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The vast majority of Americans receive their understanding American history and of the federal Constitution from the government-controlled education system. The form of instruction is from either books written by Constitutional Scholars or teachers taught by Constitutional Scholars.The "Constitutional Scholar" (and lawyers) generally gets the title after being instructed by other constitutional scholars (and lawyers) who have also been taught, or perhaps indoctrinated would be a better word, by previous ones. Since most of this instruction is in an academic environment, one must adhere to the teachings in order to pass and be awarded with basically a "Constitutional Scholar" Certificate (or membership to the Bar).One problem with this is any falsehoods, accidental and intentional, entering the teachings can be perpetrated as facts for future scholars. These "new" facts are also taught to the general population to encourage their acceptance of false information.The federal constitution was designed to lay out specific responsibilities and authorities delegated to the federal government by the several States for matters external to them and among the several States but not matters within them.The bigger issue between North and South could not be reconciled on the basis of accommodating slavery. That bigger issue was economic as DiLorenzo, Charles Beard and other historians have documented. The North offered to preserve slavery irrevocably, but the North did not offer to give up the high tariffs and economic policies that the South saw as inimical to its interests.The predominately agricultural Southern States emphatically opposed these new protective tariffs, as they raised the cost of manufactured goods purchased not only from abroad, which were often of better quality that those manufactured in the Northern States, but also on those purchased from the North itself. It also meant that foreign countries, whose sales in the United States were reduced due to the higher cost, would not have as much to spend on Southern exports such as cotton and tobacco, of which the larger portion was sold in Europe. Regardless of the damage that could be done to the Southern economy, Congress passed a new protective tariff in 1824, known as the “Sectional Tariff,” that increased the average import duty to between thirty and thirty-five percent, and broadened the range of manufactured goods covered by the tariff. As expected, this caused economic prosperity in the North, and economic privation in the South; South Carolina alone saw a twenty-five percent drop in exports over the next two years.Blaming the war on slavery was the way the northern court historians used morality to cover up Lincoln’s naked aggression and the war crimes of his generals. Demonizing the enemy with moral language works for the victor. And it is still ongoing. We see in the destruction of statues the determination to shove remaining symbols of the Confederacy down the Memory Hole.After the States LAWFULLY seceded from the Union, all property claimed by the federal government became the property of the respective State. This included Fort Sumper. When the federal troops there refused to vacate the fort, South Carolina brought in their troops."On April 12, after Lincoln ordered a fleet to resupply Sumter, Confederate artillery fired the first shots of the Civil War. Sumter’s commander, Major Robert Anderson, surrendered after less than two days of bombardment..." (History-dot-com)South Carolina felt it had no choice but to take the fort before the reinforcements arrived.Lincoln used this as one of the excuses to start the war. Lincoln waged the war WITHOUT a Congressional Declaration. Hence, the war was unconstitutional for this and the reason that the deferring States invoked their Right which they did not delegate to any other body. The war, since it was waged by the Executive Branch, was one of federal aggression since the States making up the CSA seceeded and did not rebel. The Confederate States did not want a war but had one forced upon them.Some of the facts about the war are conveniently omitted from being taught in our government-controlled education system.From the Institute for Historical Review:[Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus throughout the nation. He assumed the power to close newspapers and in fact closed hundreds of them in the North which dared criticize his policies. He arrested elected officials, including former members of Congress, who opposed him."Vice-President John C. Breckenridge, who finished second to Lincoln in electoral votes in the 1860 election, presided over the official election and swore in his successor, Hannibal Hamlin. Breckenridge, a Kentuckian, was opposed to disunion and to Lincoln. His criticism of Lincoln was censored and the Associated Press was barred from reporting his remarks. Breckenridge remained in Washington until after the First Battle of Manassas, hoping and working for peace...... It is fair to say that the War between the States was waged by the Lincoln administration with a barbarity rarely equaled in any other war in American history.Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus throughout the nation. He assumed the power to close newspapers and in fact closed hundreds of them in the North which dared criticize his policies. He arrested elected officials, including former members of Congress, who opposed him. /35Vice-President John C. Breckenridge, who finished second to Lincoln in electoral votes in the 1860 election, presided over the official election and swore in his successor, Hannibal Hamlin. Breckenridge, a Kentuckian, was opposed to disunion and to Lincoln. His criticism of Lincoln was censored and the Associated Press was barred from reporting his remarks. Breckenridge remained in Washington until after the First Battle of Manassas, hoping and working for peace. /36 He later became a Confederate general.The first taste of what was to come in the South in the course of the war was seen in the border states. In Missouri, the Anglo-Saxon population was disarmed and the state was garrisoned with volunteer units of Germans who could be counted on to support the Lincoln administration. The Anglo-Saxon population of the whole western tier of counties in Missouri were deported from their homes by General Ewing's General Order Number 11, which depopulated the region by forcibly