Civil Rights for Indigenous Peoples: China and Others

China takes a lot of heat for its various civil rights abuses.  Of particular concern is the treatment of the Uyghurs, a people native to central Asia.  They make up a significant fraction of the population of China’s Xinjiang region.  The issue arises because they differ from the bulk of China in history, language, religion, and general culture.  China’s strategy with all of its various peoples is to train them to be obedient to the wishes of the government and its leaders: good citizens by its reckoning. This type of control requires considerable commonality in language and culture. The Uyghurs have resisted this homogenization forcing the Chinese leaders to use extreme measures to attain their goals.  The most repugnant actions involve steps taken to limit the birth rate of the Uyghurs.  The United States and other countries recognized these actions as technically falling within the definition of genocide.  Much of what China is doing would also fit within what one might call “cultural genocide” since the goal is to separate the Uyghurs from their traditional culture and replace it with something more acceptable to the Chinese government.

It is appropriate to criticize China for its activities.  However, it is also appropriate to recognize that countries most critical of China have themselves been guilty of “genocidal” practices against peoples whose existence was deemed “inappropriate.”  And this activity was occurring until quite recently.

The mass murders of Native Americans as the United States colonized territories while spreading westward is well documented.  Even so, native populations persisted, and another approach was needed to terminate their existence.  Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a policy that has been referred to as “kill the Indian, save the man” would be implemented.  This practice would take native children away from their parents—forever—and strip them of their native languages, names, and culture in schools where they were reprogrammed to assimilate into white European culture. 

Note the similarities with the present-day practices in the Xinjiang region. The Chinese are at least extending their assimilation activities to adults as well as children.  The United States policy, carried to its logical conclusion, would lead to true genocide as the parent generation aged and died leaving no one to carry on.

Walter Johnson provides some perspective in his book The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States.

“It was Carl Schurz, the German radical turned Missouri liberal and Bentonite imperialist, who outlined the most coherent alternative to Indian-killing-as-the-course-of-imperial-progress in the 1870s and 1880s.  As head of the US Interior Department, Schurz had nominal jurisdiction over Indian affairs, and beginning in 1887 he sought to transform that administrative responsibility into actual control.  Schurz’s main antagonists in the effort were Generals Sherman and Philip Sheridan, who tried in 1878 to have Indian affairs moved out of the Interior Department and into the War Department.  In contrast to Sheridan’s notorious statement that ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian, Schurz advocated a policy that was later summarized by William Henry Pratt, a one-time lieutenant in the 10^th Cavalry and founder of the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, as ‘kill the Indian, save the man’—pacification through the separation of Indian children from their families and their reeducation in eastern boarding schools.  In other words, cultural genocide.”

“Within a few years, three-quarters of Native children were being taught in boarding schools run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (within the Interior Department), one third of those in off-reservation schools like Carlisle.”

Many of the tribes who remained with viable populations had been hunters and foragers who had ranged over vast areas.  With a perspective formed in the crowded nations of Europe, one was deemed to own land only if one actually worked the land.  In the eyes of the colonists, the Indians were not working the land so how could one conclude that they owned it.  By the reckoning of those who desired the Indian lands, the Indians were no different than any other beast who existed on the land.  One could do with them as one wished.

“In Schurz’s vision, citizenship and private property were mutually defining: only by learning how to cultivate the land as owners could Indians become citizens; only by learning to be citizens could they become worthy of the land upon which they had always lived, but never truly possessed according to Schurz.”

Apparently, any hope for Indian survival resided in becoming farmers.

“It was under Schurz that the push for privatization of Indian lands culminated in the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887.  The Dawes Act dissolved the common holding of American Indians and pulverized their nations into 160-acre plots, assigned one at a time and on the basis of individually held parcels of private property to every Indian head of household.” 

This legislation essentially declared Native American lifestyles illegal and un-American.  Yet another step in cultural genocide. 

“Because the reservation lands and other common lands, as restricted as they were, had once included land for hunting and seasonal migration, there was a great deal of unassigned land left over after severalty—as much as three-quarters of what had been Indian territory in the years leading up to 1887.  The Dawes Act deemed this unassigned Indian land ‘surplus’ and provided for its distribution to white homesteaders, who once again began to embark from St. Louis by the tens of thousands.”

As one might expect, the experiences of children forced to be raised in American Indian Residence Schools were not good.  While many complaints about Chinese practices relate to attempts to diminish the role of Islam in the lives of the Uyghurs, the US schools were intended to Christianize the children.  Since many of the Indian schools were run by religious groups, sexual abuse was common, along with physical and emotional abuse.

“The arc of the moral universe” is definitely long.

“In 1978 Congress passed and the President signed the Indian Child Welfare Act, giving Native American parents the legal right to refuse their child’s placement in a school. Damning evidence related to years of abuses of students in off-reservation boarding schools contributed to the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act. Congress approved this act after hearing testimony about life in Indian boarding schools.”

The Canadians would copy the US schools for its Native Americans with similar results.  A recent CBS News 60-Minutes segment, Canada’s unmarked graves: How residential schools carried out “cultural genocide” against indigenous children, focused on the number of unrecorded deaths that occurred among the children, presumably due to a combination of infections, abuse, and suicides.  CBS News also prepared a shorter piece on US residential schools: Indigenous activists shine a light on the history of residential schools.  Again, the victims claimed being subjected to cultural genocide. 

The Australians would also mistreat their Aboriginals in a similar manner and attain similar levels of pain and suffering.  They refer to the practice as “Stolen Generations.”

What is it they say about people in glass houses?

You can learn a little about a lot of things or you can learn a lot about a very few things. Guess which is the most fun.