Indigenous Holocaust 1492-Present David Michael Smith University of Houston.

Moreover, such removals and relocations destroyed Indigenous people’s ways of life, which resulted in substantial additional loss of life. Other devastating assaults on these ways of life included the Spanish missions in California, Florida, and Texas; the U.S. government’s attempts to make Plains Indians into cattle ranchers and southern Indians into American farmers…efforts by churches and governments to undermine Indian religious, governmental, and kinship systems… the often-deliberate destructions of flora and fauna that American Indians used for food and other purposes…the near extinction of the buffalo. Widespread starvation and malnutrition, the deleterious effects of forced labor, alcoholism, demoralization and despair, declining fertility, and other factors also contributed to the Indigenous Holocaust.

 When Thornton’s estimated hemispheric population decline of 70 million is multiplied by 2.5, the total number of Indigenous deaths throughout the Western Hemisphere between 1492 and 1900 appears to be about 175 million.  And the number of Indigenous people who have died in the hemisphere because of war, repression, racism, and harsh conditions of life since 1900 surely runs into the millions. By any reckoning, the Indigenous Holocaust in the Western Hemisphere was, as Stannard has pointed out, “the worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed.” No words or numbers can adequately convey the scale of the horror and tragedy involved in the greatest sustained loss of human life in history. Still, it seems to this researcher that understanding the scope and dimensions of the Indigenous Holocaust is an important first step toward collective political action which addresses the needs, interests, and aspirations of Indigenous people today—and which ensures that such a holocaust will never happen again