evacuating the women and children on the shortest of notice, along with burning their houses and stealing their property. Among those experiencing this deportation and expropriation was the mother of later President Harry S. Truman. The memories of the sufferings she and her family had endured while she was a small child stayed with Mrs. Truman throughout her life. On one occasion the aspiring young politician told his mother that he had been invited to dinner at the house of a prominent family in Kansas City. His mother admonished him to turn the silver over and check the hallmark because, "It's probably ours." On another occasion, Truman showed his mother his new National Guard uniform only to be ordered out of the house because the pants were blue.In Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, Northern troops fired on pro-Southern demonstrators, dispersed legislatures, expelled elected officials and otherwise demonstrated that no respect for constitutional rights or liberties would be shown during the course of the war.It is amazing that the Lincoln cultists have been able to shield Lincoln from the Northern atrocities committed during the war under his tenure as Commander-in-Chief of its armies. The standard line on this point, usually implied rather than stated, is that Lincoln sat in the White House exuding love for Southerners, in blissful ignorance of what Sherman, Ewing, Pope, Butler and others were doing. This, of course, is unworthy of belief and is an impossibility, given the widespread jubilant publicity in the North over the depredations of the Northern armies against the Southern people.General Ewing's General Order Number 11 in Missouri was merely a taste of what was to come throughout the South. The most famous and widely known example of Northern atrocities was the campaign of General William Tecumseh Sherman in Georgia. No portion of this country has ever felt the scourge of war like the State of Georgia experienced it.The city of Atlanta, after its surrender, was burned to the ground, and only a handful of churches and a few outlying residences escaped the holocaust. More than 4,000 edifices were burned, which was approximately 92% of the city. Only 450 buildings of any sort escaped this ruthless burning, in a city which had a population of 14,000. Captain Daniel Oakey of the Second Massachusetts Volunteers recounted the bunting of Atlanta as follows: "Sixty thousand of us witnessed the destruction of Atlanta, while our post band and that of the 33rd Massachusetts played martial airs and operatic selections."]

1. California joined the United States with the signing of the Treaty of Hidalgo which ended the Mexican-American War, in 1848. The U.S. paid Mexico $15 million for war damages. In turn, Mexico ceded nearly half of its territory, including California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and parts of Colorado, Nevada, and Utah. California officially became a state (the 31st) in 1850.2. California was originally known as the Grizzly Bear State. As California boomed—and the bear population was wiped out—it became the Golden State3. The grizzly bear on California's current state flag is a tribute to Monarch, a 1,200-lb. wild California grizzly bear captured by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst (or, rather, the reporter he hired, Allen Kelley) in 1899. Monarch was sent to San Francisco, where he was a star attraction at Woodward's Garden and then Golden Gate Park until his death in 1911. The last reported sighting of a wild California grizzly bear was in 1924.4. While Monarch is front and center on California's official state flag, which was adopted in 1911, the bear flag image dates back to 1846, two years before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. A group of Americans who'd settled in California, which was then part of Mexico, feared they'd be expelled. They invaded the Mexican outpost at Sonoma and captured the retired general Mariano Vallejo. A few days later, they raised a flag that featured a red star and crudely drawn grizzly and declared the land the California Republic.5. And who designed the original flag? William Todd, nephew of Mary Todd Lincoln. It's a small historical world.6. The one-word state motto, an exclamation-point-less "Eureka," hearkens back to the exciting days of the Gold Rush. But the exclamation of "Eureka!" is attributed to the Greek scholar Archimedes. According to legend, he had an epiphany as he stepped into a bathtub and watched the water level rise—he realized that the volume of the displaced water was equal to the volume of the foot he'd submerged. And then he ran out of the room to tell others about his discovery... while he was completely naked.7. California is the only state that's hosted both the Summer and Winter Olympics.8. California is the most populous state (and the third largest by area). To put California's population, approximately 38 million people, in perspective, one out of every eight Americans is from California.9. The fortune cookie was inspired by the Japanese fortune tradition o-mikuji and invented in California.10. I can haz state recognition? In 1973, the sabre-tooth cat, Smilodon californicus, became California's state fossil. A year earlier, Assemblyman W. Craig Biddle had nominated the cockroach-like trilobite for the honor. Nearly 2,000 museum curators and fossil experts backed him, but the bill never made it to a vote. A year later, the sabre-tooth cat made it to the floor and passed. The one no-vote? Senator W. Craig Biddle.11. Despite living in Los Angeles—a city known for its traffic—for 78 years, writer Ray Bradbury never learned to drive.12. California's most famous for its Gold Rush which began in 1848, but it also had a Silver Rush in the Calico Mountains from 1881 to 1896. By 1904, Calico was a ghost town.13. The mineral benitoite can be found in California, Japan, and Arkansas, but only San Benito County, California, has it in gemstone-quality deposits. The California State Gem Minein Coalinga allows the public to dig and take home a quart-sized bag of treasure.14. Thousands of U.S. banks failed after the 1929 stock market crash—by 1933, only 11,000 were left. All of San Francisco's banks, however, survived15. The highest point in the contiguous U.S., 14,494-foot Mt. Whitney, is only 76 miles from the lowest point in the contiguous U.S., Death Valley. They're both in Calif— well, you know.16California tops the list in