Barbara Taylor’s letter titled “An American Analogy” seeks to demonstrate how we in the United States are more humane and magnanimous toward Native Americans than the Israeli government is toward Palestinians. This claim astounds me as a professor of American history who taught at the university level for more than forty years.
The United States army as well as private citizens practiced annihilation, even genocide, against Native American tribes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The means to those ends were diverse.
Biological warfare, intended and unintended, decimated tribal populations. Massacres made no allowance for age or gender. The slaughter of buffalo herds starved men, women, and children. Our history is scarred by events like the Trail of Tears, the Sand Creek Massacre, the massacre on the Washita River, among many other incidents.
Too easily we forget the forced acculturation of Native American children in Utah and elsewhere when federal and local authorities sought to extinguish native social, religious, and cultural values and beliefs. How honorable were we Americans in our treaty-making with Native tribes? The result of our land hunger left only Native reminders in place names.
Such destruction did not end in the 19th century. During and after World War II, the U.S. Congress enacted legislation that terminated the sovereignty of a number of tribes, hastening assimilation, speeding the loss of land, and giving states criminal jurisdiction over reservations. Anyone visiting these reservations today can only feel shame for our behavior. These are lands that remained in Native hands because they held no economic value for Anglo Americans.
In all of this, I am reminded of Jesus’ words: “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone….” Perhaps in the search for victims, we should begin looking in our own backyard.
Robert A. Goldberg, Salt Lake City
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