Crimes Against Humanity ©
by Ward Churchill
NOTE:
This article was originally written as an official paper of the
Autonomous Confederation - American Indian Movement. It was passed along
to me by AIM Colorado...a member of the Autonomous Confederation.
During the past couple of seasons, there has been an
increasing wave of controversy regarding the names of professional
sports teams like the Atlanta "Braves," Cleveland "Indians," Washington
"Redskins," and Kansas City "Chiefs." The issue extends to the names of
college teams like Florida State University "seminoles," University of
Illinois "Fighting Illini," and so on, right on down to high school
outfits like the Lamar (Colorado) "Savages." Also involved have been
team adoption of "mascots," replete with feathers, buckskins, beads,
spears and "warpaint" (some fans have opted to adorn themselves in the
same fashion), and nifty little "pep" gestures like the "Indian Chant"
and "Tomahawk Chop."
A substantial number of American Indians have protested that use of
native names, images and symbols as sports team mascots and the like is,
by definition, a virulently racist practice. Given the historical
relationship between Indians and non-Indians during what has been called
the "Conquest of America," American Indian Movement leader (and
American Indian Anti-Defamation Council founder) Russell Means has
compared the practice to contemporary Germans naming their soccer teams
the "Jews," Hebrews," and "Yids," while adorning their uniforms with
grotesque caricatures of Jewish faces taken from the Nazis' anti-Semetic
propoganda of the 1930's. Numerous demonstrations have occurred in
conjunction with games - most notably during the November 15, 1992
match-up between the Chiefs and Redskins in Kansas City - by angry
Indians and their supporters.
In response, a number of players - especially African Americans and
other minority athletes - have been trotted out by professional team
owners like Ted Turner, as well as university and public school
officials, to announce that they mean not to insult but to honor native
people. They have been joined by the television networks and most major
newspapers, all of which have editorialized that Indian discomfort with
the situation is "no big deal," insisting that the whole things is just
"good, clean fun." The country needs more such fun, they've argued, and
a "few disgruntled Native Americans" have no right to undermine the
nation's enjoyment of it's leisure time by complaining. This is
especially the case, some have argued, "in hard times like these." It
has even been contended that Indian outrage at being systematically
degraded - rather than the degradation itself - creates "a serious
barrier to the sort of intergroup communication so necessary in a
multicultural society such as ours."
Okay. let's communicate. We are frankly dubious that those advancing
such positions really believe their own rhetoric but, just for the sake
of argument, let's accept the premise that they are sincere. If what
they say is true, then isn't it time we spread such "inoffensiveness"
and "good cheer" around among all the groups so that everybody can
participate equally in fostering the national round of laughs they call
for? Sure it is - the country can't have too much fun or "intergroup"
involvement - so the more, the merrier. Simple consistency demands that
anyone who thinks the Tomahawk Chop is a swell pastime must be just as
hearty in their endorsement of the following ideas - by the logic used
to defend the defamation of American Indians - should help us all really
start yukking it up.
First, as a counterpart to the Redskins, we need an NFL team called
"Niggers" to honor Afro-Americans. Half-time festivities for fans might
include a simulated stewing of the opposing coach in a large pot while
players and cheerleaders dance around it, garbed in leopard skins and
wearing fake bones in their noses. This concept obviously goes along
with the kind of gaiety attending the Chop, but also with the actions of
the Kansas Chiefs, whose team members - prominently including black
members - lately appeared on a poster ,looking "fierce" and "savage" by
way of wearing Indian regalia. Just a bit of harmless "morale boosting,"
says the Chief's front office. You bet.
So that the newly-formed Niggers sports club won't end up too out of
sync while expressing the "spirit" and "identity" of Afro-Americans in
the above fashion, a baseball franchise - let's call this one the
"Sambos" - should be formed. How about a basketball team called the
"spearchuckers/" A hockey team called the "Jungle Bunnies/" Maybe the
"essence of these teams could be depicted by images of tiny black faces
adorned with huge pairs of lips. The players could appear on TV every
week or so gnawing on chicken legs and spitting watermelon seeds at one
another. Catchy, eh? Well, there's "nothing to be upset about,"
according to those who love wearing "war bonnets" to the Super Bowl or
having "Chief Illiniwik" dance around the sports arenas of Urbana,
Illinois.
And why stop there? There are plenty of other groups to include.
