Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law. Natsu Taylor Saito

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СКАЧАТЬ 1837 government agents distributed smallpox-infected blankets to the Mandan and other peoples in North Dakota and then advised those who had been infected to seek refuge among their healthy relatives.48 The resulting pandemic in the Upper Missouri and the Plains is estimated to have killed at least 100,000 people.49

      Deaths attributed to other “natural” causes were the commonplace, predictable, and often intended consequence of colonial practices and policies. The massacres and epidemics described above, as well as the settlers’ routine destruction of housing and crops, were inevitably followed by famines and death from exposure. Fifty percent mortality rates were common—and therefore, quite predictable—in conjunction with the forced removals and internments discussed below, as well as in the boarding schools American Indian children were compelled to attend.50 The deliberate subjection of peoples to these conditions, with full awareness of their consequences, constitutes the imposition of “slow death measures,” described in the Genocide Convention as “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”51

      These are not concerns that can be relegated to the past. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that between 1999 and 2009 the overall death rates of American Indians and Alaska Natives, men and women, were nearly 50 percent greater than those of White Americans.52 Native people are twice as likely as the general population to have diabetes, almost eight times as likely to contract tuberculosis, and at significantly higher risk for asthma, chronic liver disease, heart disease, and stroke.53 In 2014 suicide was the second leading cause of death for American Indian/Alaska Natives aged ten to thirty-four, and the leading cause among girls aged ten to fourteen.54

      Sterilization

      Reproductive control allows for the disappearance of entire peoples without killing individuals. For this reason international law recognizes attempts to eliminate a people by “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” as a form of genocide.55 During the 1960s and 1970s about one-third of Puerto Rican women and one-quarter of African American women were sterilized, generally as the result of some form of coercion and often without even being informed.56 As mind-boggling as those statistics are, the highest rate of sterilization—42 percent—was among American Indian women, who were generally dependent on the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)’s Indian Health Service (IHS) for all of their medical care.57 In 1965 the IHS began “family planning” programs and in 1970 the agency inaugurated a sterilization campaign. Women were routinely sterilized without their knowledge, or after signing “consent” forms that they did not understand, or without being informed that they had a right to refuse.58 As a result, the average number of children born to American Indian women between 1970 and 1980 dropped by more than 50 percent.59

      While federally mandated sterilization was clearly intended to reduce the American Indian population, is it accurate to attribute it to American settler society’s drive to possess and control the land? The doctors who told teenage girls that they were getting tonsillectomies and then removed their ovaries probably did not expect to be personally rewarded with land grants.60 Nevertheless, the program was conceived, funded, and implemented by institutional actors intending to trigger a dramatic decline in the American Indian population, at a time when the legitimacy of US claims to the “integrity” of its land base were under serious attack. The direct and predictable result of this sterilization program is that the current generation of young American Indian adults is perhaps half as large as it might otherwise have been.61

      Contemporary Violence

      The officially sanctioned elimination of Indigenous peoples is often dismissed as a thing of the past, masking the extent to which its legacy permeates American culture, allowing Indians to be killed with impunity. As of 2012, the violent crime rate on reservations was two and a half times that of the general population, Indigenous women were being raped or sexually assaulted four times more frequently than other US women, and on some reservations women were being murdered at ten times the national average.62 Almost 90 percent of the survivors of rape or sexual assault reported non-Indigenous perpetrators.63 Nonetheless, the Justice Department, with exclusive jurisdiction over such crimes, was filing charges in only about half of the murder cases and a third of the sexual assault cases.64 In a 2019 report on its inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, the Canadian government described the crisis as part of a “genocide” that “has been empowered by colonial structures,” but the United States has yet to respond to the crisis, equally severe, on this side of the border.65

      In some jurisdictions it is only recently that murders of an American Indian are treated as crimes. In the winter of 1972 Raymond Yellow Thunder, a fifty-one-year-old Oglala Lakota, was picked up by two young White men in Gordon, Nebraska, close to the border of the Pine Ridge Reservation. They severely beat and stripped Yellow Thunder, and threw him into an American Legion dance hall to be further humiliated and abused. His body was found a week later, but his relatives were unable to convince the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the FBI, or local authorities to take the murder seriously.66 Only after several hundred American Indian Movement activists and supporters descended on Gordon were serious criminal charges filed against the perpetrators, making them the first White people in the history of Nebraska to be imprisoned for killing an Indian.67

      In early 1973, the United States initiated a seventy-one-day siege of AIM members and supporters gathered at Wounded Knee, the site of the 1890 massacre. Claiming an AIM “occupation,” the federal government sent special warfare experts, military personnel, armored personnel carriers, grenade launchers, and aircraft to the scene and placed an Army assault unit nearby, on full alert. Ultimately, “more than 500,000 rounds of military ammunition were fired into AIM’s jerry-rigged ‘bunkers’ by federal forces.”68 The following year, federal agents worked closely with handpicked tribal leaders and BIA police to subvert the election of AIM leader Russell Means as president of the Pine Ridge tribal council, in part because Means’s election would derail federal plans to appropriate a portion of the reservation rich with uranium and other natural resources.69 Between 1972 and 1976 nearly seventy AIM members and supporters on the Pine Ridge Reservation were murdered, giving the reservation a documented political murder rate equivalent to that experienced in Chile following the 1973 US-backed coup that killed its president Salvador Allende.70

      What accounts for the intensity of the governmental reaction to American Indian activism during this era? Political activists and organizations around the country were being repressed routinely, and often lethally, but no other group met with the overwhelming military force seen at Wounded Knee and no other community was subjected to politically sanctioned murders at the rate seen on Pine Ridge.71 To understand the distinction, we need to remember that most—although certainly not all—political movements of the 1960s and 1970s were struggling for inclusion in the American settler polity. By contrast, American Indian activists, at the behest of traditional elders, were bringing the illegitimacy of the occupation of their lands to the attention of the world.

      The Wounded Knee siege—like the recent resistance at Standing Rock—focused on treaty rights that, if enforced, could encourage a host of other land claims.72 According to legal scholar Russel Barsh, by 1900 the United States had asserted jurisdiction over some two billion acres of Indigenous territory. “Half of this area was purchased by treaty or agreement at an average price of less than seventy-five cents per acre,” 325 million acres “were confiscated unilaterally by Act of Congress or Executive Order, without compensation,” and another 350 million acres in the “lower” forty-eight States and Alaska had been taken “without agreement or the pretense of a unilateral action extinguishing native title.”73 By 1970, even the Interior Department was warning that the United States had never acquired valid title to about one-third of its purported land base.74

      These issues could have been—and could still be—addressed straightforwardly, through negotiations with the Indigenous nations involved. Instead, the state has chosen to ignore its СКАЧАТЬ