Melville CookeYou killed off all the Indians
You killed off the slaves
And not quite that
You killed off their remains
Eddy Grant
I NO longer watch westerns. Clint Eastwood's grim stare in Pale Rider no longer appeals to me; I find the term 'circle the wagons' abhorrent.
The western is the glorification of genocide, as white people went about their customary business in what was to them a 'New World', but a very old world to those who already lived there clearing out the natives much as farmers clear land for farming.
There is even a channel dedicated to the genre, where we can see white people riding up and down on horses all day, shooting at each other and smooching their nags more than their partners (female ones, naturally).
About two weeks ago I heard a story on television (I was not in front of the screen). It was about a Native American male, who was starting an Internet dating service for his people, in order to find them suitable matches for reproduction. Without doing this, he said, his people would cease to exist in 30 years.
This is the end result of concentrated savagery by white people, who naturally called the people they were wiping out the savages, herding them onto reservations and introducing them to that drug of all drugs, alcohol.
How many times have we seen movie scenes, where the Native American attacks the convoy or the settlement, spear and bow and arrow in hand, as the women and children huddle and grim faced men return fire with Winchester rifles and that most wonderful weapon, the Colt 'Peacemaker'. Countless. How many times have we seen Native Americans being herded along a trail, walking, dropping like flies as exhaustion and hunger got to them? In my experience, never.
The 'Trail of Tears', in which white chaps force-marched Native Americans from their own land, does not make the big or small screen. The Cherokees know about it, though. Between 1838 and 1839, under the orders of President Andrew Jackson, over 14,000 who had been rounded up were forced to walk 1,200 miles in the winter. Only 10,000 got to their destination; as an estimated 4,000 died. They were hungry, they were cold, they were sick. They cried.
GENESIS OF GENOCIDE
Add to that the removal of the other four Indian nations, which were removed from their homes 'across the Mississippi' the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, Creek and Seminole the 'Long Walk of the Navajo', enforced by the supposedly heroic Kit Carson, on which hundreds died 200 miles into the cold, starvation rations journey, and we see the genesis of genocide.
The English once had a term for the land when they went there, terra nullius, which means 'empty land', such as Australia. Not empty of trees and mountains and rivers, but empty of people, regardless of the fact that the aborigines were living there. They did their level best to shape the land to their definition (not the other way around) by savaging the people who were there before they came.
So, understand that when Colombus' offspring apologises for the treatment of the now extinct Tainos of the region, that it is a common thread which runs through white people's forays into what they called the 'New World'. And understand that when you see a western, you are looking at a cover-up of genocide and even glorification of it.
NO NEED
It is interesting that the term 'genocide', put together by a man called Raphael Lemkin (my Internet culling tells me) and published in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), was specifically coined to capture what Nazi Germany did to the Jews. In other words, there was no need for that word, for what Winston Churchill said is "a crime that has no name", before. There was no need to put together the Greek 'genos' (race or tribe) and the Latin 'cide' (to kill) for the extermination of the people who were living in the 'New World' before white people descended on them.
As I keep track of the world's declining white population and the projections of whites being a minority in the United States by 2050, I am rather amused, though. I chuckle as I remember a man called Jeffrey Amherst (they put a 'Lord' in front of it, but I do not recognise titles given to murderers), who encouraged giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans, led by Chief Pontiac, at Fort Pitt in 1763 (the reports are, naturally, disputed).
He was given 20,000 acres of the people's land and a fancy title which died with him, as he had no offspring. A man who initiated germ warfare had no offspring to carry on his line a situation which is now applicable (to a much lesser degree, of course) to the world's white population.
Yu see unfair game, it mus' play two time. I find it tremendously funny.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
