Since the European invasion of the continent known to Indigenous People as Turtle Island, the original inhabitants have experienced unspeakable harm, accurately described as genocide*. The Journey of Healing’s purpose is to provide tools to learn and move beyond romanticization or denigration or co-option,  instead to recognize of our responsibility.

On the other pages in this section we have divided the information into three categories:

• The Foundation of the Genocide (found in the Doctrine of Christian Discovery beginning legally with the Papal Bulls)
• Legal Genocide (using the Doctrine of Christian Discovery which provided the legal frameworks to entrench genocidal policies found in the US Constitution, the legal slavery of Indigenous people and the treaties made but never kept)
• Racial/Cultural Genocide (enabled by the boarding school policies, outlawing religious practices and fostering policies of linguistic genocide)

Following are four posts that contain documented examples of genocide.

Native American rancher, Raymond Yellow Thunder, in 1972 was attacked by racists, stripped from the waist down, and forced into an American Legion bar where people made fun of him, forced him to dance, and put cigarettes out on him.

ON A COLD WINTER EVENING in 1972, four young, restless white men and one woman were drinking beer and cruising the streets of Gordon, Nebraska, when they came upon an intoxicated Oglala Lakota ranch hand named Raymond Yellow Thunder.

They grabbed him by the hair, punched him in the face, stripped him from the waist down, and forced him into the trunk of their car. They thought it would be a great joke to shove him half-naked into the American Legion Hall, where a benefit dance was underway.

The townspeople stared in shock as the bruised Indian cowboy in the doorway pulled his shirttail down to cover himself and hid his face in shame. They took him outside to beat him to death. They put him in the trunk of their car and drove around. Then they put him into the cab of a pickup truck in a used car lot where he died. Two little boys found his body a week later. He had died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

His death became notable as an example of a racial assault, as he was murdered by four white men who had bragged earlier that evening about beating an Indian.

Melvin and Leslie were initially charged with assault and battery and released without bail. After AIM protested, the charges were upgraded to second-degree manslaughter. One of the five was never charged with anything. Three of them were charged with manslaughter and the fourth was charged with false imprisonment. But it was two months after the murder, in May of 1972, before any charges were made.

Raymond Yellow Thunder was castrated, his skull was crushed with a tire iron, and he was tortured with lit cigarettes.

The murderers received a light sentence. Leslie and Melvin Hare were eventually convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six years with a $500 fine, and two years with a $500 fine, respectively.

The authorities were not going to charge anybody at first. But after a protest by a caravan of AIM people and people from Pine Ridge, the Hare brothers were charged. They were convicted and sentenced to a year in prison. The local Indian leaders called on AIM to come in to help protect them. The AIM protests over Raymond’s killing and the killing of Wesley Bad Heart Bull led directly to the Indian occupation of Wounded Knee in February 1973. AIM later established the Yellow Thunder Camp in Raymond’s honor.

Murders of Indians had been going on in South Dakota for a hundred years by that time. Before the Hares, allegedly, no white man had ever been arrested, tried, or convicted for killing an Indian. It was as hard to convict a white man of killing an Indian in South Dakota as it was to convict a KKK member for lynching a Black man in Alabama.

Postscript to a July 16, 1763 letter from General Lord Jeffrey Amherst to his subordinate Colonel Henry Bouquet. “PS: You will Do well to try to Inoculate the Indians [with smallpox] by means of Blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race. I should be very glad your Scheme for hunting them down by dogs could take effect, but dogs [indecipherable] at too great a [indecipherable] to think of that at present.”

An example

“These laws of Louisiana apply only to slaves as when a black person is arrested if not claimed as a slave or proved to be free in two years he is sold as a slave; hence it follows that those free men who were arrested, being without money to pay expenses, become slaves by the operation of the laws of Louisiana.

In pursuing the cook of the William Tell, I found three other freemen confined in the same prison, one belong also to Baltimore, by the name of Leaven Dogerty: he was also released on my paying $28 expenses; one was a descendent of the Indians who once inhabited Nantucket — his name was Eral Lonnon, the grandson of Sarah Tashmy, who with Peter Micha and Joshua Chicken we’re the only three Indians I remember to have lived at Nantucket during my boyhood. Peter Micha then saved my life: he was, on a warm summers day, sitting in the shade of Barney Bunker’s mill, in approaching which my horse fell and rolled on me, so that I could neither move or call for help; when the old Indian Spring from his seat, swung his staff and shouted until he calls the horse to release me — and I am very happy to have had an opportunity to render a service to one of the few remaining of his tribe, before they become extinct. Lonnon had been six weeks in prison; he was released without difficulty on my paying $20 expenses, and no one seemed to know why he has been confined or arrested as the law does not presume persons of mixed blood to be slaves. But for the others, I had great difficulty in procuring what was considered competent witnesses to prove some free. No complaint of improper conduct had been made against any of them. The recorder said the witness must be white. Lonnon had been employed in the South Sea fishery from Nantucket and New Bedford, nearly all his life; has sailed on those voyages in the ships Eagle, Maryland, Gideon, Triton and Samuel. He was born at Mashpee Barnstable County Massachusetts and prefers to encounter the leviathan of the deep rather than the turn-keys of New Orleans.”

*The definition of genocide is “the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group.”  Population collapse which began at 1st contact between Europeans and Indigenous people in Native America spanned centuries and involved both colonial and federal administrations who were interacting with thousands of distinct Indigenous empires, cultures, and confederacies.  By 1900, the indigenous population in the Americas declined by more than 80%, and by as much as 98% in some areas.  The posts on this page and throughout this section explain the deliberate and systematic extermination of national, racial, political, or cultural groups.

White scholars’ estimations of the Indigenous population before first contact vary widely. In 1924, Paul Rivet and Karl Sapper estimated that between 40 and 50 million people lived in the hemisphere. Both Rivet and Sapper later revised their estimates downward to 15-31 million.  In 1964, Woodrow Borah estimated “upwards of 100 million” Native inhabitants. Two years later, Henry Dobyns estimated the Indigenous population of the hemisphere to be between 90 million and 112.5 million.   In 1987, Thornton provided an estimate of about 75 million and the following year, Dobyns revised his estimate significantly upward to 145 million. In 1992, Stannard estimated the original population of the hemisphere at about 100 million.

Whether it was 15 million or 145 million, in 1800, only about 600,000 Indigenous people remained in the United States. By 1900, the Indigenous population in this country reached its lowest point of about 237,000 people.

Healing cannot start until those of us in and of the oppressor class understand the history of our ancestors. (Even if your  ancestors didn’t live here, you are living on Native land so have the same duty to understand.)

See Detour Spotting — for White Anti-Racists:

The above link takes you to 28 specific attitudes or behaviors that indicate a detour or wrong turn into white guilt, denial or defensiveness. and explain a Reality Check and Consequence for each.

Number 16 is particularly relevant to the content of this website.