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Crimes Against Humanity 1

Crimes against Humanity

by Ward Churchill

During the past couple of seasons, there has been an increasing wave of

controversy regarding the names of professional sports teams

like the Atlanta "Braves," Cleveland "Indians," Washington "Redskins,"

and Kansas City "Chiefs." The issue extends to the names of college

teams like Florida State University "Seminoles," University of Illinois

"Fighting Illini," and so on, right on down to high school outfits like

the Lamar (Colorado) "Savages." Also involved have been team adoption

of "mascots," replete with feathers, buckskins, beads, spears and "war

paint" (some fans have opted to adorn themselves in the same fashion),

and nifty little "pep" gestures like the "Indian Chant"

and "Tomahawk Chop."

A substantial number of American Indians have protested that use of

native names, images and symbols as sports team mascots and the like is,

by definition, a virulently racist practice. Given the historical

relationship between Indians and non-Indians during what has been

called the "Conquest of America," American Indian Movement

leader (and American Indian Anti-Defamation Council founder) Russell

Means has compared the practice to contemporary Germans naming their

soccer teams the "Jews," Hebrews," and "Yids," while adorning their

uniforms with grotesque caricatures of Jewish faces taken from the Nazis'

anti-Semitic propaganda of the 1930's. Numerous demonstrations

have occurred in conjunction with games most notably

during the November 15, 1992 matchup between the Chiefs and Redskins

in Kansas City by angry Indians and their supporters.

In response, a number of players especially African Americans and other

minority athletes have been trotted out by professional team

owners like Ted Turner, as well as university and public school officials,

to announce that they mean not to insult but to honor native people. They

have been joined by the television networks and most major newspapers,

all of which have editorialized that Indian discomfort with the situation is

"no big deal," insisting that the whole things is just "good, clean fun."

The country needs more such fun,

they've argued, and a "few disgruntled Native Americans" have no right

to undermine the nation's enjoyment of its leisure time by complaining.

This is especially the case, some have argued, "in hard times like these."

It has even been contended that Indian outrage at being systematically

degraded rather than the degradation itself creates "a serious barrier to

the sort of intergroup communication so necessary in a multicultural

society such as ours."

Okay. Let’s communicate. We are frankly dubious that

those advancing such positions really believe their own rhetoric but, just

for the sake of argument, let's accept the premise that they are sincere. If

what they say is true, then isn't it time we spread such "inoffensiveness"

and "good cheer" around among all the groups so that everybody can

Crimes Against Humanity 2

participate equally in fostering the national round of laughs they call for?

Sure it is the country can't have too much fun or "intergroup" involvement

so the more, the merrier. Simple consistency demands that anyone who

thinks the Tomahawk Chop is a swell pastime must be just as hearty in

their endorsement of the following ideas by the logic used to

defend the defamation of American Indians should help us all really start

yukking it up.

First, as a counterpart to the Redskins, we need an NFL team

called "Niggers" to honor Afro-Americans. Halftime festivities for fans

might include a simulated stewing of the opposing coach in

a large pot while players and cheerleaders dance around it, garbed in

leopard skins and wearing fake bones in their noses. This concept

obviously goes along with the kind of gaiety attending the Chop, but also

with the actions of the Kansas Chiefs, whose team members prominently

including black members lately appeared on a poster, looking "fierce"

and "savage" by way of wearing Indian regalia. Just a bit of harmless

"morale boosting," says the Chief's front office. You bet.

So that the newly formed Niggers sports club won't end up too out of

sync while expressing the "spirit" and "identity" of Afro-Americans in

the above fashion, a baseball franchise let's call this one the "Sambos"

should be formed. How about a basketball team

called the "spearchuckers/" A hockey team called the "Jungle Bunnies."

Maybe the "essence of these teams could be depicted by images of tiny

black faces adorned with huge pairs of lips. The players could appear on

TV every week or so gnawing on chicken legs and spitting watermelon

seeds at one another. Catchy, eh? Well, there's "nothing to be upset

about," according to those who love wearing "war bonnets" to the Super

Bowl or having "Chief Illiniwik" dance around the sports arenas of

Urbana, Illinois.

And why stop there? There are plenty of other groups to include.

"Hispanics?" They can be "represented" by the Galveston "Greasers"

and the San Diego "Spics," at least until the Wisconsin "Wetbacks"

and Baltimore "Beaners" get off the ground. Asian Americans?