agricultural and dairy products in the United States. It has the world’s largest almond processing plant, refining 12 million pounds of the nutty treats a day. The state also has 5 million cows which generate more than $1bn per annum. The land is rich in fruit production too.17California is home to the world’s largest tree, General Sherman Tree in Sequoia National Park, also the tallest tree, a coastal redwood whose identity is not disclosed, and guess what, the oldest one too, Methuselah, a bristlecone pine tree from California’s the White Mountains. It is the oldest continuously standing tree in the world, estimated to be 4,650 years old!18There is an interesting story behind the movie industry to be based in Hollywood. The movie makers were trying to get away from Thomas Edison, who was based in New Jersey and had patents virtually covering the entire movie-making process, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California was against patent claims and hence, the movie makers migrated here.19Death Valley is known as the hottest and driest place in America. It is quite common for the summer temperatures to go above 100 °F.20Water is so scarce that the farmers make more money selling their water supply, than by planting food. Rice farmers of northern California sell their water supplies to thirsty Southern Californians at high rates.21Remember all the grapes? Well, from them, 17 million gallons of exotic wine is produced every year. California has become the largest wine producing state in the US and the 4th leading wine producer in the world after Italy, France, and Spain. California is North America’s Mecca for wine enthusiasts.22Californians experienced a unique weather phenomenon in 1955 when the snowfall was green with a phosphorescent effect. Residents who decided to try the language of its cereals soon died and the people who took the snow in their hands got rashes and intense itching.23You can observe “watermelon snow” while hiking across the slopes of California’s Sierra Nevada foothills in summer. It’s pink-colored and has a scent and taste like watermelon. The microscopic algae known as Chlamydomonas nivalis brought about this phenomenon.24Levi Strauss, a 44-year-old German immigrant, invented the first blue jeans in San Francisco on May 20, 1873.25Californians are the luckiest people on this planet as they were the first to taste McDonald’s mouthwatering burgers. World’s first McDonald’s restaurant was opened in 1940, by brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald in San Bernardino, California.26California is the birthplace of Fortune Cookie, Apple computer, theme park (Disneyland), Frisbee, the Barbie dolls, skateboards, and video arcade games.27Castroville, California is considered the Artichoke Capital of the World. In 1947, a young woman named Norma Jean started her journey here by becoming Castroville’s first Artichoke Queen and later became a world-famous actress by her screen name, Marilyn Monroe.28Known for its massive granite faces and plunging waterfalls, Yosemite National Park is a gem for California. Covering more than 1,100 square miles/284,899 hectares, nearly the size of Rhode Island, the park was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1984.29In 2018, California’s economy surpassed the United Kingdom to become the world’s 5th largest economy.30With more than 70 indigenous languages, California is considered one of the world’s most linguistically diverse areas. This linguistic diversity has brought a variety to American English. This variety, known as California English, has a Vowel Shift.Too many to name....

Honestly, as a Caucasian woman raised going to the Reservations in native country in New Mexico, I am sick and tired of white people answering this question. How bout we let a real First Nations person talk? Black Elk - WikiquoteGuess what folks - we stole their land, slaughtered their people and their buffalo, gave them diseases they had never even known about, destroyed them with alcohol when we weren’t outright killing them with firearms they had no initial access to, herded their children to schools far away from their families where the children had their language ripped out of them and were often raped and tortured. How would you deal with this if it happened to your people? The Canadian Government Systematically Tortured And Abused Aboriginal Children For 100 YearsBecause white people write the history books, we refuse to acknowledge that Hitler was studying how well we genocidally massacred entire populations and rewrote them out of history, and he used much of our horrific success as a model for how to get rid of the Jews, gypsies, and other outcast populations when he was writing Mein Kampf. Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?Thanks for yet again perpetuating the white colonizer superiority myth that we whose ancestors were part of the original Holocaust have participated in since the “Founding” (Read Occupation) of this country. I’d love to hear from any First Nations folks out there who can speak to the incomprehensible assault on their land, their peoples, their language, their traditions, their animals, and their spirituality by ruthless, master race colonizers.Read up on this before you rattle on about it white folk!Yes, Native Americans Were the Victims of GenocideHistorians/History Native Americans, genocide by Roxanne Dunbar-OrtizRoxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her latest book is An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States.Mass Grave at Wounded KneeThis paper, written under the title, “U.S. Settler-Colonialism and Genocide Policies,” was delivered at the Organization of American Historians 2015 Annual Meeting in St. Louis, MO on April 18, 2015.US policies and actions related to Indigenous peoples, though often termed “racist” or “discriminatory,” are rarely depicted as what they are: classic cases of imperialism and a particular form of colonialism—settler colonialism. As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe writes, “The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life—or, at least, land is necessary for life.”i The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism.The extension of the United States from sea to shining sea was the intention and design of the country’s founders. “Free” land was the magnet that attracted European settlers. After the war for independence but preceding the writing of