review essay genocide

Genocide and Transitional Justice

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• Published: 10 January 2017
• Volume 18 , pages 111–116, ( 2017 )

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• Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr. 1  

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Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen, Institute for History, History and International Studies, Johan Huizinga, Doelensteeg 16 The University of Leiden, 2311 VL, Leiden, The Netherlands

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Regilme, S.S.F. Genocide and Transitional Justice. Hum Rights Rev 18 , 111–116 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-016-0448-9

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Published : 10 January 2017

Issue Date : March 2017

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-016-0448-9

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Review Essay: The Psychology of Genocide

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Literature Review on Theories of Genocide

2019, University of Glasgow

Genocide is a concept that often heard in the history of security study, but the definition remains unclear and debatable for many scholars. Although Raphael Lemkin brought the concept in 1944, Kuper identified genocide as an “odious scourge that has inflicted great losses on humanity in all periods of history.” Some genocide cases, for example Holocaust during the World War II already happened before the concept exist. Erich Ludendorff used genocide as German strategy of total war. Although genocide and total war connected in the case of Holocaust, those are two separate phenomena with different meaning and way of conduct. This paper aims to review the theories of genocide and distinguish the concept of genocide with other concept like ethnocide, politicide, and total war.

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Jeff Benvenuto

Genocide Studies and Prevention

Christian Gudehus , Daniel Rothbart , Diana I . Popescu , JoAnn DiGeorgio-Lutz

Nafeez Ahmed

Conventional definitions of genocide, in particular the United Nations Convention standard, are state-oriented and primordialist. Genocide is seen primarily as the outcome of extremist ideology linked to undemocratic modern bureaucratic nationstates, whose homogenizing structures generate conflict with pre-existing minority groups. The UN definition of genocide imposes unwarranted politicized constraints on Lemkin’s wider original sociological conceptualization of genocide as a colonial form. For Lemkin, perpetrators of genocide could be states as well as decentralized and dispersed groups such as settler-colonists. The need for a return to Lemkin’s Historical Sociological theory of genocide, now increasingly recognized among genocide scholars, demonstrates not merely that specific cases of European imperial violence can potentially be understood as genocidal, but that this is precisely because genocide can best be understood as an extreme form of colonization. A strong case has now been made by several scholars that while this does not mean that all colonialism is genocidal, it is unequivocally clear that genocides are comprised of distinctively colonial dynamics. These colonial dynamics emerge due to the radicalisation of identity politics in the context of historically-specific sociopolitical contestations leading to major social crises, which drive the construction of new bifurcated “inside” and “outside” group identities. This speaks to the need for a new research agenda in Genocide Studies, focusing specifically on the dynamics that link socio-political crisis with exclusionary identity constructions and regressive political programmes which legitimize mass violence. By identifying how and when social crises can lead to the ‘Otherization’ of communities, it may become possible to develop more robust early warning systems for genocide prevention.

University of Glasgow

Rage Taufika

International Journal of Human Rights

Haifa Rashed

This article examines the situation of the Palestinians through the sociological lens of the concept of genocide. Following a recent trend in genocide studies, the article engages with the original theorising of Raphael Lemkin – who coined the term ‘genocide’. These studies have highlighted the association Lemkin made between genocide and colonialism and have applied the genocide concept to settler colonial societies such as Australia. It argues that if Israel is conceivably a settler colonial project then by implication its relationship with the Palestinian people can be analysed through the genocide lens. Whilst some academics and journalists are now tentatively applying terms such as ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ to describe the events surrounding the creation of the Israeli state, the historical and continuing, cultural and physical, destructive social and political relations involved in the Israel/Palestine conflict is a somewhat neglected potential case study in the field of genocide studies. The objective of this article is to highlight the potential for a Lemkin inspired sociology of genocide in analysing aspects of the Israel/Palestine conflict, through a consideration of the link he made between genocide and colonialism and some of his key ‘techniques of genocide’ as specified in the seminal text Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.

Social Sciences

Israel Charny

A new tool is presented for facilitating greater objectivity in the chaotic field of genocide studies: first, assembling the available factual data about any event of mass murder systematically; second, contextualizing each of our judgments of the nature of the crime as a choice being made by a given scholar or institution (e.g., a specific court), but not as "God's word." The Worksheet for Describing and Categorizing a Genocidal Event is believed to be innovative in several ways: (1) This model presents researchers with a methodology for developing systematic, extensive and objective information about many different aspects of an event of mass killing; (2) Emphasis is placed on identifying each researcher's guiding concept of genocide; (3) The proposed methodology purposely postpones any effort at classification-including whether an event constitutes "genocide"-until after factual data have been assembled; (4) Categorization of an event is also to be understood as an act of judgment by each researcher, not as scientifically established truth; (5) It is also to be understood that classification in the language of social sciences is different than legal classifications that in turn also are to be understood as based on whatever specific code of law.

Michael Letsinger

Genocide has been with us in varying degrees' since we left the trees for the savannahs. In all phases of human existence, in nearly every part of the world, genocide is an indivisible part of our history. Humans have an incredible capacity for marginalizing others, for supporting oppression and annihilation. I suggest genocide is a survival strategy long since adapted to our existence.1 Hundreds of millions of people have met their death in brutal genocidal episodes throughout our history. Neanderthal remains from the Troisième cave of Goyet (Belgium) dating back some 40,000 years is substantial evidence of cannibalism, possibly as a force of genocide.2 Our argument is genocide did not begin in 1940, nor was the 1940s Shoah different from a core element to the mindset of superiority in the rise of the State that has been a part of the human experience since the Bronze Age and perhaps even before then. There is a belief that there are others who serve that superiority because they are not like us because they stand in the way of our progress, our survival, or their God is not our God. While recognizing the Shoah was horrific, and it does serve modernity as the worst kind of barbarity. Further, we assert that that violence begets violence, that ignorance feeds grief, fear, and greed; that genocide becomes a

tisa mhembere

Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions edited by George J. Andreopoulos

The definition of genocide adopted in law and by professional social scientists must match the realities of life. so that there should be no situation in which thousands and even millions of defenseless victims of mass murder do not "qualify" as victims of genocide. Insofar as there is ever a major discrepancy between the reality of masses of dead people and our legal-scholarly definitions. it is the latter which must yield and change. The definition of genocide must also be consistent with the everyday usage of the word by reasonable people when they stand and face a mass of murdered people and naturally apply to such an event the only word there is in the human language for such occurrences. Thus, the. mass murders of twenty million Soviet citizens by Stalin, 1 the massacre of one hundred thousand or more of the communist opposition by Indonesia, the murders of one to two million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge are all instances of clear-cut genocide. And instances of mass murders of a lesser magnitude by governments-five thousand Tamils in Sri Lanka and fiye thousand students in Tiananmen Square in China, for example-are also, in common sense and understanding. genocidal events, although there may be a consensus to characterize these numerically smaller events as genocidal massacres, as Leo Kuper, the doyen of genocide scholars, has proposed. This chapter in Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions edited by George J. Andreopoulos proposes a generic definition of genocide. which at the same time is supplemented by a series of subcategories of different types of genocide. I shall also propose at least two new categories of genocide: first , accomplices to genocide, and second. genocide as a result of ecological destruction and abuse.

Christian Gudehus , Filip Strandberg Hassellind , Diana I . Popescu , JoAnn DiGeorgio-Lutz

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Review Essay: Larry May, Genocide: A Normative Account

American Journal of International Law, Vol. 105, p. 852, 2011

7 Pages Posted: 18 Dec 2011

Alexander K. A. Greenawalt

Pace University Elisabeth Haub School of Law

Date Written: December 17, 2011

Recent years have tested the definition of the crime of genocide, with mass atrocities in the Balkans, Rwanda, and Sudan sparking controversy over their legal characterization, and with a proliferation of international criminal tribunals and the International Court of Justice called upon to adjudicate. At times, the focus on genocide has threatened to become a distraction, as if to label these crimes something other than genocide is to diminish their gravity, rendering their victims less victimized, or less worthy of international attention. Lurking behind the technical, definitional debates, moreover, is a deeper question regarding the very coherence of genocide as a distinct offense. Is the crime reducible to a normatively satisfying legal definition, one that identifies distinct harms deserving of separate legal recognition. Or perhaps is the symbolic weight of genocide more than the law can bear? The bulk of May’s argument develops a qualified normative justification of genocide as a crime focused on a distinct harm: the loss of identity and status suffered by members of groups on account of efforts to destroy to the group. This justification, May argues, flows from his nominalist position that groups themselves have no independent ontological status and thus cannot be said to suffer harms. The unique harm of genocide, therefore, is one suffered by victims whose lives find meaning in the inter-subjective experience of group identity. The central difficulties in the law of genocide are not, of course, ones of May’s making, and his book deserves credit for carefully revealing both the necessity of a normative justification and the complex nature of that project. Whether May succeeds in justifying the offense’s group-based focus is a more debatable question. I suspect that May’s readers may be equally inclined to abandon the idea of genocide as a meaningful legal concept, or perhaps to agree with David Luban that the concept of genocide must extend beyond group destruction to include all large scale massacres that are currently proscribed by the crime against humanity of extermination. In either event, Genocide: A Normative Account will be required reading for those pursuing these questions.

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Reexamining the American Genocide Debate: Meaning, Historiography, and New Methods

Benjamin Madley is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He earned a Ph.D. in history at Yale University and was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College before coming to UCLA. A historian of the United States, Native America, and colonialism, he is the author of articles and book chapters addressing indigenous peoples and genocides in Africa, Australia, and North America, as well as Nazi mass murder in Europe. His first book, An American Genocide: The California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 , will be published by Yale University Press.

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Benjamin Madley, Reexamining the American Genocide Debate: Meaning, Historiography, and New Methods, The American Historical Review , Volume 120, Issue 1, February 2015, Pages 98–139, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/120.1.98

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N ative A mericans suffered a catastrophic demographic decline following sustained contact with Europeans. From a pre-contact population of perhaps 5,000,000 or more, the number of American Indians within the continental United States and its colonial antecedents fell to some 240,000 individuals by 1880–1900. The cataclysm thus ranks among the major long-term population disasters of world history. Some scholars assert that introduced diseases were the primary cause of this catastrophe, while others argue that colonialism, war, and diseases combined to wreak demographic devastation. 1

Academics continue to debate whether or not Native Americans—or any groups of them—suffered genocide during the conquest and colonization of the Americas. It is a question that should matter not just to scholars and Native Americans, but to all U.S. citizens. Although the political and administrative boundaries of the United States have been imposed upon indigenous peoples, they form a cohesive unit of historical analysis with real meaning and repercussions for scholars, American Indians, and non-Indians in both the past and present. While the stakes of the debate as it relates to Native Americans may echo those in other genocide debates, new methods of inquiry will help to move this particular debate forward. Examining statements of genocidal intent, massacres, state-sponsored body-part bounties, and mass death in government custody can provide scholars with a rubric for locating, evaluating, or ruling out possible instances of genocide. Detailed case studies are crucial to this approach. They can reframe the debate by focusing on the question of genocide for particular tribes rather than all Native Americans. Applying these methods to two specific cases—Connecticut's Pequot Indians and California's Yuki Indians—suggests how this approach might then be used to locate and define other cases of genocide within and beyond the Americas. 2

T he near-annihilation of North America's indigenous peoples remains a formative event in U.S. history. Along with wars, real estate transactions of often questionable validity, the making and breaking of treaties, forced removal, confinement to reservations, and the 1887 Dawes Allotment Act, which reduced federally recognized Native American landholdings by about 90,000,000 acres, the American Indian population cataclysm played a central role in the clearing of hundreds of millions of acres for colonization. These lands, in turn, provided the vast geography and the cornucopia of natural resources upon which the modern United States was built. Thus, how we explain the Native American population catastrophe informs how we understand the making of the U.S. and its colonial origins.

In 1622, the Mayflower passenger Robert Cushman wrote of America: “Our land is full … their land is empty. This then is a sufficient reason to prove our going thither to live lawful: their land is spacious and void, and they are few and do but run over the grass, as do also the foxes and wild beasts. They are not industrious, neither have [they] art, science, skill or faculty to use either the land or the commodities of it; but all spoils, rots, and is marred for want of manuring, gathering, ordering, etc.” Articulating the vacuum domicilium , or “empty domicile,” theory, which many would cite in attempting to justify their conquest and colonization of North America, Cushman claimed that American Indians did not inhabit their homelands fully enough, either in population density or in economic development, to justify their having legal ownership, particularly in so-called “empty” areas. Cushman was not alone in such thinking. 3 In 1516, the English lawyer Thomas More anticipated that colonists would, and preachers John Donne and John Cotton and even Pennsylvania proprietor William Penn later asserted that legally they could, seize “voyde and vacannt,” “abandoned” or unfilled, “vacant,” and “Waste, or unculted Country.” 4 The English philosopher and Carolina Colony secretary John Locke then contended in 1690 that colonists could obtain legal title to such Indian land with his “agricultural argument,” which suggested that agriculturally unimproved lands could be taken by those who improved them. 5 Meanwhile, “Old World” diseases such as diphtheria, influenza, malaria, measles, scarlet fever, smallpox, typhus, and whooping cough killed great numbers, diminishing many Native American populations while buttressing the specious vacuum domicilium theory in some Europeans' minds. Thus emerged the almost canonical trope of American Indian population decline as a natural disaster created by biological forces, and the expropriation of increasingly “empty” Native American lands as a just response to opportunities created by regrettable, but inevitable, natural devastation. 6

Disease did kill untold numbers of Native Americans, and scholars continue to explore the causes, dynamics, variability, and magnitude of disease-induced population losses. Yet the emphasis on disease as the prime agent of American Indian demographic decline tends to overshadow the equally undeniable role of violence in the population catastrophe and in the conquest of the United States. The determination of whether or not such violence constituted genocide requires a more careful examination of the role of human agency in this cataclysm and whether or not some colonizers committed what legal scholar William Schabas has called “the crime of crimes.” 7 It requires an exploration of the possibility of genocide in the foundations of U.S. history, or at least that of some regions. These are difficult issues. Nonetheless, the question of whether genocide occurred in the United States and its colonial antecedents should be on conference agendas, discussed in classrooms, debated in public forums, and pursued in scholarly journals because the stakes are so high for scholars, American Indians, and all U.S. citizens.

If the conquest and colonization of some regions of the United States, if not the entire nation, involved deliberate attempts to annihilate Native American peoples, scholars will need to reevaluate current interpretive axioms and address new quandaries. Scholars could, for example, reexamine the assumption that indirect effects of colonization, such as the spread of disease, rather than deliberate actions, such as murder, were the leading cause of death in most or all encounters between newcomers and Native Americans. Exceptionalist interpretations of U.S. history—which suggest that the United States is fundamentally unlike other nations—may also lose validity as researchers compare genocides in the U.S. to other mass killings and place them within global comparative frameworks. Where scholars document a genocide, it will be necessary to evaluate what roles colonial, federal, state, and territorial governments played, as well as whether the event was part of a recurring regional or national pattern. Larger questions then follow. What tended to catalyze genocide? Who ordered and carried out the killing? Why do we not know more about these events? Did democracy drive mass murder? And, ultimately, was genocide central to the making of the contemporary United States? 8

Given its political, economic, psychological, and health ramifications, the genocide question is particularly urgent for the approximately 5,220,000 U.S. citizens of self-reported Native American ancestry. Should tribes press for official apologies, reparations, and control of land where genocidal events took place? Should tribes marshal evidence of genocide in cases involving tribal sovereignty and federal recognition? How should Native American communities commemorate mass murder while also emphasizing successful accommodation, resistance, survival, and cultural renewal? The psychological issues related to genocide are also fraught. What happens when a tribal member learns that she or he is a descendant of both perpetrators and victims? How might Native American people reconcile increased knowledge of genocide—sometimes at the hands of the United States—with their frequently intense patriotism? Finally, what role might acknowledgment of genocide have on the “intergenerational/historical trauma” in some Native American communities and that trauma's connection to present-day illnesses, substance abuse, domestic violence, and suicide? 9

The question of genocide in the history of the United States and its colonial antecedents also poses explosive political, economic, educational, and psychological questions for all U.S. citizens. Acknowledgment and reparations are central issues. Should elected government officials tender public apologies to Native Americans, as Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush did in the 1980s for the relocation and internment of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II? Reparations are an important subordinate issue. Should federal officials offer compensation to American Indians, along the lines of the more than $1.6 billion that Congress awarded to 82,210 of those Japanese Americans and their heirs? The question of commemoration is closely linked. Will non-Indian citizens support or tolerate the commemoration of mass murders committed by some of the nation's forefathers with the same kinds of monuments, museums, and state-legislated days of remembrance that today commemorate the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust? Will genocides against Native Americans join those systematic mass murders in school curricula and public discourse? 10

Steps have been taken toward federal acknowledgment of some wrongs done to Native Americans. In 1989 and 1990, Congress passed the National Museum of the American Indian Act and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which in combination mandate that federally funded institutions protect Native American gravesites and return human remains and objects taken from Native Americans under certain circumstances. In 2000, the head of the federal government's Bureau of Indian Affairs, Kevin Gover, publicly apologized for that organization's role in the lethal “removal of the southeastern tribal nations” and “the ethnic cleansing that befell the western tribes.” Gover, who is Comanche and Pawnee, also acknowledged “the cowardly killing of women and children” and “tragedy on a scale so ghastly that it cannot be dismissed as merely the inevitable consequence of the clash of competing ways of life.” 11 Four years later, six U.S. senators and a congresswoman introduced “A joint resolution to acknowledge a long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the United States Government regarding Indian tribes and offer an apology to all Native Peoples on behalf of the United States.” The resolution noted how “Native Peoples suffered and perished … during … forced removal … during bloody armed confrontation and massacres [and] on numerous reservations.” 12 After failing in 2004, 2005, and 2007, the resolution passed in a diluted form in 2009. This apology, signed by President Barack Obama that year, “recognizes … years of official depredations, ill-conceived policies, and the breaking of covenants by the Federal Government regarding Indian tribes.” It also “apologizes … to all Native Peoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by citizens of the United States.” It does not, however, address genocide. 13 Still, by coming close to the issue, the apology generated substantial resistance as well as support, because the implications were, and remain, profound. It is little wonder that most scholars have avoided the genocide question, or that it remains unresolved. However, the deadlocked American genocide debate is also to blame.

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Scholars soon began using this new tool. Lemkin planned chapters on “Genocide against the American Indians” and “The Indians in North America (in part)” for two genocide histories that he was working on, but he died in 1959 before he could complete either project. 15 In the 1960s and 1970s, informed by the rising awareness of the Holocaust and genocide, a few activists and scholars began using the term to describe historical violence against American Indians. President Reagan focused additional attention on genocide by endorsing the Genocide Convention in 1984. Three years later, anthropologist Russell Thornton published the first scholarly monograph addressing genocide in the continental United States as a whole. Thornton argued that genocide was one of several causes of Native American demographic decline, but that only in certain cases did it result in total extermination. 16 The following year, the United States ratified the Convention, with caveats. Meanwhile, the field of genocide studies was beginning to coalesce, and some of its foundational publications touched on questions of genocide in colonial New England and the nineteenth-century U.S. 17

The 1992 quincentenary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Western Hemisphere catalyzed new assertions that American Indians had suffered genocide. In his book American Holocaust , American studies scholar David Stannard argued: “From almost the instant of first human contact between Europe and the Americas firestorms of microbial pestilence and purposeful genocide began laying waste the American natives.” 18 Historian Richard White responded that while “Instances of what can only be called genocide did occur against particular Indian peoples … finding specific instances of genocide does not make the entirety of American Indian policy genocidal.” 19 Thornton then critiqued Stannard's work for focusing on genocide to the exclusion of the axiom that “Populations constantly change in size due to births and deaths (and migrations).” 20 Other scholars also began mentioning genocide against Native Americans while emphasizing different theses. For example, ethnic studies scholar Ward Churchill suggested that genocide began with the European invasion and continued into the post–Cold War era through “genocidal … Internal Colonialism.” 21

Twenty-first-century scholars have offered additional assertions that Native Americans suffered genocide. 22 Still, while histories of violence against American Indians abound, detailed case studies marshaling substantial evidence of both genocidal intent and specific genocidal acts to support the broad thesis of genocide in America remain few and far between. 23 Examples include Thornton's three brief case studies, Stannard's four short studies, and the eighty-eight pages of Blood and Soil that historian Ben Kiernan dedicated to instances of genocide in “Colonial North America, 1600–1776” and “Genocide in the United States.” 24

In opposition, other scholars have claimed that Native Americans rarely, or never, suffered genocide. In 1992, historian James Axtell called “‘genocide’ … inaccurate as a description of the vast majority of encounters between Europeans and Indians.” 25 In 1994, religious studies scholar Steven Katz deemed “the depopulation of the New World … largely an unintended tragedy.” 26 Five years later, historian Robert Utley asserted that using the term “genocide” in relation to American Indians “grossly falsifies history,” since “No more than a tiny portion of the white population of the United States, mainly in the West, ever advocated” the “intentional obliteration” of American Indians “by means of mass physical annihilation.” 27 In 2004, historian William Rubinstein insisted that “American policy towards the Indians … never actually encompassed genocide,” and historian Guenter Lewy agreed: “Genocide was never American policy, nor was it the result of policy.” 28 In 2014, historian Gary Anderson added that “Genocide did not occur in America,” but “ethnic cleansing” did. 29

Two factors have polarized the American genocide debate. First, not all participants agree on what genocide means. Second, most participants frame the debate in collective terms, rather than exploring the question on a tribe-by-tribe basis. This framing has emphasized that a verdict of genocide or not genocide be rendered for the continental United States as a whole (and sometimes all of the Americas) from first contact to the present. For the debate to move forward, both issues must be addressed.

