american-holocaust

286 NOTES6. From the testimony of Major Scott]. Anthony, First Colorado Cavalry,before United States Congress, House of Representatives: "Massacre of CheyenneIndians," in Report on the Conduct of the War (38th Congress, Second Session,1865}, p. 27.7. Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and CulturalConsequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972}, p. 31.8. For a recent example, in brief, of the common assertion that the NativeAmerican population collapse was an "unintended consequence" of native contactwith Europeans who, in this version of the fiction, actually wanted to "preserveand increase"-as well as exploit-the native people, see Marvin Harris, "Depopulationand Cultural Evolution: A Cultural Materialist Perspective," in DavidHurst Thomas, ed., Columbian Consequences, Volume Three: The Spanish Borderlandsin Pan-American Perspective (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian InstitutionPress, 1991}, p. 584. Harris here is objecting specifically to my use of the word"holocaust" to describe the native population decline in the Americas in "TheConsequences of Contact: Toward an Interdisciplinary Theory of Native Responsesto Biological and Cultural Invasion," ibid., pp. 519-39. See also the recentassertion that "the first European colonists . . . did not want the Amerindians todie," but unfortunately the Indians simply "did not wear well," in Alfred W. Crosby,"Infectious Disease and the Demography of the Atlantic Peoples," Journal of WorldHistory, 2 (1991}, 122, 124.9. Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politicsand Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso Books, 1991},p. 153.10. In Sylvia Rothchild, ed., Voices from the Holocaust (New York: NewAmerican Library, 1981), p. 4.11. The dispute over the site of Columbus's first landing is discussed in JohnNoble Wilford, The Mysterious History of Columbus: An Exploration of the Man,the Myth, the Legacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), pp. 129-46.12. On the number of deaths and disappearances in Guatemala between 1970and 1985, see Robert M. Carmack, ed., Harvest of Violence: The Maya Indiansand the Guatemalan Crisis (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), p.295. According to the U.S. Defense Department the number of battle deaths inthose wars mentioned in the text was as follows: Civil War-274,235; World WarOne-53,402; World War Two--291,557; Korean War-33,629; Vietnam War-47,382.13. For the percentage of rain forest destroyed, see Cultural Survival Quarterly,14 (1990}, 86. On the politics and ecology of rain forest destruction, focusedon the Amazon but relevant to tropical forests throughout the Americas, see SusannaHecht and Alexander Cockburn, The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers,and Defenders of the Amazon (New York: Verso Books, 1989}.14. This quotation and the one preceding it are from Vanderbilt Universityanthropologist Duncan M. Earle's report, "Mayas Aiding Mayas: GuatemalanRefugees in Chiapas, Mexico," in Carmack, ed., Harvest of Violence, pp. 263,269. The rest of this volume of contemporary anthropological accounts from Guatemalamakes overwhelmingly clear how devastating is the Guatemalan government'songoing slaughter of its native Maya peoples-with the United States government'sconsent and financial support. For more detailed discussion of U.S.