Indigenous peoples of the Americas

Indigenous peoples of the Americas
Population
• Estimate	85,000,000

Indigenous peoples of the Americas are the native inhabitants of the Americas. Although these people are often referred to collectively, they belong to thousands of unique nations, tribes, and ethnicities with their own distinct histories, cultures, and languages. Common terminology used to refer to Indigenous people varies by region, such as: Native Americans in the United States, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit in Canada, and Pueblos Indígenas in Latin America.

There are an estimated 2,000 to 4,000 languages spoken by Indigenous peoples, though most have been lost due to the genocide and cultural genocide they faced since 1492. Indigenous Americans were economically and productively distinctive, ranging from urban civilizations (Maya, Aztec, and Inca) to hunter gatherer groups. With 1,000 distinct ethnicities and cultures, they cannot be viewed as one group of people.

Genocide

From 1492 and onward, with the arrival of the European settlers conducted an genocide against the Indigenous peoples of the Americas with estimated 90–95% of the original population of the Americas being killed across the Americas with an estimated by  David E. Stannard of 90 - 112 million Indigenous Americans killed in this genocide across both Americas. With white settlers personally killing 18 million Indigenous Americans as they were rewarded through legislation to murder Indigenous Americans (white settlers were rewarded for scalping little indigenous boys) by the Spencer Phips proclamation and Pennsylvania Scalp Act.

These are just a few of the thousands acts of genocide against the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, this list spans both the Americas and each of these are short but they deserve their own articles:

1492 - 1510:  Genocide and Enslavement of the Taino People

With the arrival of Christopher Columbus in Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), he came across the Taino people, whose population ranged from several hundred thousand to over one million. Upon seeing these people, Columbus immediately wrote in his journal about the potential for enslavement. This led to the imposition of the gold tribute system, forcing Indigenous people over age 14 to deliver specific quotas of gold and cotton every three months. Failure to comply led to the cutting off of hands, while creating famine among the Taino..

Alongside the spread of diseases like swine flu and smallpox from the Europeans, by 1496 the Taino fled to the mountains to escape the mines; they were forced to abandon their homes. During this time, the Spanish brought their pigs and intentionally let them trample the remaining Taino crops, which was the first man-made wave of famine. In addition to trampling the crops, these pigs carried swine flu, which infected the Taino. Six years later, in 1502, Spanish Governor Nicolás de Ovando arrived in Hispaniola and established the encomienda system.

In practice, encomienda was slavery, which had already existed before Nicolás de Ovando; however, his arrival formalized it and made it "legal". A year later, Nicolás's soldiers trapped the Taino nobility inside their meeting house under the guise of a political meeting. With the Taino nobility inside, they burned the meeting house, with the Taino leaders burning alive. After this, his soldiers hanged Queen Anacaona, destroying the pre-colonial hierarchy and replacing it with the new colonial hierarchy of Nicolás de Ovando. By 1504, the Spanish used war dogs to hunt down the fleeing Taino, who were then punished and sent to work in the gold mines, where the mortality rate reached nearly 100%, killing almost all who worked there long enough due to exhaustion.

A Spanish census in 1508 shows that the Taino population plummeted from several hundred thousand to 60,000. Due to this, the Spanish employed this same system in present-day Puerto Rico and Jamaica. By 1510, the Taino population was so low after the Spanish overworked them to death that the Spanish Crown authorized the importation of enslaved Africans to replace the dying Taino.

After this, Taino women were raped and forced into marriages with Spanish colonizers, creating the "mestizo." This effectively erased the Taino people culturally, which is why the Taino people were considered "extinct" for a while. However, they were rather just culturally extinct, as genetics show they were forced to intermarry with the Spanish, and so the records show they were of Spanish descent.

European powers and merchants demanded cheap labour, land and commodities such as sugar, gold, timber leading to expropriation and the imposition of slavery. They used ideological rationalizations such as Christian missions, “civilizing” rhetoric masked and justified the expropriation and settler violence.

