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Title: American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World by David E. Stannard ISBN: 0-19-508557-4 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: November, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.18 (33 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Everybody Should Read This
Comment: I did not fully understand the atrocities the Europeans committed against the indigenous people of the Americas until I read this book.
Stannard chronicles the slaughter and dispossesion of American Indians beginning with the earliest Spanish arrivals in the Caribbean, Mexico, and South America, moving to the English immigrants in the Northeast, and finally to the Anglo settlers in the South and West. He also mentions the campaigns against the indigenous Central Americans happening today. He also discusses the ideological connection between the the Spainish Inquisition, the American Indian Holocaust, and the Jewish Holocaust.
The Europeans kept written and pictorial journals of their atrocities, and in some cases their acts are recorded in newspapers and Congressional records, so the author's assertions are well documented. Excerpts include: The Spanish bragging about feeding Indian infants to their flesh eating dogs; Anglo settlers in the West, after a particularly brutal massacre, using the entrails of Indian men as tobacco holders.
I would argue that most Americans do not even know how this land was really acquired because the history has been so completely buried. Everybody needs to know what happened here and on whose graves our country was really built. Read this book!
Rating: 5
Summary: A stunning revelation.
Comment: I highly recommend this book for both its eloquence and its massively detailed research. If only it were required reading in our schools. I was taught in my youth to feel pride in my own family line that goes back to the earliest New England colonists, a brigade general who fought with George Washington in the French and Indian Wars and the American Revolution, and a long and 'distinguished' line of pioneer 'Indian fighters'. I also know that this family line also contains a long history of mental illness, schizoid personality disorder, and substance abuse and the family legends and personality are interlaced with PTSD and the trauma of war. After reading this book I can now put this family history into the context of New World genocide, which also damages the psyche of the perpetrators. I can also see how it is that the political leaders of our government to the present day have, as Stannard in part documents, phobically avoided responsibility for American genocide and for cultivating international efforts to prevent genocide. It also comes as no surprise then that the 'coalition' in the latest war against Iraq, itself one act in a century of Arab genocide, comprises the U.S., Australia, and Spain. These are three nations who have refused to confess or make any official apology for their histories of genocide and as a result continue to condone and perpetrator genocidal actions.
Rating: 5
Summary: Connected Holocausts
Comment: My one quibble with this book is that it only chronicles destruction - it does not discuss the long and continuing resistance of Native American people and cultures. In places like Vermont, the Abenaki continue to live in the shadows of their white neighbors, learned to use guitars and fiddles so we wouldn't be arrested for drum playing, and quietly suffer through continuing discrimination (there are several stores, where I could walk in and wait as long as the store is open, and not be served). A dirty little secret of the Democratic Party, which continues to hold the governorship of Vermont, is that it runs on a platform of never recognizing the Native People of Vermont - whether or not we gain federal recognition. (For fair comparison, I should note that the Republican Party wants to remove sovereign status from all Native Nations.) This is rascism, and Vermont history is completely whitewashed. The few times the Abenaki are mentioned in Vermont history textbooks that are sanctioned for use in the schools, we are constantly labeled as murderers and thieves. Never mind, of course, that we were murdered and raped in large numbers by European settlers who were stealing our crops and land.
Besides the continuing tribal resistance, there are very important modern movements of resistance that are pan-Indian, and embrace Hispanics and sympathetic whites and others, such as the Seventh Generation Project in Minnesota, and Tonatierra in Arizona.
The worst critique most people have come up with about this book is that its count of native peoples in the Western Hemisphere is inflated. That is hardly the case. If you check the research of modern anthropologists and professors in American Indian Studies Departments, you find out that the numbers have been consistently undercounted up until the modern day, and that the "accepted figures" taught in school were based on very little evidence.
There was native-on-native violence, and I agree that this has been somewhat glossed over. However, that is almost refreshing compared to the historically inaccurate painting of native peoples as bloodthirsty barbarians found in most of the older histories. Spanish conquerers are known to have over-counted the number of humans sacrifices made by the Aztecs, while not mentioning their own human sacrifices to God in the form of the Spanish Inquistion and the many bloody Christian sectarian wars being fought in Europe at the time. I cannot imagine the victims feel any worse about being sacrificed on an altar instead of a battlefield, and both are sacrificed in great pain in the name of a God or gods.
The rest of the critiques I have seen are rascist nonsense. One particular reviewer said that it only showed the "indian side of the story". First of all, Indians are inhabitants of India, I am Native American or American Indian, at least to outsiders, just as only blacks are allowed to use the inflammatory n-word with each other in single-race company. Secondly, the vast majority of histories only tell the white side of the story, so reading the "other side" should be informative. Thirdly, sir, to be mildly insulting, you sound like a stereotypical holocaust denier in your critiques - and I do mean of both the American and the European Jewish. There are very few books that only tell Hitler's side of the story - and none of them are accepted as valid scholarship. The same should hold true in modern histories of what happened in Native America.
I make this comparison for good reason - that being that Hitler is documented as having said that he based his final solution for the Jews on the U.S. government's final solution of the "Indian problem". In the thirties, this was continuing - with the Vermont Eugenics Project and other rascist eugenics projects that specifically targeted Native Americans and African Americans to be surgically castrated. Several of my grandmother's cousins were caught and targeted in that net. It continued in the 60s, when the BIA-run hospitals were discovered to be using saline solution instead of vaccines on our infants, experimental surgery on our people, and to be basically castrating women during C-sections so they could not have any more children. And it continues today, with uncapped Uranium deposits on Navajo land out west doing irreparable genetic damage to the people, with the Superfund site that magically "ends" at the border of the Akwesasne Reservation in Upstate New York and Canada, and many others (Winona LaDuke wrote an excellent book covering this continuing devastation in detail).
I highly suggest reading Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, in addition to this book.
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