american-holocaust

338 NOTES23. Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The "Final Solution"in History, Expanded Edition (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), pp. 365, 462.24. Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Hanover, N.H.: BrandeisUniversity Press and University Press of New England, 1987), p. 20.25. There is an overview of these and other practices in Rex Weyler, Blood ofthe Land: The Government and Corporate War Against the American IndianMovement (New York: Random House, 1982), esp. pp. 218-26. The best sourcesfor up to date reports on such matters are the South and Meso American IndianInformation Center in Oakland, California, which publishes a newsletter and otherdocuments, arid the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, home-basedin Copenhagen, which publishes a newsletter and a Document Series on violenceand genocide against native peoples. To date, there are several score book-lengthreports in the IWGIA Document Series.26. Until the recent passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act, year in and yearout between a quarter and a third of all American Indian children were removedby government authorites from their families and placed in foster homes, adoptivehomes, or institutions-SO to 90 percent of which were headed and run by non­Indian persons. Article II, Section (e) of the Genocide convention defines as genocide"forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." On the problemof the forced break-up of Indian families (published prior to the implementationof the Indian Child Welfare Act), see Steven Unger, ed., The Destruction ofAmerican Indian Families (New York: Association on American Indian Affairs,1979).27. Leo Kuper, "The United States Ratifies the Genocide Convention," Interneton the Holocaust and Genocide, 19 (February, 1989), reprinted in Frank Chalkand Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and CaseStudies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) pp. 422-25.28. For detailed discussion and analysis of the American government's ongoingrefusal to join the rest of the world's nations in their unconditional condemnationof genocide, see Lawrence J. LeBlanc, The United States and the GenocideConvention (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).29. New York Times International (21 May 1991), p. AS, columns 1-6.30. EdwardS. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The PoliticalEconomy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), pp. 37-86.31. U.S. Department of Commerce-Bureau of the Census, We, the First Americans(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989), pp. 12-13; U.S.Department of Health and Human Services, Indian Health Service Chart SeriesBook (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988), pp. 43 (Table4.20), 47 (Table 4.24). It must be noted that even these shocking suicide and healthstatistics greatly understate the desperate reality of life on many Indian reservations,for there are direct correlations between such so-called quality of life indicesand the degree of cultural integrity individual Indian peoples have been able tomaintain. Thus, for example, among the different Pueblo peoples of New Mexico,those who have suffered the most erosion of traditional values through forcedacculturation into American life have two to three (and in one case almost forty)times the overall suicide rate of those who have been able to hold on to more oftheir customary lifeways. SeeN. Van Winkle and P. May, "Native American Sui-