american-holocaust

GENOCIDEDuring the course of four centuries-from the 1490s to the 1890s­Europeans and white Americans engaged in an unbroken string ofgenocide campaigns against the native peoples of the Americas. Picturedon the following pages are the results of the first of theseslaughters-the Spanish depredations in the West Indies and Mesoamericaunder the initial command of Christopher Columbus-andwhat conventionally, though incorrectly, is regarded as the last ofthem-the United States Army's massacre of Sioux Indians near acreek called Wounded Knee in South Dakota. These scenes are representativeof thousands of other such incidents that occurred (andin some places continue to occur) in the Indies and in South, Central,and North America, most of them bloodbaths that have goneunnamed and are long forgotten.The illustrations of the Spanish cruelties are by Jean Theodoreand Jean Israel de Bry, from a 1598 edition of Bartolome de LasCasas's Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies. The accompanyingcaptions are drawn from Las Casas's descriptions of theevents he witnessed. With two exceptions, the photographs fromthe Wounded Knee massacre are printed here with the permissionof the Nebraska State Historical Society. The exceptions are thephotograph of Big Foot, from the National Anthropological Archivesof the Smithsonian Institution, and the photograph of GeneralColby and Zintka Lanuni, which is printed by courtesy of theDenver Public Library's Western History Collection. Quotations inthe captions for the Wounded Knee photographs are from RichardE. Jensen, R. Eli Paul, and John E. Carter, Eyewitness at WoundedKnee (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991).