History Class

This happened to me a month ago and I just thought I would share this experience with everyone.

In my history class we were talking about the genocide and the holocaust of the Jewish people and the genocide in Vietnam and the Rwanda genocide. My teacher was talking about all these things and I thought that he was for sure going to mention what happened here in America, but he didn’t. After class I went up to him and I recommend watching the movie Older Than America that explained the small part of what happened to Native people, I told him it was about the cultural genocide of Native American people and that we lost over millions of people, more than the Holocaust in Germany. What he said to me was really astonishing, “Well it wasn’t really a genocide. What happened in Germany was a genocide, they (Jewish People) had no way to fight back. Here in America the Indians fought back, and when they lost they were moved to reservations. Only, probably a million or two, died during the expansion of the west.” In my mind I was speechless. I simply replied, “Well I still recommend that you watch this movie.” he smiled and said, “Absolutely.” I said my good-bye and walked away from the classroom feeling sad, angry, and very upset. I was so upset that when I tried talking to my little brother about it, I started crying. I was asking my brother “How could it not be a genocide?! There were over 20 million of us here before the colonist came, and by 1970 there were 260,000. Where did they go? They didn’t move to Hawaii or any other place, they were gone, killed, how do you not call that genocide?”

I hope that everyone could have an open mind and try to learn the real history of how this great nation was made and what it was founded upon.