Book Review: American Holocaust by David Stannard
In American Holocaust, (Oxford University Press, 1992), David Stannard offers an important, readable, and frank history of the four-century holocaust perpetrated in what has become known as the Americas. In the first of three sections, Stannard repopulates what have been cast as the “empty lands” of North, Central, and South America, documenting thousands of years of peoples, cultures, languages, governing structures and economies prior to the arrival of Columbus. Second, he describes the deadly combination of disease, massacre, brutality, and enslavement wrought upon the native peoples of the Americas by first the Spanish then the English. Third, he analyzes the theologies, ideologies, and political economies of these European nations, which motivated and were used to justify such horror. The relative simplicity and directness of his prose makes his work accessible for those with little historical training.
By periodically integrating first-hand accounts, drawings, and photographs of those who were tortured and died at the hands of Europeans, Stannard attempts to mitigate the reader’s potential for numbness in the face of statistics. His effort pays off. Stannard reports in detail the nearly universal decimation of populace after populace by 95 percent or more. Gaining a sense those who died as individuals and families is one of the achievements of this work.
The data Stannard provides support the emotional impact of his study. For many thousands of years, upwards of 100 million people lived throughout the Americas. Civilizations flourished in large and small settlements, in more rugged or lush environs. Upon contact with the Spanish, disease immediately began to wreak havoc in Central and South America because of the native peoples’ lack of immunity. Concurrently, the brutal thrust for gold and other riches began taking down village after village. Meted out at first by simple plundering, then war waged by Europeans pursuing “victory by any means”, then forced labor, violence through decades and centuries came to result in the death of millions. In North America, though manifesting somewhat differently, Spanish and English disease coupled with militant extermination led again to the demise of millions.
Stannard argues that the genocide perpetrated in these territories was driven by greed and powered by the Christian mandate to convert or destroy the ungodly. Whether for gold and silver (the Spanish) or property (the English), Europeans consumed the lives of native peoples for their labor and their land. Pre-Christian and Christian mythology and theology provided ideological support; for example, Christian hatred of the body (as the location of sin) and the necessity of stamping out sin (in order to prepare the way for the second coming of Christ) justified maltreatment and death of “heathens”. Because Spain needed labor, it set up torturous missions in order to convert natives, keeping them alive. The English, Stannard points out, did not bother much with conversion. Depopulated terrain was more in their interest, thus they chose primarily to destroy those they cast as sinful.
Stannard also explores the role of racial ideologies. He shows race as category coming about in part through the use of “blood lines” in Spain, differentiating Jews from Christians to determine property ownership and other rights. Later, once it was recognized how much labor would be lost if Christians could not enslave other Christians (such as native peoples who converted), laws passed that hinged slave status on one’s religion of origin.
While Stannard’s arguments are convincing, a major flaw in his analysis is in the lack of coverage of natives’ resistance efforts. His portrayal of native peoples as actual victims while simultaneously (and justifiably) glorifying their cultures is done a disservice by not accentuating the myriad ways in which they must have fought back as well. He does include a few anecdotes of war and legal routes to maintain sovereignty, for example, but not enough to provide a comparably rich sense of native agency in this area.
I highly recommend this work for anyone interested in really knowing the history of the land under US American feet and obtaining a sobering awareness of what continues to need to be done.