Ever since the early 1990s, scholars of "post-colonial theory" or "settler colonialism" have asserted that beginning with Columbus landing in the New World, European settlers have been responsible for a deliberate and systematic campaign to kill the indigenous people of the Americas, which constitutes "American Genocide" or "American Holocaust" (Stannard 1992; Whitt and Clarke 2019). The European settlers did this so that they could steal the land that had previously belonged to the Amerindians.
As a consequence of this, you can now go to the website of the "Native Land Digital" and see how all the land that once belonged to the indigenous peoples of America is now claimed by European settlers. You can also see how European settler colonialists stole the indigenous lands in Australia, New Zealand, and Israel. (The identification of the Jews in Israel as settler colonialists explains the pro-Palestinian attacks on Israel.) If you live somewhere in these parts of the world, you can type in your street address at the Native Land Digital and identify the indigenous tribes who owned the land that you have stolen.
Previously, I have written about how Charles Darwin on his trip on the Beagle saw the brutal consequences of European attacks on indigenous peoples in South America, New Zealand, and Australia:
"Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal. We may look to the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope, and Australia, and we find the same result. Nor is it the white man alone that thus acts the destroyer; the Polynesian of Malay extraction has in parts of the East Indian archipelago, thus driven before him the dark-coloured native. The varieties of man seem to act on each other in the same way as different species of animals--the stronger always extirpating the weaker. It was melancholy at New Zealand to hear the fine energetic natives saying, that they knew the land was doomed to pass from their children."
Darwin seemed to see this as a vicious expression of the natural human propensity to tribalism or xenophobia. Others have explained this as showing the natural desire for ethnic identity as rooted in our evolved human nature: when people favor their ethnic or racial community over others, they are practicing an extended form of kin selection that advances their ethnic genetic interests. We have evolved to like those who look like us, because groups of people that look similar share more genes with one another than other groups. This has been part of the reasoning from the Alt-Right supporters of Donald Trump's program for mass deportations of illegal immigrants and closing the borders to the immigration of non-European people into the United States.
I have argued that while there is a natural desire for social membership, with symbolic cues for membership in a society, there is no evidence that this must be expressed as a natural desire for ethnic or racial identity in an ethnically and racially homogeneous society. Human beings are happy to live in multiethnic and multiracial liberal societies.
One can see this even in Trump's MAGA movement. Far from promoting the ethnic identity of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America, Trump has actively solicited and won the support of many Black males, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, and Catholics. And in 2024, the most pro-Trump racial demographic was American Indians! 65% of American Indian voters voted for Trump as compared with 57% of whites for Trump.
So, 533 years after Columbus landed in the New World, there are still many descendants of the Indigenous Americans alive today. Significantly, many if not most of them are genetic and cultural hybrids--genetic and cultural mixtures of Indigenous, European, and Black people. This illustrates the Darwinian evolution of hybridization. (This Darwinian hybridization includes the interbreeding of the Neanderthal and human species as recently as 45,000 years ago [Curry 2024; Gibbons 2024].) This fact by itself refutes the claim that European settler colonialism in the Americas has been responsible for an "American Genocide."
In his book Not Stolen; The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World, Jeff Fynn-Paul presents this as the demographic argument against the claim of genocide in the Americas. Scholars disagree about the population of the Indigenous people in the New World in 1491. But they agree that the two largest population centers were in areas of the great Aztec and Inca civilizations--central Mexico and greater Peru.
If you look at the Wikipedia article on "Ethnic Groups in Latin America," you will see that in Mexico (with a population of 127 million), 70% of the people are mestizos, 14% Amerindians, and 15% whites; in Peru (with a population of 34 million), 32% are mestizos, 45% Amerindians, and 12% whites; in Ecuador (with a population of 18 million), 41% are mestizos, 39% are Amerindians, and 10% whites. When Columbus landed in the New World, 50% of the total population of Indigenous Americans was in the Aztec region, and 25% in the Inca region. So, as we should expect, the great majority of the people in these two regions today are either pure Indigenous Americans or mestizos (mixtures of Indigneous and European people).
So, with as many as 150 million mestizos and Amerindians living where their Indigenous ancestors lived five hundred years ago in the Aztec and Inca regions, it's hard to see the "genocide" of one million dead claimed by Stannard and others.
In Canada, only about 5% of the population are Indigenous people; and in the United States, only a little over 1% are Indigenous. But that's not surprising considering that in 1491, probably less than 12% of the total Indigenous population of the Americas was in what is now Canada and the U.S. In these two areas, the low population of the Indigenous people has been overwhelmed by the large population of European immigrants.
What is most striking in all of this is the interracial mixing. This is depicted in this painting.
Casta is Spanish for "caste" or "race." In the early 18th century, "casta paintings" were popular in Mexico as studies of a mixed-race society (Deans-Smith 2005). If you click on and enlarge the image above, you can see that the "Virgin of Guadalupe" (the Virgin Mary) stands over all the mixed-race couples as a vulvic symbol of the Mother of All. Left of the Virgin Mary is the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, where this image of the Virgin Mary is enshrined.
The first couple is a well-dressed European woman standing next to her Indian husband wearing a loin cloth and carrying a bow. The child is painted to resemble his father. We also see a European man coupled with a well-dressed African woman, alongside their mixed-race child. This is what I mean by genetic and cultural hybridization.
Here the cultural hybridization is depicted by the mixture of clothing styles. But another example of cultural hybridization is in the traditions of holidays. In Mexico, for instance, the Day of the Dead is a vestige of Aztec religion, and it is celebrated on the evenings of November 1 and 2, which coincides with All Soul's Day in the Catholic calendar. So, this holiday fuses Catholic and Indigenous religious practices.
I have previously written about another image of racial and cultural hybridization in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, which appears in the Museum as part of the Darwinian evolutionary story of multiethnic and multiracial humanity in Mexico. The idealized female body in the middle represents the racial and cultural hybridization of the human species:
But even if this shows the genetic and cultural survival of Indigenous people in the New World, it is true that probably over 90% of the original Amerindian population died from the infectious diseases introduced by the Europeans--such as smallpox, measles, and typhoid. But this was not intended by the Europeans, and so it does not count as "genocide," which is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "the deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of people from a particular group identified as having a shared ethnicity, nationality, etc., with the intention of partially or wholly destroying that group." Of course, the word "genocide" was first used in 1944-1945 as a term for what German Nazi leaders did in trying to exterminate Jews and other disfavored groups. There is no evidence that the Europeans had any such deliberate and systematic policy for murdering Indigenous Americans.
We are left with Fynn-Paul's conclusion that "the Americas today are simply teeming with the descendants of the Indigenous people who were alive in 1491," and therefore "Europeans did not slaughter or displace the great majority of Indigenous people of the New World" (41-42).
REFERENCES
Curry, Andrew. 2024. "Study Reveals Kinship Among First Modern Humans in Europe." Science 386: 1207.
Deans-Smith, Susan. 2005. "Creating the Colonial Subject: Casta Paintings, Collectors, and Critics in Eighteenth-Century Mexico and Spain." Colonial Latin American Review 14: 169-204.
Fynn-Paul, Jeff. 2023. Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World. New York: Bombardier Books.
Gibbons, Ann. 2024. "Neanderthals and Moderns Mingled Early and Often." Science 384: 132-133.
Stannard, David. 1992. American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Whitt, Laurelyn, and Alan W. Clarke. 2019. North American Genocides: Indigenous Nations, Settler Colonialism, and International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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