David Stannard’s American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World is a searing account of the Native American genocide perpetrated by Europeans in the Americas–Spain in South America and Anglo-Americans in the north.
I felt so much grief and shame reading this book. The sheer destruction and rampant barbaric cruelty shown to the indigenous people of the Americas, and the staggering number of deaths is horrifying. Scholars generally agree that the indigenous population was somewhere between 75 to 100 million people, with 8 to 12 million living north of Mexico. Ninety to 95% of the native population were wiped out after the start of Spanish exploration, later followed by the British in North America.
Stannard describes pre-Colombian life (that is, before Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean/West Indies in 1492) as rich in culture and resources. There were magnificent cities, abundant crops, little disease, and artistic and architectural beauty throughout the land. Warfare was different than what the conquistadors brought with them. It usually involved expressed declarations of war between groups, with little brutality for brutality’s sake. When the Spanish arrived, the wholesale slaughter and enslavement overwhelmed the population, while the diseases the Europeans brought to both South and North America decimated the native people, who died by the millions. The genocide was a combination of violence and disease, driven by a lust for power and wealth.
The first half of the book details the American genocide in stark terms. The level and type of violence perpetrated against the indigenous peoples was sickening. I can’t provide details without massive content warnings. I felt terrible pain reading of the unrelenting brutality against the men, women, and children. In addition to the rampant slaughter, widespread enslavement in the south also destroyed the population through starvation, overwork, and disease.
The second half of the book describes the Christian holy wars in Europe and the East going back almost a thousand years. Stannard discusses the Christian oppression that spread throughout that part of the world, including the particular violence against the Jews, between Protestants and Catholics, and the Crusades in the middle east. Total conversion of the American indigenous populations or extermination was the goal brought by the fanatical Europeans. The Christian obsession with suppressing humanity’s’ “wild urges” and sexuality led to the explorers seeing the native peoples as barely more than beasts, inhuman and savage. They forced their religion on them or annihilated them. Stannard writes:
In sum, when in 1492 the seal was broken on the membrane that for tens of thousands of years had kept the residents of North and South America isolated from the inhabitants of the earth’s other inhabited continents, the European adventurers and colonists who rushed through the breach were representatives of a religious culture that was as theologically arrogant and violence-justifying as any the world had ever seen.”
The horrific loss of the native people and their culture cannot be overstated. The Americas were their land, their home, and the genocidal project of the Europeans caused incalculable loss, cruelty, and destruction.