All five measures of the 1948 “United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” were fulfilled by this treatment.ĢIn the twentieth century, US government decisions on Indian affairs were generally paternalistic in nature. Tribal economies were pushed to adapt to an agrarian ideal under measures such as the Dawes Act which allocated pockets of land to individual Indians, breaking up communally occupied agricultural and hunting grounds. Bad-faith negotiations brought the Indian land base down from much of the interior to limited and (mostly) poor quality reservation lands under governmental supervision. The power of what had been recognized as sovereign entities shrank through judicial decisions which reduced the status of Indians in the management of their own affairs and declared tribal peoples to be “dependent nations,” a phrase that in manifest destiny ideology justified the continued breaking of treaties. (There were, of course, many more, but Indian blood and cultural affiliation was seen as something to be denied by many). A combination of disease, vicious colonial warfare and the use of education as a weapon to “kill the Indian, save the man” had by the beginning of the 19 th century reduced the number of people in the United States willing to claim Native ancestry in the census to just 250,000. 1That American Indian nations have survived into the 21 st century should be an occasion for celebration, given how truly close Native America came to a total obliteration.
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