1519 - 1521: The Fall of Tenochtitlan (Aztec Empire)

Hernan Cortez, with his 1,300 Spanish infantry and 200,000 Indigenous allies, laid siege to the Aztec Empire. He acquired these Indigenous allies by exploiting the ethnic and tribal antagonisms between the Indigenous allies and the Aztec Empire. These Indigenous auxiliaries allied with the Spanish largely to overturn Aztec political-economic domination, to reduce Aztec tribute and coercion, and to save themselves from Spanish brutality. The Fall of the Aztec Empire is often credited to Hernan Cortez and his men, but in reality, it was the 200,000 Indigenous auxiliaries that allowed for the fall.

This 93-day siege killed over 240,000 Aztecs due to murder and starvation. This was worsened by the intentional spread of smallpox by the Spanish, which killed an estimated 40% of the population of Central Mexico within a year. The Spanish left after this but returned to destroy the major temples in order to conduct cultural genocide. They dismantled the indigenous religion by imposing Christianity, constructing churches on the remains of the temples. On top of this, they destroyed Aztec libraries, art, and other cultural artifacts, aiming to erase indigenous knowledge and traditions, as well as their language, laws, and customs among the indigenous population, leading to the loss of indigenous languages, cultural practices, and social structures.

During this siege, Spanish deputy Pedro de Alvarado ordered the Massacre at the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan, in which he authorized the slaughter of thousands of Aztec nobles and priests during the festival of Toxcatl. The unarmed priests were trapped within the sacred temple and slaughtered by the Spanish. This event dissolved the Aztec leadership structure.

In 1562, the Franciscan priest Diego de Landa ordered an inquisition against the Maya civilization to root out the ‘’paganism’’ of the Maya. On July 12, 1562, he ordered the torture of thousands of Maya and the burning of over 5,000 distinct religious images. His men burned 27 Mayan hieroglyphic books; this act of cultural genocide severed the Maya from centuries of their own history, astronomy, and literature. Only four pre-colonial Maya hieroglyphic books remain in existence today.

The Aztec imperial order rested on tributary domination of subject peoples. Cortés exploited these class and ethnic antagonisms: subject nations joined him to overthrow Aztec domination. The fall of the Aztecs transformed the communal and seasonal forms of subsistence into expropriated, commodified land, people, and labor. The social fabric of Indigenous communal life was destroyed; wealth, enslaved Aztecs, and land were concentrated in colonial hands. Over centuries, this produced the colonial class structure that fed into the formation of modern Mexican capitalism.

1497 - 1829: Genocide of the Beothuk

The Beothuk people of Newfoundland, Canada, with the advent of the white settlers' private appropriation of bays and shorelines, were deprived of the ecological base for their reproduction. They suffered tuberculosis introduced by the white settlers and starved due to fear of approaching the European fishing settlements, as they were hunted for sport by the white settlers. In one instance, John Peyton, along with two others, fired upon a band of 50 Beothuk with buckshot, killing many and injuring the rest. Some injured individuals were physically beaten to death after being shot, while the others were left to die from their injuries or freeze to death.

The settlers violently forced the Beothuk from their ancestral lands, robbing them of their sustenance by aggressively exploiting the island's salmon, seals, and birds. By establishing permanent fishing premises, the settlers blocked the Beothuk from accessing the coastline, cutting off their access to the marine resources essential for surviving the winter.

This forced retreat into the interior was met with aggression; invading fur trappers established traplines that disrupted traditional caribou hunts. These white trappers terrorized the Beothuk, ransacking their camps, destroying their winter supplies, and engaging in lethal attacks that drove the population to starvation.

The last known Beothuk was a woman named Shanawdithit, but in 1829, she died in a St. John's hospital after her long fight with tuberculosis.

1636 - 1638: Pequot Genocide

The Pequot Genocide started with the Pequot killing John Stone, a British slave trader who sold Indigenous Americans, in retaliation for the death of Tatobem, a Grand Sachem of the Pequot tribe who was killed by the Dutch. The British Massachusetts Bay colonists tried to use Stone's death to steal land from the Pequot. When the Pequot refused, Governor Henry Vane of the Massachusetts Bay Colony sent John Endicott with a military force to attack Block Island, where the white settlers burned the villages and crops. They then sailed to Pequot territory along the Thames River and burned Pequot villages and crops.

