The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

genocide against indigenous peoples 45
A discussion of genocide as practiced against indigenous peoples should not
therefore focus solely or even principally on deliberate attempts to massacre entire
societies. Often the widespread dying resulted not so much from deliberate killing
but from the fatal circumstances imposed by the imperialists on the conquered.
Where deliberate extermination was the cause, it is useful to refer to Charny’s distinction
between genocide and genocidal massacre (1994:76). Indigenous peoples have
often been the victims of genocidal massacres, where the slaughter is on a smaller
scale and results from a general attitude toward indigenous peoples rather than necessarily
being part of a campaign for total elimination of the victim population.
On the other hand, campaigns of extermination are characteristic of those phases
of colonization in which the invaders have decided on a course of ethnic cleansing
to rid a territory of its indigenous inhabitants and appropriate it for themselves.
In the heyday of colonialism such exterminations were often justified in the name
of progress. The indigenous populations were stigmatized as savages who ought
to make way for civilization. In his book The Winning of the West, for example,
Theodore Roosevelt justified the treatment meted out to the Indians of the United
States in the following terms: “The settler and pioneer have at bottom had justice
on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game
preserve for squalid savages” (Roosevelt 1889:90). General Roca, the minister for
war in Argentina at the end of the nineteenth century, put it even more bluntly
when he stated the case for clearing the pampas of their Indian inhabitants. Speaking
to his fellow countrymen he argued that “our self-respect as a virile people
obliges us to put down as soon as possible, by reason or by force, this handful of
savages who destroy our wealth and prevent us from definitively occupying, in the
name of law, progress and our own security, the richest and most fertile lands of
the Republic” (Serres Güiraldes 1979:377–78). 1 Roca then proceeded to lead a campaign,
known in Argentine history as the Conquest of the Desert, whose express
purpose was to clear the pampas of Indians. The Indians were not entirely exterminated
physically, but they were eradicated socially, ceasing to exist as separate
and identifiable peoples.
A similar campaign to exterminate an indigenous population was carried out in
Tasmania during the nineteenth century. The settlers tired of acts of resistance
committed by the native Tasmanians and therefore organized a drive in which a
line of armed men “beat” across the island, as they would do if they were flushing
game, only this time the quarry was the remaining Tasmanians. The official objective
of this drive was to capture the Tasmanians and “bring them to civilization,”
but, as Davies reported in The Last of the Tasmanians, “the real motive in the
hearts of most of the participants was nothing more than the destruction of vermin,
backed by the fear not only of what the native might do to their persons, but
also the menace he presented to their crops and their flocks....The aborigines were
killed and maimed and left to die in the bush” (1974:123). The line did not, in fact,
exterminate the Tasmanians, but it harried and decimated them so severely that it
hastened their eventual extinction. 2