I write in response to Svend Serup's letter (Reconciliation needs truth, April 11, Citizen).
Serup is correct that aboriginal people sometimes massacred entire enemy groups, including women and children. The incident that he mentions was probably the Bloody Falls Massacre, which took place in 1771. A group of Chippewyan men accompanying Samuel Hearn, a Hudson's Bay Company explorer, killed every man, woman, and child of a group of about 20 Inuit.In our own area, around 1755, a Chilcotin war party destroyed the Carrier village at Chinlac, near the junction of the Stuart River and the Nechako, killing everyone present, some 200 people. The bodies of the children were split open like salmon and put up on the drying racks.
It is, however, a mistake to attribute such genocidal behaviour only to native people. On many occasions, European settlers engaged in similar behaviour. A few incidents, such as the Sand Creek and Wounded Knee massacres, carried out by American soldiers, are famous, but the killing of non-combatant Indians was widespread and in some areas quite common. In the mid- and late 19th century, American settlers in Washington, Oregon, and northern California carried out what can only be described as genocide. As late as 1910, Indians were hunted like animals in California.
Genocide, and more generally the deliberate killing of non-combatants, is a crime not limited to any one race or culture.
Among far too many examples we have the German genocide of the Jews and the Roma, the Turkish genocides of the Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks, the Greek genocide of the Peloponnesian Turks (1820), the Chinese genocide of the Dzungar Mongols (1755-1758), the attempted genocide of Jews by Arabs in 1948, the massacre of Arabs and Indians by black Africans in Zanzibar (1964), the Arab genocide of black people in the Sudan, the Rwandan genocide of Tutsis by Hutus,the genocide of Bosnian Muslims by the racially-identical Serbs, and the massacres of the Rohingya in Burma.
Bill Poser
Prince George
