The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

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Genocide against Indigenous Peoples
David Maybury-Lewis
It is sad that few of us are surprised when we hear of genocides committed against
indigenous peoples. We may be outraged or sickened, but, if we have any knowledge
of the grim history of contacts between indigenous peoples and other societies,
we are unlikely to be surprised. The reason is that the defining characteristic
of indigenous peoples is not simply, as is often supposed, that they were “there”
(wherever they are) first. Such a definition works well enough in the Americas or
Australia, but is unsatisfactory in Africa and Eurasia. There, populations have eddied
backward and forward over given territories for centuries, so that their “original
inhabitants” are not clearly defined and often are in polemical dispute. The
defining characteristic of indigenous peoples is not therefore priority on the land
but rather that they have been conquered by invaders who are racially, ethnically,
or culturally different from themselves. Accordingly, indigenous peoples are those
who are subordinated and marginalized by alien powers that rule over them. It
follows that they are relatively powerless, and so they become prime targets for genocide
(see Maybury-Lewis 1997:8).
Genocide committed against indigenous populations was a particularly nasty
aspect of the European seizure of empires from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries,
but it was neither invented nor practiced solely by European imperialists.
Genocide is in fact a new name, invented in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin (Richard
1992:6), for a very old outrage, namely the massacre or attempted massacre of an
entire people. Such annihilations took place in antiquity, such as when the Romans
destroyed Carthage and sowed its fields with salt. They were later carried on by
conquering peoples such as the Huns and the Mongols and countless others. European
imperialism and the massacres of indigenous peoples to which it gave rise
added a bloody chapter to the history of genocide, which began much earlier and
is unfortunately not yet finished.
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