the US Constitution, the Continental Congress produced the Northwest Ordinance. This was the first law of the incipient republic, revealing the motive for those desiring independence. It was the blueprint for gobbling up the British-protected Indian Territory (“Ohio Country”) on the other side of the Appalachians and Alleghenies. Britain had made settlement there illegal with the Proclamation of 1763.In 1801, President Jefferson aptly described the new settler state’s intentions for horizontal and vertical continental expansion, stating: “However our present interests may restrain us within our own limits, it is impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar form by similar laws.” This vision of manifest destiny found form a few years later in the Monroe Doctrine, signaling the intention of annexing or dominating former Spanish colonial territories in the Americas and the Pacific, which would be put into practice during the rest of the century.The form of colonialism that the Indigenous peoples of North America have experienced was modern from the beginning: the expansion of European corporations, backed by government armies, into foreign areas, with subsequent expropriation of lands and resources. Settler colonialism requires a genocidal policy. Native nations and communities, while struggling to maintain fundamental values and collectivity, have from the beginning resisted modern colonialism using both defensive and offensive techniques, including the modern forms of armed resistance of national liberation movements and what now is called terrorism. In every instance they have fought and continue to fight for survival as peoples. The objective of US authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples—not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide.The objective of US colonialist authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples—not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide as contrasted with premodern instances of extreme violence that did not have the goal of extinction. The United States as a socioeconomic and political entity is a result of this centuries-long and ongoing colonial process. Modern Indigenous nations and communities are societies formed by their resistance to colonialism, through which they have carried their practices and histories. It is breathtaking, but no miracle, that they have survived as peoples.Settler-colonialism requires violence or the threat of violence to attain its goals, which then forms the foundation of the United States’ system. People do not hand over their land, resources, children, and futures without a fight, and that fight is met with violence. In employing the force necessary to accomplish its expansionist goals, a colonizing regime institutionalizes violence. The notion that settler-indigenous conflict is an inevitable product of cultural differences and misunderstandings, or that violence was committed equally by the colonized and the colonizer, blurs the nature of the historical processes. Euro-American colonialism, an aspect of the capitalist economic globalization, had from its beginnings a genocidal tendency.So, what constitutes genocide? My colleague on the panel, Gary Clayton Anderson, in his recent book, “Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian,” argues: “Genocide will never become a widely accepted characterization for what happened in North America, because large numbers of Indians survived and because policies of mass murder on a scale similar to events in central Europe, Cambodia, or Rwanda were never implemented.”ii There are fatal errors in this assessment.The term “genocide” was coined following the Shoah, or Holocaust, and its prohibition was enshrined in the United Nations convention presented in 1948 and adopted in 1951: the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The convention is not retroactive but is applicable to US-Indigenous relations since 1988, when the US Senate ratified it. The genocide convention is an essential tool for historical analysis of the effects of colonialism in any era, and particularly in US history.In the convention, any one of five acts is considered genocide if “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”:(a) killing members of the group;(b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;(c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;(d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;(e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.iiiThe followings acts are punishable:(a) Genocide;(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;(d) Attempt to commit genocide;(e) Complicity in genocide.The term “genocide” is often incorrectly used, such as in Dr. Anderson’s assessment, to describe extreme examples of mass murder, the death of vast numbers of people, as, for instance in Cambodia. What took place in Cambodia was horrific, but it does not fall under the terms of the Genocide Convention, as the Convention specifically refers to a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, with individuals within that group targeted by a government or its agents because they are members of the group or by attacking the underpinnings of the group’s existence as a group being met with the intent to destroy that group in whole or in part. The Cambodian government committed crimes against humanity, but not genocide. Genocide is not an act simply worse than anything else, rather a specific kind of act. The term, “ethnic cleansing,” is a descriptive term created by humanitarian interventionists to describe what was said to be happening in the 1990s wars among the republics of Yugoslavia. It is a descriptive term, not a term of international humanitarian law.Although clearly the Holocaust was the most extreme of all genocides, the bar set by the Nazis is not the bar required to be considered genocide. The title of the Genocide convention is the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” so the law is about preventing genocide by identifying the elements of government policy, rather than only punishment after the fact. Most importantly, genocide does not have to be complete to be considered genocide.US history, as well as inherited Indigenous trauma, cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against Indigenous peoples. From the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the twentieth century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, forced