"Hispanics?" They can be "represented" by the Galveston "Greasers" and
the San Diego "Spics," at least until the Wisconsin "Wetbacks" and
Baltimore "Beaners" get off the ground. Asian Americans? How about the
"slopes," "Dinks," "Gooks," and "Zipperheads?" Owners of the latter
teams might get their logo ideas from editorial page cartoons printed in
the nation's newspapers during World War II: slanteyes, buck teeth, big
glasses, but nothing racially insulting or derogatory, according to the
editors and artists involved at the time. Indeed, this Second World
War-vintage stuff can be seen as just another barrel of laughs at least
by what current editors say are their "local standards" concerning
American Indians.
Let's see. Who's been left out Teams like the Kansas City "Kikes,"
Hanover "Honkies," San Leandro "Shylock," Daytona "Dagos," and Pittsburg
"Polacks" will fill a certain social void among white folk. Have a
religious belief? Let's all go for the gusto and gear up the Milwaukee
"Mackeral Snappers" and Hollywood "Holy Rollers." The Fighting Irish of
Notre Dame can be rechristened the "Drunken Irish" or "Papist Pigs."
Issues of gender and sexual preference can be addressed through creation
of teams like the St. Louis "Sluts," Boston "Bimbos," Detroit "Dykes,"
and the Fresno "Fags." How about the Gainsville "Gimps" and the
richmond "Retards," so the physically and mentally impaired won't be
excluded from our fun and games?
Now, don't go getting "overly sensitive" out there. None of this is
dreaming or insulting, at least not when it's being done to Indians.
Just ask the folks who are doing it, or their apologists like Andy
Rooney in the national media. They'll tell you - as in fact they have
been telling you - that there's no been no harm done, regardless of what
their victims think, feel, or say. The situation is exactly the same as
when those with precisely the same mentality used to insist that Step
'n' Fetchit was okay, or Rochester on the Jack Benny show, or Amos and
Andy, Charlie Chan, the Frito Bandito, or any other cutesy symbols
making up the lexicon of American racism. Have we communicated yet?
Let's get just a little bit real here. The notion of "fun" embodied in
rituals like the Tomahawk Chop must be understood for what it is.
There's not a single non-Indian example used above which can be
considered socially acceptable in even the most marginal sense. The
reasons are obvious enough. So why is it different where American
Indians are concerned? One can only conclude that, in contrast to the
other groups at issue, Indians are (falsely) perceived as being too few,
and therefore too weak, to defend themselves effectively against racist
and otherwise offensive behavior.
Fortunately, there are some glimmers of hope. A few teams and their fans
have gotten the message and have responded appropriately. Stanford
University, which opted to drop the name "Indians" from, has experienced
no resulting drop in attendance. Meanwhile, the local newspaper in
Portland, Oregon recently decided its long-standing editorial policy
prohibiting use of racial epithets should include derogatory teams
names. The Redskins, for instance, are now referred to as "the
Washington team," and will continued to be described in this way until
the franchise adopts an inoffensive moniker (newspaper sales in Portland
have suffered no decline as a result).
Such examples are to be applauded and encouraged. They stand as
figurative beacons in the night, proving beyond all doubt that it is
quite possible to indulge in the pleasure of athletics without accepting
blatant racism into the bargain.
Nuremburg Precedents
On October 16, 1946, a man named Julius Stricher mounted the steps of a
gallows. Moments later he was dead, the sentence of an international
tribunal composed of representatives of the United States, France, Great
Britain, and the Soviet Union having been imposed. Streicher's body
was then cremated, and - so horrendous were his crimes thought to have
been - his ashes dumped into an unspecified German river so that "no one
should ever know a particular place to go for reasons of mourning his
memory."
Julius Streicher had been convicted at Nuremberg, Germany of what were
termed "Crimes Against Humanity." The lead prosecutor in his case
Justice Robert Jackson of the United States Supreme Court had not
argued that the defendant had killed anyone, nor that he had personally
committed any especially violent act. Nor was it contended that
Streicher had held any particularly important position in the German
government during the period in which the so called Third Reich had
exterminated some 6,000,000 Jews, as well as several million Gypsies,
Poles, Slavs, homosexuals, and other untermenschen (subhumans).
The sole offense for which the accused was ordered put to death was in
having served as publisher/editor of a Bavarian tabloid entitled Der
Sturmer during the early-to-mid 1930s, years before the Nazi genocide
actually began. In this capacity, he had penned a long series of
virulently anti-Semetic editorials and ''news."
Stories, usually accompanied by cartoons and other images graphically
depicting Jews in extraordinarily derogatory fashion. This, the
prosecution asserted, had done much to "dehumanize" the targets of his
distortion in the mind of the German public. In turn, such
dehumanization had made it possible or at least easier for average
Germans to later indulge in the outright liquidation of Jewish "vermin."
The tribunal agreed, holding that Streicher was therefore complicit in
genocide and deserving of death by hanging.