The Pequot retaliated by besieging Fort Saybrook, the first British fortified settlement in New England. Unlike the English exterminatory tactics, the Pequot engaged in traditional warfare intended to humiliate and drive out the enemy, not exterminate them. After this siege, the British settlers, alongside Indigenous allies, signed the Treaty of Hartford, intended to erase the Pequot people, which they conducted in an event called the Mystic/Pequot Massacre.

English settlers led by John Mason, alongside Narragansett allies, surrounded a fortified Pequot village at Mystic. The English set the village on fire and shot anyone attempting to escape. It is estimated that 400 to 700 Pequot civilian women, children, and men were murdered in less than an hour. The Pequot who survived were sold into slavery in the Caribbean, and the Treaty of Hartford criminalized any mention or recognition of the culture or existence of the Pequot.

It is through this system of capitalist expansion and primitive accumulation that genocides are created when combined with state formation and a settler-colony, as seen in Israel today.

1675 - 1678: Metacom’s Rebellion

A combined union of the Wampanoag, Nipmuck, Pocumtuc, and Narragansett peoples, led by Metacomet, sought to drive out the white settlers in New England. It was the bloodiest domestic war in American history per capita, with over 5,000 Indigenous Americans dying. Survivors were sold into slavery by the thousands. The war ended with Metacom being shot and beheaded, and his head was displayed in Plymouth for decades by the white settlers.

The war was fought throughout the summer and winter, preventing the Indigenous peoples from farming and harvesting crops. The English destroyed food stores (such as during the Great Swamp Fight), leading to widespread starvation. Metacomet's soldiers had to choose between fighting and feeding their families, and many surrendered when faced with starvation.

The rebellion arose from centuries of dispossession, economic dependency, epidemics, and massacres. The state and private capital, using colonial expansion and land grabs, stole Native communal territories and hunting grounds, which eroded the ways of life of Indigenous Americans. Additionally, English courts, tribute demands, and missionaries criminalized Indigenous cultural law and cultural reproduction.

1755: Wabanaki Genocide or the Scalp Acts

Colonial governments commodified and dehumanized the lives of Indigenous Americans. In 1755, Spencer Phips, the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts, issued a proclamation offering cash bounties: £40 for the scalp of an Indigenous man, and £20 for the scalps of women or children under 12. This was a genocide in which settlers were rewarded for scalping Indigenous women, children, and men in order to exterminate the Wabanaki people. These bounties were equivalent to roughly $10,000–$12,000 per scalp.

The 1755 proclamation was one of five issued by Massachusetts colonial authorities that year alone, and part of an estimated 65 to 80 scalp proclamations issued in New England between 1675 and 1760. The proclamation not only offered money for scalps (proof of death); it also offered higher cash payments for capturing Penobscot men, women, and children alive, who were then sold into slavery. In addition to cash, settlers who engaged in this "hunting" were sometimes rewarded with the land of the people they killed, allowing them to establish towns on ancestral Wabanaki territory.

Following the 1755 decree, the Massachusetts Assembly voted to raise the bounty to £300, showing a sustained, funded policy of genocide. When capital demands territory, extraction, or labor, it leads to the expropriated populations being criminalized or exterminated. We still see this today with state violence against minorities, the criminalization of the poor, and corporate land grabs all justified in the same way with "development" and "rule of law."

1763: The Western Indians' Defensive War

The Western Indians' Defensive War, or Pontiac's War, was a widespread Native American resistance against British settlers in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley regions. It began with British settlers occupying French forts in the Great Lakes. The Indigenous Americans initially viewed this cautiously, but then British commander-in-chief Jeffery Amherst implemented new policies in which he stopped the diplomacy of gift-giving and trade that the French used with the Indigenous Americans, which the Indigenous Americans took as breaking diplomatic relations.

Neolin, a prophet of the Lenni Lenape people, urged his people to reject European goods (especially alcohol), return to traditional ways, and drive the British from their lands. Around 1763, red wampum "war belts" circulated among the Ottawa, Ojibwe, Potawatomi, Huron, Seneca, Delaware, and Shawnee peoples, acting as vital diplomatic, political, and spiritual calls to unite against British colonial expansion. These belts signaled a coordinated pan-Indigenous alliance, urging them to rise up and reclaim their lands.