removal of Native American children to military-like boarding schools, allotment, and a policy of termination.Within the logic of settler-colonialism, genocide was the inherent overall policy of the United States from its founding, but there are also specific documented policies of genocide on the part of US administrations that can be identified in at least four distinct periods: the Jacksonian era of forced removal; the California gold rush in Northern California; during the Civil War and in the post Civil War era of the so-called Indian Wars in the Southwest and the Great Plains; and the 1950s termination period; additionally, there is the overlapping period of compulsory boarding schools, 1870s to 1960s. The Carlisle boarding school, founded by US Army officer Richard Henry Pratt in 1879, became a model for others established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Pratt said in a speech in 1892, "A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man."Cases of genocide carried out as policy may be found in historical documents as well as in the oral histories of Indigenous communities. An example from 1873 is typical, with General William T. Sherman writing, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children . . . during an assault, the soldiers can not pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.”ivThe so-called “Indian Wars” technically ended around 1880, although the Wounded Knee massacre occurred a decade later. Clearly an act with genocidal intent, it is still officially considered a “battle” in the annals of US military genealogy. Congressional Medals of Honor were bestowed on twenty of the soldiers involved. A monument was built at Fort Riley, Kansas, to honor the soldiers killed by friendly fire. A battle streamer was created to honor the event and added to other streamers that are displayed at the Pentagon, West Point, and army bases throughout the world. L. Frank Baum, a Dakota Territory settler later famous for writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, edited the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer at the time.Five days after the sickening event at Wounded Knee, on January 3, 1891, he wrote, “The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one or more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”Whether 1880 or 1890, most of the collective land base that Native Nations secured through hard fought for treaties made with the United States was lost after that date.After the end of the Indian Wars, came allotment, another policy of genocide of Native nations as nations, as peoples, the dissolution of the group. Taking the Sioux Nation as an example, even before the Dawes Allotment Act of 1884 was implemented, and with the Black Hills already illegally confiscated by the federal government, a government commission arrived in Sioux territory from Washington, DC, in 1888 with a proposal to reduce the Sioux Nation to six small reservations, a scheme that would leave nine million acres open for Euro-American settlement. The commission found it impossible to obtain signatures of the required three-fourths of the nation as required under the 1868 treaty, and so returned to Washington with a recommendation that the government ignore the treaty and take the land without Sioux consent. The only means to accomplish that goal was legislation, Congress having relieved the government of the obligation to negotiate a treaty. Congress commissioned General George Crook to head a delegation to try again, this time with an offer of $1.50 per acre. In a series of manipulations and dealings with leaders whose people were now starving, the commission garnered the needed signatures. The great Sioux Nation was broken into small islands soon surrounded on all sides by European immigrants, with much of the reservation land a checkerboard with settlers on allotments or leased land.vCreating these isolated reservations broke the historical relationships between clans and communities of the Sioux Nation and opened areas where Europeans settled. It also allowed the Bureau of Indian Affairs to exercise tighter control, buttressed by the bureau’s boarding school system. The Sun Dance, the annual ceremony that had brought Sioux together and reinforced national unity, was outlawed, along with other religious ceremonies. Despite the Sioux people’s weak position under late-nineteenth-century colonial domination, they managed to begin building a modest cattle-ranching business to replace their former bison-hunting economy. In 1903, the US Supreme Court ruled, in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, that a March 3, 1871, appropriations rider was constitutional and that Congress had “plenary” power to manage Indian property. The Office of Indian Affairs could thus dispose of Indian lands and resources regardless of the terms of previous treaty provisions. Legislation followed that opened the reservations to settlement through leasing and even sale of allotments taken out of trust. Nearly all prime grazing lands came to be occupied by non-Indian ranchers by the 1920s.By the time of the New Deal–Collier era and nullification of Indian land allotment under the Indian Reorganization Act, non-Indians outnumbered Indians on the Sioux reservations three to one. However, “tribal governments” imposed in the wake of the Indian Reorganization Act proved particularly harmful and divisive for the Sioux.”vi Concerning this measure, the late Mathew King, elder traditional historian of the Oglala Sioux (Pine Ridge), observed: “The Bureau of Indian Affairs drew up the constitution and by-laws of this organization with the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. This was the introduction of home rule. . . . The traditional people still hang on to their Treaty, for we are a sovereign nation. We have our own government.”vii “Home rule,” or neocolonialism, proved a short-lived policy, however, for in the early 1950s the United States developed its termination policy, with legislation ordering gradual eradication of every reservation and even the tribal governments.viii At the time of termination and relocation, per capita annual income on the Sioux reservations stood at $355, while that in nearby South Dakota towns was $2,500. Despite these circumstances, in pursuing its termination policy, the Bureau of Indian Affairs advocated the reduction of services and introduced its program to