The doctrine of extinction
Genocide is an ugly word meant to describe an ugly crime. Genocide is not, in spite of its ugliness, that rare of a crime in the history of men.
Nowadays the term genocide is most often used when discussing the wholesale murder of Jews by Hitler and those who served him, but Hitler was certainly not the first, or even the most recent, perpetrator of this ugly crime.
It is important to note here that whether the wholesale murder of a population and attempted obliteration of a culture is actually called genocide or not depends largely on who is writing the story. The Turkish campaign against the Armenians during the early decades of the 20th century is still not called genocide for fear of upsetting the Turks who are “allies” in whatever war is making money these days. The same goes for Burma where a darling of the “International Community,” Aung San Suu Kyi, finds herself on the wrong side of history trying to defend the slaughter of the Rohingya people, and the imprisonment of journalists who dare to report on it.
On the other hand, the unpleasantness that took place in Rwanda a few years ago is routinely referred to as the “Rwandan genocide,” taking place as it did between two African tribes, calling it what it was did not offend the sensibilities of the Colonial Powers.
In our own country, the industrial-level slaughter of millions of Native Americans is not termed genocide by most historians, the more polite euphemism “Manifest Destiny” being more palatable.
Murder, be it individual or wholesale, is much less problematic if the victim stays dead. It starts getting complicated when the victim keeps coming back to life, or when there are too many witnesses. In such a situation bullets start to attract too much attention. It becomes necessary to doctor the evidence, to shift to a strategy of genocide by bureaucracy.
A wholesale denial of existence aimed at whatever community or culture those in power wish to destroy. An excellent example of this approach was a certain Walter Ashby Plecker, the first registrar of the State of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics. Very early in his tenure he let it be known that there would be no birth certificates issued to American Indians.
There being “... no damned Indians in Virginia ...” Plecker wished to institutionalize the oppression of blacks and completely eliminate the existence of Native Americans in his state. At least on paper, there is little doubt that he would have preferred a more physical elimination, but as that was not politically feasible, genocide by government paperwork was the only option open to him.
While Plecker may be the most egregious example available to us at the moment, his predecessors and his descendants have continued to find this approach useful. If, for example, a community is able to survive and perhaps even thrive, and perhaps wishes to reestablish itself, the “Little Pleckers” can always say “... there are no records, you cannot possibly be who you are because we have no record of you ...,” sort of a bureaucratic perversion of reality.
This approach has been used time and time again against various Native communities, sometimes in very perverted ways. (A particularly abominable example being “Cherokee Nation v. Zinke” in which the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma argued that the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokees did not meet the definition of “Indian” under one Federal law. A sad example of broader community division).
DNA introduced another wrinkle into the mix. A few years ago, one Native community in particular began to experience an inspiring renaissance. Their people, both in the home community and in the diaspora, began coming together in a way that reminded me of the return of the Jews to Jerusalem from Babylon in the Second Temple era. This resurgence was, of course, a cause of concern to certain people with a vested interest in the status quo, the “Little Pleckers.”
Various bureaucrats at various time have declared these people extinct, and some wished to keep it that way. Somebody decided that it would be a great idea to convince people from this community to “voluntarily” submit a DNA test, believing that they could use the results to further the extinction narrative. A substantial number of the population did so. The program was quickly dropped when the majority of the people were proven to have 50% or more Indian blood.
Score one for survival.
As a boy I heard many stories of court houses that were burned to destroy records, usually for the purpose of stealing someone’s inheritance. The situation facing many Native Americans today is very similar, but the inheritance in question is not land, it is our very identity, and we will not give it up.
Our ancestors sacrificed too much to bring us here.