How about the "slopes," "Dinks," "Gooks," and "Zipperheads?" Owners

of the latter teams might get their logo ideas from editorial page cartoons

printed in the nation's newspapers during World War II: slant eyes,

buck teeth, big glasses, but nothing racially insulting or derogatory,

according to the editors and artists involved at the time. Indeed, this

Second World War vintage stuff can be seen as just another barrel of

laughs, at least by what current editors say are their "local standards"

concerning American Indians.

Let's see. Who's been left out? Teams like the Kansas City "Kikes,"

Hanover "Honkies," San Leandro "Shylock," Daytona "Dagos,"

and Pittsburg "Polacks" will fill a certain social void among white folk.

Have a religious belief? Let's all go for the gusto and gear

up the Milwaukee "Mackerel Snappers" and Hollywood "Holy

Crimes Against Humanity 3

Rollers." The Fighting Irish of Notre Dame can

be rechristened the "Drunken Irish" or "Papist Pigs." Issues of

gender and sexual preference can be addressed through creation of teams

like the St. Louis "Sluts," Boston "Bimbos," Detroit "Dykes,"

and the Fresno "Fags." How about the Gainesville "Gimps"

and the Richmond "Retards," so the physically and mentally

impaired won't be excluded from our fun and games?

Now, don't go getting "overly sensitive" out there. None of this is

dreaming or insulting, at least not when it's being done to Indians. Just

ask the folks who are doing it, or their apologists like Andy Rooney in

the national media. They'll tell you as in fact they have been telling you

that there's been no harm done, regardless of what their victims think,

feel, or say. The situation is exactly the same as when those with precisely

the same mentality used to insist that Step 'n' Fetchit was okay, or

Rochester on the Jack Benny show, or Amos and Andy, Charlie Chan,

the Frito Bandito, or any other cutesy symbols making up the lexicon of

American racism. Have we communicated yet? Let's get just a little bit

real here. The notion of "fun" embodied in rituals like the Tomahawk

Chop must be understood for what it is. There's not a single non-Indian

example used above which can be considered socially acceptable in even

the most marginal sense. The reasons are obvious enough. So why is it

different where American Indians are concerned? One can only

conclude that, in contrast to the other groups at issue, Indians are (falsely)

perceived as being too few, and therefore too weak, to defend themselves

effectively against racist and otherwise offensive behavior.

Fortunately, there are some glimmers of hope. A few teams and their fans

have gotten the message and have responded appropriately.

Stanford University, which opted to drop the name "Indians," has

experienced no resulting drop in attendance. Meanwhile, the local

newspaper in Portland, Oregon recently decided its longstanding editorial

policy prohibiting use of racial epithets should include derogatory teams’

names. The Redskins, for instance, are now referred to as

"the Washington team," and will continue to be described in this way until

the franchise adopts an inoffensive moniker (newspaper sales in

Portland have suffered no decline as a result). Such examples

are to be applauded and encouraged. They stand as figurative beacons in

the night, proving beyond all doubt that it is quite possible to indulge in

the pleasure of athletics without accepting blatant racism into the bargain.

Nuremburg Precedents

On October 16, 1946, a man named Julius Streicher mounted the steps of

a gallows. Moments later he was dead, the sentence of an international

tribunal composed of representatives of the United States, France, Great

Britain, and the Soviet Union, having been imposed. Streicher's body was

then cremated, and so horrendous were his crimes thought to have been

his ashes dumped into an unspecified German river so that "no

Crimes Against Humanity 4

one should ever know a particular place to go for reasons of mourning his

memory."

Julius Streicher had been convicted at Nuremberg, Germany of what

were termed "Crimes Against Humanity." The lead prosecutor in his case,

Justice Robert Jackson of the United States Supreme Court, had not

argued that the defendant had killed anyone, nor that he had personally

committed any especially violent act. Nor was it contended

that Streicher had held any particularly important position in the German

government during the period in which the so called Third Reich

had exterminated some 6,000,000 Jews, as well as several million

Gypsies, Poles, Slavs, homosexuals, and other untermenschen

(subhumans).

The sole offense for which the accused was ordered put to death was in

having served as publisher/editor of a Bavarian

tabloid entitled Der Sturmer during the early to mid 1930s, years

before the Nazi genocide actually began. In this capacity, he had

penned a long series of virulently anti-Semitic editorials and ''news."

Stories were usually accompanied by cartoons and other images

graphically depicting Jews in extraordinarily derogatory fashion. This,

the prosecution asserted, had done much to "dehumanize" the targets of

his distortion in the mind of the German public. In turn, such

dehumanization had made it possible, or at least easier, for average

Germans to later indulge in the outright liquidation of Jewish "vermin."

The tribunal agreed, holding that Streicher was therefore complicit in

genocide and deserving of death by hanging.