relocate Indians to urban industrial centers, with a high percentage of Sioux moving to San Francisco and Denver in search of jobs.ixThe situations of other Indigenous Nations were similar.Pawnee Attorney Walter R. Echo-Hawk writes:In 1881, Indian landholdings in the United States had plummeted to 156 million acres. By 1934, only about 50 million acres remained (an area the size of Idaho and Washington) as a result of the General Allotment Act of 1887. During World War II, the government took 500,000 more acres for military use. Over one hundred tribes, bands, and Rancherias relinquished their lands under various acts of Congress during the termination era of the 1950s. By 1955, the indigenous land base had shrunk to just 2.3 percent of its [size at the end of the Indian wars].xAccording to the current consensus among historians, the wholesale transfer of land from Indigenous to Euro-American hands that occurred in the Americas after 1492 is due less to British and US American invasion, warfare, refugee conditions, and genocidal policies in North America than to the bacteria that the invaders unwittingly brought with them. Historian Colin Calloway is among the proponents of this theory writing, “Epidemic diseases would have caused massive depopulation in the Americas whether brought by European invaders or brought home by Native American traders.”xiSuch an absolutist assertion renders any other fate for the Indigenous peoples improbable. This is what anthropologist Michael Wilcox has dubbed “the terminal narrative.” Professor Calloway is a careful and widely respected historian of Indigenous North America, but his conclusion articulates a default assumption. The thinking behind the assumption is both ahistorical and illogical in that Europe itself lost a third to one-half of its population to infectious disease during medieval pandemics. The principle reason the consensus view is wrong and ahistorical is that it erases the effects of settler colonialism with its antecedents in the Spanish “Reconquest” and the English conquest of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. By the time Spain, Portugal, and Britain arrived to colonize the Americas, their methods of eradicating peoples or forcing them into dependency and servitude were ingrained, streamlined, and effective.Whatever disagreement may exist about the size of precolonial Indigenous populations, no one doubts that a rapid demographic decline occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its timing from region to region depending on when conquest and colonization began. Nearly all the population areas of the Americas were reduced by 90 percent following the onset of colonizing projects, decreasing the targeted Indigenous populations of the Americas from a one hundred million to ten million. Commonly referred to as the most extreme demographic disaster—framed as natural—in human history, it was rarely called genocide until the rise of Indigenous movements in the mid-twentieth century forged new questions.US scholar Benjamin Keen acknowledges that historians “accept uncritically a fatalistic ‘epidemic plus lack of acquired immunity’ explanation for the shrinkage of Indian populations, without sufficient attention to the socioeconomic factors . . . which predisposed the natives to succumb to even slight infections.”xiiOther scholars agree. Geographer William M. Denevan, while not ignoring the existence of widespread epidemic diseases, has emphasized the role of warfare, which reinforced the lethal impact of disease. There were military engagements directly between European and Indigenous nations, but many more saw European powers pitting one Indigenous nation against another or factions within nations, with European allies aiding one or both sides, as was the case in the colonization of the peoples of Ireland, Africa and Asia, and was also a factor in the Holocaust. Other killers cited by Denevan are overwork in mines, frequent outright butchery, malnutrition and starvation resulting from the breakdown of Indigenous trade networks, subsistence food production and loss of land, loss of will to live or reproduce (and thus suicide, abortion, and infanticide), and deportation and enslavement.xiii Anthropologist Henry Dobyns has pointed to the interruption of Indigenous peoples’ trade networks. When colonizing powers seized Indigenous trade routes, the ensuing acute shortages, including food products, weakened populations and forced them into dependency on the colonizers, with European manufactured goods replacing Indigenous ones. Dobyns has estimated that all Indigenous groups suffered serious food shortages one year in four. In these circumstances, the introduction and promotion of alcohol proved addictive and deadly, adding to the breakdown of social order and responsibility.xiv These realities render the myth of “lack of immunity,” including to alcohol, pernicious.Historian Woodrow Wilson Borah focused on the broader arena of European colonization, which also brought severely reduced populations in the Pacific Islands, Australia, Western Central America, and West Africa.xv Sherburne Cook—associated with Borah in the revisionist Berkeley School, as it was called—studied the attempted destruction of the California Indians. Cook estimated 2,245 deaths among peoples in Northern California—the Wintu, Maidu, Miwak, Omo, Wappo, and Yokuts nations—in late eighteenth-century armed conflicts with the Spanish while some 5,000 died from disease and another 4,000 were relocated to missions. Among the same people in the second half of the nineteenth century, US armed forces killed 4,000, and disease killed another 6,000. Between 1852 and 1867, US citizens kidnapped 4,000 Indian children from these groups in California. Disruption of Indigenous social structures under these conditions and dire economic necessity forced many of the women into prostitution in goldfield camps, further wrecking what vestiges of family life remained in these matriarchal societies.Historians and others who deny genocide emphasize population attrition by disease, weakening Indigenous peoples ability to resist. In doing so they refuse to accept that the colonization of America was genocidal by plan, not simply the tragic fate of populations lacking immunity to disease. If disease could have done the job, it is not clear why the United States found it necessary to carry out unrelenting wars against Indigenous communities in order to gain every