Cougar Face
Looking at native American displacement in recent ethnically cleansed episodes all over the world in recent decades is the basis of the book called " Ethnic Cleansing And The Indian" by author Gary Clayton Anderson. This history book reexamines the suppose genocide of American Indians in a another more modern version of ethnic displacement which is common in many areas around the world.
The takeover of land by speculators is primarily the reasoning for native American land loss as the United States saw valuable resources they wanted and took from groups of people who were not recognized as citizens and as enemies that needed to be relocated for the betterment of the people. This process, the author states, was played over and over again through generations as settlers pored from empires overseas and old empires power base and alliances with native American empires collapsed in North America opening up opportunities for the pale faces. The frontier expansion was made possible from the innumerable conflicts with organized terrorist "Ranger'' units comprised of back country pioneers with grievances and hatred for the Indians as well as the British overlords they saw preventing them of more land and ownership. The crimes of these militias and ranger groups wiping out whole villages was often erased through history and would constitute war crimes had they occurred today. These conflicts continued because whites continually pushed Natives to the fringes of society and that lined continued to push West as more and more people replaced the ethnically replaced Natives and new resources were needed for this expanding population and migration from Europe into what was former occupied Native lands.
Anderson also relates the roles of treaties with Indian groups and how they played in cleansing areas free of Indians as the American government always found some Indians who would easily sell out others who wanted to stay put on their ancestor all lands. This disgraceful financial fraudulent land dispossessing actions is repeated throughout this book and the interesting chapter on Californian Indians and their quick demise although the author seems to discount the number of Indians killed by settlers, miners, government officials, outlaws and in a land this big his underestimation of Indians killed in the Golden State. While numbers of Indians pre gold rush could never be determined in a land that large is must of been great well past a hundred and fifty thousand and the figure of only fifty thousand of Indians by 1855 can not be all attributed to disease given the spread out nature of California. No where else can one correctly estimate a human carnage of ethnically cleansing in North America can be found than in California. This story of the West only was able to occur by the process of power given to speculators who saw profits from land over preservation of it as the main purpose of Western expansion and development.
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