Ethnocide Program

An Ethnocide Program is a political program aiming at diminishing a people's culture.

• Context:
  • …
• Example(s):
  • Ethnocide of Uyghurs.
  • Ethnocide of American Indians.
  • Ethnocide of Indigenous Canadians.
  • …
• See: Cultural Genocide, Genocide.

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References

2021

• (Wikipedia, 2021) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocide Retrieved:2021-1-15.
  • Ethnocide is the extermination of national cultures as a genocide component.

    Reviewing the legal and academic history of usage of the terms genocide and ethnocide, Bartolomé Clavero differentiates them by stating that "Genocide kills people while ethnocide kills social cultures through the killing of individual souls". In addition, "since cultural genocide can only be the cultural dimension of genocide", the idea of ethnocide goes beyond the idea of "cultural genocide", because it is part of a broader genocidal process.

    Because concepts such as cultural genocide and ethnocide have been used in different contexts, the anthropology of genocide examines their inclusion and exclusion in law and policies.

2014

• (Grinde, 2004) ⇒ Donald A. Grinde. (2004). “Taking the Indian Out of the Indian: US Policies of Ethnocide through Education.” Wicazo Sa Review 19, no. 2
  • QUOTE: As the genocidal policies to eliminate Native American populations in North America began to lose momentum at the end of the nineteenth century (the Native American population in the United States had been reduced to 500,000 by 1890), American Indians faced a new U.S. colonial policy that aimed to obliterate American Indian culture through education. This "civilizing" policy had three cornerstones: Christianization, education, and the instilling of private property (usually in that order). Developed in the first half of the nineteenth century during the removal era and refined by midcentury, the drastic impetus for creating and enacting the three-pronged policy can best be summed up in the words of secretary of the interior Alexander H. H. Stuart, who stated in 1851 that American Indians were "encompassed by an unbroken chain of civilization... and the only alternatives left are, to civilize or exterminate them." Just after the Civil War, secretary of the interior O. H. Browning reiterated this sentiment when he reported that instilling the fundamental concepts of European agriculture in American Indian people "is no doubt the best, if not the only, policy that can be pursued to preserve them from extinction." These policies were erroneously based on the assumption that Native Americans had no educational structures, no sense of property, and an inferior brand of spirituality. In fact, Native Americans had educational systems long before 1492, with Native teachers and scholars imparting knowledge to children and adults on a day-to-day basis both before and after white contact. Elders as well as people knowledgeable about specific ideas and techniques instructed members of their societies about a broad range of topics including history, religion, arts and crafts, literature, geography, zoology, botany, medicine, law, political science, astronomy, soil science, and theater. Since American Indian models of instruction centered on oral tradition, Europeans often typified Native American education as "primitive," defective, or nonexistent.

1996

• (Dussaulté & Erasmus, 1996) ⇒ Ren Dussaulté, and Georges Erasmus. (1996). “Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.”
  • QUOTE: ... By far the most ambitious and tragic initiative, however, was the joint government and church residential school program. Introduced originally for Indian children, the system would eventually draw children from almost every Aboriginal community — Indian, Métis and Inuit — across the country. Beginning in 1849, the program developed to include boarding schools, built close to the reserves for children between the ages of 8 and 14, and industrial schools, placed near non-Aboriginal urban centres to train older children in a range of trades. The schools — 80 of them at the high point — were the centrepiece of the assimilation strategy. ...

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