Ottawa war chief Obwaandi'eyaag (Pontiac) forged and influenced a coalition of Indigenous nations, including the Huron and Potawatomi, in April 1763. Drawing on Neolin's spiritual mandate to purge British influence and return to traditional ways, Pontiac convinced his allies to strike at Fort Detroit, launching a widespread uprising across the Great Lakes region against colonial encroachment.

Pontiac returned after the first failed attempt with a coalition of soldiers from multiple tribes (including Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Huron) to formally besiege Fort Detroit. Seeking to drive the British out of the Great Lakes, the Indigenous Americans cut off all supply lines and killed English settlers in the area, while generally leaving French settlers alone due to their diplomatic relations. Although the initial assault failed, Pontiac's forces dominated the surrounding area, ambushing British reinforcements at Point Pelee and settling in for a protracted, months-long siege.

Indigenous American soldiers captured eight British forts. As Delawares and Shawnees besieged Fort Pitt, British Captain Simeon Ecuyer and trader William Trent gave blankets and handkerchiefs from their smallpox-infected hospital to the Indigenous American diplomats who were trying to reach a peaceful agreement, deliberately spreading smallpox as they had done previously.

The introduction of European goods, the dependence on trade, and the sudden removal of that trade, combined with land grabs and settler violence, forced them to engage in the Western Indians' Defensive War

1802 - 1860: The Trail of Tears & Manifest Destiny

Before the 1830 Indian Removal Act, the 1802 Georgia Compact compelled the federal government to remove all Indigenous Americans in Georgia in exchange for western land claims and $1.25 million. This created immense pressure for removal, fueled by the 1829 gold discovery on Cherokee land. The Creek Nation resisted this, influenced by Tecumseh's pan-Indian movement, viewing their leadership as a "puppet government" under U.S. Agent Benjamin Hawkins.

Following the Battle of Burnt Corn, where a white settler militia murdered a Creek Nation group, the conflict escalated with the Battle of Fort Mims, which served as a pivotal act of resistance against U.S. encroachment. This event incited national outrage as white settlers were murdered in retaliation, offering Andrew Jackson a justification to expropriate the land of the Creek Nation, which led to the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. The Creek Nation had chosen a defensive position that was considered nearly impregnable, but the U.S. opened fire with two cannons. The bombardment lasted two hours but was largely ineffective. During this time, Cherokee allies of the U.S. swam across the river and attacked the Red Stick village from the rear, burning the houses of their families, which forced the Creek Nation soldiers to protect their families, leaving themselves open.

Seeing smoke from the village, Jackson ordered a full frontal bayonet charge. Trapped between the burning village and the wall of soldiers, the Creek Nation refused to surrender. The battle continued until nightfall. Over 800 soldiers died (approx. 80% of the Creek Nation's Red Sticks). 557 bodies were found on the field; roughly 250 more were shot while trying to flee by swimming in the river. 350 Creek women and children were captured and imprisoned.

On August 9, 1814, Jackson forced the Creek Nation to sign the Treaty of Fort Jackson, in which the Creek Nation was forced to cede 23 million acres of land to the U.S. government. This land included territory belonging to the Lower Creeks, the allies who had fought alongside Jackson; however, he ignored their protests as he stole more than half of present-day Alabama and part of southern Georgia. The vast new territory became the heart of the "Cotton Kingdom," leading to a massive expansion of plantation slavery in the Deep South.

After this, in 1828, Andrew Jackson won the presidency on a platform based on the removal of Native Americans to open up land for white southern settlers. President Jackson proposed the Indian Removal Act to Congress, framing it as a benevolent policy to save Native Americans from annihilation by white settlers. Two years later, in 1830, Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law.

Following this, the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw peoples were forcibly relocated from their ancestral lands in the Southeast to "Indian Territory" (modern-day Oklahoma). This genocide, known as the Trail of Tears, ethnically cleansed 60,000 Indigenous Americans and killed a great number due to exposure, disease, and starvation: an estimated 4,000 to 8,000 Cherokee (20-25% of their population), 2,500 to 6,000 Choctaw, and approximately 3,500 Creek were killed, with thousands more deaths recorded among the other peoples.