The American genocide debate is in part the struggle to define a word. Most participants who stated a particular definition began with the Genocide Convention, but Stannard, Lewy, Thornton, Alfred Cave, and Kiernan are among the few who accepted it unmodified. Others disagreed over both who is protected and what crimes are genocidal. Churchill expanded the Convention's list of protected groups to include any “human group,” while also extending the list of genocidal acts to include physical, biological, and cultural genocide. 30 In contrast, Rubinstein narrowed the scope of genocidal acts—“Genocide might … be defined as the deliberate killing of most or all members of a collective group”—while excluding “ most ‘acts’ which are construed as genocide in international law,” beyond direct killing. 31 Axtell expanded the scope of protected groups to include any “group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator ,” but limited genocide to “one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group.” 32 Katz also expanded the range of protected groups, but insisted: “genocide applies only when there is an actualized intent … to physically destroy an entire group.” 33 Finally, Anderson defined genocide as “a concerted effort to kill large numbers of people or indeed to annihilate a given people” that “a legitimate government must plan, organize, and implement.” 34

Genocide is, however, more than an academic concept. It is a crime defined by an international legal treaty and subsequent case law. On December 9, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Genocide Convention and its definition “unanimously and without abstentions.” 35 It remains the only authoritative international legal definition. Moreover, unlike at least twenty-two alternative definitions proffered since 1959, it has teeth. To date, 146 nations have signed or are parties to the Genocide Convention. In addition, it is supported and further defined—as a legal instrument—by a growing body of international case law. The Convention thus provides a powerful, though imperfect, definition for investigating possible cases of genocide. 36

The second factor polarizing the American genocide debate arises from a focus on judging the entire history of the continental United States, and sometimes the whole Western Hemisphere, from 1492 to the present, as fundamentally genocidal or not genocidal. This is a case of lumping when splitting is in order. Contact between Native Americans and Europeans in the continental United States has spanned centuries, ranged over 2,959,000 square miles, and involved interactions among British, Dutch, French, Mexican, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Texan, Confederate, and U.S. regimes—all of which changed over time—and hundreds of American Indian peoples, themselves hardly homogeneous or static. Despite some exceptions, scholars on both sides of the debate have largely avoided in-depth analyses of particular regions in specific periods or during particular tribes' demographic declines. 37 This dearth of specific case studies, along with definitional differences, helps explain the dispute's abstract and unresolved nature.

It is difficult to argue meaningfully about genocide on a national level without either definitional agreement or robust local studies to support broad conclusions. Thornton blazed a trail by bringing brief tribal case studies into his argument. Stannard touched upon the role of both genocidal intent and genocidal actions, as did Churchill. More recently, Thornton noted, “Physical genocide seems more characteristic of years and decades than of centuries,” while Kiernan demonstrated the importance of regional studies, emphasizing genocidal intent, command structures, and genocidal massacres. 38 Still, as historian Dan Stone observed in 2008, “it is remarkable that, given the enormous historiography on the colonial period and frontier conflict [in North America], there is not more that directly addresses the question of genocide.” 39

D espite the pioneering work done by Thornton, Stannard, Kiernan, and others, there remains a need for additional detailed case studies to provide the data that will permit a more accurate and comprehensive assessment of genocide's occurrence and frequency in the history of the United States and its colonial antecedents. How might such studies be done? In-depth tribal and geographical case studies covering discrete time periods first require that markers be located indicating the possible occurrence of genocide. Annihilationist statements, massacres, state-sponsored body-part bounties, and mass death in government custody are four ways of locating, and ultimately defining, prima facie cases of genocide.

Some non-Indian policymakers articulated their intent to annihilate Native American peoples both before and after 1776. As early as 1622, Virginia Colony leaders responded to an Indian attack by planning “a sharp revenge … even to … the rooting them out for being longer a people vppon the face of the Earth.” 40 In 1711, Virginia's House of Burgesses advocated “exterpating all Indians without distinction of Friends or Enemys.” 41 Forty-four years later, the Massachusetts Bay Colony “require[d] his Majesty's Subjects of this Province to embrace all Opportunities of pursuing, captivating, killing and destroying all and every” Penobscot Indian. 42 During Pontiac's Uprising, Field Marshal Jeffery Amherst ordered a subordinate officer to “Try Every … Method, that can Serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race,” later adding, “I Wish to Hear of no Prisoners , should any of the Villains be met with in Arms.” 43 Thomas Jefferson considered intentional extermination and, as Kiernan observed, repeatedly wrote of the possibility. In 1780, for example—while governor of Virginia—Jefferson wrote to General George Rogers Clark of the Virginia Militia: “the Shawanese, Mingoes, Munsies, and the nearer Wiandots are troublesome thorns in our sides. However we must leave it to yourself to decide … If against these Indians, the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal.” 44 In 1787 and 1789, President George Washington's secretary of war, Henry Knox, considered expelling or destroying various American Indian tribes, and in 1790 he ordered General Joseph Harmar “to extirpate, utterly, if possible” resisting Shawnees and their allies in Ohio. 45

The idea of exterminating American Indians became increasingly common during the nineteenth century. Jefferson was perhaps the first sitting U.S. president to consider genocide when he wrote in 1807, “if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or is driven beyond the Mississippi,” adding: “In war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.” 46 In 1830, President Andrew Jackson went further, telling the U.S. Congress to overcome “melancholy reflections” resulting from driving Indians “to the tomb” with this cheerful thought: “true philanthropy reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one generation to make room for another.” 47 Americans listened. By 1856, the governor of Washington Territory, Isaac Stevens, could proclaim, to “deafening cheers” in the territorial House of Representatives, that “ war shall be prosecuted until the last hostile Indian is exterminated .” 48 The definition of “hostile Indian” might be debatable in this quotation, while exterminating such “hostile Indians” may here suggest war crimes—that is, violations of the laws of war—rather than genocide. Yet in other instances, leaders clearly meant to target all Indian people belonging to a particular tribe or nation. In 1862, General John Pope of the U.S. Army wrote to a subordinate officer: “It is my purpose utterly to exterminate the Sioux.” 49 Military and political leaders sometimes condoned such policies. In 1868, Representative James M. Cavanaugh of Montana declared in Congress, “I like an Indian better dead than living. I have never in my life seen a good Indian (and I have seen thousands) except when I have seen a dead Indian.” 50 Later that year, General Ulysses S. Grant, in the final weeks of his successful presidential campaign, warned: “the settlers and emigrants must be protected, even if the extermination of every Indian tribe [is] necessary.” 51 The following year, General Philip Sheridan reportedly proclaimed, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” 52 Less famously, in 1873 the head of the U.S. Army, General William T. Sherman, telegraphed subordinates that in attacking the Modocs, “You will be fully justified in their utter extermination.” 53 Even as late as 1886, Theodore Roosevelt announced, “I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” 54 The fact that Roosevelt—a man of intense political ambition—could joke about genocide suggests the acceptance of such ideas by many voters even late in the nineteenth century.

Of course, some documented exterminatory statements may have been no more than rhetoric. Still, words—especially those of political and military leaders—often lead to actions. Thus, the route from annihilationist language to exterminatory acts needs to be carefully delineated, since expressions of genocidal intent alone do not constitute genocide.

Massacres were often the physical manifestations of annihilationist statements. The study of massacres—defined here as predominantly one-sided intentional killings of five or more noncombatants or relatively poorly armed or disarmed combatants, often by surprise and with little or no quarter—can serve four functions in reexamining the American genocide debate. First, because they are one hallmark of genocide, the substantial number of known massacres suggests the need for a more thorough examination of the American genocide question. Second, the reporting of massacres often flags those regions or times when immigrants and their allies may have committed genocide against Native Americans. Third, the killings themselves can constitute genocide, or at least “genocidal massacres,” which sociologist Leo Kuper defined as “the annihilation of a section of a group—men, women and children, as for example in the wiping out of whole villages.” 55 Finally, the close study of patterns of repeated massacres can help researchers locate genocidal intent and uncover genocidal command structures.

John Barber, “The Moravian Indian Martyrs” (1850), from John W. Barber and Elizabeth G. Barber, Historical, Poetical and Pictorial American Scenes … to Which Is Added a Historical Sketch, of Each of the United States (New Haven, Conn., 1850), 77. Courtesy of the Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. In 1782, Pennsylvania militiamen bludgeoned to death and scalped at least ninety Christian Delaware Indians—the majority women and children—at Gnadenhütten, Ohio.

The accompanying map locates fifty-five reported massacres, each involving the killing of between twenty-six and one thousand Native Americans in what are now thirty-one states, from 1539 to 1890. (See the Appendix for a list of the sources on which the map is based.) It is in no way comprehensive. Detailed investigations of specific regions' and Native American nations' histories will likely reveal a greater density of massacres across both time and space than is represented on this map. Taken alone, “massacre on the scale of Sand Creek, Wounded Knee and Mystic” may be “demographically insignificant” to the overall American Indian population cataclysm, as White has suggested. 56 However, it is not obligatory to limit our search for the latter's causes to only one major factor. As scholars study massacre clusters and move toward calculating the total number of Native Americans massacred in American history, the cumulative demographic impact of these mass killings will be revealed as significant, even if they do not approach the number of deaths caused by disease.

This map locates fifty-five reported massacres of Native Americans in what are now thirty-one states between 1539 and 1890, but it is in no way comprehensive. The tribal names used here are those familiar to non-specialists; they are not necessarily the names used by American Indians to describe themselves. Map by Springer Cartographics LLC for Benjamin Madley. For the sources used to compile this map, see the Appendix.

State-sponsored body-part bounties—rewards officially paid for Native Americans' heads and scalps—are another manifestation of exterminationist intent and genocidal crimes that appear frequently in the history of the United States and its colonial antecedents. The act of mutilating enemies is not unusual in world history, and Native Americans sometimes scalped non-Indians, but an examination of bounty programs can serve five functions in reexamining the American genocide debate. First, they indicate sustained, institutionalized killing and its intentional support by authorities who provided both funding and legal impunity to bounty hunters. Second, these programs point to killing policies that deliberately abandoned traditional European rules of war, or jus in bello , when administrators offered bounties for the heads or scalps of civilians, women, and children, and because it was often difficult to distinguish between heads and scalps belonging to so-called enemy versus friendly Indians, or between “hostiles” and children or other blameless members of a targeted “enemy” group. Third, because bounty programs often involved considerable monetary sums, studying them can help scholars map genocidal command structures. Fourth, because administrators sometimes kept records of bounties paid or body parts collected, these bounty programs generated quantitative evidence of genocidal state-sponsored crimes. Finally, such programs had demographic impacts beyond the direct killing of individuals. By forcing Indians to evade bounty hunters, body-part bounties interfered with subsistence, housing, medical care, and reproduction, thus providing additional, less direct, evidence of genocide. 57 In sum, bounty programs may flag regions or times when governments or their agents institutionalized genocide against Native Americans.

Policymakers offered bounties for Native American heads or scalps in at least twenty-three states or their colonial, territorial, or Mexican antecedents. In 1637, during the Pequot War, Connecticut militiamen apparently instituted the first head bounty in what would become the United States. Four years later, the Dutch of New Amsterdam promised “Ten fathoms of Wampum for each head of the … Raritans, and 20 fathoms of Wampum for every head of the Indians who have most barbarously murdered our people on Staten Island .” 58 Officials frequently offered bounties for both Indian prisoners and heads. For example, in 1674 Virginia offered “three matchcoates for every prisoner … and one matchcoate for [every] head.” 59 Such dual bounty systems complicate the genocidal intent of these programs by suggesting that officials were more interested in taking prisoners than heads and scalps. Yet the small number of prisoners paid for under dual bounty programs, relative to the numbers of heads and scalps, may suggest that the effect was otherwise. As to intent, the tempo of head and scalp bounty offerings now accelerated. In 1675, during King Philip's War, Connecticut and Massachusetts offered “for ever[y] Head one Coat.” 60 Connecticut introduced the first specific scalp bounty, promising its Narragansett allies one coat for each Wampanoag “Head-skin” and twenty for King Philip's head. Narragansetts promptly delivered “about Eighteen Heads,” and Benjamin Church's company later brought King Philip's head to Plymouth for “their Præmium [of] Thirty Shilllings ,” receiving what may have been the first monetary body-part bounty. 61 Thirteen years later, French officials in Canada promised ten beaver pelts for each “Maquae” scalp taken along the upper Connecticut River (in New Hampshire and Vermont), and in 1689, Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut agreed to pay “eight pounds, per head, for every fighting Indian man.” 62 French officials now added another innovation: bounties for killing Native American women, in this case in upper New York. In 1694, Massachusetts seems to have offered the first bounties for the heads and scalps of American Indian children; in 1695 it specified £25 for women or children “under the age of fourteen years, that shall be killed.” 63 Head bounties now generally gave way to rewards for lighter, more portable scalps. 64 In 1697, Massachusetts offered bounties for the scalps of men, women, and “every child of the said enemy under the age of ten years.” 65

Scalp bounties proliferated during the eighteenth century, sometimes with devastating results. Between 1703 and 1704, for example, Massachusetts apparently paid for 208 Indian scalps. The colony then passed additional scalp bounties in 1706, 1709, and 1710, from 1722 to 1726, and in 1744, 1747, 1755, and 1756. Connecticut offered scalp bounties in 1704, and in 1746 targeted Indian women and children. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland instituted nine scalp bounty programs during the eighteenth century. In 1747 alone, New York paid for at least twenty-six Indian scalps. Colonies sometimes amassed substantial war chests. Maryland raised nearly £10,000 to fund Indian scalp and prisoner bounties between 1755 and 1757. Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia enacted ten head or scalp bounties, while French Louisiana administrators promised bounties in 1703 and 1723. French officials offered fifty écus for each Miami scalp brought to Fort Detroit in 1751, and the British promised scalp bounties in the Ohio River Valley in 1755. 66

During the nineteenth century, government scalp bounty programs spread south and west. In 1814, Illinois offered $50 “for the scalp of any Indian—man, woman, or child—who entered an American settlement with ‘murderous intent.’” 67 The United States apparently promised $200 for slain or captive enemies during Florida's Second Seminole War, while in 1835 and 1837, the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua, which then included parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, paid scalp bounties. The resulting death toll was sometimes substantial: in 1847, one bounty hunter serving Chihuahua estimated having taken 487 Apache scalps, some almost certainly from future U.S. territory. Minnesota and Montana then enacted four scalp bounties between 1863 and 1869. Southern Arizona counties probably offered the last government-sponsored American Indian scalp bounties within the United States, in 1885. 68

Spencer Phips, “A Proclamation” (Boston, November 3, 1755). Courtesy of the University of California, Los Angeles. Note the £20 bounty for the scalps of Penobscot children “under the Age of Twelve Years.”

Mass death in government custody can also be indicative of one or more of the five genocidal acts defined by the United Nations Genocide Convention: “Killing members of the group,” “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group,” and “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” Nineteenth-century removal and incarceration on federal reservations proved lethal to large numbers of Native Americans. More than 4,000 Choctaws died of hunger, exposure, accidents, and disease during and immediately after their deportation, under military guard, to Oklahoma in 1832 and 1833. Some 700 Creeks died while being marched from Alabama to Oklahoma in 1836. At least 3,500 others died of disease during the first year after they arrived. And perhaps 8,000 Cherokees “died as a more or less direct result of the Trail of Tears” before, during, and after 1838. 69

Despite substantial evidence pointing to the lethality of forced removal and confinement on reservations, such policies proliferated. Of some 1,300 Dakota people taken to Crow Creek in 1863, fewer than 1,000 survived to see their first winter there. In the Southwest, the “Long Walk” to New Mexico's Bosque Redondo Reservation and subsequent malnutrition and illness killed perhaps 2,000, if not more, Navajos between 1863 and 1868. 70 To the northwest, federal officials deported 153 Modocs from Oregon to Oklahoma in 1873. By 1881, more than a third had died from poor conditions and disease exacerbated by corruption. Inadequately fed, 94 Northern Cheyenne also incarcerated in Oklahoma died between 1876 and 1878, while in 1884, some 400 out of not more than 2,600 Piegans starved to death at Montana's Blackfoot Indian Agency. Between 1877 and 1881, some 180 out of 431 Nez Percés also died in federal captivity. Then, in 1886, the U.S. Army made 498 Chiricahua Apaches—including 399 women and children—prisoners of war. By 1894, 246 were dead. Births barely outnumbered additional deaths, and by 1913, only 261 Chiricahua Apache prisoners remained, after twenty-seven years of incarceration. Again and again, mass Native American death followed the imposition of federal custody. 71

G enocidal statements, massacres , official body-part bounties, and mass death in government custody are four ways of locating and defining prima facie cases of genocide. So how does this method operate in practice? Two American Indian genocides—one in seventeenth-century Connecticut, the other in nineteenth-century California—are illustrative of how these markers can be used to locate and define genocides in North America and beyond.

The Pequot Indians of Connecticut endured one of the earliest genocides in what would become the United States, an event now remembered as the Pequot War. Colonists' motives for attacking were complex, but their immediate casus belli was the July 20, 1636, killing of the English trader John Oldham by Narragansett Indians in waters near Block Island, off Rhode Island. Block Island's Narragansetts were not allied with the Pequots. Yet Massachusetts Bay Colony leaders responded by attacking both Block Island Narragansetts and Connecticut Pequots, who had previously “slain one Captaine Norton, and Captaine Stone, with seven more of their company.” 72 This expedition aimed to kill substantial numbers of American Indians.

On August 25, 1636, John Endicott's ninety-eight-man force sailed from Boston. “They had commission,” wrote Massachusetts Colony governor John Winthrop, “to put to death the men of Block Island, but to spare the women and children, and to bring them away [enslave them] and from thence to go to the Pequods to demand the murderers of Capt. Stone and other English [by Pequots], and one thousand fathom of wampum for damages, etc., and some of their children as hostages, which if they should refuse, they were to obtain it by force.” 73 At Block Island, Endicott's men failed to carry out these orders. According to one of his officers, Captain John Underhill, “the Indians being retired into Swamps, so as wee could not find them, wee burnt and spoyled both houses and corne in great abundance.” 74 Still, the expedition failed to kill many Narragansetts, take slaves, or acquire substantial loot.

Following orders, Endicott now sailed against the Pequots. Underhill recalled: “the Indians spying of us came running in multitudes along the water side, crying, what cheere Englishmen, what cheere, what doe you come for? They not thinking we intended warre went on cheerefully untill they come to Pequeat riuer.” Then they “cryed, what Englishman, what cheere, what cheere, are you hoggerie, will you cram us? That is, are you angry, will you kill us, and doe you come to fight.” Endicott demanded the killers' heads, and negotiations ensued. A Pequot “Ambassadour” explained that the Pequots had thought that Stone and company were Dutch, not English. The English rejected this explanation and issued an ultimatum: deliver the killers' heads or “wee will fight with you.” The Pequots continued to negotiate, and the English attacked. 75 Governor Winthrop later wrote, “The Naragansett men told us after, that thirteen of the Pequods were killed, and forty wounded,” and that Endicott's men burned sixty wigwams. 76 Thus began the Pequot War.

Pequots now besieged Connecticut's Fort Saybrook and “slew diverse Men.” 77 During the siege, Pequots—perhaps hoping to end the conflict—asked the fort's commander, Lion Gardiner, “have you fought ynough[?].” Some years later, Gardiner recollected that the Pequots then “asked if we did vse to kill women & childrē[n?]” His answer was ominous: “we said they should see yt heraftr,” to which some Pequots allegedly responded, “we will goe to conectecott and kill men women & children.” 78 Further Anglo-Pequot clashes followed, and by the end of April 1637, Pequots had killed “about Thirty ” colonists in all, while suffering an unknown number of casualties. 79

On May 1, Connecticut's General Court joined the conflict by declaring “offensiue warr” against the Pequots and mustering ninety men under Captain John Mason to attack. 80 Before they departed, a Hartford minister primed Mason's men for large-scale killing. At a Hartford church service, the minister exhorted them to “make their multitudes fall under your warlike weapons.” 81 “[A]bout five hundred Indians ,” including Mohegans under their leader Uncas and Narragansetts under Miantonomi, joined Mason. 82 At Fort Saybrook, Gardiner paid “15 yards of trading Cloath” to Mohegans for at least four Pequot heads. 83 This was perhaps the first head bounty in colonial U.S. history. The combined force, minus some Narragansetts who went home, now sailed toward the Pequots at Mystic, Connecticut, while Underhill moved to meet them. 84 Mason's plan was simple: “We had formerly concluded to destroy them by the Sword and save the Plunder.” 85 He intended a final solution to the Pequot problem.

