The genocide of the Native Americans, an original sin that can never be washed away

Hello everyone, welcome to today's Lingshicha Talk, this is Han Shuo. Today we're going to talk about the dark side of American history, the original sin that will never be washed away, the genocide of the Native Americans.

Let's open a map and find Plymouth, near Boston in the Northeastern United States, where the Mayflower landed on the North American continent more than 400 years ago and where 102 European settlers began their new lives, the ancestors of tens of thousands of Americans today. However, the Wampanoag, a tribe living in Plymouth, were not that lucky. Four hundred years ago they had a flourishing population, and today only about 2,000 descendants of this tribe remain.

This is just one of the skeletons the United States has hidden in its closet. The United States has carried out systematic genocide against indigenous people. The population of Native Americans fell from 5 million in the 15th century to 237,000 in 1900. The Wampanoag were the lucky ones among the indigenous people. Most of them were exterminated, a few were driven to the islands of New England to work as slaves in the vineyards. It's even more tragic that more than a dozen Native American tribes, such as the Pequot, Mohegan, and Massachusetts, are now completely extinct.

Native Americans were exterminated in large numbers, their lands plundered by white settlers. Once masters of the North American continent, they were now compressed into a few remote, impoverished inland enclaves.

The American magazine Atlantic Monthly commented that looking back at the 400-year history of Western colonization in North America, it was an uncompromising path of blood and tears. Shannon Keller O'Loughlin, chief executive and attorney of the Association on American Indian Affairs, said that the US. government needs to acknowledge that America's success today was built on the massacre and extermination of another race, a historic trauma that continues to affect the US now.

To this day, the economic and social development of Native Americans lags far behind that of other ethnic groups. In August 2020, a United Nations report noted that indigenous peoples in the United States are exposed to toxic pollutants, including nuclear waste, released or produced by extractive industries, agriculture and manufacturing. The soil and lead dust pollution from mining waste poses a more significant health threat to indigenous peoples in the United States than to other groups.

The genocide of Native Americans is the original sin of the United States which can never be washed away. The US government should officially acknowledge the genocide committed by the US against Native Americans, sincerely apologize and repent to the victims and their descendants, take practical measures to mend the wounds of Native Americans, and seriously address the severe human rights problems and racist crimes that exist in its own country.

What are your thoughts on these crimes committed by the US ?