Native+American+Genocide

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 * 1) -"In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue" . . . and made the first contact with the "Indians."
 * 2) -This date marked the beginning of the long road of persecution and genocide of Native Americans, our indigenous people.
 * 3) -Genocide was an important cause of the decline for many tribes.
 * 4) -In 1493, when Columbus returned to the Hispaniola, he quickly implemented policies of slavery and mass extermination of the Taino population of the Caribbean.
 * 5) -Within three years, five million were dead.
 * 6) -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.
 * 7) -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.
 * 8) -"Indian Removal" policy was put into action to clear the land for white settlers.
 * 9) -Methods for the removal included slaughter of villages by the military and also biological warfare.
 * 10) -The Removal Act of 1830 set into motion a series of events which led to the "Trail of Tears" in 1838, a forced march of the Cherokees, resulting in the destruction of most of the Cherokee population."
 * 11) -The concentration of American Indians in small geographic areas, and the scattering of them from their homelands, caused increased death, primarily because of associated military actions, disease, starvation, extremely harsh conditions during the moves, and the resulting destruction of ways of life.
 * 12) -Genocide entered international law for the first time in 1948; the international community took notice when Europeans (Jews, Poles, and other victims of Nazi Germany) faced cultural extinction.
 * 13) -In California and Texas there was blatant genocide of Indians by non-Indians during certain historic periods.
 * 14) -In California, the decrease from about a quarter of a million to less than 20,000 is primarily due to the cruelties and wholesale massacres perpetrated by the miners and early settlers
 * 15) -"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.
 * 16) -The discrimination of the Native American population is only one example of this ruthless destruction