Mason and Underhill attacked at dawn on May 26, 1637, and Mason soon announced, “WE MUST BURN THEM.” 86 As Mason torched the “West-side” of Mystic, Underhill “set fire on the South end with a traine of Powder, the fires of both meeting in the center of the Fort.” 87 Mason wrote that Mystic's inhabitants “ran as Men most dreadfully Amazed.” Then, “when the Fort was thoroughly Fired, Command was given, that all should fall off and surround the Fort .” 88 Pequots fired back but “were scorched and burnt … deprived of their armes [because] the fire burnt their very bowstrings.” Thus, “many were burnt in the Fort, both men, women, and children, others forced out, and came in troopes to the Indians , twentie, and thirtie at a time, which our soldiers received and entertained with the point of the sword; downe fell men, women, and children.” 89 The English could have taken scores of Pequots prisoner. Instead, they murdered them in keeping with Mason's plan to “destroy them by the Sword.”

How many Pequots were in Mystic that morning remains unclear, but few survived. According to Underhill, Indian eyewitnesses reported “about foure hundred soules in this Fort, and not above five of them escaped out of our hands.” 90 Other contemporary writers estimated 300 to 400 killed. 91 Mason wrote that the Mystic Pequots were “utterly Destroyed, to the Number of six or seven Hundred , as some of themselves confessed,” while “There were only seven taken Captive & about seven escaped .” 92 Supporting his assertion, Mason published a drawing of the fort (see Figure 3 ) containing ninety-eight lodges, and historian Alfred Cave, who authored the definitive Pequot War history, considered Mason's estimate of 600–700 dead “probably more accurate” than Underhill's estimate of about 400. 93 In contrast, colonists lost just “ two Slain outright, and about twenty Wounded .” 94

John Underhill, “The Figure of the Indians' Fort or Palizado in New England and the Manner of the Destroying It by Captayne Vnderhill and Captayne Mason,” from Underhill, Nevves from America; or, A New and Experimentall Discoverie of New England (London, 1638), preceding p. 1. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

The Mystic Massacre shocked many eyewitnesses, but some contemporary writers sought to justify it. According to Underhill, “Great and dolefull was the bloudy sight to the view of young soldiers that never had beene in Warre, to see so many soules lie gasping on the ground so thicke in some places, that you could hardly passe along.” Mason and Underhill's Indian allies “cried mach it , mach it ; that is, it is naught, it is naught, because it is too furious, and slaies too many men.” Underhill, too, was troubled, but wrote: “sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents.” 95 Mason was simply triumphant: “ Thus was God seen in the Mount, Crushing his proud Enemies and the Enemies of his People … burning them up in the Fire of his Wrath, and dunging the Ground with their Flesh: It was the LORD'S Doings, and it is marvelous in our Eyes! ” 96 Some political leaders and colonists also endorsed the atrocity. Twenty days after the massacre, Governor Winthrop wrote: “There was a day of thanksgiving kept in all the churches for the victory obtained against the Pequods.” 97 Plymouth Colony governor William Bradford later wrote that while “It was a fearfull sight to see them thus frying in ye fyer, and ye streams of blood quenching ye same, and horrible was ye stinck & sente ther of; but ye victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave the prays therof to God, who had wrought so wonderfuly for them.” 98 Underhill, Mason, Winthrop, and Bradford all endorsed the atrocity after the fact.

Had Mystic been an isolated event, it would have constituted a single “genocidal massacre.” However, it was only the beginning of a systematic state-sponsored killing campaign. Immediately following the massacre, some 300 Pequot warriors from nearby, enraged by the slaughter of their families and fellow Pequots, counterattacked. 99 According to Underhill, in “an houre [we] slew and wounded above a hundred Pequeats , all fighting men that charged us.” 100 As they marched to their boats, colonists and their Indian allies repeatedly shot Pequots and “fetch[ed] their Heads,” presumably to claim head bounties. 101 Seven Mohegans who had been with the Pequots told the English: “about an hundred Pequets were slaine or hurt, in the fight with the English at their returne from the Fort.” 102 The Pequot leader Sassacus, “with the remainder of this massacre [then] fled the Countrey,” and Massachusetts mobilized 120 militiamen under Captain Israel Stoughton to hunt down survivors. 103

A two-prong operation now began to “utterly roote them out,” according to one contemporary writer. 104 A joint expedition of colonists composed the first prong. Stoughton's force reached the mouth of Connecticut's Thames River in late June, took Pequot prisoners, and on July 5 executed at least twenty-two of them. 105 Forty Connecticut men under Mason then joined him. 106 On July 13 they killed six at New Haven before beheading two Indian leaders at Sachem's Head. 107 Farther down the coast, they surrounded Pequots and local Sasqua Indians in a swamp near Fairfield. After “the English slew but few,” at least 180 “ old Men, Women and Children ” surrendered, while others remained in the swamp. 108 Colonists then “killed fortie or fiftie besides those that they cut off in their retrait,” while “ sixty or seventy ” Pequots escaped. 109 In total, the killings of mid-May to mid-July 1637 took a cataclysmic toll on the Pequots. According to Underhill, Pequots were “slaine by the sword, to the number of fifteene hundred soules in the space of two moneths and lesse.” 110 Still, the killing continued. According to P. Vincent, writing in 1637, “Some other small parties of them were since destroyed.” 111 Montauk and Mohawk Indians constituted the second prong, killing at colonists' behest.

Head bounties encouraged the killing of Pequot survivors, sometimes by enlisting Indian participation with genocidal threats. The Pequot War was one of many instances in which a colonizing regime threatened Indians from one tribe into killing Indians from another. Three days after the Mystic Massacre, Gardiner met with Long Island's Montauk leader Wyandanch and warned him that if “you haue pequits with you … they might kill my men, … and So we may kill all you for ye pequits but if you will kill all the pequits yt come to you and send me thr heads,” then “you shall haue trade with vs.” Wyandanch later sent Gardiner a dozen Pequot heads, and Gardiner “paid … as I had promised.” Wyandanch then “kild … many of ye pequits and sent thr heds to” Gardiner, probably fearing that unless he continued this grisly trade, Englishmen would “come and kill vs all as they did ye pequits.” 112 Similar fears and rewards likely motivated other New England and New York Indians. In 1637, Mason reported, “The Pequots now became a Prey to all Indians . Happy were they that could bring in their Heads to the English : Of which there came almost daily to Winsor , or Hartford [Connecticut].” 113 That summer, Mohawks sent the heads and hands of perhaps forty or more Pequots, including Sassacus, to Hartford, for, as Gardiner explained, “they all fered vs.” 114 On August 5, Winthrop reported that Englishmen had brought to Boston “part of the skin and lock of hair of Sasacus” and of twenty-six others. On August 26, Winthrop recorded how “The Indians about sent in still many Pequods' heads and hands from Long Island and other places,” while on August 31, “The Naragansetts sent us the hands of three Pequods.” 115 By demonstrating that body-part bounties—which motivated some or all of this head, hand, and scalp collecting—could be an effective Indian-killing policy, colonists established a lethal, enduring tradition.

During the Pequot War, colonists and their allies killed an estimated “one quarter to two thirds” of all Pequots, while enslaving and intentionally scattering survivors. 116 Some colonial leaders sought total erasure. The September 1638 Treaty of Hartford banished Pequots from their homeland, gave 200 surviving Pequot men and their relatives to the Mohegans and Narragansetts, specified that Pequots “shall no more be called Pequots but Narragansetts and Mohegans,” and called for the beheading of any surviving Pequots who had killed or attempted to kill any English person. 117 Dispersal then continued.

Connecticut and Massachusetts colonists used slavery in an attempt to destroy the surviving Pequot community. Colonial authorities ultimately made perhaps 600 Pequots the chattels of their Indian enemies. At least 319 others became Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Plymouth colonists' property or were shipped overseas: at least one to Britain, seventeen to Caribbean bondage on Providence Isle, and eighty or more to slavery in Bermuda. Colonists thus sought to scatter and destroy the Pequot nation. 118

Defying genocidal intentions and policies, Pequots resisted and survived. In 2010, exactly 3,373 U.S. citizens identified themselves as Pequots. Today, many are members of Connecticut's Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation or the neighboring Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. 119

Twenty-first-century Pequots are not the only American Indians descended from genocide survivors. Northern California's Yuki Indians endured a similar ordeal. California's first civilian United States governor, Peter Burnett, set the stage in 1851 by declaring “[t]hat a war of extermination will continue to be waged … until the Indian race becomes extinct.” 120 One month later, state legislators allocated $500,000 to fund Indian-hunting state militia campaigns. In 1852, the U.S. Senate then refused to ratify the eighteen treaties that would have set aside approximately 7 percent of California as federal Indian reservation lands, thus leaving California Indians without explicit federal protection. 121 The first known massacre of Yuki people followed less than two years later.

On May 15, 1854, white explorers entered Round Valley, the heart of the Yuki homeland, and preemptively massacred as many as forty Yuki people. Colonization followed, diminishing traditional food sources and pushing some Yuki to eat whites' livestock. In response, whites once again began massacring Yuki. One man later testified that in 1856, “the Indians were killing stock, and the whites were killing Indians.” 122 Another explained: “for every beef that has been killed by them ten or fifteen Indians have been killed.” 123 Yet another testified that in 1856, “the first expedition by the whites against the Indians was made, and have continued ever since … we would kill, on an average, fifty or sixty Indians on a trip … frequently we would have to turn out two or three times a week.” 124 Such expeditions presumably killed hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of Yuki people.

Meanwhile, whites kidnapped Yuki women and children, taking advantage of laws that, between 1850 and 1863, allowed them to take and hold Indians—including children—for years at a time. By 1856, one Indian agent wrote of Yuki “squaws and children taken away by white men,” and of Yuki men who “said they would all work at anything I wanted them to, if only I would protect their squaws and children.” In 1857, another agent reported from Round Valley: “the Indians … have very few children—most of them doubtless having been stolen and sold.” 125

That year the Yuki resisted by killing whites for the first time, and whites responded with continued killing. In October 1857, Indian agent Thomas Henley warned that killing would “continue until the force of the whites is sufficient to overwhelm the Indians and exterminate them or drive them from the Reservation.” Henley asked for federal troops to protect the Yuki, but as with others who echoed such requests, his appeal fell on deaf ears. 126 Whites killed twenty-seven Yuki during the first ten months of 1858, while 1860 depositions underscored some killers' genocidal intent. 127 According to one man, the livestock manager H. L. Hall “commenced killing all the Indians [he and his colleagues] could find in the mountains … I heard Mr. Hall say that he did not want any man to go with him to hunt Indians, who would not kill all he could find, because a knit would make a louse.” 128 Army lieutenant Edward Dillon added that Hall “well nigh depopulated a country, which but a short time since swarmed with Indians.” 129 Hall himself explained how, in one instance, “all the squaws were killed because they refused to go further. We took one boy into the valley, and the infants were put out of their misery, and a girl ten years of age was killed for stubbornness.” 130 Finally, a Long Valley man testified that he and his comrades had “killed one hundred and fifty or two hundred Indians.” 131

The destruction of Yuki people intensified that winter. Special Treasury Agent J. Ross Browne reported that in Round Valley, “during the winter of 1858–'59, more than a hundred and fifty peaceable Indians, including women and children, were cruelly slaughtered by the whites.” Browne explained, “Armed parties went into the rancherias in open day, when no evil was apprehended, and shot the Indians down—weak, harmless, and defenseless as they were—without distinction of age or sex; shot down women with sucking babes at their breasts; killed or crippled the naked children that were running about.” 132

Despite the U.S. Army troops stationed in the valley, the killing continued because commanders had ordered regulars there not to confront or arrest whites. In April 1859, an informant told how “in the vicinity of Round Valley … within the past three weeks, from three to four hundred bucks, squaws and children have been killed.” 133 Two weeks later, Major Edward Johnson reported: “the whites have waged a relentless war of extermination against the Yukas [and] have ruthlessly massacred men, women, and children,” estimating “some six hundred … killed within the last year.” 134 That summer, the killing became even more organized.

On July 11, 1859, Walter Jarboe recruited sixteen men to hunt surviving Yuki. By August 21, Major Johnson reported that Jarboe had killed at least sixty-four Yuki people, explaining, “I believe it to be the Settled determination of many of the inhabitants to exterminate the Indians.” 135 That same day, Johnson also warned California governor John Weller of Jarboe's indiscriminate killings. Nevertheless, on September 6, Weller enrolled Jarboe's men as a volunteer state militia company to kill or take into custody Yuki beyond the Round Valley Reservation. 136

Jarboe's Eel River Rangers thus continued their campaign, now with state sponsorship. On October 18, Agent Browne warned the U.S. commissioner of Indian affairs that Jarboe “has been engaged for some months past in a cruel and relentless pursuit of the Indians in this vicinity, slaughtering miscellaneously all with whom he comes in contact, without regard to age or sex.” 137 Newspapers reported massacres committed by Jarboe's men: twenty-five Indians killed in late September, twenty in October, thirty on December 9, and another thirty on December 13. 138 A declaration of genocidal intent made Jarboe's intentions clear. In a December 3 report to Governor Weller, Jarboe emphasized: “however cruel it may be … nothing short of extermination will suffice to rid the Country of them [the Yuki].” 139 Still, the governor failed to stop him.

Weller finally dissolved Jarboe's company almost two months later, on January 24, 1860. Jarboe then reported that from September 20, 1859, to January 24, 1860, “I fought them 23 times, killed 283 Warriors, the number of wounded was not known, took 292 prisoners, sent them to the Reservation.” 140 Given reports that Jarboe's company routinely murdered noncombatants, this was almost certainly an underestimate. According to a January 22 newspaper report, “In seventy days they had fifteen battles with the red men; killed more than four hundred of them; took six hundred of them prisoners, and had only three of their own number wounded and one killed.” 141 Another newspaper declared Jarboe's campaign a “deliberate, cowardly, brutal massacre of defenseless men, women, and children,” while some state legislators denounced it as “a slaughter of beings … who make no resistance, and make no attacks.” 142 Scalp bounties did not play a role in this genocide, but in April 1860, California legislators voted to pay Jarboe, his men, and their suppliers $9,347.39 for “the expedition against the Indians in the county of Mendocino.” 143

J. Ross Browne, “Protecting the Settlers.” From Browne, “The Coast Rangers: A Chronicle of Events in California,” part II: “The Indian Reservation,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine 23, no. 135 (August 1861): 313. Courtesy of the Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. This image accompanied an article by Browne in which he described the killing of Yuki people at Round Valley, California.

Federal officials incarcerated most of the remaining Yuki at the Round Valley Reservation, with lethal results. Forced labor had already taken many lives. One man testified that during the winter of 1856–1857, “about three hundred died on the reservation, from the effects of packing them through the mountains in snow and mud … they were worked naked, with the exception of [minimal clothing and] usually packed fifty pounds.” 144 Conditions on the reservation deteriorated following Jarboe's campaign.

Institutionalized malnutrition led to starvation conditions. In 1860, Round Valley Reservation Indians were given just 480 to 910 calories' worth of food per day, or sometimes more, in the form of potatoes, while those who did not work received no food. In 1862, rations plunged further. In October, a newspaper reported that Round Valley Indians “in starving condition” were leaving “in the hope of escaping death by starvation.” 145 That December a reservation employee testified, “ There is nothing for them to eat .” 146 Captain George, a local chief, also claimed to have “nothing to eat,” and Captain C. D. Douglas reported daily rations of just 160 to 390 calories. 147

Kidnappings also continued. In 1860, one local man explained, “among these hostile tribes which we attacked, we found no children, and I believe there has been a practice of abducting the children [for] profit.” 148 In 1862, an Indian agent added that Round Valley's “white men … at every opportunity make merchandise of [Indian] children and wives of their squaws.” 149 Such abductions destroyed Yuki families while undercutting demographic recovery.

Vigilantes, meanwhile, continued killing Yuki on and off the reservation. In July 1861, Superintending Agent George Hanson protested that Round Valley Reservation Indians were “being hunted down like wild beasts and killed.” 150 The killing subsided in 1862, but after a white man was killed in 1863, soldiers and volunteers killed ten Yuki before lynching five others. 151 This seems to have been the last mass killing of Yuki people. However, between 1854 and 1864, the Yuki population had declined by 90 percent or more. 152 Although pushed to the brink of oblivion, Yuki people survived, and today some are members of California's Round Valley Indian Tribes.

T he P equot and Y uki cases demonstrate the utility of documenting genocidal statements, massacres, body-part bounties, and mass death in government custody to identify, locate, and define cases of genocide in Native American history and beyond. In both genocides, policymakers and perpetrators expressed “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Massacres, body-part bounties, and mass death in government custody provide additional evidence of genocidal intent, as well as evidence of genocidal acts including “Killing,” “Causing serious bodily or mental harm,” and “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Containment in dangerous conditions and dispersal through kidnapping and slavery may constitute “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” Finally, kidnapping and slavery involved “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” Studying the planning, execution, and aftermath of specific genocidal crimes can also reveal who ordered them, carried them out, and rewarded them, rather than lumping all architects, commanders, perpetrators, and accomplices together. This approach points the way toward an effective methodology with which to evaluate the question of genocide at any time and place in history.

The case study as a unit of analysis allows for the examination of whether or not a particular “national, ethnical, racial or religious group” suffered genocide. There may be questions about genocide that can be resolved only by analyzing crimes against multiple American Indian tribes, but for the purposes of resolving the American genocide debate, locating and documenting evidence for individual tribal histories avoids problems associated with considering all Native Americans together. Crucially, it moves away from misleading colonial constructs of race to focus on particular tribes. Case studies are also often more practical, specific, and useful to contemporary American Indian nations than lumping all Indians—across several centuries and millions of square miles—together. For example, studying tribes as nations—in discrete case studies—clarifies how regimes committed genocide even when other Native Americans did some of the killing. Case studies also provide an avenue for locating and delineating the specific genocidal crimes suffered by different tribes at different times at the hands of different perpetrators. Detailed case study analyses are an important new direction in genocide studies—a field often dominated by theoretical debates—offering a powerful tool with which to understand genocide and combat its denial around the world.

The case study method is not limited to locating and defining instances of genocide in the United States and its colonial antecedents. These methods can also be applied in other geographies where genocides may have occurred, such as Africa, Asia, Latin America, and beyond. They may be particularly useful in helping to move other national genocide debates forward. Indeed, detailed case studies examining genocide in Queensland, Tasmania, and Victoria have helped to advance the ongoing Australian genocide debate. 153

In those times and places where intended destruction, massacre, state-sponsored body-part bounties, and mass death in government custody appear, it makes sense to investigate the possibility of genocide. This involves refocusing the American genocide debate from a macro analysis to investigations of history at the tribal level. Each Native American population decline requires careful, detailed examination, not limited to the seventeenth-century Pequot or the nineteenth-century Yuki cases. Questions of genocidal intent, actions, and consequences must be meticulously investigated in each case. In the absence of robust case studies, general statements about whether or not “all” or “most” Native American tribes suffered genocide, even if germane, are difficult to substantiate. Moreover, the stakes are too high to limit our studies to such an all-or-nothing approach. The claim that not every American Indian tribe suffered genocide should not be allowed to block debate and further research into the question of genocide in U.S. history. Careful analyses of specific regions and tribes will provide the crucial building blocks upon which later meta-analyses can be built. By examining each case in detail, scholars will dignify its particularities and ultimately help create a clearer, more vivid mosaic of varied Native American experiences, and of U.S. history as a whole.

The “Old World” pathogens that non-Indians carried in their blood, mucus, saliva, and semen killed untold numbers of American Indians, but the ideas in their heads, coupled with the weapons in their hands, also led to mass violence, and in some cases genocide. It is not surprising that scholars have written so little about this topic. The violence that Native Americans suffered during America's conquest is painful to contemplate, and cannot be reversed. Yet rather than distancing ourselves from this traumatic history, we need to move closer to it.

Possible cases of genocide are worth investigating for many reasons, but three stand out. Decency demands that even long after the deaths of the victims, we preserve the truth of what befell them, so that their memory can be honored and the repetition of similar crimes deterred. Justice demands that even long after the perpetrators have vanished, we document the crimes that they and their advocates have too often concealed, denied, or suppressed. Finally, historical veracity demands that we carefully examine the Native American demographic catastrophe, in all its varied aspects and causes, in order to better understand formative events in both Native American and United States history.

Massacre Map Sources

These massacre statistics are in many cases contested. Accurately counting bodies in the aftermath of a massacre is often difficult due to a host of factors. Killing fields may be substantial in area. Victims' bodies may be carried away by rivers, sink in bodies of water, or be consumed and scattered by animals. Perpetrators may incinerate, bury, or otherwise conceal corpses. Survivors may cremate or inter their loved ones and community members. Death toll estimates may also be intentionally misleading. Given the varying implications of massacre body counts in different contexts, perpetrators, bystanders, and survivors may minimize, exaggerate, or obfuscate the numbers killed. As a result of these many factors, primary sources often disagree on massacre death tolls, as do later analyses. The following sources report both the lowest and highest reasonable death toll for each massacre on the map.

