The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

62 modernity’s edges
nel and volunteers that was mounted in the late 1820s, resulted in the capture of
only two aboriginals, one of whom was a small boy and the other of whom escaped
shortly afterward (Morris 1972:66–67; Tatz 1991:97). As colonial forces discovered,
it was not easy to eliminate hunter-gatherers, since they tended to stay in remote
areas, were often widely dispersed across the landscape, and were eminently familiar
with their surroundings.
The number of indigenous people in Tasmania did decline precipitously, from
an estimated five thousand at the time of first contact with Europeans in 1642 to
some three hundred in 1830 (Diamond 1993:57). Some of them died from disease,
but substantial numbers died at the hands of colonists who shot them on sight, poisoned
them, caught them in steel traps and then killed them with swords, and
dashed out the brains of their children (Turnbull 1948:39–42). Aboriginal women
were raped, men were emasculated, and children were captured and forced into
slavery. Many of those who managed to survive the mistreatment, disease, and starvation
were rounded up in the early 1830s and forcibly relocated to Flinders Island,
where the majority of them died. With the death in 1876 of Truganini, an elderly
full-blooded Aboriginal woman who lived her last days in Hobart, the last of Tasmania’s
aboriginals was gone. As the local newspaper, the Mercury noted, “For the
first time in human history, dies out the last of a race, a race...which never knew
the meaning of suffering, wretchedness, and contempt until the English, with their
soldiers, bibles, and rum-puncheons, came and dispossessed them of their heritage”
(Mercury, quoted in Morris 1972:70).
Truganini’s mother had been stabbed to death by a European, her sister was
raped by sealers, and her husband’s hands were cut off; she herself lived her final
days fearing that her body would be dissected by scientists (Turnbull 1948:235–36;
Morris 1972:69–70). Her last words were, “Don’t let them cut me up,” and she
begged the doctor who was attending her to ensure that she was buried “behind
the mountains.” After her death, her body was sent to the Tasmanian Museum,
where it remained in a box in the basement (Turnbull 1948:236; Morris 1972:70).
The descendants of Tasmanian Aboriginals and the people who colonized the island
have pressed the government to treat the remains of Tasmania’s indigenous
peoples with greater respect, but the government continues to maintain that they
do not deserve special treatment. Tasmanian Aboriginal spokespersons argue that
they themselves were in fact subjected to “special treatment,” treatment that was
genocidal both in intent and practice.
There have been ongoing debates over the issue of genocide among indigenous
peoples. The situation is perhaps best illustrated in the case of the Ache of
eastern Paraguay, who were described in the 1970s as the victims of genocidal policies
(Munzel 1973, 1974; Lewis 1974; Arens 1976, 1978; Smith and Melia 1979). In
the 1870s the Ache were still hunter-gatherers who moved about the landscape in
small groups. By the 1940s and 1950s some of the Ache groups were harassed and
attacked by Paraguayan colonists (Hill and Hurtado 1995:49). The 1960s saw pacification
efforts carried out, and some of the Ache were moved onto reservations.