The 1830 Indian Removal Act embodied the interests of the emergent American bourgeoisie and of land-hungry sections of the petty-bourgeois white settler population whose immediate upward mobility depended on expropriation. Jacksonian democracy presented itself as the voice of the "common man," but it acted decisively in defense of property expansion and capitalist development against Indigenous societies.

1846 - 1873: The California Genocide

The first Governor of California, Peter Burnett, declared in 1851 that "a war of extermination will continue to be waged... until the Indian race becomes extinct."

A year before this, the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians was enacted by the same governor who had just declared a genocide against Indigenous Americans. In practice, this law allowed white settlers to take custody of Indigenous children from their families for slavery, and in doing so, it legalized the slavery of Indigenous children in California. The California state legislature raised $1.5 million in the 1850s to reimburse private militias for killing Indigenous people. The most notable incidents included the Clear Lake Massacre in 1850, where the U.S. cavalry killed 100 Pomo people on an island, and the hunting of the Yuki people.

The Indigenous population living in California was roughly 300,000 to 310,000 before contact with white settlers. The State of California organized and funded volunteer militia units specifically to hunt and kill Indigenous people, but mere initial contact with white settlers had already dropped the Indigenous population to approximately 150,000 due to loss of land, slavery, and violence.

The state passed bond acts in the 1850s to pay for these massacres. The U.S. federal government later reimbursed California for these expenses, effectively using federal tax dollars to subsidize the genocide. In some areas of California, local municipalities paid bounties for the severed heads and scalps of Indigenous people.

Alongside the genocide, the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians also allowed for any Indigenous person found not working to be arrested for "vagrancy." A white settler could then pay their bail and force them to work off the debt, which was essentially legalized slavery. This, combined with the theft of children for "custody," destroyed Indigenous families.

There were hundreds of massacres, but I will just mention a few, with the most notable being the Bloody Island Massacre, which occurred in Lake County, California, when the U.S. Cavalry, led by Nathaniel Lyon, killed hundreds of Pomo people. It was a retaliatory strike after Pomo individuals killed settlers Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone, who had enslaved, starved, and brutally abused them.

The Bridge Gulch Massacre was another instance in which a group of around 70 white settlers, led by Sheriff Dixon, tracked the Wintu people to a spot near the natural bridge on Hayfork Creek. Under the cover of early morning darkness, the settlers launched a surprise attack on the camp. The slaughter resulted in the deaths of approximately 150 to 300 Wintu people, many of whom were women and children. Some reports specify exactly 153 victims. No members of the sheriff's posse were killed, and no members of the group were prosecuted, as it aligned with California Governor Peter Burnett's goals of complete genocide.

The Yontoket Massacre was one of the deadliest attacks on Indigenous Americans in U.S. history, decimating the cultural and spiritual center of the Tolowa Dee-ni' people. While the Tolowa Dee-ni' people were gathered for a ten-day Nee-dash (feather prayer ceremony), a 33-member white settler militia from Crescent City surrounded the village at dawn and set fire to the redwood plank houses while families were inside. As people fled the burning village, they were shot or stabbed. The settlers cut off heads and threw both their religious regalia and babies into the fire. Between 450 and 600 people were murdered, with no lives lost on the settler side.

Survivors were forced to flee to other villages, such as Howonquet, but attacks continued for years. It is estimated that 902 Tolowa were killed in just seven years following this event.

During these massacres, the white settlers also fenced off hunting grounds, diverted water sources for gold mining, which ruined salmon runs, and let livestock destroy native food sources like acorns. This was to starve Indigenous Americans with the intention of genocide in California, alongside disease, which was exacerbated by slavery, malnutrition, and the intentionally unsanitary conditions of the concentration camps.

White land speculators, ranchers, sheriffs, and business interests organized and benefited directly from the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous populations. Their actions were often formalized by state decisions and budgets, while settler militias provided the muscle for the ethnic cleansing; these actions were frequently justified publicly as the protection of settlers and property.

1864 - 1890: The Place of Suffering and the Wounded Knee Massacre

The Place of Suffering

Commonly but inappropriately referred to as The Long Walk, is what the Navajo themselves call this event, along with The Time of Fear. Between 1864 and 1866, the U.S. government forced over 10,000 Navajo men, women, and children to walk 400 miles from their ancestral homelands in what is now Arizona and New Mexico to a concentration camp at Bosque Redondo.