During his remarks to the Nuremburg tribunal, Justice Jackson observed
that, in implementing its sentences, the participating powers were
morally and legally binding themselves to adhere forever after to the
same standards of conduct that were being applied to Streicher and the
other Nazi leaders. In the alternative, he said, the victorious allies
would have committed "pure murder' at Nuremberg no different in
substance from that carried out by those they presumed to judge rather
than establishing the "permanent benchmark for justice" which was
intended.
Yet in the United States of Robert Jackson, the indigenous American
Indian population had already been reduced, in a process which is
ongoing to this day, from perhaps 12.5 million in the year 1500 to fewer
than 250,000 by the beginning of the 20th century. This was
accomplished, according to official sources, "largely through the
cruelty of Euro American settlers," and an informal but clear
governmental policy which had made it an articulated goal to
"exterminate these red vermin" or at least whole segments of them.
Bounties had been placed on the scalps of Indians any Indians in
places as diverse as Georgia, Kentucky, Texas, the Dakotas, Oregon, and
California and had been maintained until resident Indian populations
were decimated or disappeared altogether. Entire peoples such as the
Cherokee had been reduced to half their size through a policy of forced
removal from their homelands east of the Mississippi River to what were
then considered less preferable areas in the West.
Others, such as the Navajo, suffered the same fate while under military
guard for years on end. The United States Army had also perpetrated a
long series of wholesale massacres of Indians at places like Horseshoe
Bend, Bear River, Sand Creek, the Washita River, the Marias River, Camp Robinson and Wounded Knee.
Through it all, hundreds of popular novels - each competing with the
next to make Indians appear more grotesque, menacing, and inhuman - were
sold in the tens of millions of copies in the U.S. Plainly, the Euro
American public was being conditioned to see Indians in such a way so as
to allow their eradication to continue. And continue it did until the
Manifest Destiny of the U.S a direct precursor to what Hitler would
subsequently call Lebensraumpolitik (the politics of living space) was
consummated.
By 1900, the national project of "clearing" Native Americans from their
land and replacing them with "superior" Anglo American settlers was
complete; the indigenous population had been reduced by as much as 98
percent while approximately 97.5 percent of their original territory had
''passed'' to the invaders. The survivors had been concentrated, out of
sight and mind of the public, on scattered "reservations," all of them
under the self-assigned "plenary" (full) power of the federal
government. There was, of course, no Nuremberg-style tribunal passing
judgment on those who had fostered such circumstances in North America.
No U.S. official or private citizen was ever imprisoned never mind
hanged for implementing or propagandizing what had been done. Nor had
the process of genocide afflicting Indians been completed. Instead, it
merely changed form.
Between the 1880s and the 1980s, nearly half of all Native American
children were coercively transferred from their own families,
communities, and cultures to those of the conquering society. This was
done through compulsory attendance at remote boarding schools, often
hundreds of miles from their homes, where native children were kept for
years on end while being systematically '"deculturated" (indoctrinated
to think and act in the manner of Euro Americans rather than as
Indians). It was also accomplished through a pervasive foster home and
adoption program including - blind adoptions, where children would be
permanently denied information as to who they were/are and where they'd
come from - placing native youths in non-Indian homes.
The express purpose of all this was to facilitate a U.S. governmental
policy to bring about the "assimilation" (dissolution) of indigenous
societies. In other words, Indian cultures as such were to be caused to
disappear. Such policy objectives are directly contrary to the United
Nations 1948 Convention on Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of
Genocide, an element of international law arising from the Nuremburg
proceedings. The forced "transfer of the children" of a targeted
"racial, ethnical, or religious group" is explicitly prohibited as a
genocidal activity under the Convention's second article.
Article II of the Genocide Convention also expressly prohibits
involuntary sterilization as a means of ''preventing births among" a
targeted population. Yet, in 1975, it was conceded by the U.S.
government that its Indian Health Service (IHS) then a subpart of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), was even then conducting a secret program of involuntary sterilization
that had affected approximately 40 percent of all Indian women. The
program was allegedly discontinued, and the IHS was transferred to the
Public Health Service, but no one was punished. In 1990, it came out
that the IHS was inoculating, Inuit children in Alaska with Hepatitis-B
vaccine. The vaccine had already been banned by the World Health
Organization as having demonstrated a correlation with the HIV-Syndrome
which is itself correlated to AIDS. As this is written [March, 1993], a
"field test" of Hepatitis-A vaccine, also HIV-correlated, is being
conducted on Indian reservations in the northern plains region.
