Certainly, this has been the case in the Dakota context. Our entire nation was brutally punished for our decision to go to war against the U.S. government and its citizens. The United States unilaterally abrogated our treaties, stole our Minnesota homeland, imprisoned our people in concentration camps, force-marched our women and children, mass-lynched our warriors, mass-incarcerated our able-bodied men, ethnically-cleansed us from Minnesota, and then instituted further policies of genocide, including a bounty system on Dakota scalps. The United States crushed our resistance so thoroughly that our people began to believe we were to blame for this chain of events. Rather than viewing the United States as perpetrators of crimes in a colonial context in which the ultimate goal was to acquire our lands and resources, many of our people began to blame the very people who attempted to protect our people, our culture, and our homeland from harm by going to war against the invaders. In this sad context, using international criteria to assess the events of 1862 provides some much needed clarity. The U.N. Convention details agreed-upon international standards for determining what constitutes genocide in Article II, which states: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Any one of these criteria met singly constitutes genocide. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the U.S. government and its citizens violated all of these criteria in multiple ways. As I will explain below, whites in Minnesota also perpetrated these crimes against Dakota people in multiple ways and there has yet to be any accountability or redress for them. Waziyata Win
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 03:47:02 +0000