For Acoma, see Captain Velasco to the Viceroy, March 22, 1601, in George P. Hammond and Agapito Rey, eds., Don Juan de Oñate: Colonizer of New Mexico, 1595–1628 , 2 vols. (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1953), 2: 614–615; and Alonso Sanchez to Rodrigo del Rio, February 28, 1599, ibid., 1: 427.

For Antelope Creek, see “Proceedings of a Board of Officers … January 21, 1879, Special Orders, No. 8,” summarized in Peter John Powell, People of the Sacred Mountain: A History of the Northern Cheyenne Chiefs and Warrior Societies, 1830–1879 , 2 vols. (San Francisco, 1981), 2: 1396.

For Arenal, see court questions in “Testimony of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado on the Management of the Expedition, September 3, 1544,” in George P. Hammond and Agapito Rey, eds. and trans., Narratives of the Coronado Expedition, 1540–1542 (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1940), 319–336, here 335; and Pedro de Castañeda, “Narrative of the Expedition to Cíbola … by Pedro de Castañeda of Náxera,” ibid., 191–283, here 226–227.

For Bad Axe, see Patrick J. Jung, The Black Hawk War of 1832 (Norman, Okla., 2007), 172; and General Henry Atkinson in Cecil Eby, “That Disgraceful Affair”: The Black Hawk War (New York, 1973), 257–258.

For Bear River, see Colonel P. Edw. Connor to Colonel R. C. Drum, February 6, 1863, in United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies , 4 series, 130 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1880–1901), series 1, vol. 50, pt. I, 185–187, here 187; and Edward Price to Friend James, September 14, 1863, Pajaro Times (Watsonville, Calif.), October 17, 1863, 1.

For Big Hole, see Jerome A. Greene, Nez Perce Summer, 1877: The U.S. Army and the Nee-Me-Poo Crisis (Helena, Mont., 2000), 374; and “The Fight at Big Hole,” New York Times , September 29, 1889, 11.

For Bloody Island, see N. Lyon, Brevet Captain, to Major E. R. S. Canby, May 22, 1850, in “Message from the President of the United States … at the Commencement of the Second Session of the Thirty-First Congress,” S. Ex. Doc. 1, pt. 2, 31st Cong., 2nd Sess., 1850, 82; and Edwin Allen Sherman, “Sherman Was There: The Recollections of Major Edwin A. Sherman (continued),” California Historical Society Quarterly 24, no. 1 (1945): 47–72, here 54.

For Blue Water Creek, see R. Eli Paul, Blue Water Creek and the First Sioux War, 1854–1856 (Norman, Okla., 2004), 106.

For Bridge Gulch, see Franklin Buck to Marcy Bradley, June 9, 1852, Franklin Buck Papers, 1846–1853, Box 1, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.; and Fred Stacer in the Golden Era (San Francisco), November 15, 1879, 3.

For Camp Grant, see Chip Coldwell-Chanthaphonh, Massacre at Camp Grant: Forgetting and Remembering Apache History (Tucson, Ariz., 2007), 89.

For Canyon de Chelly, see Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Narbona to Governor Fernando Chacón, January 24, 1805, in Frank McNitt, Navajo Wars: Military Campaigns, Slave Raids, and Reprisals (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1972), 431.

For Chama River, see H. H. Bancroft, The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft , 39 vols., vol. 17: History of Arizona and New Mexico, 1530–1888 (San Francisco, 1889), 249.

For Clear Lake, see William H. Davis, Sixty Years in California: A History of Events and Life in California (San Francisco, 1889), 342; and Statement of Juan Bojorges, in Robert F. Heizer, ed., Collected Documents on the Causes and Events in the Bloody Island Massacre of 1850 (Berkeley, Calif., 1973), 67–70.

For Cokadjal, see Lyon to Canby, May 22, 1850, 82.

For Colorado River, see correspondent, Sacramento Daily Union , October 20, 1866, 2.

For Fort Fox, see R. David Edmunds and Joseph L. Peyser, The Fox Wars: The Mesquakie Challenge to New France (Norman, Okla., 1993), 156.

For Galveston Island, see David La Vere, The Texas Indians (College Station, Tex., 2004), 178.

For Gnadenhütten, see John Heckewelder, A Narrative of the Mission of the United Brethren among the Delaware and Mohegan Indians … to the Close of the Year 1808 (Philadelphia, 1820), 320–321; and David Zeisberger, April 7, 1782, entry in Eugene F. Bliss, ed. and trans., Diary of David Zeisberger, a Moravian Missionary among the Indians of Ohio , 2 vols. (Cincinnati, 1885), 1: 85.

For Goose Creek, see Samuel Eveleigh to Boone and Berresford, July 19, 1715, quoted in Chapman J. Milling, Red Carolinians (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1940), 144–145; and Francis Le Jau to John Chamberlain(?), August 22, 1715, in Francis Le Jau and Frank J. Klingberg, eds., The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 1706–1717 (Berkeley, Calif., 1956), 160–163, here 161.

For Great Swamp, see Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975), 312 n. 43.

For Green River, see Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 295; and James Pierson Beckwourth, The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, Mountaineer, Scout, and Pioneer, and Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians , ed. T. D. Bonner (New York, 1856), 137.

For Guano Valley, see B. A. Farmer to J. K. Luttrell, March 2, 1866, Sacramento Daily Union , March 12, 1866, 2; and Smoke Creek, Nevada, correspondent, March 4, 1866, Sacramento Daily Union , March 14, 1866, 2.

For Hillabee, see James White, Brig. Gen., to John Cocke, Major-General, November 24, 1813, Weekly Register (Baltimore), December 25, 1813, 282–283, here 283; and Major General John Cocke to General [Andrew Jackson], November 27, 1813, Andrew Jackson Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 1–2, here 1.

For Humboldt Bay, see Sheriff Van Ness summarized and J. A. Lord quoted in Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), February 28, 1860, 2.

For the Humboldt River, see Zenas Leonard, Narrative of the Adventures of Zenas Leonard … of the Rocky Mountains (Clearfield, Pa., 1839), 37–38.

For Little Robe Creek, see John S. Ford, Captain Commanding Texas Frontier, to H. R. Runnels, Governor of Texas, May 22, 1858, in “Protection of the Frontier of Texas,” H. Ex. Doc. 27, 35th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1850, 20.

For Lost River, see Benjamin Madley, “California and Oregon's Modoc Indians: How Indigenous Resistance Camouflages Genocide in Colonial Histories,” in Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, and Alexander Laban Hinton, eds., Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America (Durham, N.C., 2014), 95–130, here 103.

For Mankato, see Daily Review (Mankato, Minn.), December 26, 1896, 1–2.

For Marias River, see E. M. Baker, Major, to Brevet Major J. T. McGinniss, February 18, 1870, in “Piegan Indians,” H. Ex. Doc. 269, 41st Cong., 2nd Sess., 1870, 16–17; and “Statement of Mr. A. B. Hamilton, January 16, 1915,” 1–2, here 1, MF53, Claims of the Heirs of Chief Heavy Runner for Reimbursement of Losses, SB287, Heavy Runner Records, 1914–1921, Montana Historical Society Archives, Helena.

For Matagorda, see J. W. Wilbarger, Indian Depredations in Texas (1888; repr., Austin, Tex., 1890), 210.

For Moth Island, see Hubert H. Bancroft and Salvador Vallejo to M. G. Vallejo, March 13, 1843, summarized in Bancroft, The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft , vol. 21: History of California , vol. IV: 1840–1845 (San Francisco, 1886), 362–363 and 362 n. 28; M. G. Vallejo to Comandante of Sonoma, April 1, 1843, in S. F. Cook, “The Conflict between the California Indian and White Civilization: II,” Ibero-Americana 22 (1943): 1–55, here 9.

For Mystic, see John Underhill, Nevves from America; or, A New and Experimentall Discoverie of New England (London, 1638), 39; and John Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War: Especially of the Memorable Taking of Their Fort at Mistick in Connecticut in 1637 (Boston, 1736), 10.

For Napituca, see “Fidalgo” of Elvas, in James Alexander Robertson, ed. and trans., True Relation of the Hardships Suffered by Governor Fernando de Soto … by a Gentleman of Elvas , 2 vols. (1557; repr., DeLand, Fla., 1933), 2: 63; and Jerald T. Milanich, Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe (1995; repr., Gainesville, Fla., 1998), 133.

For Nickajack and Running Water, see James Ore to Governor Blount, September 24, 1794, in Ramsey, The Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century , 616–617, here 616; and Edward Albright, Early History of Middle Tennessee (Nashville, Tenn., 1909), 196.

For Nilco, see “Fidalgo” of Elvas, in Robertson, True Relation of the Hardships Suffered by Governor Fernando de Soto , 2: 221–223.

For Nombre de Dios, see Verner W. Crane, The Southern Frontier, 1670–1732 (Durham, N.C., 1929), 250; and Steven J. Oatis, A Colonial Complex: South Carolina's Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War, 1680–1730 (Lincoln, Neb., 2004), 284.

For Norridgewock, see Samuel Penhallow, The History of the Wars of New-England, with the Eastern Indians (Boston, 1726), 106.

For Owens Lake, see Cadmium, January 8, 1865, Daily Alta California , January 22, 1865, 1; and J. W. A. Wright in the San Francisco Daily Evening Post , November 22, 1879, 2.

For Pavonia, see John Fiske, The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America , 2 vols. (Boston, 1899), 1: 185; and David deVries quoted in Jennings, The Invasion of America , 164–165.

For Penateka, see Wilbarger, Indian Depredations in Texas , 183–185; and J. H. Moore paraphrased in T. R. Fehrenbach, Comanches: The Destruction of a People (New York, 1974), 348.

For Peskeompskut, see Robert Bardwell and William Drew summarized in George Madison Bodge, Soldiers in King Philip's War … With an Appendix (Leominster, Mass., 1896), 247; and “contemporary writers” summarized ibid., 246.

For Potomac, see Virginia Company Court Minutes, November 12, 1623, in Susan Myra Kingsbury, The Records of the Virginia Company of London , 4 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1906), 2: 477–481, here 478; and Robert Bennett to Edward Bennett, June 9, 1623, in Kingsbury, The Records of the Virginia Company of London , 4 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1935), 4: 220–222, here 221–222.

For Poundridge, see E. B. O'Callaghan, History of New Netherland; or, New York under the Dutch , 2 vols. (New York, 1846), 1: 301.

For Prospect Bluff, see Lt. Col. D. L. Clinch to Col. R. Butler, August 2, 1816, Army and Navy Chronicle , February 25, 1836, 114–115, here 115; J. Loomis to Commodore Daniel T. Patterson, August 13, 1816, in “Letter from the Secretary of the Navy … Relating to the Destruction of the Negro Fort … in the Month of July, 1816,” H. Ex. Doc. 119, 15th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1819, 15–17; and “Extract of a Letter to a Gentleman in Charleston, Dated Camp Crawford, August 4 [1816],” Connecticut Courant (Hartford), September 10, 1816, 3.

For San Saba, see Kelly F. Himmel, The Conquest of the Karankawas and the Tonkawas, 1821–1859 (College Station, Tex., 1999), 26.

For Sand Creek, see Elliot West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence, Kans., 1998), 305; and eyewitness estimates in Stan Hoig, The Sand Creek Massacre (Norman, Okla., 1961), 183, 186–187.

For Santa Fe, see Don Diego de Vargas Zapata et al., December 29, 1693, in John L. Kessell, Rick Hendricks, and Meredith D. Dodge, eds., To the Royal Crown Restored: The Journals of don Diego de Vargas, New Mexico, 1692–94 (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1995), 533.

For Spanish Fork Canyon, see Geo. S. Evans, Colonel, to Lieut. W. L. Ustick, April 17, 1863, in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion , series 1, vol. 50, pt. I, 205–208, here 207–208.

For Spanish Peaks, see Pedro Fermín de Mendinueta quoted and summarized in Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, Conn., 2008), 78.

For Spruce Swamp, see John Tallcot to Honrd Gent, July 4, 1676, in J. Hammond Trumbull, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, from 1665 to 1678 , 15 vols. (Hartford, Conn., 1852), 2: 458–459, here 458.

For Stanislaus, see José Maria Amador, “Memorias sobre la historia de California,” in S. F. Cook, “Expeditions to the Interior of California Central Valley, 1820–1840,” Anthropological Records of the University of California 20, no. 5 (1962): 151–214, here 197–198.

For Tuckasejah, see J. G. M. Ramsey, The Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century: Comprising Its Settlement … to 1800 (Charleston, S.C., 1853), 268–269.

For Washita, see Little Robe, Minimic, Grey Eyes, and Red Moon in Jerome A. Greene, Washita: The U.S. Army and the Southern Cheyennes, 1867–1869 (Norman, Okla., 2004), 136; and Ben Clark quoted in Stan Hoig, The Battle of the Washita: The Sheridan-Custer Indian Campaign of 1867–69 (Garden City, N.Y., 1976), 200–201.

For White Stone Hill, see Alf. Sully, Brigadier-General, to Maj. J. F. Meline, September 11, 1863, in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion , series 1, vol. 22, pt. I, 555–561, here 559; and Doane Robinson, A History of the Dakota or Sioux Indians from Their Earliest Traditions … to … Abandonment of the Old Tribal Life (Aberdeen, S.Dak., 1904), 328.

For Wounded Knee, see Richard E. Jensen, “Big Foot's Followers at Wounded Knee,” Nebraska History 71, no. 4 (1990), 194–212, here 198; and Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee (Cambridge, 2004), 345.

I am grateful to William Bauer, Colin Calloway, John Demos, John Faragher, Albert Hurtado, Paul Kelton, Ben Kiernan, Timothy Macholz, William Marotti, Preston S. McBride, Edward Melillo, Jeffrey Ostler, Christopher Parsons, Peter Stacey, Russell Thornton, and the American Historical Review 's editors and anonymous reviewers for their help with this essay.

1 Estimates of the pre-contact Native American population in North America and in what would become the continental United States vary dramatically and remain contested. The following are some influential estimates. In 1841, the artist George Catlin estimated 16,000,000; and in 1860 the missionary Emmanuel Domenech estimated 16,000,000 to 17,000,000 in North America, not including Mexico, “two centuries ago.” In 1928 and 1939, anthropologists James Mooney and Alfred Kroeber estimated 1,152,950 and 1,025,950 respectively for the native population north of Mexico. Estimates then trended upward. In 1976, anthropologist Douglas H. Ubelaker estimated 1,850,011 for the continental United States. In 1983, anthropologist Henry Dobyns estimated “approximately 18 million Native Americans living north of civilized Mesoamerica in the early years of the sixteenth century.” Four years later, demographer Russell Thornton estimated “5+ million” in “the conterminous United States,” and in 1992 geographer William Denevan estimated 3,790,000 in North America, excluding Mexico and Central America. Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians , 2 vols. (London, 1841), 1: 6; Domenech, Seven Years' Residence in the Great Deserts of North America , 2 vols. (London, 1860), 1: 429; Mooney, The Aboriginal Population of America North of Mexico (Washington, D.C., 1928), 33; Kroeber, Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America (Berkeley, Calif., 1939), 131; Ubelaker, “Prehistoric New World Population Size: Historical Review and Current Appraisal of North American Estimates,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 45, no. 3 (1976): 661–665, here table 2, 664; Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville, Tenn., 1983), 42; Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 (Norman, Okla., 1987), 32, 60; Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 , 2nd ed. (Madison, Wis., 1992), xxviii. The Indian Office reported 243,299 American Indians in 1887, while the Census Bureau reported 237,196 in 1900. United States Department of the Interior, Annual Reports of the Department of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1900: Indian Affairs—Report of the Commissioner and Appendixes (Washington, D.C., 1900), 48; United States Bureau of the Census, Indian Population in the United States and Alaska, 1910 (Washington, D.C., 1915), 10. According to Thornton, “the single most important factor in American Indian population decline was an increased death rate due to diseases introduced from the Eastern Hemisphere”; American Indian Holocaust and Survival , 44. Epidemiologist and microbiologist Francis L. Black wrote, “Approximately 56 million people died as a result of European exploration in the New World [and] most died of introduced diseases.” Black, “Why Did They Die?” Science 258 (December 11, 1992): 1739–1740, here 1739. For additional scholarship on the causes, dynamics, and impact of introduced diseases on Native Americans see footnote 7.

2 Thornton noted this debate in “Native American Demographic and Tribal Survival into the Twenty-First Century,” American Studies 46, no. 3–4 (2005): 23–38, here 31.

3 R. C., “Reasons and Considerations Touching the Lawfulness of Removing out of England into the Parts of America [1622],” in John Demos, ed., Remarkable Providences, 1600–1760 (New York, 1972), 25–31, here 28.

4 Thomas More, A Fruteful, and Pleasaunt Worke … Called Vtopia , trans. Raphe Robynson (1516; repr., London, 1551), 73; John Donne, “A Sermon Preached to the Honourable Company of the Virginian Plantation,” November 13, 1622, in George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, eds., The Sermons of John Donne , 10 vols. (Berkeley, Calif., 1953–1962), 4: 274; John Cotton, “Gods Promise to His Plantations” (London, 1630), in The Old South Leaflets: Twelfth Series ([Boston], 1894), no. 6, 6; William Penn, A Brief Account of the Province of Pennsylvania, Lately Granted … to William Penn and His Heirs and Assigns (London, 1681), 1.

5 James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge, 1993), 169. David Armitage called this the “agriculturalist argument” in “John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government ,” Political Theory 32, no. 5 (2004): 602–627, here 618. Locke asserted that whatsoever a man “removes out of the State [of] Nature” and “hath mixed his Labour with,” he “thereby makes it his Property.” He then proposed an expansive definition of wasteland available for expropriation: “if either the Grass of his Inclosure rotted on the Ground, or the Fruit of his planting perished without gathering, and laying up, this part of the Earth, notwithstanding his Inclosure, was still to be looked on as Waste, and might be the Possession of any other.” Locke specified: “several Nations of the Americans … are rich in Land, and … yet for want of improving it by labour, have not 1/100 part of the Conveniencies we enjoy.” John Locke, Two Treatises of Government: In the Former, the False Principles and Foundation of Sir Robert Filmer, and His Followers Are Detected and Overthrown (1690; repr., London, 1698), 185, 194, 196, emphasis in the original. Locke's views of property and colonialism are contested. For recent discussion, see Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government .”

6 Bubonic plague and cholera probably arrived later.

7 For scholarship on the causes, dynamics, variability, and demographic impact of Native American death due to introduced diseases, see Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd series, 33, no. 2 (1976): 289–299; William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York, 1977), 199–216; Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned ; Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival ; David E. Stannard, “Disease and Infertility: A New Look at the Demographic Collapse of Native Populations in the Wake of Western Contact,” Journal of American Studies 24, no. 3 (1990): 325–350; Douglas H. Ubelaker, “Patterns of Demographic Change in the Americas,” Human Biology 64, no. 3 (1992): 361–379; Dean R. Snow, “Microchronology and Demographic Evidence Relating to the Size of Pre-Columbian North American Indian Populations,” Science 268 (June 16, 1995): 1601–1604; Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York, 1997); David S. Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,” William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd series, 60, no. 4 (2003): 703–742; Jones, Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); Paul Kelton, Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492–1715 (Lincoln, Neb., 2007). For one study of how disease has been used to limit the discussion of violence, see Kelton, Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation's Fight against Smallpox, 1518–1824 (Norman, Okla., forthcoming 2015), chap. 4. Quotation from William Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes (New York, 2002), 212.

8 Some works addressing U.S. exceptionalism include Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York, 1996); Siobhán McEvoy-Levy, American Exceptionalism and US Foreign Policy: Public Diplomacy at the End of the Cold War (New York, 2001); Jonathan A. Glickstein, American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety: Wages, Competition, and Degraded Labor in the Antebellum United States (Charlottesville, Va., 2002). Sociologist Michael Mann posited a relationship between democracy and ethnic cleansing in The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (New York, 2005).

9 The 2010 census reported 5,220,579 people as being Native American or part Native American. See Karen R. Humes, Nicholas A. Jones, and Roberto R. Ramirez, “Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin: 2010,” March 2011, www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-02.pdf ; Eduardo Duran, Judith Firehammer, and John Gonzalez, “Liberation Psychology as the Path toward Healing Cultural Soul Wounds,” Journal of Counseling & Development 86, no. 3 (2008): 288–295, here 292. For more on intergenerational trauma, see Yael Danieli, ed., International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma (New York, 1998). In 2007, several hundred Indian and non-Indian participants at the 37th Annual United Indian Health Services Annual Board and Staff Meeting for northwestern California discussed the connection between the historical trauma resulting from genocide and contemporary Native American health issues.

10 Eric K. Yamamoto and Liann Ebesugawa, “Report on Redress: The Japanese American Internment,” in Pablo de Greiff, ed., The Handbook of Reparations (New York, 2006), 257–283, here 257–258, 269–270, 274.

11 Kevin Gover, “Remarks of Kevin Gover, Assistant Secretary-Indian Affairs: Address to Tribal Leaders,” Journal of American Indian Education 39, no. 2 (2000): 4–6, here 4–5.

12 To Acknowledge a Long History of Official Depredations and Ill-Conceived Policies by the United States Government Regarding Indian Tribes and Offer an Apology to All Native Peoples on Behalf of the United States , S.J. Res. 37, 108th Cong., 2nd Sess., 2004, and H.J. Res. 98, 108th Cong., 2nd Sess., 2004.

