a peace parley be convened and, as was customary at such
events, gifts distributed.
To say that it did would be to understate the case. The disease spread like
wildfire among the Ottawas, Mingos, Miamis, Lenni Lenapes (Delawares), and
several other peoples. By conservative estimate, the toll was over 100,000
dead, a matter which effectively broke the back of native resistance in
what the United States would later call the "Northwest Territory," allowing
its conquest less than thirty years later. Amherst's maneuver, which
displays a considerable familiarity with the notion of disease as a weapon,
has been erroneously described as a "milestone of sorts" in military
history by Robert O'Connell1 in his book Of Arms and Men. Actually, since
he specified the group targeted for "extirpation" as being not just
opposing combatants, but an entire race, the "Ohio Valley incident" is not
properly understood as an example of biological warfare. Rather, it
indisputably an instance of genocide pursued through microbes.
This was by no means a singular incident, although it is the best
documented. Only slightly more ambiguous was the U.S. Army's dispensing of
"trade blankets" to Mandans and other Indians gathered at Fort Clark, on
the Missouri River in present-day North Dakota, beginning on June 20, 1837.
Far from being trade goods, the blankets had been taken from a military
infirmary in St. Louis quarantined for smallpox, and brought upriver aboard
the steamboat St. Peter. When the first Indians showed symptoms of the
disease on July 14, the post surgeon advised those camped near the post to
scatter seek "sanctuary" in the villages of healthy relatives. By then, the
disease was already showing up at Fort Union, adjacent to the main Mandan
village some forty miles further upriver. The trader there, Jacob Halsey,
who was married to an Indian woman, then attempted to administer a vaccine
which had been stored by the army rather than used to inoculate the people
for whom it was supposedly provided.
The perfectly predictable result of the "Fort Clark episode" was the
igniting of a pandemic which raged for several years, decimating peoples as
far as the Blackfeet, Bloods, and Piegans in southern Alberta and
Saskatchewan to the west as far as the Yuroks and other northern California
peoples, and Southward to the Kiowas and Comanches on the Staked Plains of
Texas.
There is no conclusive figure as to how many Indians died--it depends a bit
on how many one is willing to concede were there in the first place--but
estimates run as high as 100,000. However many people perished, their
"vanishing" made the subsequent U.S. conquest of the entire Plains region,
begun seriously in the 1850s, far easier than it would otherwise have been.
By this point, California, along with its residual population of native
people, had been acquired by the United States from Mexico. There is
nothing confusing about the meaning of language found in an 1853 San
Francisco newspaper, explaining how the incoming Angloamericans were
handling their "Indian Question": "people are.. .ready to knife them, shoot
them, or inoculate them with smallpox--all of which have been done
(emphasis added)." Thus, by the mid-nineteenth century, it appears that the
eradication of Indians through deliberate infection with plague diseases
had become so commonplace that it was no longer a military specialty.
Rather, it had been adopted as a method of "pest control" by average
civilians. All that is missing are the details as to exactly who did it to
which group of northern California natives, how many times and with what
overall degree of success. Whatever it was, it fit within a conscious
strategy of the citizenry, described in the San Francisco Bulletin on July
10, 1860, to effect the "ultimate extermination of the race by disease."
Given these circumstances, as well as those described in this section more
generally, it is at best an absurdity to contend that attrition through
disease represents anything approximating a "benign" explanation for the
complete extinction of numerous North American native peoples--or the
near-total disappearance of the "race" as a whole--between 1600 and 1900.
To the contrary, based on the evidence the presumption should be--and
should have been all along--that the waves of epidemic disease that
afflicted indigenous populations during these centuries were deliberately
induced, or at least facilitated, by the European invaders.
To do otherwise is tantamount to arguing, as some "scholars" do, that
approximately 50 percent of the Jews who died as a result of "ghettoization
and general privation" at the hands of the nazis shouldn't be tallied into
of the Holocaust since, after all, they perished from "natural causes" like
starvation and disease. Framed more broadly, it would be the same as that
of the estimated fifty million fatalities usually attributed to the d World
War, at least two-thirds should not be counted since they died of
malnutrition, exposure, disease, and war--related traumas rather than from
killing techniques." If such "standards" seem ridiculous when in these
contexts--and they should--they should seem no less so when applied to the
devastation of Native North America.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