inch of land they took from them—along with the prior period of British colonization, nearly three hundred years of eliminationist warfare.In the case of the Jewish Holocaust, no one denies that more Jews died of starvation, overwork, and disease under Nazi incarceration than died in gas ovens or murdered by other means, yet the acts of creating and maintaining the conditions that led to those deaths clearly constitute genocide. And no one recites the terminal narrative associated with Native Americans, or Armenians, or Bosnian.Not all of the acts iterated in the genocide convention are required to exist to constitute genocide; any one of them suffices. In cases of United States genocidal policies and actions, each of the five requirements can be seen.First, Killing members of the group: The genocide convention does not specify that large numbers of people must be killed in order to constitute genocide, rather that members of the group are killed because they are members of the group. Assessing a situation in terms of preventing genocide, this kind of killing is a marker for intervention.Second, Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group: such as starvation, the control of food supply and withholding food as punishment or as reward for compliance, for instance, in signing confiscatory treaties. As military historian John Grenier points out in his First Way of War:For the first 200 years of our military heritage, then, Americans depended on arts of war that contemporary professional soldiers supposedly abhorred: razing and destroying enemy villages and fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlements for captives; intimidating and brutalizing enemy noncombatants; and assassinating enemy leaders. . . . In the frontier wars between 1607 and 1814, Americans forged two elements—unlimited war and irregular war—into their first way of war.xviiGrenier argues that not only did this way of war continue throughout the 19th century in wars against the Indigenous nations, but continued in the 20th century and currently in counterinsurgent wars against peoples in Latin America, the Caribbean and Pacific, Southeast Asia, Middle and Western Asia and Africa.Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part: Forced removal of all the Indigenous nations east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory during the Jackson administration was a calculated policy intent on destroying those peoples ties to their original lands, as well as declaring Native people who did not remove to no longer be Muskogee, Sauk, Kickapoo, Choctaw, destroying the existence of up to half of each nation removed. Mandatory boarding schools, Allotment and Termination—all official government policies--also fall under this category of the crime of genocide. The forced removal and four year incarceration of the Navajo people resulted in the death of half their population.Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group: Famously, during the Termination Era, the US government administrated Indian Health Service made the top medical priority the sterilization of Indigenous women. In 1974, an independent study by one the few Native American physicians, Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri, Choctaw/Cherokee, found that one in four Native women had been sterilized without her consent. Pnkerton-Uri’s research indicated that the Indian Health Service had “singled out full-blooded Indian women for sterilization procedures.” At first denied by the Indian Health Service, two years later, a study by the U.S. General Accounting Office found that 4 of the 12 Indian Health Service regions sterilized 3,406 Native women without their permission between 1973 and 1976. The GAO found that 36 women under age 21 had been forcibly sterilized during this period despite a court-ordered moratorium on sterilizations of women younger than 21.Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group: Various governmental entities, mostly municipalities, counties, and states, routinely removed Native children from their families and put them up for adoption. In the Native resistance movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the demand to put a stop to the practice was codified in the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. However, the burden of enforcing the legislation lay with Tribal Government, but the legislation provided no financial resources for Native governments to establish infrastructure to retrieve children from the adoption industry, in which Indian babies were high in demand. Despite these barriers to enforcement, the worst abuses had been curbed over the following three decades. But, on June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling drafted by Justice Samuel Alito, used provisions of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) to say that a child, widely known as Baby Veronica, did not have to live with her biological Cherokee father. The high court’s decision paved the way for Matt and Melanie Capobianco, the adoptive parents, to ask the South Carolina Courts to have the child returned to them. The court gutted the purpose and intent of the Indian Child Welfare Act, missing the concept behind the ICWA, the protection of cultural resource and treasure that are Native children; it’s not about protecting so-called traditional or nuclear families. It’s about recognizing the prevalence of extended families and culture.xviiiSo, why does the Genocide Convention matter? Native nations are still here and still vulnerable to genocidal policy. This isn’t just history that predates the 1948 Genocide Convention. But, the history is important and needs to be widely aired, included in public school texts and public service announcements. The Doctrine of Discovery is still law of the land. From the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, most of the non-European world was colonized under the Doctrine of Discovery, one of the first principles of international law Christian European monarchies promulgated to legitimize investigating, mapping, and claiming lands belonging to peoples outside Europe. It originated in a papal bull issued in 1455 that permitted the Portuguese monarchy to seize West Africa. Following Columbus’s infamous exploratory voyage in 1492, sponsored by the king and queen of the infant Spanish state, another papal bull extended similar permission to Spain. Disputes between the Portuguese and