13 To Acknowledge a Long History of Official Depredations and Ill-Conceived Policies by the United States Government Regarding Indian Tribes and Offer an Apology to All Native Peoples on Behalf of the United States , S.J. Res. 15, 109th Cong., 1st Sess., 2005; H.J. Res. 3, 109th Cong., 1st Sess., 2005; S.J. Res. 4, 110th Cong., 1st Sess., 2007; H.J. Res. 3, 110th Cong., 1st Sess., 2007; Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2010, H.R. 3326, 111th Cong., 1st Sess., 2009.

14 Raphaël Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, D.C., 1944), xi–xii, chap. 9; Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 9 December 1948 , United Nations—Treaty Series, vol. 78: No. 1021, 280. The Nullem crimen sine lege concept (no crime without law) bars the prosecution of genocide perpetrators for crimes committed before their nation became a party to the UN Genocide Convention.

15 Michael A. McDonnell and A. Dirk Moses, “Raphael Lemkin as Historian of Genocide in the Americas,” Journal of Genocide Research 7, no. 4 (2005): 501–529, here 502; “Deaths,” New York Times , August 31, 1959, 21. For more on Lemkin's unpublished writing about Native Americans and genocide, see John Docker, “Are Settler-Colonies Inherently Genocidal? Re-reading Lemkin,” in A. Dirk Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York, 2008), 81–101.

16 SS officer Adolf Eichmann's 1961 trial—in combination with the film Judgment at Nuremberg and political scientist Raul Hilberg's book The Destruction of the European Jews —introduced the Holocaust to many in the United States. Holocaust-related art, literature, media, and scholarship then proliferated. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston, 1999), 133; Judgment at Nuremberg , dir. Stanley Kramer (Roxlom Films, 1961); Lawrence Baron, “The First Wave of American ‘Holocaust’ Films, 1945–1959,” American Historical Review 115, no. 1 (February 2010): 90–114, here 90; Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1961). In 1966, the Cree Indian folk singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie sang “of the genocide basic to this country's birth.” Academics William Sturtevant and Samuel Stanley wrote about genocide in “the Eastern States” two years later, and in the 1970s Native American activists adopted the term. By 1979, ethnic studies scholar Jack Norton argued that according to the Genocide Convention, certain northwestern California Indians suffered genocide under U.S. rule. Five years later, in the English translation of The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other , Tzvetan Todorov asserted: “the sixteenth century perpetrated the greatest genocide in human history.” Buffy Sainte-Marie, “My Country 'Tis of Thy People You're Dying,” on Little Wheel Spin and Spin (LP record, Vanguard, 1966). Political scientist Adam Jones kindly pointed this out to me. William C. Sturtevant and Samuel Stanley, “Indian Communities in the Eastern States,” The Indian Historian 1, no. 3 (1968): 15–19, here 17; Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (New York, 1983), 415, 429, 478; Jack Norton, Genocide in Northwestern California: When Our Worlds Cried (San Francisco, 1979); Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other , trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1984), 5. For 1960s and 1970s histories addressing violence against American Indians, see, for example, Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (Berkeley, Calif., 1961); Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York, 1970); Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975). For Ronald Reagan and the Genocide Convention, see Bernard Gwertzman, “Reagan Will Submit 1948 Genocide Pact for Senate Approval,” New York Times , September 6, 1984, A1, A9; Lawrence J. LeBlanc, The United States and the Genocide Convention (Durham, N.C., 1991), 142; Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival , xvi, 44.

17 LeBlanc, The United States and the Genocide Convention , 145, Appendix D. In 1986, scholars founded the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies and from the first issue included articles addressing genocide and Native Americans. Historian Frank Chalk's and sociologist Kurt Jonassohn's 1990 edited collection The History and Sociology of Genocide included essays on Native Americans in colonial New England and in the nineteenth-century U.S. while arguing that Indians suffered genocide, primarily through famine, massacres, and “criminal neglect.” That same year, sociologist Helen Fein touched on “Genocide in North America.” Seena B. Kohl, “Ethnocide and Ethnogenesis: A Case Study of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw, a Genocide Avoided,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1, no. 1 (1986): 91–100; Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, “Indians of the Americas, 1492–1789,” in Chalk and Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven, Conn., 1990), 173–180; Chalk and Jonassohn, “Indians of the United States in the Nineteenth Century,” ibid., 195–203, see 203 for assertion of genocide against American Indians described above; Fein, “Contextual and Comparative Studies II: Other Genocides,” Current Sociology 38, no. 1 (1990): 79–91, here 80–82.

18 David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York, 1992), xii, emphasis in the original.

19 Richard White, “Morality and Mortality,” New Republic , January 18, 1993, 33–35, here 35, emphasis in the original.

20 Russell Thornton, review of Stannard, American Holocaust , Journal of American History 80, no. 4 (1994): 1428.

21 Women's and gender studies scholar M. Annette Jaimes mentioned “genocidal examples” of “the U.S. destruction of its indigenous population,” while scholars Lenore A. Stiffarm and Phil Lane Jr. proclaimed, “Surely, there can be no more monumental example of sustained genocide—certainly none involving a ‘race’ of people as broad and complex as this—anywhere in the annals of human history.” Jaimes, “Introduction: Sand Creek: The Morning After,” in Jaimes, ed., The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance (Boston, 1992), 1–12, here 3; Stiffarm with Lane, “The Demography of Native North America: A Question of American Indian Survival,” ibid., 23–53, here 37; Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco, 1997), 97, 159, 289–290.

22 English and Native American studies professor Elizabeth Cook-Lynn wrote about “Anti-Indianism and Genocide” in 2001. Four years later, media and cultural studies scholar Andrea Smith wrote of “the more than 500 years of genocide that Native peoples have faced,” while historian Mark Levene discussed examples of “the Anglo-American drive to rapid state-building and genocide.” In 2008, historian Alfred A. Cave argued, “While examples of state-sponsored extermination of indigenous populations can be found in the records of every colonial power in the Americas, they were … not the rule and were aimed not at all Indians but at a limited number of specific tribal groups.” In 2010, historian Gregory D. Smithers addressed the importance of racial thinking in North American genocides, while in 2011 historian Brenden Rensink summarized “the state of Native American genocide studies.” Cook-Lynn, Anti-Indianism in Modern America: A Voice from Tatekeya's Earth (Urbana, Ill., 2001), 185; Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 5; Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State , 2 vols. (London, 2005), 2: 84; Cave, “Genocide in the Americas,” in Dan Stone, ed., The Historiography of Genocide (New York, 2008), 273–295, here 276, 279–288; Smithers, “Rethinking Genocide in North America,” in Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford, 2010), 322–341; Rensink, “Genocide of Native Americans: Historical Facts and Historiographic Debates,” in Samuel Totten and Robert K. Hitchcock, eds., Genocide of Indigenous Peoples: A Critical Bibliographic Review (New Brunswick, N.J., 2011), 15–36, here 16.

23 Some twenty-first-century histories addressing violence against Native Americans include Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Gary Clayton Anderson, The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820–1875 (Norman, Okla., 2005); Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, Mass., 2006); Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (New York, 2008); Peter Rhoads Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York, 2008); Alfred A. Cave, Lethal Encounters: Englishmen and Indians in Colonial Virginia (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2011).

24 Thornton briefly addressed the Yana, Yuki, and Tolowa genocides in American Holocaust and Survival , 109–113, 200–208; Stannard touched on the Pequot War, King Philip's War, the Cherokee, and California Indians in American Holocaust , 111–117, 121–124, 134–146; Ben Kiernan addressed “Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” “The Pequot War,” “King Philip's War,” “Extermination and Genocidal Massacres in the Eighteenth Century,” “War, Expansion, and Genocidal Massacres,” “the Trail of Tears,” “Extermination in Texas,” “Genocide in California,” and “Genocidal Massacres on the Great Plains” in Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, Conn., 2007), chaps. 6 and 8. For my own case studies see Benjamin Madley, “California's Yuki Indians: Defining Genocide in Native American History,” Western Historical Quarterly 39, no. 3 (2008): 303–332; Madley, “When ‘The World was Turned Upside Down’: California and Oregon's Tolowa Indian Genocide, 1851–1856,” in Adam Jones, ed., New Directions in Genocide Research (New York, 2012), 170–196; Madley, “The Genocide of California's Yana Indians,” in Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons, eds., Centuries of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts , 4th ed. (New York, 2012), 16–53; Madley, “California and Oregon's Modoc Indians: How Indigenous Resistance Camouflages Genocide in Colonial Histories,” in Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, and Alexander Laban Hinton, eds., Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America (Durham, N.C., 2014), 95–130.

25 James Axtell, Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America (New York, 1992), 261.

26 Steven T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context: The Holocaust and Mass Death before the Modern Age , 2 vols. (New York, 1994), 1: 20, emphasis in the original.

27 Robert M. Utley, “Total War on the American Indian Frontier,” in Manfred F. Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster, eds., Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871–1914 (Cambridge, 1999), 399–414, here 401, 399. Utley did concede that “In one sense the concept of genocide is relevant: cultural genocide” (400), by which he meant assimilation policies. Yet his argument ignored the genocidal crimes, as specified by the Genocide Convention, that some argue took place during the United States' attempt to assimilate American Indians.

28 William D. Rubinstein, Genocide: A History (Harlow, 2004), 53; Guenter Lewy, “Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?,” Commentary 118, no. 2 (2004): 55–63, here 63.

29 Gary Clayton Anderson, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America (Norman, Okla., 2014), 13, 7.

30 Stannard, American Holocaust , 281; Lewy, “Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?,” 61; Thornton, “Native American Demographic and Tribal Survival into the Twenty-First Century,” 31–32; Cave, “Genocide in the Americas,” 275; Kiernan, Blood and Soil , 11; Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide , 431–433.

31 Rubinstein, Genocide , 2, 3, emphasis in the original.

32 Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn quoted in Axtell, Beyond 1492 , 261, emphasis in the original.

33 Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context , 127, 128, emphasis in the original.

34 Anderson, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian , 13.

35 LeBlanc, The United States and the Genocide Convention , 1.

36 Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction , 2nd ed. (New York, 2010), 16–20. The participants are listed at United Nations Treaty Collection, http://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=UNTSONLINE&tabid=2&mtdsg_no=IV-1&chapter=4&lang=en#Participants . Since 1993, the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda have tried genocide cases using the Genocide Convention. The International Criminal Court at The Hague, established in 2002, is empowered to try genocide suspects using the Genocide Convention, as embedded in the Rome Statutes. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (also known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal) began its first trial in 2009 and also uses the Genocide Convention. Some national courts have also found their citizens guilty of genocide. For example, in 2013, a Guatemalan tribunal found that nation's former president, Efraín Ríos Montt, guilty of genocide, although a court later repealed this ruling. Elisabeth Malkin, “Former Leader of Guatemala Is Guilty of Genocide against Mayan Group,” New York Times , May 11, 2013, A6; Malkin, “Guatemala's Highest Court Overturns Genocide Conviction of Former Dictator,” New York Times , May 21, 2013, A6.

37 Some exceptions include Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival , 109–113, 200–208; Stannard, American Holocaust , 111–117, 121–124, 134–146; and Kiernan, Blood and Soil , chaps. 6 and 8.

38 Thornton, “Native American Demographic and Tribal Survival into the Twenty-First Century,” 32.

39 Dan Stone, “Introduction,” in Stone, Historiography of Genocide , 1–6, here 3.

40 Susan Myra Kingsbury, ed., The Records of The Virginia Company of London , 4 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1906), 3: 683.

41 R. A. Brock, ed., The Official Letters of Alexander Spotswood, Lieutenant-Governor of the Colony of Virginia, 1710–1722: Now First Printed from the Manuscript in the Collections of the Virginia Historical Society , 2 vols. (Richmond, Va., 1882), 1: 134.

42 Spencer Phips, “A Proclamation” (Boston, November 3, 1755), 1.

43 Amherst, memorandum, May 4, 1763, in Sylvester K. Stevens and Donald H. Kent, eds., The Papers of Col. Henry Bouquet , 18 vols. (Harrisburg, Pa., 1940), 2: 161; Amherst to Bouquet, June 29, 1763, ibid., 204, emphasis in the original. Ben Kiernan generously provided the first quotation.

44 Jefferson quoted in Kiernan, Blood and Soil , 318–323, 328–329.

45 Knox quoted in Roscoe R. Hill, ed., Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789 , 34 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1936), 32: 330; Knox quoted in Walter Lowrie and Matthew St. Clair Clarke, eds., American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States, from the First Session of the First to the Third Session of the Thirteenth Congress, Inclusive, Commencing March 3, 1789, and Ending March 3, 1815 , 38 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1832), 4: 13, 97.

46 Jefferson quoted in Kiernan, Blood and Soil , 328.

47 Jackson quoted in James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897 , 10 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1896), 2: 521.

48 Editor and Isaac Stevens in “Arrival of Gov. Stevens,” Pioneer and Democrat (Olympia), January 25, 1856, 2, emphasis in the original.

49 Jno. Pope, Major-General, to Col. H. H. Sibley, September 28, 1862, in United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies , 4 series, 130 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1880–1901), series 1, vol. 13, 686.

50 Cavanaugh quoted in F. and J. Rives and George A. Bailey, The Congressional Globe: Containing the Debates and Proceedings of the Second Session, Fortieth Congress (Washington, D.C., 1868), 2638. Preston McBride kindly provided this quotation.

51 Grant paraphrased in “The Indian Peace Commissioners–Political Matters–Business Prospects,” New York Times , October 16, 1868, 1.

52 Sheridan quoted in Edward S. Ellis, The History of Our Country from the Discovery of America to the Present Time , 8 vols. (Indianapolis, 1900), 6: 1483.

53 W. T. Sherman, General, to Gen. Schofield, April 12, 1873, in Daily Alta California (San Francisco), April 14, 1873, 1.

54 Roosevelt quoted in Hermann Hagedorn, Roosevelt in the Bad Lands (Boston, 1921), 355.

55 Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn., 1981), 10.

56 White, “Morality and Mortality,” 35.

57 Discussing Spanish colonialism in Latin America, demographer Massimo Livi Bacci observed that violence and brutality worsened the indigenous demographic crisis caused by colonialism. Bacci, Conquest: The Destruction of the American Indios , trans. Carl Ipsen (Malden, Mass., 2008), 74.

58 For Connecticut in 1637, see Lion Gardiner, A History of the Pequot War … in the Year 1638 (Cincinnati, 1860), 21–22. For the Dutch in 1641, see “Ordinance of the Director and Council of New Netherland, Offering a Reward for the Heads of Raritan Indians, Passed 4 July, 1641,” in E. B. O'Callaghan, comp. and trans., Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 1638–1674 (Albany, N.Y., 1868), 28–29, emphasis in the original.

59 For Virginia in 1674, see “An Act for the Safeguard and Defence of the Country against the Indians,” in William Waller Hening, The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619 , 13 vols. (New York, 1823), 2: 331–333, here 332.

60 For Connecticut and Massachusetts in 1675, see “Articles, Covenants and Agreements Had, Made and Concluded by … the Six Present Sachems of the Whole Narhaganset Country … and the Govenours of the Said Massachusets, and Connecticut …,” in W. Hubbard, The Present State of New-England (London, 1677), 21–23, here 21–22. Connecticut and Massachusetts simultaneously offered two coats for every prisoner.

61 N. S., The Present State of New-England, with Respect to the Indian War (London, 1676), 9; T. C., Entertaining Passages Relating to Philip's War Which Began in the Month of June, 1675 (Boston, 1716), 45, emphasis in the original. Connecticut simultaneously offered two coats for every prisoner and forty for King Philip alive. See N. S., The Present State of New-England, with Respect to the Indian War , 9.

62 For French officials in 1688, see “Examination of Magsigpen, an Indian,” in John Romeyn Brodhead, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York , 15 vols. (Albany, N.Y., 1853), 3: 561–562. For Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut in 1689, see “By the Commissioners of the Colonies of the Massachusetts, Plymouth and Connecticut, for Managing the Present War against the Common Enemy,” in James Sullivan, The History of the District of Maine (Boston, 1795), 412–413.

63 For French bounty, see Louis XIV to M. de Frontenac and M. de Champigny, May 8, 1694, in E. B. O'Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York , 15 vols. (Albany, N.Y., 1855), 9: 573. For Massachusetts in 1694 and 1695, see “An Act for Encouraging the Prosecution of the Indian Enemy & Rebels, and Preserving Such as Are Friends,” in The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay , 21 vols. (Boston, 1869), 1: 175–176, here 176; “An Act for the Continuation of Several Acts Therein Mentioned, That Are Near Expiring,” ibid., 210–211, here 211. In 1694 and 1695, Massachusetts offered equal monetary rewards for dead victims and living prisoners.

64 For the origins of scalping, see James Axtell and William C. Sturtevant, “The Unkindest Cut, or Who Invented Scalping?,” William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd series, 37, no. 3 (1980): 451–472. For more on “scalping in America and similar war customs,” see Georg Friederici, Skalpieren und ähnliche Kriegsgebräuche in Amerika (Braunschweig, 1906).

65 For Massachusetts in 1697, see “An Act for Encouragement of the Prosecution of the Indian Enemy and Rebels,” in The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay , 1: 292–293, here 292.

66 For Massachusetts in 1703–1704, see William Douglass, A Summary, Historical and Political, of the First Planting … and Present State of the British Settlements in North-America (London, 1760), 556–557. For Massachusetts in 1706–1710, see “An Act to Encourage the Prosecution of the Indian Enemy and Rebels,” in The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay , 1: 594–595, here 594; “An Act for Reviving and Further Continuing of Several Temporary Acts, Which, by Their Respective Limitations, Are Near Determining and Expiring,” ibid., 639–640, here 640; and “An Act for Reviving and Further Continuing of Several Temporary Acts, Which by Their Respective Limitations, Are Near Determining and Expiring,” ibid., 657–658, here 658. For Massachusetts in 1722–1726, see “An Act to Encourage the Prosecution of the Indian Enemy and Rebels,” in The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay , 21 vols. (Boston, 1874), 2: 258–259; and “List of the Public Acts,” ibid., 1123–1160, here 1132. For Massachusetts in 1744 and 1747, see “[Act of] October 25, 1744,” in The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay , 21 vols. (Boston, 1878), 3: 218; and “[Act of] April 23, 1747,” ibid., 342. For Massachusetts in 1755 and 1756, see “Action of House against Penobscots,” in James Phinney Baxter, ed., The Documentary History of the State of Maine , 24 vols. (Portland, Maine, 1916), 24: 62; “Proclamation S. Phips,” ibid., 62–64; and “In House of Represent', June 10, 1756,” ibid., 64–65. For Connecticut in 1704 and 1746, see Charles J. Hoadly, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, from August, 1689, to May, 1706 (Hartford, Conn., 1868), 464; and “An Act for the More Effectual Carrying on the War and Defending of the Frontiers,” in Hoadly, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, from May, 1744, to November, 1750, Inclusive (Hartford, Conn., 1876), 227–229, here 227–228. For New York, see “An Act for Giving a Reward for Such Scalps … to the Indians,” in The Colonial Laws of New York from the Year 1664 to the Revolution , 5 vols. (Albany, N.Y., 1894), 3: 540–542, here 540; and Colonel Johnson to Governor Clinton, May 7, 1747, in O'Callaghan, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (1855), 6: 360–363, here 360–361. For New Jersey, see “At a Meeting of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs the 22d Day of January 1745–6,” in Collections of the New Jersey Historical Society , 27 vols. (Newark, N.J., 1852), 4: 305–306; and Jonathan Belcher, “A Proclamation,” in William Nelson, ed., Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New Jersey , 33 vols. (Patterson, N.J., 1898), 20: 39–41, here 40. For Pennsylvania, see “At a Council Held in the State House, Saturday the 10th April, 1756,” in Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania , 17 vols. (Harrisburg, Pa., 1851), 7: 78–83, here 78; “Orders and Instructions of Gov. M. to Capt. Isaac Wayne, Dated at Reading, Jan ry , 1756,” in Samuel Hazard, Pennsylvania Archives , 2 series, 19 vols. (Philadelphia, 1853), series 2, vol. 2, 542–543, here 543; and “At a Council Held at Philadelphia [in] 1764,” in Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania , 17 vols. (Harrisburg, Pa., 1852), 9: 188–190, here 189. For Maryland, see Dan Wolstenhohue and I. Ridout to Horatio Sharpe, Esq, Lieutenant Governor and Commander in Chief of the Province of Maryland, May 25, 1757, in William Hand Browne, Archives of Maryland , 864 vols. (Baltimore, 1888), 6: 557–563, here 559; Sharpe to Baltimore, May 29, 1757, in Browne, Archives of Maryland , 864 vols. (Baltimore, 1890), 9: 5–7, here 6; “Assembly Proceedings, June 23–July 8, 1755,” in J. Hall Pleasants, ed., Archives of Maryland , 864 vols. (Baltimore, 1935), 52: 172–215, here 177; “An Act for His Majesty's Service, and Further Defence and Security of This Province, ” ibid., 650–656, here 651–653; and “Assembly Proceedings, November 1–December 20, 1765, ” in J. Hall Pleasants, ed., Archives of Maryland , 864 vols. (Baltimore, 1942), 59: 41–261, here 65. For twenty-six scalps in New York, see “A Receipt,” in Alexander C. Flick, ed., The Papers of Sir William Johnson , 14 vols. (Albany, N.Y., 1939), 9: 8; and “An Account of Expenses with Receipt,” ibid., 15–31, here 22–25, 30. For Virginia, see “Minutes of the Virginia Governor's Council,” October 24, 1711, in Colonial and State Records of North Carolina , 26 vols. (Raleigh, 1886), 1: 815; “An Act for Preventing and Repelling the Hostile Incursions of the Indians, at Enmity with the Inhabitants of This Colony,” in William Waller Hening, The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia , 13 vols. (Richmond, Va., 1819), 6: 550–552, here 551; “An Act to Amend an Act, Intituled, An Act for Preventing and Repelling the Hostile Incursions of the Indians, at Enmity with the Inhabitants of This Colony,” ibid., 564–565, here 564; “An Act for the More Effectual Preventing and Repelling the Hostile Incursions of the Indians at Enmity with the Inhabitants of This Colony,” in Hening, The Statutes at Large , 13 vols. (Richmond, Va., 1820), 7: 121–123, here 122; and “An Act for Augmenting the Forces in the Pay of This Colony to Two Thousand Men; and for Other Purposes Therein Mentioned,” ibid., 163–169, here 165. For North Carolina, see “An Act for appointing a Militia,” in Walter Clark, ed., The State Records of North Carolina , 30 vols. (Goldsboro, N.C., 1904), 23: 596–601, here 601; and “An Act for the Encouragement of the Militia and Volunteers Employed in Prosecuting the Present Indian War,” in Clark, The State Records of North Carolina , 30 vols. (Goldsboro, N.C., 1905), 24: 15. For South Carolina, see Steven J. Oatis, A Colonial Complex: South Carolina's Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War, 1680–1730 (Lincoln, Neb., 2004), 146; and “An Act to Impower … the Governor … and Also to Provide a Fund for Defraying the Charges Arising Thereby,” in Thomas Cooper, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina , 10 vols. (Columbia, S.C., 1838), 3: 23–30, here 24. For Georgia, see “At a Council Held in the Council Chamber at Savannah on … 9th February 1760,” in Allen D. Candler, ed., The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia , 39 vols. (Atlanta, 1907), 8: 248. For French bounties, see Jean-François Lozier, “Lever des chevelures en Nouvelle-France: La politique française du paiement des scalps,” Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française 56, no. 4 (2003): 513–542, here 522–523, 527–528. For the Ohio River Valley, see Captain Robert Orme, “Orders at the Camp on the West Side of the Great Meadows, June the 25th,” journal entry of June 25, 1755, in Winthrop Sargent, The History of an Expedition against Fort Du Quesne, in 1755: Under Major-General Edward Braddock, Generalissimo of H.B.M. Forces in America (Philadelphia, 1855), 343–344, here 343.