During his remarks to the Nuremburg tribunal, Justice Jackson

observed that, in implementing its sentences, the participating powers

were morally and legally binding themselves to adhere forever after to

the same standards of conduct that were being

applied to Streicher and the other Nazi leaders. In the alternative, he said,

the victorious allies would have committed ‘pure murder’ at Nuremberg

no different in substance from that carried out by those they

presumed to judge rather than establishing the "permanent benchmark for

justice" which was intended.

Yet in the United States of Robert Jackson, the indigenous American

Indian population had already been reduced, in a process which is

ongoing to this day, from perhaps 12.5 million in the year 1500 to fewer

than 250,000 by the beginning of the 20th century. This was

accomplished, according to official sources, "largely through the cruelty

of Euro American settlers," and an informal but clear governmental policy

which had made it an articulated goal to "exterminate these red vermin" or

at least whole segments of them.

Bounties had been placed on the scalps of Indians, any Indians, in places

as diverse as Georgia, Kentucky, Texas, the Dakotas, Oregon,

Crimes Against Humanity 5

and California and had been maintained until resident Indian populations

were decimated or disappeared altogether. Entire peoples such as

the Cherokee had been reduced to half their size through a policy of

forced removal from their homelands east of the Mississippi River to

what were then considered less preferable areas in the West.

Others, such as the Navajo, suffered the same fate while under military

guard for years on end. The United States Army had also perpetrated

a long series of wholesale massacres of Indians at places

like Horseshoe Bend, Bear River, Sand Creek, the Washita River,

the Marias River, Camp Robinson and Wounded Knee.

Through it all, hundreds of popular novels each competing with the next

to make Indians appear more grotesque, menacing, and inhuman

were sold in the tens of millions of copies in the U.S. Plainly, the Euro

American public was being conditioned to see Indians in such a way so as

to allow their eradication to continue. And continue it did until

the Manifest Destiny of the U.S, a direct precursor to what Hitler would

subsequently call Lebensraumpolitik (the politics of living space), was

consummated.

By 1900, the national project of "clearing" Native Americans from their

land and replacing them with "superior" Anglo American settlers was

complete; The indigenous population had been reduced by as much as

98 percent while approximately 97.5 percent of their original territory

had ''passed'' to the invaders. The survivors had been concentrated, out of

sight and mind of the public, on scattered "reservations," all of them

under the self assigned "plenary" (full) power of the federal government.

There was, of course, no Nuremberg style tribunal passing judgment on

those who had fostered such circumstances in North America. No

U.S. official or private citizen was ever imprisoned,

never mind hanged, for implementing or propagandizing what had been

done. Nor had the process of genocide afflicting Indians been completed.

Instead, it merely changed form.

Between the 1880s and the 1980s, nearly half of all Native American

children were coercively transferred from their own families,

communities, and cultures to those of the conquering society. This was

done through compulsory attendance at remote boarding schools, often

hundreds of miles from their homes, where native children were kept for

years on end while being systematically '"deculturated"

(indoctrinated to think and act in the manner of Euro Americans

rather than as Indians). It was also accomplished through

a pervasive foster home and adoption program including blind adoptions,

where children would be permanently denied information as to who they

were/are and where they'd come from placing native youths in non-Indian

homes.

The express purpose of all this was to facilitate a U.S. governmental

policy to bring about the "assimilation" (dissolution) of indigenous

Crimes Against Humanity 6

societies. In other words, Indian cultures as such were to be caused to

disappear. Such policy objectives are directly contrary

to the United Nations 1948 Convention on Punishment and Prevention of

the Crime of Genocide, an element of international law arising from

the Nuremburg proceedings. The forced "transfer of the children" of

a targeted "racial, ethnical, or religious group" is explicitly prohibited as

a genocidal activity under the Convention's second article.

Article II of the Genocide Convention also expressly prohibits involuntary

sterilization as a means of ''preventing births among"

a targeted population. Yet, in 1975, it was conceded by the U.S.

government that its Indian Health Service (IHS), then a subpart of the

Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), was even then conducting a secret

program of involuntary sterilization that had affected approximately

40 percent of all Indian women. The program was allegedly discontinued,

and the IHS was transferred to the Public Health Service, but no one was

punished. In 1990, it came out that the IHS was inoculating, Inuit children

in Alaska with Hepatitis B vaccine. The vaccine had already been

banned by the World Health Organization as having demonstrated

a correlation with the HIV Syndrome which is itself correlated to AIDS.

As this is written [March, 1993], a "field test" of Hepatitis A vaccine, also

HIV correlated, is being conducted on Indian reservations in the northern

plains region.

