ABSTRACT

This chapter considers the impact of European invasion upon diverse indigenous peoples. Vast geographic, temporal, and cultural differences exist among these cases, but there are important common features in the strategies and outcomes of genocide. There is a close link between extinction discourse and the more virulent and systematically hateful ideologies that fueled the Nazi Holocaust in Europe. Ethnic studies scholar Ward Churchill has called it “unparalleled in human history, both in terms of its sheer magnitude and its duration.” Carroll Kakel devotes considerable space to exploring the “imperialist and expansionist vision” of American “founding fathers” such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Legal discrimination, and the imposition of broader “social death” measures, buttressed these frequent genocidal massacres. An event of great significance in the Western hemisphere was the first Continental Indigenous International Convention, held in Quito, Ecuador in July 1990, and “attended by four hundred representatives from 120 indigenous nations and organizations.”.