67 John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven, Conn., 1986), 32.

68 For the Second Seminole War in Florida, see Nathaniel West, The Ancestry, Life, and Times of Hon. Henry Hastings Sibley, LL.D . (Saint Paul, Minn., 1889), 333 n. 2. For Florida, Sonora, and Chihuahua, see Friederici, Skalpieren und ähnliche Kriegsgebräuche in Amerika , 56. For 487 scalps, see Ralph A. Smith, “The Bounty Wars of the West and Mexico,” Great Plains Journal 28 (1989): 102–121, here 105. For Minnesota, see Oscar Malmros, Adjutant General, “GENERAL ORDERS NO. 41 [July 4, 1863],” in Executive Documents of the State of Minnesota, for the Year 1863 (Saint Paul, Minn., 1864), 192–193, here 192; “GENERAL ORDERS NO. 44 [July 20, 1863],” ibid., 195–196, here 196; and “GENERAL ORDERS NO. 60 [September 22, 1863],” ibid., 198. For Montana, see George W. Manypenny, Our Indian Wards (Cincinnati, 1880), 272. For Arizona in 1885, see “Money for Indian Scalps,” New York Times , October 12, 1885, 1.

69 Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Long Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (New York, 1993), 81, 87; Grant Foreman, ed., A Traveler in Indian Territory: The Journal of Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Late Major-General in the United States Army (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1930), 120; Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival , 118.

70 J. P. Williamson in Stephen R. Riggs, Mary and I: Forty Years with the Sioux (Chicago, 1880), 197; John Upton Terrell, The Navajos: The Past and Present of a Great People (New York, 1970), 192.

71 H. C. Hasbrouck to Samuel Breck, November 5, 1873, in “Message from the President of the United States, Transmitting Copies of the Correspondence and Papers Relative to the War with the Modoc Indians in Southern Oregon and Northern California, during the Years 1872 and 1873,” H. Ex. Doc. 122, 43rd Cong., 1st Sess., 1874, 102; Albert L. Hurtado, “The Modocs and the Jones Family Indian Ring: Quaker Administration of the Quapaw Agency, 1873–1879,” in Robert E. Smith, ed., Oklahoma's Forgotten Indians (Oklahoma City, 1981), 86–107; “Table of Statistics Relating to Population, Education, & c., by Tribes and Their Respective Agencies,” in United States Office of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior for the Year 1881 (Washington, D.C., 1881), 272–291, here 278; Donald J. Berthrong, The Cheyenne and Arapaho Ordeal: Reservation and Agency Life in the Indian Territory, 1875–1907 (Norman, Okla., 1976), 37; “Responsibility for Starvation among the Piegans,” open letter from C. C. Painter to E. John Ellis, December 24, 1884, in The Action of Congress in Regard to the Piegan Indians of Montana (Philadelphia, 1885), 10–13, here 12; General N. A. Miles to President R. B. Hayes, January 19, 1881, in Mark H. Brown, The Flight of the Nez Perce (New York, 1967), 429; Lieutenant Guy Howard to Adjutant-General, U.S. Army, December 23, 1889, in “Message from the President of the United States, Transmitting a Letter of the Secretary of War and Reports Touching the Apache Indians at Governor's Island,” S. Ex. Doc. 35, 51st Cong., 1st Sess., 1890, 9; H. Henrietta Stockel, Survival of the Spirit: Chiricahua Apaches in Captivity (Reno, Nev., 1993), 176; “Release of Apache Prisoners of War,” in Reports of the Department of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1913 , H. Doc. 1009, vol. 2, 63rd Cong., 2nd Sess., 1914, 36. The off-reservation U.S. Indian boarding school system, initiated in 1879, constituted another form of federal removal and incarceration that may have been genocidal. Some guardians sent young people voluntarily. However, federal agents used coercion and force, sometimes supported by legislation, to take many others, some as young as five years old, to schools that were often far from students' families and communities. Frequently barred from returning home for years, many students tried to escape, but many died. The total number of students who died as a result of attending these schools remains unknown. Overviews of the boarding schools include Michael C. Coleman, American Indian Children at School, 1850–1930 (Jackson, Miss., 1993); David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence, Kans., 1995); Margaret L. Archuleta, Brenda J. Child, and K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1879–2000 (Phoenix, Ariz., 2000); Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln, Neb., 1998); Clifford E. Trafzer, Jean A. Keller, and Lorene Sisquoc, eds., Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences (Lincoln, Neb., 2006).

72 John Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal, “History of New England,” 1630–1649 , ed. James Kendall Hosmer, 2 vols. (New York, 1908), 1: 83 n. 1, 183–184; John Underhill, Nevves from America; or, A New and Experimentall Discoverie of New England (London, 1638), 2, 9. Scholarship on the Pequot War as genocide includes Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Minneapolis, 1980), 34–55; Chalk and Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide , 180; Michael Freeman, “Puritans and Pequots: The Question of Genocide,” New England Quarterly 68, no. 2 (1995): 278–293; Kiernan, Blood and Soil , 227–235. According to Mason, Pequots did not kill these men. See John Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War: Especially of the Memorable Taking of Their Fort at Mistick in Connecticut in 1637 (Boston, 1736), viii–x.

73 Entry of August 25, 1636, in Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal , 1: 186. Drinnon labeled these orders “explicitly genocidal”; Facing West , 34. Underhill claimed that there were 100 men plus officers in the expedition; Nevves from America , 3. Mason wrote of 120 men; A Brief History of the Pequot War , ix.

74 Underhill, Nevves from America , 7, emphasis in the original.

75 Ibid., 9–15.

76 Entry of August 24, 1636, entry inserted after September 23, 1636, and entry of October 21, 1636, in Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal , 1: 189–190, 194. Underhill recollected that after killing “numbers” of Pequots and “having burnt and spoyled what we could light on, wee imbarqued”; Nevves from America , 15.

77 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , ix.

78 Lion Gardiner [here Gardener], Relation of the Pequot Warres: Written in 1660 by Lieutenant Lion Gardener and Now First Printed from the Original Manuscript with an Historical Introduction , ed. W. N. Chattin Carlton (Hartford, Conn., 1901), 15. ( Note: At the time this book was published, the family name had not yet been standardized as Gardiner.)

79 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , x, emphasis in the original.

80 J. Hammond Trumbull, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, Prior to the Union with New Haven Colony, May, 1665 (Hartford, Conn., 1850), 9. Underhill claimed that 100 men set out; Nevves from America , 23.

81 Edward Johnson quoted in J. Franklin Jameson, ed., Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence, 1628–1651 (New York, 1910), 166.

82 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 5, emphasis in the original.

83 Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot Warres , 20. As many as seven Pequots died in this incident. Underhill, Nevves from America , 24–25; P. Vincent, A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England, between the English, and the Salvages: With the Present State of Things There (London, 1637), 8–9; Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 1.

84 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 5–6; Underhill, Nevves from America , 36–37.

85 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 8.

86 Entry of May 25, 1637, in Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal , 1: 220; Underhill, Nevves from America , 37; Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 8, capitalization as in the original.

87 Underhill, Nevves from America , 39. See also Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 8.

88 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 8, emphasis in the original.

89 Underhill, Nevves from America , 39, emphasis in the original. According to Mason, “Others of the Stoutest issued forth, as we did guess, to the Number of Forty , who perished by the Sword”; A Brief History of the Pequot War , 9, emphasis in the original.

90 Underhill, Nevves from America , 39.

91 Gardiner, not an eyewitness, estimated 300 killed; Relation of the Pequot Warres , 20, 30. Winthrop, also not an eyewitness, wrote of 302 slain; entry of May 25, 1637, in Winthrop's Journal , 1: 220. Vincent, whose narrative may or may not have been that of an eyewitness, estimated “betwixt three and foure hundred … killed”; A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England , 12. Plymouth Colony governor William Bradford, not an eyewitness, estimated “about 400” killed; Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation , ed. Charles Deane (Boston, 1856), 357.

92 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 10, emphasis in the original.

93 Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst, Mass., 1996), 151.

94 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 10, emphasis in the original. See also Underhill, Nevves from America , 39. Vincent suggested that one of the two men may have been killed by friendly fire; A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England , 12.

95 Underhill, Nevves from America , 39–40, 43, 40, emphasis in the original.

96 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 14, emphasis and capitalization as in the original.

97 Entry of June 15, 1637, in Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal , 1: 222. On October 12, 1637, Winthrop recorded another day of celebration: “A day of thanksgiving [was again] kept in all the churches for our victories against the Pequods” (1: 238).

98 Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation , 357.

99 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 11; Underhill, Nevves from America , 42.

100 Underhill, Nevves from America , 42, emphasis in the original.

101 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 11–12. See also Vincent, A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England , 12.

102 Seven Mohegans summarized in Vincent, A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England , 15.

103 Ibid.; Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 14.

104 Vincent, A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England , 15.

105 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 14; entry of July 5, 1637, in Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal , 1: 224–225. Vincent reported twenty-three slain; A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England , 16. William Hubbard claimed thirty killed; Hubbard, A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-England, from the First Planting Thereof in the Year 1607, to This Present Year, 1677 (Boston, 1677), 128.

106 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 15; Vincent wrote of “200 English” in this campaign; A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England , 15.

107 Entry of July 13, 1637, in Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal , 1: 226.

108 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 15–17; Vincent, A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England , 16, emphasis in the original.

109 Vincent, A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England , 16; Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 17. Mason wrote, “We afterwards searched the Swamp , & found but few Slain ”; ibid., emphasis in the original.

110 Underhill, Nevves from America , 2.

111 Vincent, A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England , 16.

112 Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot Warres , 21, 22; Wyandanch quotation from 24.

113 Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War , 17, emphasis in the original.

114 Vincent, A True Relation of the Late Battell Fought in New England , 16–17; Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot Warres , 21. It is not clear if someone paid the Mohawks for these Pequot heads and hands.

115 Entries of August 5, 26, and 31, 1637, in Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal , 1: 229, 231.

116 Freeman, “Puritans and Pequots,” 289.

117 John Haynes, Roger Ludlow, Edward Hopkins, Miantonomo, and Uncas, “Articles of Agreement between the English in Connecticutt and the Indian Sachems,” September 21, 1638, 1–2, Connecticut State Library, Hartford, http://cslib.cdmhost.com/cdm/ref/collection/p128501coll11/id/3860 .

118 The Treaty of Hartford specified: “200 Pequots living that are Men besides Squaws and Papooses The English do give unto Miantimone and the Narragansetts to make up the Number of Eighty with the Eleaven they have already and to the Poquin his Number.” Ibid., 2. For dispersal beyond New England, see Michael L. Fickes, “‘They Could Not Endure That Yoke’: The Captivity of Pequot Women and Children after the War of 1637,” New England Quarterly 73, no. 1 (2000): 58–81, here 61; entry of July 5, 1637, in Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal , 1: 224–225, here 225; entry of July 6, 1637, ibid., 225–226, here 225; entry of July 12, 1637, ibid., 226; entry of July 13, 1637, ibid., 226–228, here 227–228; James E. Smith, Slavery in Bermuda (New York, 1976), 25. Kiernan observed, “English policy was clear: the Pequot ethnic group had to disappear. The survivors were to be made unable to reproduce themselves as a community”; Blood and Soil , 233.

119 United States Census Bureau, American Fact Finder , 2010, “Pequot tribal grouping alone or in any combination,” http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml .

120 Scholarship designating the Yuki catastrophe as genocide includes Gary E. Garrett, “The Destruction of the Indian in Mendocino County, 1856–1860” (M.A. thesis, Sacramento State College, 1969); Virginia P. Miller, Ukomno'm: The Yuki Indians of Northern California (Socorro, N.Mex., 1979); Lynwood Carranco and Estle Beard, Genocide and Vendetta: The Round Valley Wars of Northern California (Norman, Okla., 1981); Madley, “California's Yuki Indians.” The Burnett quote is from Journals of the Legislature of the State of California, at Its Second Session: Held at the City of San Jose, Commencing on the Sixth Day of January, and Ending on the First Day of May, 1851 ([San Jose], 1851), 15.

121 The Statutes of California, Passed at the Second Session of the Legislature, Begun on the Sixth Day of January, 1851, and Ended on the First Day of May, 1851, at the City of San Jose (San Jose, 1851), 520–521; George E. Anderson and Robert F. Heizer, “Treaty-Making by the Federal Government in California, 1851–1852,” in George E. Anderson, W. H. Ellison, and Robert F. Heizer, eds., Treaty Making and Treaty Rejection by the Federal Government in California, 1850–1852 (Socorro, N.Mex., 1978), 1–36, here 26; W. H. Ellison, “Rejection of California Indian Treaties: A Study in Local Influence on National Policy,” ibid., 50–70, here 62.

122 Frank Asbill and Argle Shawley, The Last of the West (New York, 1975), 18–19; Lyman L. Palmer, History of Mendocino County, California, Comprising Its Geography, Geology, Topography, Climatography, Springs and Timber (San Francisco, 1880), 459, 595, 596; Benjamin Arthur deposition, February 28, 1860, in California Legislature, Special Joint Committee on the Mendocino War, Majority and Minority Reports of the Special Joint Committee on the Mendocino War (Sacramento, 1860) [hereafter MMR ], 51.

123 John W. Burgess deposition, February 28, 1860, in MMR , 24.

124 Dryden Lacock deposition, February 25, 1860, ibid., 49. According to the Indian War Papers , Lacock testified, “we could kill, on an average, 15 or 20 Indians on a trip.” See Lacock deposition in Military Department, Adjutant General, Indian War Papers, folder F3753: 441, California State Archives, Sacramento [hereafter IWP ].

125 According to California's 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, children could, with the consent of “friends” or “parents,” be held and worked without pay until age fifteen for females or age eighteen for males. “[A]ny white person” could also visit a jail and pay “said fine and costs” for any “Indian … convicted of an offence … punishable by fine.” Indian convicts then worked to pay off the fines their employer had paid on their behalf. Meanwhile, the act empowered whites to arrest Indian adults “found loitering and strolling about, or frequenting public places where liquors are sold, begging, or leading an immoral or profligate course of life.” When a court received a “complaint” along these lines, the act required court officers to capture and then lease “such vagrant within twenty-four hours to the best bidder.” Successful bidders could then legally hold and work convicts for up to four months without compensation. In 1860, legislators expanded the 1850 act. First, they legalized the “indenture” of “any Indian or Indians, whether children or grown persons,” including “prisoners of war” and “any vagrant Indian” as “apprentices, to trades, husbandry, or other employments.” Second, legislators gave judges the power to “bind” and apprentice Indian minors without the consent of their parents or guardians. Third, they allowed white employers to retain Indians indentured as minors beyond their attainment of majority age. Thus, boys under fourteen could be indentured until they turned twenty-five, and girls under fourteen until twenty-one. Fourth, teenagers indentured “over fourteen and under twenty years of age, if males,” could be held “until they attain[ed] the age of thirty years; if females, until they attain[ed] the age of twenty-five years.” Finally, Indians over age twenty could be indentured for a fixed term of ten years. The Statutes of California, Passed at the First Session of the Legislature (San Jose, 1850), 408–410; The Statutes of California, Passed at the Eleventh Session of the Legislature, 1860: Begun Monday, the Second Day of January, and Ended on Monday, the Thirteenth Day of April (Sacramento, 1860), 196–197. Quotations from Simmon Storms to Tho. Henley, June 20, 1856, Letters Received, Records of the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824–1881, National Archives, Record Group 75.4, General Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Microfilm Publication M234 [hereafter M234], reel 35: 475, 474; Vincent Geiger to Tho. Henley, September 24, 1857, ibid., reel 35: 1281.

126 Geiger to Henley, September 24, 1857; Thos. Henley to J. Denver, October 27, 1857, M234, reel 35: 1328.

127 Isaac W. Shanon deposition, February 28, 1860, in MMR , 72; Thos. Henley to Chas. Mix, June 19, 1858, M234, reel 36: 814–815; S. Storms to T. Henley, November 23, 1858, ibid., 987.

128 William T. Scott deposition, March 2, 1860, in MMR , 22; H. L. Hall deposition, February 26, 1860, ibid., 42.

129 Dillon quoted in Robert F. Heizer, The Destruction of California Indians (1974; repr., Lincoln, Neb., 1993), 296.

130 Hall deposition, in MMR , 42.

131 Jackson Farley deposition, February 26, 1860, ibid., 74.

132 J. Ross Browne, “The Coast Rangers: A Chronicle of Events in California,” part II: “The Indian Reservation,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine 23, no. 135 (August 1861): 306–316, here 312. This may have been an underestimate. In January 1859, one newspaper announced “The slaughter of one hundred and seventy Indians , in the locality of Round Valley, since November last.” Daily Alta California , January 20, 1859, 2, emphasis in the original.

133 Edward Dillon deposition, February 27, 1860, in MMR , 59–60; informant paraphrased in Petaluma Journal , reprinted in Daily Alta California , April 16, 1859, 1.

134 Johnson quoted in A. G. Tassin, “Chronicles of Camp Wright, Part I,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 10, no. 55 (1887): 24–32, here 27.

135 Sacramento Daily Union , January 16, 1860, 2; Edward Johnson to W. Mackall, IWP , F3753: 378.

136 Letter summarized in Garrett, “The Destruction of the Indian in Mendocino County,” 66; William B. Secrest, When the Great Spirit Died: The Destruction of the California Indians, 1850–1860 (Sanger, Calif., 2003), 300.

137 J. Ross Browne to A. Greenwood, October 18, 1859, M234, reel 37: 69.

138 A Stock Raiser, October 1, 1859, in Sonoma County Journal (Petaluma, Calif.), October 7, 1859, 2; W. S. Jarboe, October 16, 1859, in Santa Rosa Democrat , reprinted in Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), November 7, 1859, 2; Santa Rosa Democrat , December 20, 1859, reprinted in Daily Alta California , January 1, 1860, 1; “A Member of Jarboe's Company” summarized in Santa Rosa Democrat , December 20, 1859, reprinted in Daily Alta California , January 1, 1860, 1.

