There is much written concerning the Jewish Holocaust during World War II, when an estimated six million Jews were slaughtered or died from the elements and starvation, and there is much written concerning the African slave trade and the horrors surrounding the practice of slavery in America. However, little is written or even acknowledged concerning the genocide by the Europeans of the Native American people.

             The term "genocide" derives from the Latin "genos," race or tribe, and "cide," killing, and means literally the killing or murder of an entire tribe or people (Genocide pp). The Oxford English Dictionary defines genocide as "the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group," and cites the first usage of the term as R. Lemkin"s 1944 Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, "by genocide we mean the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group" (Genocide pp). In 1946, the United Nations General Assembly adopted this term and defended it as "a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups" (Genocide pp).

             Twenty-one years after Christopher Columbus first landed on the Caribbean island he named Hispaniola, some eight million native people, he chose to call Indians, had been killed (Stannard pp). And this was only the beginning, for within a mere few generations, the Europeans had exterminated all but a handful of the Western Hemisphere"s native peoples (Stannard pp). For years historical demographers have been uncovering, in region upon region, "post-Columbian depopulation rates of between 90 to 98 percent with such regularity that an overall decline of 95 percent has become a working rule of thumb" (Stannard pp). To put this in perspective, the ratio of native survivorship in the Americas following European contact was less than half of what the survivorship ratio would be in the U.