"There was no room for Indians in Jefferson's empire of liberty," writes Jones. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson himself spoke frankly of what we would today call genocide. "We must leave it to yourself to decide [whether] the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal," Jefferson once wrote to Clark's older brother, the storied Indian fighter George Rogers Clark. "The same world would scarcely do for them and us."

It is difficult to comprehend the magnitude of the atrocities—intentional, neglectful, or accidental—perpetuated on Indian people by the conquering culture, and later by the very government that assumed responsibility for their protection.

[Columbus] took more Indian prisoners and put them aboard his two remaining ships. At one part of the island he got into a fight with Indians who refused to trade as many bows and arrows as he and his men wanted. Two were run through with swords and bled to death.

So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

In two years, through muder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.

"Endless testimonies . . . prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives . . . . But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if they tried to kill one of us now and then . . . . The admiral, it is true, was blind as those who came after him, and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes against the Indians . . . ." [quote from Bartolomé de las Casas]

The Spaniards "thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades."

Cortés then began his march of death from town to town, using deception, turning Aztec against Aztec, killing with the kind of deliberateness that accompanies a strategy — to paralyze the will of the population by a sudden frightful deed.

In Peru, that other Spanish conquistador Pizarro, used the same tactics, and for the same reasons....

In the North American English colonies, the pattern was set early as Columbus had set it in the islands of the Bahamas. In 1585, before there was any permanent English settlement in Virginia, Richard Grenville landed there with seven ships. The Indians he met were hospitable, but when one of them stole a small silver cup, Grenville sacked and burned the whole Indian village.

Not able to enslave the Indians, and not able to live with them, the English decided to exterminate them. Edmund Morgan writes, in his history of early Virginia, American Slavery, American Freedom:

The murder of a white trader, Indian-kidnaper, and troublemaker became an excuse to make war on the Pequots in 1636.

Folks like conservative author Dinesh D'Souza, who, in a debate with me at Western Washington University in May, insisted that terming the process genocide was absurd. It was, to him, merely an emotional appeal on my part, devoid of content; calculated to gain applause at the expense of honesty. To Dinesh, genocide was an inappropriate term because most of the Indians who perished died from diseases, not warfare waged by whites.

That Dinesh has never read the definition of genocide, readily available in the United Nation's 1948 Genocide Convention, certainly was no surprise. But had he done so, he would have seen that in order to qualify as genocide, one does not have to directly kill anyone per se. Rather, genocide describes any of the following acts, committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to bring about the group's destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, or forcibly transferring the children of the group to another.

In fact, each of these categories has been met in the case of American Indians. And had it not been for conquest, those diseases to which Indians had no resistance—and which colonists praised as the "work of God," clearing the land for them—wouldn't have ravaged the native populations as they did. To imply that such deaths were merely accidental or incidental would be like saying the Nazis bore no responsibility for the 1.6 million or so Jews who died of disease and starvation in the camps, rather than having been gassed or shot. But try saying that at your local neighborhood synagogue and see how far you get—with good reason.

On the mainland, we know for sure that our fellow-countrymen have, through their cruelty and wickedness, depopulated and laid waste an area which once boasted more than ten kingdoms, each of them larger in area than the whole of the Iberian Peninsula. The whole region, once teeming with human beings, is now deserted over a distance of more than two thousand leagues: a distance, that is, greater than the journey from Seville to Jerusalem and back again.

At a conservative estimate, the despotic and diabolical behaviour of the Christians has, over the last forty years, led to the unjust and totally unwarranted deaths of more than twelve million souls, women and children among them, and there are grounds for believing my own estimate of more than fifteen million to be nearer the mark.

The extirpation of Indians, of course, did not begin with America's founding fathers. United States citizens and public servants like Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson, were only following a tradition that had long been established by European colonists. Like most American traditions, it was chartered by religious zealots. Puritan Saints who governed the Massachusetts Bay Colony, within a decade of its founding in 1630, passed what amounts to the first gun-control legislature on the continent when it legislated that settlers could not "...shoot off a gun on any unnecessary occasion, or at any game except an Indian or a wolf" (quoted in Lopez, 1978, p. 170). Lopez notes that the Puritans used similar tactics in liquidating both wolves and Indians: "He set out poisoned meat for the wolf and gave the Indian blankets infected with smallpox. He raided the wolf's den to dig out and destroy the pups, and stole the Indian's children" (1978, pp. 170-171).

White "settlers" required little prodding to kill Indians, but the Colonial governments spared no expense in ridding the New World of its old inhabitants. Just as bounties were paid for the legs, tails, or ears of animals regarded as a nuisance to "civilization," so were bounties paid for the scalps of Indians. "By 1717, all the New England colonies had bounties in place, as did New Jersey. Massachusetts rescinded its Scalp Act in 1722, on the grounds that it had become 'ineffectual,' but reinstated it by public demand in 1747" (Churchill, 1997, p. 182).

What the encyclopedia does not emphasize or deny is that Columbus was a major supplier of slaves prior to 1500, and it's estimated that he brought some 6,000 Native people to Europe.

Columbus's first contact was in 1492, when he captured some two dozen of the Arawak tribe of the Caribbean. With a fleet of 17 ships, some 1,200 colonists and 34 horses, he returned in Nov. 1493. On his way he briefly stopped in St. Croix, where members of his group captured four Indian men and two women in a canoe. They cut the head off one man with an ax and took the others aboard as captives to send to Spain as slaves. It's the first recorded instance of a killing by Columbus's group. (Source:  500 Nations by Alvin M. Josephy Jr.)