139 W. Jarboe to John Weller, December 3, 1859, IWP , F3753: 401.

140 W. Jarboe to John Downey, February 18, 1860, ibid., 432.

141 Daily Alta California , January 22, 1860, 1.

142 San Francisco Evening Bulletin , February 24, 1860, 2, in MMR , 6.

143 Statutes of California, Passed at the Eleventh Session of the Legislature, 1860 , 173.

144 Arthur deposition in MMR , 51.

145 William J. Hildreth deposition, February 24, 1860, in MMR , 33; George Rees deposition, February 27, 1860, ibid., 17; Red Bluff (Calif.) Beacon , October 9, 1862, 2. The calories came from “six or seven ears of corn.” A medium ear of cooked corn contains approximately 80–130 calories. Audrey H. Ensminger, et al., Foods and Nutrition Encyclopedia , 2nd revised ed., 2 vols. (Boca Raton, Fla., 1993), 1: 489.

146 J. M. Robinson testimony, December 18, 1862, in Mendocino Herald, Martial Law in Round Valley, Mendocino Co., California, the Causes Which Led to That Measure, the Evidence, as Brought Out by a Court of Investigation Ordered by Brig. Gen. G. Wright, Commanding U.S. Forces on the Pacific (Ukiah City, Calif., 1863), 12, emphasis in the original.

147 Captain George summarized in D. H. Dohrman testimony, December 19, 1862, ibid., 17. According to C. D. Douglas, daily rations consisted of “two to three ears of corn to each Indian.” Douglas in Frank H. Baumgardner III, Killing for Land in Early California: Indian Blood at Round Valley, 1856–1863 (New York, 2005), 242.

148 William Frazier deposition, February 22, 1860, in MMR , 15.

149 Geo. M. Hanson to Wm. P. Dole, October 10, 1862, in United States Office of Indian Affairs, Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, for the Year 1862 (Washington, D.C., 1863), 311.

150 Geo. M. Hanson to William P. Dole, July 14, 1861, in United States Office of Indian Affairs, Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Accompanying the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, for the Year 1861 (Washington, D.C., 1861), 150.

151 Rena Lynn, The Story of the Stolen Valley (Willits, Calif., 1977), 19.

152 In 1854 there were some 6,000 to 20,000 Yuki people. By 1864, reservation officials counted just 300 at Round Valley. S. F. Cook, “The Aboriginal Population of the North Coast of California,” University of California Anthropological Records 16, no. 3 (1956): 81–129, here 108, 127; Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival , 203; Tassin, “Chronicles of Camp Wright, Part I,” 25; Elijah Potter, “Elijah Renshaw Potter Reminiscences,” Bancroft Manuscript C-D 5136: 2, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, Calif.; Austin Wiley in United States Office of Indian Affairs, Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the Year 1864 (Washington, D.C., 1865), 119.

153 Some genocide case studies addressing Queensland, Tasmania, and Victoria include Raymond Evans, “‘Plenty Shoot ’Em': The Destruction of Aboriginal Societies along the Queensland Frontier,” in A. Dirk Moses, ed., Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York, 2004), 150–173; Raymond Evans, A History of Queensland (Melbourne, 2007), especially 52–56, 92–98, 135–138; Lyndall Ryan, “Abduction and Multiple Killings of Aborigines in Tasmania, 1804–1835,” Yale Genocide Studies Program Working Paper no. 35 (2007), 1–26; James Boyce, Van Diemen's Land (Melbourne, 2008), especially chap. 14 and the appendix, “Towards Genocide: Government Policy on the Aborigines, 1827–38”; Benjamin Madley, “From Terror to Genocide: Britain's Tasmanian Penal Colony and Australia's History Wars,” Journal of British Studies 47, no. 1 (2008): 77–106; Lyndall Ryan, “Settler Massacres on the Port Philip Frontier, 1836–1851,” Journal of Australian Studies 34, no. 3 (2010): 257–273.

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The Yazidi Genocide

Beheading of men, rape, and enslavement of women—the destruction of a minority ethnic community is among the crimes committed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Will the group be brought to justice for its persecution of the Yazidis?

Yazidis observe the religious new year, Lalish, Iraq, April 19, 2016. Andrea Dicenzo/European Pressphoto Agency

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In the early hours of August 3, 2014, fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) flooded out of their bases in Syria and Iraq, and swept across the Sinjar region of northern Iraq. There, hundreds of villages were scattered around the foot of Mount Sinjar, an arid one-hundred-kilometer-long mountain range, which forms the region’s heart. Lying less than fifteen kilometers from the Syrian border, Sinjar is home to the majority of the world’s Yazidis, a distinct religious community whose beliefs and practice span thousands of years, and whose adherents ISIS publicly reviles as infidels.

The ISIS attack was well organized with hundreds of fighters acting in concert with each other as they seized towns and villages on all sides of the mountain. As they moved into Sinjar, ISIS fighters faced little or no resistance. The Iraqi Kurdish forces, the peshmerga, reportedly withdrew in the face of the ISIS advance, leaving much of the region defenseless. As word spread that the peshmerga had left their checkpoints, ad hoc groups of lightly armed local Yazidi men mounted a limited defense of some villages in an attempt to give their families and neighbors more time to escape. By daybreak, Yazidi families from hundreds of villages across Sinjar were fleeing their homes in fear and panic. They took little with them. Others were advised by Arab neighbors to stay in the villages and raise white flags over their houses.

By the time ISIS entered Sinjar, there were few military objectives in the region. ISIS fighters focused their attention on capturing Yazidis. After controlling the main roads and all strategic junctions, fighters set up checkpoints and sent mobile patrols to search for fleeing Yazidi families. Within hours, Yazidis who had been unable to escape to the nearby city of Duhok found themselves encircled by armed, black-clad ISIS fighters.

Those who fled early enough to reach the upper plateau of Mount Sinjar were besieged by ISIS. A humanitarian crisis quickly unfolded as ISIS trapped tens of thousands of Yazidi men, women, and children in temperatures rising above 50 degrees Celsius and prevented them from accessing water, food, or medical care. On August 7, 2014, at the request of the Iraqi government, President Barack Obama announced American military action to help the Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar. American, Iraqi, British, French, and Australian forces were involved in airdrops of water and other supplies to the besieged Yazidis. ISIS fighters shot at planes airdropping aid, and at helicopters attempting to evacuate the most vulnerable Yazidis.

Hundreds of Yazidis—including infants and young children—died on Mount Sinjar before the Syrian Kurdish forces called the People’s Protection Units (YPG) were able to open a corridor from Syria to Mount Sinjar, allowing for those besieged on the mountain to be moved to safety. Together with Yazidi volunteers, they repelled ISIS attacks on the corridor, as it sought to reestablish the siege.

On lower ground, ISIS fighters captured thousands of Yazidis in their villages or on the roads as they fled between August 3–5. Almost all villages were emptied within seventy-two hours of the attack, with the exception of Kocho village which was not emptied until August 15. In the process of capture and transfer, hundreds of ISIS fighters operating across a vast territory in the Sinjar region systematically divided Yazidis into three distinct groups: men and boys aged approximately 12 and above; women and children; and later, drawn from the pool of male children who had remained with the women, boys aged 7 and above. Each group suffered distinct and systematic violations, sanctioned under ISIS’s ideological framework.

Yazidi Men and Boys Aged Approximately 12 and Above

After we were captured, ISIS forced us to watch them beheading some of our Yazidi men. They made the men kneel in a line in the street, with their hands tied behind their backs. The ISIS fighters took knives and cut their throats.

—Girl, aged 16 at capture, held for seven months, sold once

Following capture, ISIS swiftly separated Yazidi men and boys who had reached puberty from women and other children. ISIS fighters summarily executed men and boys who refused to disavow Yazidism and convert to Islam. Most were executed by gunshots to the head; others had their throats cut. ISIS fighters carried out executions of male Yazidis in the streets of towns and villages, at makeshift checkpoints, on roadsides as well as on the lower sections of the roads ascending Mount Sinjar. Other captives, including family members, were often forced to witness the killings. In at least two villages, Kocho and Qani, ISIS executed Yazidi men and boys en masse. The bodies of those killed on capture were often left in situ. Yazidis, captured and forcibly transferred to Mosul and Tel Afar in the days following the attack, described being driven along roads, the sides of which were littered with corpses.

Men and older boys who were forcibly converted to Islam became ISIS captives. Separated from women and children, they were quickly transferred to sites in Tel Afar, Mosul, and Baaj where they were later forced to work, laboring on construction projects, digging trenches, and looking after cattle. They were forced to discard their Yazidi identity, to pray, grow their beards and hair, and follow other religious dicta as interpreted and promulgated by the terrorist group. Those who attempted to escape were executed upon capture.

By the spring of 2015, ISIS appeared to have determined that any conversions that the Yazidis had made were false. Little information is available about the fate and whereabouts of the Yazidi men and older boys who had been forcibly converted after this point.

Yazidi Women and Girls Aged 9 and Above

We were registered. ISIS took our names, ages, where we came from and whether we were married or not. After that, ISIS fighters would come to select girls to go with them. The youngest girl I saw them take was about 9 years old. One girl told me that “if they try to take you, it is better that you kill yourself.”

—Girl, aged 12 at capture, held for seven months, sold four times

After the killing of the men and older boys, Yazidi women and their remaining children were forcibly transferred to temporary holding sites where they remained for between one and twenty-four hours. There, ISIS separated those who were married from those who were not. Only girls aged 8 years and under were allowed to remain with their mothers. For the most part boys were not separated from their mothers at this stage. Quickly surmising that the greatest danger lay in being placed in the group of unmarried females, unmarried women and girls pretended their younger siblings or nephews or nieces were their own children. Married women who had no children to provide evidence of the marriage did likewise.

Fighters recorded the names of the women and girls, their age, the village they came from, whether they were married or not, and if they were married, how many children they had. Some women and girls reported ISIS fighters taking photographs of them. ISIS forced Yazidi women to give up valuables, including gold, money, and mobile telephones. As the fighters did so, women rushed to write and memorize telephone numbers of relatives who, they hoped, might be in a position to assist them later.

They were then moved to designated holding sites in Mosul, Tel Afar, and Baaj, deeper inside ISIS-controlled territory. These sites held hundreds, sometimes thousands, of Yazidi women and children, and were surrounded by armed ISIS fighters. Captives were given little food or water. Many, particularly infants and young children, became very sick. No medical care was provided.

From the moment that Yazidi women and girls entered the holding sites, ISIS fighters came into the rooms where they were held in order to select women and girls they wished to take with them. Interviewees described feelings of abject terror on hearing footsteps in the corridor outside and keys opening the locks. Women and girls scrambled to the corners of the rooms, mothers hiding their daughters. The selection of any girl was accompanied by screaming as she was forcibly pulled from the room, with her mother and any other women who tried to keep hold of her being brutally beaten by fighters.

Yazidi women and girls began to scratch and bloody themselves in an attempt to make themselves unattractive to potential buyers. Some committed suicide at holding sites in Tel Afar, Mosul, and in Raqqah city. Some women and girls killed themselves by cutting their wrists or throats, while others hanged themselves using their headscarves.

While individual incidents of rape committed by ISIS fighters at the holding sites in Tel Afar and Mosul were reported, mass rape of Yazidi women and girls did not occur. Such is the rigid ideology governing ISIS’s treatment of Yazidi women and girls as chattel, as well as the control it exerted over the majority of its fighters. Sexual violence, including the sexual slavery, being committed against Yazidi women and girls is tightly controlled by ISIS, occurs in a manner prescribed and authorized, and is respectful only of the property rights of those who “own” the women and girls.

Captured Yazidi women and girls were deemed property of ISIS and are openly termed sabaya or slaves. ISIS sold most of the Yazidi women and girls in slave markets, or souk sabaya , or through individual sales to fighters who come to the holding centers. In some instances, an ISIS fighter might buy a group of Yazidi females in order to take them into rural areas without slave markets where he could sell them individually at a higher price. Approximately one-fifth of Yazidi women and girls were kept as collective property of ISIS for distribution to military bases throughout Iraq and Syria.

ISIS began to transfer women and girls into Syria for sale as early as August 17, 2014, after which multiple forced transfers of Yazidi women and children took place. Most were taken to either or both of two locations in Raqqah city: an underground prison or security base, and/or a group of buildings densely surrounded by trees, referred to by ISIS fighters as “the farm.” Some—generally unmarried women and girls—were purchased by fighters and removed in a matter of days. Some women, often those with more than three children, might remain at the holding sites for up to four months before being sold.

Yazidi women and girls were sold to individual fighters directly from the holding sites as well as in slave markets across ISIS-controlled Iraq and Syria. A central committee, the Committee for the Buying and Selling of Slaves, organizes the slave markets. Where the central committee authorizes the opening of a slave market in a particular town, it devolves some of its functions to a local committee and commander. In the last year, ISIS fighters have started to hold online slave auctions, using the encrypted Telegram application to circulate photos of captured Yazidi women and girls, with details of their age, marital status, current location, and price.

Some Yazidi women and girls were present at their sale. Most were simply informed by their fighter-owner that he had bought or sold her. Once ISIS sells a Yazidi woman or girl, the purchasing fighter receives complete rights of ownership and can resell, gift, or will his “slave” as he wishes. Fighters who buy and sell Yazidi women and girls, as well as those who arrange the trading of them, come from all over the world.

While held by ISIS fighters, Yazidi women and girls over the age of 9 are subjected to brutal sexual violence. Most of those interviewed reported violent daily rapes by their fighter-owners. Some were handcuffed behind their backs during the rapes while others had their hands and legs tied to the corners of the beds. Girls as young as 9 were raped, as were pregnant women. Many women and girls reported being injured as a result of the rapes, suffering bleeding, cuts, and bruising. Attempts to escape have been met with beatings, and in some instances, gang rape. Many Yazidi women and girls reported that they were forced to take birth control, in the form of pills and injections, by their fighter-owners. Other women were given no birth control.

Fighters routinely beat Yazidi women and girls in their possession. Where Yazidi women and children are injured by rapes or beatings, ISIS fighters do not permit them access to medical care. Yazidi women and girls were often forced to work as domestic servants in the fighters’ houses, cooking, cleaning, and taking care of their children. Living conditions were poor with a pattern of fighters not providing adequate food or water to Yazidi women and children they were holding captive.

From the moment of capture, through the various holding sites and while being bought and raped by ISIS fighters, Yazidi women and girls were verbally abused by ISIS fighters. Insults were specifically directed at their Yazidi faith, saying that they “worshipped stones” and referring to them as “dirty kuffar ” and “devil-worshippers.”

As “spoils of war” ISIS does not permit the reselling of Yazidis to non-ISIS members. Such sale is punishable by death. The financial incentives for an individual fighter to break this rule, however, are tremendous. Whereas Yazidi women and children are sold among fighters for between $200-1,500, they are generally sold back to their families for between $10,000-40,000. Many of the families of the Yazidi women and girls who were sold back are now heavily in debt and worry not only about making payments, but also about how they will be able to afford to buy back other relatives that fighters wish to sell in future.

Many of the Yazidi women and girls interviewed bore physical wounds and scars of the abuse they suffered. More apparent, however, was the mental trauma. Most spoke of thoughts of suicide, of being unable to sleep due to nightmares about ISIS fighters at their door, and of being consumed by fears for family members missing or still held by ISIS.

Young Children with Their Mothers

When he would force me into a room with him, I could hear my children screaming and crying outside the door. Once he became very angry. He beat and threatened to kill them. He forced two of them to stand outside barefoot in the snow until he finished with me.

—Woman, held for eleven months, sold seven times

Hundreds of Yazidi children continue to be transferred around ISIS-controlled areas of Iraq and Syria as their mothers are sold and resold. Once a Yazidi girl reaches the age of 9, ISIS takes the girl from her mother and sells her as a slave. When a Yazidi boy reaches 7 years of age, he too is taken from his mother and sent to an ISIS training camp and from there on to battle.

Children held with their mothers are often aware of their mothers being the victims of prolonged and intense violence. The extent of their understanding of the sexual nature of the violence depends on the age of the children, and whether rapes occurred in their presence. ISIS fighters often beat Yazidi children for making too much noise or for clinging to their mothers. Incidents of ISIS fighters killing Yazidi children have also been documented.

ISIS fighters and their families routinely told the Yazidi children that they and their mothers were “ kuffar ” and that they were dirty.

Yazidi Boys Aged 7 and Above

The ISIS fighters told us, “Children are young. They are like animals. We can change them. But you are adults. We will not be able to change your mind.” They said this to us at the hall in Mosul.

—Girl, aged 17 at capture, held for seventeen months, sold eight times

When Yazidi boys reach the age of 7, ISIS removes them from their mothers’ care, regardless of their location at the time. Mothers and siblings who try to keep hold of the boys are severely beaten. Women interviewed recounted ISIS fighters telling them that they were taking their sons to teach them to be Muslims and to train them to fight. A Saudi ISIS fighter showed some Yazidi women a video of young boys being trained in an ISIS camp, saying, “We are training them to kill kuffar like you.”

ISIS forcibly transfers the boys to training centers or military camps in Iraq and Syria. Many training centers are set up in former schools. There the boys are registered and given Islamic names. From then on, the boys are only called by their new names, and are treated as ISIS recruits. Yazidi boys are mixed with Sunni Arab boys who are also being trained. The boys attend sessions in Quranic recitation as well as military exercises, including how to use AK47s and other weapons. They are forced to watch videos of beheadings and suicide missions. On a general level, the training and indoctrination aim to increase recruitment, and all children are treated as recruits regardless of their background. But on a specific level, targeting the Yazidi boys uniquely, the training and indoctrination serves to destroy their religious identity as Yazidis, recasting them as followers of ISIS-interpreted Islam.

After completing the training, Yazidi boys are distributed according to the needs of the terrorist group. Some have become fighters on the battlefield while others are deployed to guard ISIS bases or to perform other duties as their commanders require.

Determining Genocide Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, to which Syria and Iraq are parties, states that the crime of genocide is committed when a person commits a prohibited act with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such. Prohibited acts are (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic determined that ISIS was committing the crime of genocide, as well as multiple crimes against humanity and war crimes, against the Yazidis, a protected religious group within the meaning of the Genocide Convention. This finding was particularly notable for two reasons: first, ISIS was committing all five prohibited acts as envisaged by the drafters of the Genocide Convention; and second, though killings did take place, the genocide was perpetrated largely through non-killing, highly gendered crimes, notably acts of extreme sexual violence.

In a lengthy legal analysis, the commission found that ISIS sought to destroy the Yazidis through killings; sexual slavery, enslavement, torture and inhuman and degrading treatment and forcible transfer causing serious bodily and mental harm; the infliction of conditions of life that bring about a slow death; the imposition of measures to prevent Yazidi children from being born, including forced conversion of adults, the separation of Yazidi men and women, and mental trauma; and the transfer of Yazidi children from their own families and placing them with ISIS fighters, thereby cutting them off from beliefs and practices of their own religious community, and destroying their identity as Yazidis.

The sexual enslavement of Yazidi women and girls has received much focus in media coverage of the genocide and is personified in Nadia Murad, a survivor recently made UN Goodwill Ambassador. Following the jurisprudence arising from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and notably the Akayesu case, the commission found that sexual violence, including sexual slavery, constituted the infliction of serious bodily and mental harm on the victims, and was an integral part of the process of intended destruction of the Yazidi women and girls, their families, and their communities. The commission drew attention to the fact that rape and sexual violence, when committed against women and girls as part of a genocide, is a crime against a wider protected group, but it is equally a crime committed against a female, as an individual, on the basis of her sex. Yazidi women and girls, the commission posited, were doubly victimized on the basis of their religion and their sex.

The crime of genocide requires that the perpetrator have a special intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group. The genocidal acts must be committed against a person because of their membership in a particular group and as an incremental step in the overall objective of destroying the group.

Historically, the special intent to destroy has often been inferred from conduct, including statements. ISIS, however, explicitly holds its abuse of the Yazidis to be mandated by its religious interpretation, and has not sought to reframe its conduct. In an article, “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour,” published in ISIS’s English-language magazine Dabiq , ISIS indicated that its plan to attack Sinjar was presaged by research into how its religious interpretation mandated the treatment of the Yazidis, who were found not to be “people of the book” and who, consequently, could not be permitted to exist within the group’s conception of an Islamic State.

This religious interpretation determined the behavior of ISIS fighters during the attack on Sinjar and in their subsequent abuse of Yazidi men, women, and children. ISIS’s killing of the men and boys who did not convert, forced conversions, sexual enslavement and enslavement of Yazidi women and girls, and forced abduction, indoctrination, and recruitment of Yazidi boys to be used in hostilities, de facto converting them, adhered seamlessly to the religious mandates set out by its “scholars” concerning how to treat Yazidi captives.

The notion of ISIS-interpreted Islam as a purifying force was present throughout all ISIS fighters’ interactions with the Yazidis. From schools in Tel Afar to houses in Raqqah city, fighters repeatedly told captured Yazidi women and girls, held as slaves, that they were “dirty Yazidis” and “ kuffar .” The Dabiq article continues in this vein: “Their creed is so deviant from the truth that even cross-worshipping Christians for ages considered them devil-worshippers and Satanists.”

The public statements and conduct of ISIS and its fighters in their targeting and abuse of the Yazidis demonstrated that ISIS intended to destroy the Yazidis of Sinjar, composing the majority of the world’s Yazidi population, in whole or in part.