The Genocide Convention makes it a crime against "humanity" to create

conditions leading to the destruction of an identifiable human group, as

such. Yet the BIA has utilized the government's plenary prerogatives

to negotiate mineral leases "on behalf of" Indian peoples paying a fraction

of standard royalty rates. The result has been "super profits" for

a number of preferred U.S. corporations. Meanwhile, Indians, whose

reservations ironically turned out to be in some of the most mineral rich

areas of North America, which makes us, the nominally

wealthiest segment of the continent's population, live in dire poverty.

By the government's own data in the mid1980s, Indians

received the lowest annual and lifetime per capita incomes of any

aggregate population group in the United States. Concomitantly,

we suffer the highest rate of infant mortality, death by exposure

and malnutrition, disease, and the like. Under such circumstances,

alcoholism and other escapist forms of substance abuse are endemic in

the Indian community, a situation which leads both to a general physical

debilitation of the population and a catastrophic accident rate. Teen

suicide among Indians is several times the national average.

The average life expectancy of a reservation based Native American man

is barely 45 years; Women can expect to live less than three years longer.

Such itemizations could be continued at great length, including matters

like the radioactive contamination of large portions of contemporary

Indian Country, the forced relocation of traditional Navajos, and so on.

But the point should be made: Genocide, as defined in international law,

Crimes Against Humanity 7

is a continuing fact of day-to-day life (and death) for North America's

native peoples. Yet there has been, and is, only the barest flicker of

public concern about or even consciousness of, this reality. Absent any

serious expression of public outrage, no one is punished and the process

continues.

A salient reason for public acquiescence before the ongoing holocaust in

Native North America has been a continuation of the popular legacy,

often through more effective media. Since 1925, Hollywood has

released more than 2,000 films, many of them rerun frequently on

television, portraying Indians as strange, perverted, ridiculous, and often

dangerous things of the past. Moreover, we are habitually

presented to mass audiences one dimensionally, devoid of

recognizable human motivations and emotions: Indians thus serve as

props, little more. We have thus been thoroughly and systematically

dehumanized.

Nor is this the extent of it. Everywhere we are used as logos, as mascots,

as jokes: "Big Chief" writing tablets, "Red Man" chewing tobacco,

"Winnebago," campers., "Navajo" and "Cherokee" and "Pontiac"

and "Cadillac" pickups and automobiles. There

are the Cleveland "Indians," the Kansas City "Chiefs,"

the Atlanta "Braves" and the Washington "Redskins" professional sports

teams not to mention those in thousands of colleges, high schools,

and elementary schools across the country each with their own

degrading caricatures and parodies of Indians and or things Indian.

Pop fiction continues in the same vein including an unending stream of

New Age manuals purporting to expose the inner works of indigenous

spirituality in everything from pseudo philosophical to do-it-yourself

styles. Blond yuppies from Beverly Hills amble about the country

claiming to be reincarnated 17th century Cheyenne Ushamans ready to

perform previously secret ceremonies.

In effect, a concerted, sustained, and in some ways accelerating effort has

gone into making Indians unreal. It is thus of obvious importance that

the American public begin to think about the implications of such things

the next time they witness a gaggle of facepainted and war--

bonneted buffoons doing the "Tomahawk Chop" at a baseball or football

game. It is necessary that they think about the implications of the grade

school teacher adorning their child in turkey feathers

to commemorate Thanksgiving. Think about the significance of John

Wayne or Charleston Heston killing a dozen "savages" with a single bullet

the next time a western comes on TV. Think about why Land o Lakes

finds it appropriate to market its butter with the stereotyped image of an

"Indian princess" on the wrapper. Think about what it means when non-

Indian academics profess, as they often do, to "know more about Indians

than Indians do themselves." Think about the significance of charlatans

like Carlos Castaneda and Jamake Highwater and Mary Summer Rain

and Lynn Andrews churning out "Indian" bestsellers one after the other,

while Indians typically can't get into print. Think about the real situation

Crimes Against Humanity 8

of American Indians. Think about Julius Streicher.

Remember Justice Jackson's admonition. Understand that the treatment of

Indians in American popular culture is not "cute'' or "amusing," or just

"good, clean fun."

Know that it causes real pain and real suffering to real people. Know that

it threatens our very survival. And know that this is just as much

a crime against humanity as anything the Nazis ever did. It is likely

the indigenous people of the United States will never demand that

those guilty of such criminal activity be punished for their deeds. But

the least we have to expect indeed to demand is that such practices finally

be brought to a halt.