The Genocide Convention makes it a crime against "humanity" to create
conditions leading to the destruction of an identifiable human group, as
such. Yet the BIA has utilized the government's plenary prerogatives to
negotiate mineral leases "on behalf of" Indian peoples paying a
fraction of standard royalty rates. The result has been "super profits"
for a number of preferred U.S. corporations. Meanwhile, Indians, whose
reservations ironically turned out to be in some of the most
mineral-rich areas of North America, which makes us, the nominally
wealthiest segment of the continent's population, live in dire poverty.
By the government's own data in the mid-1980s, Indians received the
lowest annual and lifetime per capita incomes of any aggregate
population group in the United States. Concomitantly, we suffer the
highest rate of infant mortality, death by exposure and malnutrition,
disease, and the like. Under such circumstances, alcoholism and other
escapist forms of substance abuse are endemic in the Indian community, a
situation which leads both to a general physical debilitation of the
population and a catastrophic accident rate. Teen suicide among Indians
is several times the national average
The average life expectancy of a reservation-based Native American man
is barely 45 years; women can expect to live less than three years
longer.
Such itemizations could be continued at great length, including matters
like the radioactive contamination of large portions of contemporary
Indian Country, the forced relocation of traditional Navajos, and so on.
But the point should be made: Genocide, as defined in international
law, is a continuing fact of day-to-day life (and death) for North
America's native peoples. Yet there has been and is only the barest
flicker of public concern about or even consciousness of, this reality.
Absent any serious expression of public outrage, no one is punished and
the process continues.
A salient reason for public acquiescence before the ongoing holocaust in
Native North America has been a continuation of the popular legacy,
often through more effective media. Since 1925, Hollywood has released
more than 2,000 films, many of them rerun frequently on television,
portraying Indians as strange, perverted, ridiculous, and often
dangerous things of the past. Moreover, we are habitually presented to
mass audiences one-dimensionally, devoid of recognizable human
motivations and emotions: Indians thus serve as props, little more. We
have thus been thoroughly and systematically dehumanized.
Nor is this the extent of it. Everywhere we are used as logos, as
mascots, as jokes: "Big Chief" writing tablets, "Red Man" chewing
tobacco, "Winnebago," campers., "Navajo" and "Cherokee" and "Pontiac"
and "Cadillac" pickups and automobiles. There are the Cleveland
"Indians," the Kansas City "Chiefs," the Atlanta "Braves" and the
Washington "Redskins" professional sports teams not to mention those
in thousands of colleges, high schools, and elementary schools across
the country each with their own degrading caricatures and parodies of
Indians and or things Indian. Pop fiction continues in the same vein
including an unending stream of New Age manuals purporting to expose the
inner works of indigenous spirituality in everything from
pseudo-philosophical to do-it-yourself styles. Blond yuppies from
Beverly Hills amble about the country claiming to be reincarnated 17th
century Cheyenne Ushamans ready to perform previously secret ceremonies.
In effect, a concerted, sustained, and in some ways accelerating effort
has gone into making Indians unreal. It is thus of obvious importance
that the American public begin to think about the implications of such
things the next time they witness a gaggle of face-painted and
war-bonneted buffoons doing the "Tomahawk Chop" at a baseball or
football game. It is necessary that they think about the implications of
the grade-school teacher adorning their child in turkey feathers to
commemorate Thanksgiving. Think about the significance of John Wayne or
Charleston Heston killing a dozen "savages" with a single bullet the
next time a western comes on TV. Think about why Land-o-Lakes finds it
appropriate to market its butter with the stereotyped image of an
"Indian princess" on the wrapper. Think about what it means when
non-lndian academics profess as they often do to "know more about
Indians than Indians do themselves." Think about the significance of
charlatans like Carlos Castaneda and Jamake Highwater and Mary Summer
Rain and Lynn Andrews churning out "Indian" bestsellers one after the
other,while Indians typically can't get into print.
Think about the real situation of American Indians. Think about Julius
Streicher. Remember Justice Jackson's admonition. Understand that the
treatment of Indians in American popular culture is not "cute'' or
"amusing," or just "good, clean fun."
Know that it causes real pain and real suffering to real people. Know
that it threatens our very survival. And know that this is just as much a
crime against humanity as anything the Nazis ever did. It is likely
the indigenous people of the United States will never demand that those
guilty of such criminal activity be punished for their deeds. But the
least we have to expect - indeed to demandis that such practices
finally be brought to a halt.
Relevant Sites
A young Warriors fight...
In Whose Honor?
Dead Indians...
The continuing war...
Ethnic Cleansing
Sterilizations
Good ones should be dead...
Continuing hate...
No more babies...
Cumulative Site Index
This site is maintained by JS Dill.
Please provide an opinion regarding this site ...
