[vito]

Before this gets too far afield, lets keep to facts. There never was a policy of genocide to eliminate Native Americans. There were terribly unfair incidents, such as at Wounded Knee, but the policy of the colonialists, and then the Americans, was never genocide. Certainly Native Americans were forcible relocated, and many did die from disease, starvation and exposure, but that was not the intent of the action. I am not denying that white European descendants settled this country, sometimes at the expense of the aboriginals, but that is not genocide. The same thing has happened countless times as one cultural or ethnic group, with superior technology or numbers moved into a geographic area already occupied by another group, and forced the original occupants to move, be assimilated or otherwise deprived of what had once been theirs. And it is undoubtedly true that had the Native American tribes been better organized in their opposition to the white invaders, and had they the weaponry that the invaders introduced to the land, their loss of what is now the 48 contiguous states would have been much slower and probably less complete.