It began with threats demanding the Navajo leave, and when the Navajo refused to comply, Colonel Kit Carson initiated a brutal "scorched earth" campaign in 1863. Carson's troops burned down homes, destroyed crops, and chopped down thousands of peach trees in Canyon de Chelly. With livestock slaughtered and water sources poisoned, and facing starvation and freezing temperatures, thousands of Navajo were forced to surrender. The ethnic cleansing was not a single march but a series of marches that took place over two years. The most infamous group departed in the spring of 1864.

They were forced to walk roughly 450 miles across the harsh desert; due to the burning of their homes and food, they were ill-equipped for the journey. Many were starving, barefoot, and dressed in rags during freezing winter conditions. Pregnant women, children, and seniors who fell behind were shot on the spot. The soldiers rode on horses and in wagons with rations, and were ordered to monitor the Navajo and shoot those who slowed down.

Once the survivors arrived at the Bosque Redondo concentration camp, they found it desolate and unsuitable for human habitation; the soil was poor, and the water from the Pecos River was highly alkaline, causing severe intestinal disease. The camp was designed for 5,000 people but held over 9,000; there was no wood for heating or cooking, and they were forced to travel miles away to dig for mesquite roots to eat. Smallpox and other diseases ran rampant. During the march and imprisonment, it is estimated that 2,500 to 3,500 Navajo died from starvation, disease, and freezing conditions.

On November 29, 1864, in the Colorado Territory, Colonel John Chivington led a militia of 700 white settlers in a premeditated, unprovoked attack on a peaceful village of Cheyenne and Arapaho at Sand Creek. Despite the camp flying both a white flag of truce and an American flag, and having been directed to the site by the U.S. military for protection, the soldiers slaughtered over 150 people, mostly women, children, and elders. The troops mutilated bodies to take trophies, such as scalps, the genitals of men and women, and fetuses carved out of their mothers' bodies, which were later displayed in Denver. Although the massacre was later condemned by a Congressional investigation as a "gross outrage," no participants were ever held legally accountable.

Wounded Knee Massacre

In December 1890, U.S. 7th Cavalry troops intercepted a band of Miniconjou Lakota led by the ailing Chief Spotted Elk. While the Army attempted to disarm the group near Wounded Knee Creek, a scuffle broke out involving Black Coyote, a deaf Lakota man who did not understand the orders to surrender his rifle. When the rifle discharged, soldiers opened fire indiscriminately with Hotchkiss mountain guns. The barrage killed between 250 and 300 Lakota, nearly half of whom were women and children; many were pursued for miles across the snow.

In the aftermath, 20 Medals of Honor were awarded to the soldiers, awards that to this day have still not been rescinded. The U.S. state combined violence with legal instruments, broken treaties, removal acts, and later allotment laws and ideological constructs such as Manifest Destiny and racialized social Darwinism to justify genocide and ethnic cleansing.

1870 - 1910: Genocide in the Southern Cone and Amazon

The "Conquest of the Desert''

More appropriately, the Ethnic Cleansing of Patagonia, was launched under the command of General (later President) Julio Argentino Roca. The Argentine state initiated this systematic military campaign designed to ethnically cleanse Patagonia. Targeting the Mapuche, Ranquel, and Tehuelche peoples, the campaign sought to forcibly incorporate Indigenous lands into the national economy, allowing white settlers to use the land for pastoralism. Utilizing modern Remington repeating rifles and, at times, trench warfare, the army destroyed Indigenous resistance.

Following the subjugation of Indigenous resistance, thousands of survivors were subjected to state-sponsored ethnic cleansing. They were forced into concentration camps (such as on Martín García Island), transported hundreds of miles to Buenos Aires on death marches, and had their families deliberately separated. Men were forced into army labor, while women and children were redistributed as domestic slaves to wealthy families in the city. This effort to conduct a cultural genocide succeeded in forcing Indigenous people to hide their heritage, leading to the long-lasting false notion that Argentina was a white nation with no Indigenous population.

The army enforced the property theft required by agrarian capitalism; legal and administrative institutions validated these actions. Indigenous resistance was framed as "criminal," a bourgeois ideological mask that justified ethnic cleansing.