Spanish monarchies led to the papal-initiated Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which, besides dividing the globe equally between the two Iberian empires, clarified that only non-Christian lands fell under the discovery doctrine.xixThis doctrine on which all European states relied thus originated with the arbitrary and unilateral establishment of the Iberian monarchies’ exclusive rights under Christian canon law to colonize foreign peoples, and this right was later seized by other European monarchical colonizing projects. The French Republic used this legalistic instrument for its nineteenth- and twentieth-century settler colonialist projects, as did the newly independent United States when it continued the colonization of North America begun by the British.In 1792, not long after the US founding, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson claimed that the Doctrine of Discovery developed by European states was international law applicable to the new US government as well. In 1823 the US Supreme Court issued its decision inJohnson v. McIntosh. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Marshall held that the Doctrine of Discovery had been an established principle of European law and of English law in effect in Britain’s North American colonies and was also the law of the United States. The Court defined the exclusive property rights that a European country acquired by dint of discovery: “Discovery gave title to the government, by whose subjects, or by whose authority, it was made, against all other European governments, which title might be consummated by possession.” Therefore, European and Euro-American “discoverers” had gained real-property rights in the lands of Indigenous peoples by merely planting a flag. Indigenous rights were, in the Court’s words, “in no instance, entirely disregarded; but were necessarily, to a considerable extent, impaired.” The court further held that Indigenous “rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished.” Indigenous people could continue to live on the land, but title resided with the discovering power, the United States. The decision concluded that Native nations were “domestic, dependent nations.”The Doctrine of Discovery is so taken for granted that it is rarely mentioned in historical or legal texts published in the Americas. The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples, which meets annually for two weeks, devoted its entire 2012 session to the doctrine.xx But few US citizens are aware of the precarity of the situation of Indigenous Peoples in the United States._______________i Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, vol. 4 (December 2006), 387.ii Gary Clayton Anderson, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime that Should Haunt America. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014.), 4.iii “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Paris, 9 December 1948,” Audiovisual Library of International Law, http://untreaty.un.org/cod/avl/ha/cppcg/cppcg.html (accessed December 6, 2012). See also Josef L. Kunz, “The United Nations Convention on Genocide,” American Journal of International Law 43, no. 4 (October 1949) 738–46.iv April 17, 1873, quoted in John F. Marszalek, Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order(New York: Free Press, 1992), 379.v See Testimony of Pat McLaughlin, Chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux government, Fort Yates, North Dakota (May 8, 1976), at hearings of the American Indian Policy Review Commission, established by Congress in the Act of January 3, 1975.vi See: Kenneth R. Philp, John Collier’s Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920-1954.vii King quoted in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, The Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 156.viii For a lucid discussion of neocolonialism in relation to American Indians and the reservation system, see Joseph Jorgensen, The Sun Dance Religion: Power for the Powerless (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 89–146.ix There is continuous migration from reservations to cities and border towns and back to the reservations, so that half the Indian population at any time is away from the reservation. Generally, however, relocation is not permanent and resembles migratory labor more than permanent relocation. This conclusion is based on my personal observations and on unpublished studies of the Indigenous populations in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles.x Walter R. Echo-Hawk, In the Courts of the Conqueror (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2010), 77–78.xi Colin G. Calloway, review of Julian Granberry, The Americas That Might Have Been: Native American Social Systems through Time (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), Ethnohistory 54, no. 1 (Winter 2007), 196.xii Benjamin Keen, “The White Legend Revisited,” Hispanic American Historical Review 51 (1971): 353.xiii Denevan, “The Pristine Myth,” 4–5.xiv Henry F. Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press in cooperation with the Newberry Library, 1983), 2. See also Dobyns, Native American Historical Demography, and Dobyns, “Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate,” Current Anthropology 7 (1966), 295–416, and “Reply,” 440–44.xv Woodrow Wilson Borah, “America as Model: The Demographic Impact of European Expansion upon the Non-European World,” in Actas y Morías XXXV Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, México 1962,3 vols. (Mexico City: Editorial Libros de México, 1964), 381.xvii John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 5, 10.xviii http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/06/25/supreme-court-thwarts-icwa-intent-baby-veronica-case-150103xix Robert J. Miller, “The International Law of Colonialism: A Comparative Analysis,” in “Symposium of International Law in Indigenous Affairs: The Doctrine of Discovery, the United Nations, and the Organization of Americans States,” special issue, Lewis and Clark Law Review 15, no. 4 (Winter 2011), 847–922. See also Vine Deloria Jr., Of Utmost Good Faith (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1971), 6–39; Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2008).xx Eleventh Session, United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, http://social.un.org/index/IndigenousPeoples/UNPFIISessions/Eleventh.aspx (accessed October 3, 2013).