Protection and Justice The Yazidi community of Sinjar has been devastated by the ISIS attack. In its aftermath, no free Yazidis remained: the community had all been displaced, captured, converted, or killed. Female survivors of sexual slavery have been shattered, with many experiencing suicidal thoughts, and intense feelings of rage interspersed with periods of deep depression and listlessness. There is limited access to psychosocial support. Furthermore, with hundreds of Yazidi men missing or dead, Yazidi women face a precarious existence in a society that has not encouraged their independence, or given many of them the tools to live autonomously. With regard to the youngest female victims of sexual slavery, some the families have had tremendous difficulty acknowledging the crimes committed against them.

Yazidi children, held with their mothers, are similarly traumatized but many have not, to date, received specialized therapy. Yazidi boys who were taken for indoctrination and training by ISIS suffer outbursts of rage, and are traumatized by prolonged exposure to violence, either directly at the hands of their instructors or in combat, or by witnessing it on the battlefield or in training videos.

Families, whether captured or not, are struggling to deal with the trauma experienced by those who were bought back or smuggled out, and by the profound distress of not knowing the fate or whereabouts of relatives still in ISIS-controlled territory. Many are in profound debt having sold all valuables, including land, and having borrowed money to buy back relatives offered for sale by ISIS fighters.

Over one thousand Yazidi women and children are receiving medical treatment, including trauma therapy, under the auspices of a program run by the Federal Republic of Germany. Many more, including female survivors of sexual slavery, are refugees in Europe, having placed themselves in the hands of smugglers and made dangerous journeys by land, and increasingly by boat. Yazidi victims of genocide, including but not limited to victims of sexual violence, must be better identified and treated as a vulnerable group for the purposes of housing, psychosocial support, and with regard to asylum processes.

There is a sense of profound disappointment with the international community. While there is support for organizations doing humanitarian work in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps and, abroad, refugee camps, it is perceived that, at best, there is a paralysis, and, at worst, a reluctance regarding the taking of any action to rescue Yazidis still held by ISIS. This is compounded by reports of Yazidi captives being killed in airstrikes on ISIS bases and other military targets.

The ongoing attack by ISIS on the Yazidis is viewed by the community not as a standalone event, but part of a long history of historical oppression and violence against them. While most Yazidis said they wanted ISIS brought to justice for their crimes, few believed that international criminal justice was possible, citing centuries of impunity in relation to attacks on their community.

In its report, the commission made wide-ranging recommendations to the United Nations, the governments of Syria and Iraq, and the wider international community concerning rescue and protection of, and greater care for the Yazidi community of Sinjar. While noting states’ obligations under the Genocide Convention, the commission repeated its call for the Security Council to refer urgently the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court, or to establish an ad hoc tribunal with relevant geographic and temporal jurisdiction.

Over 3,200 women and children are still held by ISIS. Most are held in the Syrian Arab Republic where Yazidi women and girls continue to be sexually enslaved and otherwise abused, and Yazidi boys, indoctrinated and trained. Thousands of Yazidi men and boys are missing. ISIS’s trade in women and girls and its recruitment and use of boys have never ceased.

The genocide of the Yazidis is ongoing.

This essay is adapted from “They Came to Destroy: ISIS Crimes Against the Yazidis,” a report issued on June 16, 2016, by the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic.

The United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic was established on August 22, 2011 by the UN Human Rights Council. The commission is mandated to investigate all alleged violations of international human rights law since March 2011 in Syria as well as, where possible, identify those responsible with a view to ensuring that perpetrators are held accountable. The commissioners are Paulo Pinheiro (chairperson), Karen Koning AbuZayd, Carla del Ponte, and Vitit Muntarbhorn.

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Big game, small world

Is globalization intensifying, or ebbing? Neither? Both? The political scientist Daniel Drezner spotlights two recent pieces in the Financial Times and Vox that appear to argue opposite cases but which, Drezner argues, cohere around the notion that the global economy has somehow overcome a seemingly unending series of geopolitical shocks — for now. “Great power governments and violent non-state actors have done their darnedest to push the world towards economic segmentation, and it just ain’t happening ,” Drezner writes.

“In many ways the current period might resemble the global political economy of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century,” he continues. “Even as countries were raising tariffs, improvements in technology and infrastructure swamped those effects, causing globalization to continue to grow.” Drezner acknowledges one possible cloud on the horizon, however: “Of course, that era ended with the First World War.”

Joke’s on you

When a graphic artist in 1987 depicted Augusto Pinochet as Louis XIV on the cover of a magazine, the Chilean dictator responded by confiscating every copy of the publication, and jailing the magazine’s editors for extremism: Such is the power humor can have over dictators, “Authoritarians succeed when their extremism and exceptionalism… is normalized,” the scholar of fascism Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote in her newsletter, Lucid. “ Humor that calls this out can be deeply validating .”

Autocrats and their opponents all use humor — in differing ways, and to differing ends. The former seek to humiliate critics and allies alike, in an effort to showcase their strength. The latter group try to use jokes and satire to undermine the seemingly all-powerful dictator. One trend she notes: “As strongmen consolidate their power, they become more insecure and thus less tolerant of criticism, even if that criticism is made in jest.”

A friend in deed

Technology and the internet are changing society in ways we are only beginning to grasp. Take, for example, friendship. Pre-internet, people were largely limited to maintaining friendships in their immediate geography, and a relative lack of mobility meant those connections were fairly stable. Those factors are gradually eroding, and the impacts are not being felt equally: Those with higher levels of education are more likely to report having close friends than those with less education.

That doesn’t, however, mean that friendship is in inexorable decline. “The new social landscape requires a more purposeful and attentive approach to developing and sustaining social relationships,” Kelsey Eyre Hammond writes in American Storylines, reviewing a new book about the changing nature of friendship. One conclusion: “If [friendships] seem more difficult to manage and maintain it’s because they are .”

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Mr. Lowry is the editor in chief of National Review.

With the defenestration of Joe Biden and the ascent of Kamala Harris, conventional wisdom has gone from asking, “How can Donald Trump lose?” to “How can he win?”

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As usual when he falters, Mr. Trump is getting a lot of advice from his own side.

For as long as Mr. Trump has been in the ascendancy in the G.O.P., he will go off on some pointless tangent, and Republicans will urge him — perhaps as they hustle down a corridor of the U.S. Capitol — to talk about the economy instead of his controversy du jour.

A close cousin of this perpetual advice is the admonition that Mr. Trump should concentrate more on the issues in this campaign. Neither recommendation is wrong, but they are insufficient to make the case against Kamala Harris.

Presidential races are won and lost on character as much as the issues, and often the issues are proxies for character. Not character in the sense of a candidate’s personal life but the attributes that play into the question of whether someone is suited to the presidency — is he or she qualified, trustworthy and strong, and does he or she care about average Americans?

Presidential races, in this sense, are deeply personal; they usually involve disqualifying the opposing candidate, rather than convincing voters that his or her platform is wrongheaded.

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Journal of Materials Chemistry C

Recent advances of flexible iontronic pressure sensors: materials, microstructure designs, applications, and opportunities.

Flexible iontronic pressure sensors are the emerging flexible pressure sensors with extraordinary sensing performances, such as high sensitivity, outstanding resolution, and strong signal intensity due to the formation of electrical double-layer capacitance. In recent years, significant advancements have been made in the preparation and application of flexible iontronic pressure sensors in the fields of e-skins and wearable electronics. In this review, recent advances of flexible iontronic pressure sensors are comprehensively overviewed from the perspective of key performance indicators, such as sensitivity, linearity, response/recovery time, durability, accuracy, and detection range. The factors influencing each performance indicator are systematically elaborated to give readers a deep understanding. Then, we systemically introduce strategies to enhance sensing performances of flexible iontronic pressure sensors, including material choosing and structural design of electrodes and dielectric layers. Subsequently, the applications of flexible iontronic pressure sensors in health monitoring, information transmission, human-machine interaction, and spatial pressure mapping are comprehensively introduced. Finally, the directions for future development of flexible iontronic pressure sensors are thoroughly discussed.

• This article is part of the themed collections: Journal of Materials Chemistry C HOT Papers and Journal of Materials Chemistry C Recent Review Articles

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J. Wang, Y. Chen, S. Tu, X. Cui, J. Chen and Y. Zhu, J. Mater. Chem. C , 2024, Accepted Manuscript , DOI: 10.1039/D4TC03226H

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NeurIPS 2024 Datasets and Benchmarks Track

If you'd like to become a reviewer for the track, or recommend someone, please use this form .

The Datasets and Benchmarks track serves as a venue for high-quality publications, talks, and posters on highly valuable machine learning datasets and benchmarks, as well as a forum for discussions on how to improve dataset development. Datasets and benchmarks are crucial for the development of machine learning methods, but also require their own publishing and reviewing guidelines. For instance, datasets can often not be reviewed in a double-blind fashion, and hence full anonymization will not be required. On the other hand, they do require additional specific checks, such as a proper description of how the data was collected, whether they show intrinsic bias, and whether they will remain accessible. The Datasets and Benchmarks track is proud to support the open source movement by encouraging submissions of open-source libraries and tools that enable or accelerate ML research.

The previous editions of the Datasets and Benchmarks track were highly successful; you can view the accepted papers from 2021 , 2002 , and 2023 , and the winners of the best paper awards 2021 , 2022 and 2023

CRITERIA. W e are aiming for an equally stringent review as the main conference, yet better suited to datasets and benchmarks. Submissions to this track will be reviewed according to a set of criteria and best practices specifically designed for datasets and benchmarks , as described below. A key criterion is accessibility: datasets should be available and accessible , i.e. the data can be found and obtained without a personal request to the PI, and any required code should be open source. We encourage the authors to use Croissant format ( https://mlcommons.org/working-groups/data/croissant/ ) to document their datasets in machine readable way.   Next to a scientific paper, authors should also submit supplementary materials such as detail on how the data was collected and organised, what kind of information it contains, how it should be used ethically and responsibly, as well as how it will be made available and maintained.

RELATIONSHIP TO NeurIPS.  Submissions to the track will be part of the main NeurIPS conference , presented alongside the main conference papers. Accepted papers will be officially published in the NeurIPS proceedings .

SUBMISSIONS.  There will be one deadline this year. It is also still possible to submit datasets and benchmarks to the main conference (under the usual review process), but dual submission to both is not allowed (unless you retracted your paper from the main conference). We also cannot transfer papers from the main track to the D&B track. Authors can choose to submit either single-blind or double-blind . If it is possible to properly review the submission double-blind, i.e., reviewers do not need access to non-anonymous repositories to review the work, then authors can also choose to submit the work anonymously. Papers will not be publicly visible during the review process. Only accepted papers will become visible afterward. The reviews themselves are not visible during the review phase but will be published after decisions have been made. The datasets themselves should be accessible to reviewers but can be publicly released at a later date (see below). New authors cannot be added after the abstract deadline and they should have an OpenReview profile by the paper deadline. NeurIPS does not tolerate any collusion whereby authors secretly cooperate with reviewers, ACs or SACs to obtain favourable reviews.

SCOPE. This track welcomes all work on data-centric machine learning research (DMLR) and open-source libraries and tools that enable or accelerate ML research, covering ML datasets and benchmarks as well as algorithms, tools, methods, and analyses for working with ML data. This includes but is not limited to:

• New datasets, or carefully and thoughtfully designed (collections of) datasets based on previously available data.
• Data generators and reinforcement learning environments.
• Data-centric AI methods and tools, e.g. to measure and improve data quality or utility, or studies in data-centric AI that bring important new insight.
• Advanced practices in data collection and curation that are of general interest even if the data itself cannot be shared.
• Frameworks for responsible dataset development, audits of existing datasets, identifying significant problems with existing datasets and their use
• Benchmarks on new or existing datasets, as well as benchmarking tools.
• In-depth analyses of machine learning challenges and competitions (by organisers and/or participants) that yield important new insight.
• Systematic analyses of existing systems on novel datasets yielding important new insight.

Read our original blog post for more about why we started this track.

Important dates

• Abstract submission deadline: May 29, 2024
• Full paper submission and co-author registration deadline: Jun 5, 2024
• Supplementary materials submission deadline: Jun 12, 2024
• Review deadline - Jul 24, 2024
• Release of reviews and start of Author discussions on OpenReview: Aug 07, 2024
• Rebuttal deadline - Aug 16, 2024
• End of author/reviewer discussions on OpenReview: Aug 31, 2024
• Author notification: Sep 26, 2024
• Camera-ready deadline: Oct 30, 2024 AOE

Note: The site will start accepting submissions on April 1 5 , 2024.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Q: My work is in scope for this track but possibly also for the main conference. Where should I submit it?

A: This is ultimately your choice. Consider the main contribution of the submission and how it should be reviewed. If the main contribution is a new dataset, benchmark, or other work that falls into the scope of the track (see above), then it is ideally reviewed accordingly. As discussed in our blog post, the reviewing procedures of the main conference are focused on algorithmic advances, analysis, and applications, while the reviewing in this track is equally stringent but designed to properly assess datasets and benchmarks. Other, more practical considerations are that this track allows single-blind reviewing (since anonymization is often impossible for hosted datasets) and intended audience, i.e., make your work more visible for people looking for datasets and benchmarks.

Q: How will paper accepted to this track be cited?

A: Accepted papers will appear as part of the official NeurIPS proceedings.

Q: Do I need to submit an abstract beforehand?

A: Yes, please check the important dates section for more information.

Q: My dataset requires open credentialized access. Can I submit to this track?

A: This will be possible on the condition that a credentialization is necessary for the public good (e.g. because of ethically sensitive medical data), and that an established credentialization procedure is in place that is 1) open to a large section of the public, 2) provides rapid response and access to the data, and 3) is guaranteed to be maintained for many years. A good example here is PhysioNet Credentialing, where users must first understand how to handle data with human subjects, yet is open to anyone who has learned and agrees with the rules. This should be seen as an exceptional measure, and NOT as a way to limit access to data for other reasons (e.g. to shield data behind a Data Transfer Agreement). Misuse would be grounds for desk rejection. During submission, you can indicate that your dataset involves open credentialized access, in which case the necessity, openness, and efficiency of the credentialization process itself will also be checked.

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

A submission consists of:

• Please carefully follow the Latex template for this track when preparing proposals. We follow the NeurIPS format, but with the appropriate headings, and without hiding the names of the authors. Download the template as a bundle here .
• Papers should be submitted via OpenReview
• Reviewing is in principle single-blind, hence the paper should not be anonymized. In cases where the work can be reviewed equally well anonymously, anonymous submission is also allowed.
• During submission, you can add a public link to the dataset or benchmark data. If the dataset can only be released later, you must include instructions for reviewers on how to access the dataset. This can only be done after the first submission by sending an official note to the reviewers in OpenReview. We highly recommend making the dataset publicly available immediately or before the start of the NeurIPS conference. In select cases, requiring solid motivation, the release date can be stretched up to a year after the submission deadline.
• Dataset documentation and intended uses. Recommended documentation frameworks include datasheets for datasets , dataset nutrition labels , data statements for NLP , data cards , and accountability frameworks .
• URL to website/platform where the dataset/benchmark can be viewed and downloaded by the reviewers. 
• URL to Croissant metadata record documenting the dataset/benchmark available for viewing and downloading by the reviewers. You can create your Croissant metadata using e.g. the Python library available here: https://github.com/mlcommons/croissant
• Author statement that they bear all responsibility in case of violation of rights, etc., and confirmation of the data license.
• Hosting, licensing, and maintenance plan. The choice of hosting platform is yours, as long as you ensure access to the data (possibly through a curated interface) and will provide the necessary maintenance.
• Links to access the dataset and its metadata. This can be hidden upon submission if the dataset is not yet publicly available but must be added in the camera-ready version. In select cases, e.g when the data can only be released at a later date, this can be added afterward (up to a year after the submission deadline). Simulation environments should link to open source code repositories
• The dataset itself should ideally use an open and widely used data format. Provide a detailed explanation on how the dataset can be read. For simulation environments, use existing frameworks or explain how they can be used.
• Long-term preservation: It must be clear that the dataset will be available for a long time, either by uploading to a data repository or by explaining how the authors themselves will ensure this
• Explicit license: Authors must choose a license, ideally a CC license for datasets, or an open source license for code (e.g. RL environments). An overview of licenses can be found here: https://paperswithcode.com/datasets/license
• Add structured metadata to a dataset's meta-data page using Web standards (like schema.org and DCAT ): This allows it to be discovered and organized by anyone. A guide can be found here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/dataset . If you use an existing data repository, this is often done automatically.
• Highly recommended: a persistent dereferenceable identifier (e.g. a DOI  minted by a data repository or a prefix on identifiers.org ) for datasets, or a code repository (e.g. GitHub, GitLab,...) for code. If this is not possible or useful, please explain why.
• For benchmarks, the supplementary materials must ensure that all results are easily reproducible. Where possible, use a reproducibility framework such as the ML reproducibility checklist , or otherwise guarantee that all results can be easily reproduced, i.e. all necessary datasets, code, and evaluation procedures must be accessible and documented.
• For papers introducing best practices in creating or curating datasets and benchmarks, the above supplementary materials are not required.
• For papers resubmitted after being retracted from another venue: a brief discussion on the main concerns raised by previous reviewers and how you addressed them. You do not need to share the original reviews.
• For the dual submission and archiving, the policy follows the NeurIPS main track paper guideline .

Use of Large Language Models (LLMs): We welcome authors to use any tool that is suitable for preparing high-quality papers and research. However, we ask authors to keep in mind two important criteria. First, we expect papers to fully describe their methodology, and any tool that is important to that methodology, including the use of LLMs, should be described also. For example, authors should mention tools (including LLMs) that were used for data processing or filtering, visualization, facilitating or running experiments, and proving theorems. It may also be advisable to describe the use of LLMs in implementing the method (if this corresponds to an important, original, or non-standard component of the approach). Second, authors are responsible for the entire content of the paper, including all text and figures, so while authors are welcome to use any tool they wish for writing the paper, they must ensure that all text is correct and original.

REVIEWING AND SELECTION PROCESS

Reviewing will be single-blind, although authors can also submit anonymously if the submission allows that. A datasets and benchmarks program committee will be formed, consisting of experts on machine learning, dataset curation, and ethics. We will ensure diversity in the program committee, both in terms of background as well as technical expertise (e.g., data, ML, data ethics, social science expertise). Each paper will be reviewed by the members of the committee. In select cases where ethical concerns are flagged by reviewers, an ethics review may be performed as well.

Papers will not be publicly visible during the review process. Only accepted papers will become visible afterward. The reviews themselves are also not visible during the review phase but will be published after decisions have been made. Authors can choose to keep the datasets themselves hidden until a later release date, as long as reviewers have access.

The factors that will be considered when evaluating papers include:

• Utility and quality of the submission: Impact, originality, novelty, relevance to the NeurIPS community will all be considered. 
• Reproducibility: All submissions should be accompanied by sufficient information to reproduce the results described i.e. all necessary datasets, code, and evaluation procedures must be accessible and documented. We encourage the use of a reproducibility framework such as the ML reproducibility checklist to guarantee that all results can be easily reproduced. Benchmark submissions in particular should take care to ensure sufficient details are provided to ensure reproducibility. If submissions include code, please refer to the NeurIPS code submission guidelines .  
• Was code provided (e.g. in the supplementary material)? If provided, did you look at the code? Did you consider it useful in guiding your review? If not provided, did you wish code had been available?
• Ethics: Any ethical implications of the work should be addressed. Authors should rely on NeurIPS ethics guidelines as guidance for understanding ethical concerns.  
• Completeness of the relevant documentation: Per NeurIPS ethics guidelines , datasets must be accompanied by documentation communicating the details of the dataset as part of their submissions via structured templates (e.g. TODO). Sufficient detail must be provided on how the data was collected and organized, what kind of information it contains,  ethically and responsibly, and how it will be made available and maintained. 
• Licensing and access: Per NeurIPS ethics guidelines , authors should provide licenses for any datasets released. These should consider the intended use and limitations of the dataset, and develop licenses and terms of use to prevent misuse or inappropriate use.  
• Consent and privacy: Per  NeurIPS ethics guidelines , datasets should minimize the exposure of any personally identifiable information, unless informed consent from those individuals is provided to do so. Any paper that chooses to create a dataset with real data of real people should ask for the explicit consent of participants, or explain why they were unable to do so.
• Ethics and responsible use: Any ethical implications of new datasets should be addressed and guidelines for responsible use should be provided where appropriate. Note that, if your submission includes publicly available datasets (e.g. as part of a larger benchmark), you should also check these datasets for ethical issues. You remain responsible for the ethical implications of including existing datasets or other data sources in your work.
• Legal compliance: For datasets, authors should ensure awareness and compliance with regional legal requirements.

ADVISORY COMMITTEE

The following committee will provide advice on the organization of the track over the coming years: Sergio Escalera, Isabelle Guyon, Neil Lawrence, Dina Machuve, Olga Russakovsky, Joaquin Vanschoren, Serena Yeung.

DATASETS AND BENCHMARKS CHAIRS

Lora Aroyo, Google Francesco Locatello, Institute of Science and Technology Austria Lingjuan Lyu, Sony AI

Contact: [email protected]