Even though Spain monarchs hesitated to sanction the capturing of Indians, the cruel Columbus did not stop shipping Indians in chains to the slave markets of Cadiz and Seville. In 1503, the Queen gave her permission and "required a share in the profit" of his slave trade. By the 1520s, slave raiding in Florida and the Carolina coast was common.

Records show that in 1603, the British began to abduct Native Americans from New England and the Virginia coast, taking them to England. Abductions played a major role in the British plan for colonization. They said they took Indians as slaves to learn about the lay of the land, the language, and to acquire mediators. If a ship returned to England, it was filled with Native American slaves who were forced to toil as oarsmen.

Thomas Hunt kidnapped 27 Indians in 1614 from Massachusetts and took them to Spain for sale. A few were sold and the rest taken by Spanish friars and Christianized. As children learn in the movie Squanto, one of those Native warriors escaped and returned to his people in 1619, only to find them dead from disease, a European form of germ warfare.

Native Americans: Weapons of Mass Destruction

Diseases were not fast enough to accomplish the dreaded annihilation, so they combined this biological warfare with the sword, guns and hunting dogs as the Spanish did to exterminate the "vermin." That the mercilessness of the British was not forgotten by invading settlers can be seen on the "trail of tears." On the trail of tears, which was nearly 300 miles in length, the Cherokee Indians were deliberately marched past areas known to have outbreaks of cholera and other epidemic diseases. To add to their debilitated state from diseases, the freezing weather, and the forced death march, they were fed spoiled flour and rancid meat. Nearly 8,000 died on this march out of 17,000.

Another logical step in biological warfare is the deliberate withholding of treatments for diseases. One case among the Native Americans is the Apaches and their fight with tuberculosis. "Tuberculosis was allowed to affect the Apaches, e.g., the government could have returned the people to the southwest, which at the time was a popular remedy for TB. Instead, the government refused to allow the sick and dying Apaches to come home. So...not overtly, but certainly covertly, the government exercised revenge on the Apaches. And, if they could do that to one tribe, they could do it to all who resisted the encroachment." In many cases there may have been no deliberate attempt at withholding a cure, but the end result was welcomed.

When the Spaniards had collected a great deal of gold from the Indians, they shut them up in three big houses, crowding in as many as they could, then set fire to the houses, burning alive all that were in them, yet those Indians had given no cause nor made any resistance.

When we asked them for food...they mocked us like the others. In view of this, the corners of the pueblo were taken by four men, and four others with two servants began to seize those natives who showed themselves. We put them in an estufa [kiva]...We set fire to the big pueblo...where we thought some were burned to death because of the cries they uttered. We at once took out the prisoners [from the kiva], two at a time, and lined them up against some cottonwoods close to the pueblo, where they were garroted and shot many times until they were dead. Sixteen were executed, not counting those who burned to death....This was a remarkable deed for so few people in the midst of so many enemies.

Of course, it was the flesh-and-blood women of the New World who felt the real sting of the Spanish conquest. Native American women were occasionally subjected to rape and other sexual outrages but even more often to a form of subjugation that was physical and spiritual—they were pressured to convert to Christianity, embrace the Hispanic culture and the European work ethic and submit to the authority of the various men in their lives, including their priests and their husbands.

Bouvier argues that the friars seized on seemingly mundane matters in a calculated effort to extinguish the indigenous culture of California and remake the Native Americans in their own image. An emphasis on eating three meals a day in the European fashion, she points out, represented an effort to restructure the lives of the Native Americans according to "the Western model . . . of worship, work and rest, punctuated by meals."

In colonial times, everyone knew about the plague. Even before the Mayflower sailed, King James of England gave thanks to "Almighty God in his great goodness and bounty towards us" for sending "this wonderful plague among the salvages [sic]."

In 1994, several smaller states went to the U.N., urgently pleading for a small but decisive increase in the world body's presence in Rwanda. Advance warning had been given of the Intentions of the Hutu militia, and word of their plans had been authoritatively leaked to local peacekeepers. Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. envoy to the U.N., was instructed to block the proposal to send more troops. After the self-inflicted debacle in Somalia, the United States had decided that Africa was boring and dangerous and that its pleas should go unheard. The Hutu genocide plan went off without a hitch; the United States then approved a military intervention by the French government, which sent its troops to protect the mass murderers against the rebellion of the Rwandan Patriotic Front.

Do yourself a favor and look up the date on which the United States actually ratified the 1948 Convention on Genocide (40 years after its passage at the United Nations) or the last time it refused to recognize a genocide (the 1915-1923 massacre of Armenians, the subject of a failed congressional resolution last fall).

No historian would accept accounts of Nazi officials as to what happened in Nazi Germany because these accounts were written to justify that regime. Yet American historians are still subjective about their own history with a few exceptions. They try to justify and rationalize what happened, give excuses or lay blame on a few exceptionally cruel generals or wild frontiersmen. There were too many massacres for them to be accidental. There were too many buffalo for them to become extinct in a period of five years. Genocide is colonial policy, not accident.

Our nation's values also include obfuscating and misleading history lessons that are designed to make Americans feel good about our country's past and to delude ourselves about the truth. Americans like to think that this continent was sparsely populated with Indians and we bought it fair and square. In fact, it was densely populated with people who took pity on inept colonizers and helped them survive their tough, early years in this foreign place. In the end, the Americans stole or coerced 98 percent of this land from those who occupied it before Columbus. And the Americans invented remarkably creative stories to justify both the past theft of this continent and their present control and continued theft of the remaining two percent of the land over which Indians still exercise sovereign authority.

We would like to believe that the singular focus and greed of our ancestors is a thing of the past which we have grown beyond. This is our necessary myth. We always place the crime in some buried chunk of the bygone years, so that we can become innocents and, thus, in our own eyes we are simply victims of earlier evil deeds.