As the Hamas versus Israel war drags into its fourth week, America and its allies continue to show blatant disregard for world opinions and show iron-clad support to Israel to continue its barbaric assault which has claimed 9,237 innocent Palestinian lives (as of 4th November 2023).
When we study the history of the United States own sordid history of dealing with its own indigenous population, we can find many parallels with the history of the occupation of Palestine.
In a 2019 study, researchers from the University College of London (UCL) estimated that when Christopher Columbus came in 1492, there were about 62 million indigenous people residing in South, Central and North America. Over a period of about 100 years, European settlers killed about 56 million or 90% of the native population in the whole Americas.
In particular, the number of Native American Indian people (the early term used was Red Indians) in North America was estimated to be between 5-10 million. Yet by 1800, the number plummeted to 600,000. According to the U.S. Census Bureau in 1900, only about 237,000 Native Americans remained. Over a period of roughly 400 years, the Native American Indian population has been reduce to 5 % or 2.5 % of its original numbers depending upon which number of original population you use.
More than a dozen tribes such as the Pequot, Mohegan and Massachusetts were completely exterminated. The strategy was to subject the natives to forced sterilization, forced assimilation and even killed for their scalps upon which financial rewards were provided by the government.
In a January 2023 article entitled “The United States’ treatment of native Americans: A sad, cruel legacy of control and neglect in the United States”, Dr. Michael Kryzanek of Bridgewater State University USA wrote that “the history of United States government treatment of Native Americans is full of broken promises, forced removal from tribal lands, murderous conflicts bordering on genocide and an adamant refusal to respect basic human rights”.
Since the 1970s, American academics have begun to use the term “genocide” to denounce U.S. policies toward American Indians. Books such as American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World by David E. Stannard, a professor at the University of Hawaii, and A Little Matter of Genocide by Ward L. Churchill, a former professor at the University of Colorado, sent shock waves across the academic community.
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur by Ben Kiernan, a professor at Yale University, gave a brief account of genocides the United States committed against American Indians at different historical stages. An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 by Benjamin Madley, unearthed the massacres of Native Americans by the U.S. government during the California Gold Rush.
Examples of such atrocities abound. For example, during 1830 – 1850, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 was enforced. Tribes were forcibly removed from the southern regions to the land west of the Mississippi using the overwhelming power of the military.
These tribes were confined to makeshift reservations that were basically internment camps (shades of Gaza) and were not allowed to return to their ancestral homelands.
The indigenous population opposed these measures leading to wars, for example the Great Sioux War. These led to battles like Custer’s last stand and culminated later in 1890, when the military gathered the Lakota tribe to disarm them and which led to the brutal slaughter of 250 Indian men, women and children at Wounded Knee in Eastern Montana.
Scalping, or the cutting of the forehead skin with hair attached of a dead foe was an Indian practice demonstrating warriorship in battle. However, the settlers and state governments used the practice to annihilate the local Indian population by providing rewards for scalps of the natives.
For example, in his 1756 Declaration of War against the Lenni Lenape tribe, the Pennsylvania Gov. Robert Hunter Morris said, “For the scalp of every male Indian enemy above the age of 12 years, produced as evidence of their being killed, the sum of 130 pieces of eight”.
Today there are 324 Indian Reservations with 574 recognised tribes. The total area occupied by these tribes has shrunk to 2% of the total land area of the United States.
Ironically, although these indigenous people were the first to settle in America, US citizenship was not granted to them until 1924, 148 years after the declaration of independence from Britain in 1776. Worse still, it was only in 1965 that they were given the right to vote.
According to Professor Emerson Baker, a Salem State University professor who specializes in New England history “Most people do not realize that Native Americans were here first and that the colonists did their best to remove them from the land. They just have no idea of the extremes that it took,”
Notice the uncanny parallels on the fate inflicted upon the Native American Indians with that of the helpless Palestinians? Settlers coming from countries far, far away upon a land already occupied with indigenous population, colonialisation through brute force of arms, displacement from their traditional homelands, broken promises of peace, suffering from wars and famine, present pitiful living conditions, settler occupiers then claiming the land as their own and brazenly lecturing about the virtue of democracy, freedom and human rights to all and sundry.
So forget about the slogan of “America being the land of the free”, about the Statue of Liberty being the symbol of true American value, that Americans value justice and eschew injustice of any sort. Their history with respect to their own treatment of the indigenous population belies this narrative. Israel proudly claims that it is the only democratic state in the Middle East. What an abhorrent statement from an apartheid regime.
Indeed, one can say Israel is using the same playbook as its American benefactor, confident that America will indeed cover, protect and justify its excesses and injustices perpetrated upon the Palestinian people.
So next time you hear President Biden pompously talk about “America as the champion of democracy and defender of the freedom of the world,” remember what his own country did with their own native population.
Dr Awaluddin Mohamed Shaharoun is a member of IKRAM Academia