1886 - 1910: The Selk'nam Genocide.

In the late 19th century, sheep ranching companies and white settlers, backed by Argentine state interests, waged a genocide against the Selk'nam, who hunted sheep after their traditional guanaco hunting grounds were fenced off. Ranchers offered bounty payments for the heads, ears, or hands of the Selk'nam. A Romanian settler named Julius Popper became infamous for leading private militias in armed hunts, often posing for photographs with the bodies of his victims. Alongside the violence, intentionally introduced diseases killed thousands. Survivors were captured and forcibly removed to Salesian missions on Dawson Island, where they were supposed to be converted but were instead separated from their families and exposed to more diseases; many died from overcrowding and illness. Others were kidnapped and displayed in "human zoos" as "cannibals" in Paris, London, and Brussels. Their population fell from an estimated 4,000 to a few hundred in a matter of decades due to diseases in these human zoos and Salesian missions.

Rancher enterprises wanted property and labour control, the state and its local proxies enforced that imperative through genocide as racial pseudoscience, Social Darwinism, and the colonial “civilising” mission served to rationalise and conceal this atrocity.

1879 - 1913: The Putumayo Genocide

The Peruvian Amazon Company owned by rubber baron Julio César Arana, who faced no legal consequences and later became a senator in Peru, the Peruvian Amazon Company perpetrated what is now known as the Putumayo genocide. Registered in London, the company operated in a lawless border region, enslaving the Huitoto, Bora, Andoque, and several other Indigenous groups through a brutal system of debt peonage and terror.

To enforce rubber quotas, overseers employed systematic flogging, the "cepo" torture stocks, mutilation, and mass executions. Exposed by investigators like Roger Casement and W.E. Hardenburg, the regime is estimated to have caused the deaths of 40,000 to 100,000 people, nearly annihilating entire populations.

Capital's drive for profit incentivized settlers into this genocidal system, where labor could be appropriated violently, producing pressure to squeeze ever greater returns from frontier zones. Local rulers, company agents, and paramilitary forces enacted this materially, creating genocidal mechanisms when cheap labor was necessary for accumulation.

1870s - 1990: The Cultural Genocide and Forced Sterilization.

As the genocide of Indigenous Americans became unviable, settler colonies transitioned to cultural genocide via forced assimilation. Governments mandated the removal of Indigenous children from their homes, placing them in church-run boarding schools designed to eradicate their heritage in favor of Eurocentric values. This ideology was epitomized by Captain Richard Henry Pratt's dehumanizing mandate: "Kill the Indian, and save the man."

In Canada, the Residential School system (active until 1996) became a site of systemic abuse and neglect. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented over 3,200 deaths, though recent ground-penetrating radar at sites like Kamloops and Marieval suggests the actual death toll, including those buried in unmarked graves, is significantly higher. This era of institutionalization was followed by the "Sixties Scoop," during which authorities systematically stripped Indigenous children of their identities by adopting them into white families. These policies did more than remove individuals; they severed the intergenerational transmission of culture, creating a legacy of trauma that persists today.

Beyond cultural genocide, U.S. and Peruvian authorities engaged in direct, state-sponsored reproductive violence targeting Indigenous populations to suppress reproduction. In the 1970s, investigations into the Indian Health Service (IHS) revealed that thousands of Indigenous American women were sterilized without consent, with studies suggesting up to 25% of women of childbearing age were affected during that era.

Similarly, in Peru during the 1990s, Alberto Fujimori's government implemented a "Voluntary Surgical Contraception" program that systematically targeted Indigenous Quechua and Aymara women in rural, impoverished areas. Over 200,000 women were sterilized without consent, often threatened with fines or subjected to the procedure without understanding what it entailed.

To this end, he proves how the development of the social productive power of labour, co-operation, division of labour, use of machinery on a large scale, are impossible without the expropriation of the labourers, and the corresponding transformation of their means of production into capital. In the interest of the so-called national wealth, he seeks for artificial means to ensure the poverty of the people. Here his apologetic armor crumbles off, bit by bit, like rotten touchwood. It is the great merit of E.G. Wakefield to have discovered, not anything new about the Colonies , but to have discovered in the Colonies the truth as to the conditions of capitalist production in the mother country. As the system of protection at its origin attempted to manufacture capitalists artificially in the mother-country, so Wakefield’s colonisation theory, which England tried for a time to enforce by Acts of Parliament, attempted to effect the manufacture of wage-workers in the Colonies. This he calls “systematic colonisation.”

— Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, Chapter 33: The Modern Theory of Colonisation

In simple terms, capitalist development depends on the expropriation of producers and the social creation of wage labor, requiring the proletarianization of Indigenous Americans in other words, turning them into wage workers. Forced assimilation and sterilization operate as instruments to break communal life, control reproduction, and produce labor power on terms favorable to capital and state power.

1963 - 1980 Silent Genocide of the Amazon

Waimiri-Atroari Massacre

During the Brazilian military dictatorship, the regime adopted a policy of violent Amazonian expansion, designating Indigenous peoples as "obstacles to progress." In this context, the state perpetrated a genocide against the Waimiri-Atroari people (who call themselves Kinja) between 1972 and 1977 to pave the BR-174 highway through their ancestral lands in Amazonas.

Backed by the Brazilian Army, which employed heavy machinery, and with the complicity of FUNAI, the Waimiri-Atroari population was devastated, plummeting from approximately 3,000 to just over 300 individuals. Evidence uncovered by the National Truth Commission indicates the military conducted blitzkrieg-style attacks, utilizing helicopters to drop explosives and chemical substances similar to napalm on villages. Survivors were forcibly displaced, facing hunger and disease, while their territory was subsequently targeted for mining, marking one of the most severe atrocities against Indigenous peoples in Brazil's history.

The Massacre at the 11th Parallel

in 1963 occurred during a brutal campaign to clear land for commercial rubber and mineral extraction, in which the firm Arruda, Junqueira & Co. orchestrated a massacre of the Cinta Larga people in Mato Grosso. On the orders of Antonio Mascarenhas Junqueira, attackers dropped dynamite from planes before returning on foot to execute survivors with machetes and firearms. This atrocity was part of a broader genocide that included poisoning and biological warfare. It was later exposed by the Figueiredo Report, highlighting both the extreme vulnerability of uncontacted tribes and the complicity of the state's Indian Protection Service (SPI).

One of the most infamous accounts describes a woman who was hanged upside down and sliced in half with a machete while her baby was shot in the head. The 1963 incident was part of a larger series of attacks involving poisoning with arsenic-laced sugar and the intentional spreading of diseases like smallpox and influenza.

The massacre was planned by Antonio Mascarenhas Junqueira, head of the rubber firm Arruda, Junqueira & Co., who notoriously referred to the Cinta Larga people as "parasites" and "pests." This violence continues today, affecting not only Indigenous peoples across the Americas but also manifesting in many forms, such as urban evictions, Amazonian land grabs, or the corporate seizure of community common property.

1981 - 1983: The Guatemalan Genocide

During the Guatemalan Civil War, the military government launched a "scorched earth" campaign against the Maya peoples, whom the state accused of supporting communist guerrillas. Under dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, the army massacred entire villages, particularly in the Ixil Triangle. Soldiers burned crops, slaughtered livestock, and committed mass rapes to destroy the community structure. According to the UN-backed Historical Clarification Commission, approximately 200,000 people were killed, 83% of whom were Maya.

In 2013, Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity by a Guatemalan court, making him the first former head of state convicted of such crimes in his own country. However, that historic verdict was overturned ten days later by the Constitutional Court, which cited procedural errors and ordered a retrial. Although a 2018 court ruling during the retrial confirmed that the military had committed genocide, Ríos Montt died in 2018 before a final sentence was rendered, leaving legal accountability a subject of deep conflict in Guatemala.

The verdict was heavily contested by the Guatemalan bourgeoisie, military allies, and political figures. Unsurprisingly, the regime enjoyed political backing and material and moral support from the U.S., particularly as this occurred during the Cold War. The state response was backed politically, materially, and doctrinally by U.S. counterinsurgency practices, which included training and funding provided through the School of the Americas.

These are not all the atrocities committed against Indigenous Americans. One must take into account how few were recorded, how few are mentioned here to save space and time, and the potentially thousands of atrocities that combined to create one of the largest genocides in history.

History

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Culture

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