NOTE: The following is what Robert Jackson, chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, had to say about genocidal behaviour:"

"No regime bent on exterminating another peoples will describe their intent in so many words, since such intent is imbedded in the very operation of the system of extermination. On the contrary, the actions of the agencies of murder are enough proof of such intent, and therefore when the transporting of people into the conditions of disease and death is condoned and facilitated by a government, and when these crimes are concealed from the scrutiny of the world of the same government or other agencies, it can be safely asserted that this regime intends to annihilate the targeted people and is guilty before the world of crimes against humanity."

Scalping. This line “upon producing such Savage taken or his scalp (as in the custom of America) if killed to the Officer Commanding at Halifax, Annapolis Royal, or Minas” from Nova Scotia’s English Colonial Governor Edward Cornwallis’s October 2, 1749 proclamation for Mi’kmaq scalps, which is included in my book “First Nations History - We Were Not the Savages - Third Edition” has often been mistaken by many readers as a reference to the alleged scalp taking practices of American Indians.

To refute such claims, I want to make this very clear, it is not an reference to an American Indian custom, but to a custom founded by the British in British North America. It was initiated by them for the purpose of terrorizing into submission, or exterminating, American Indian Tribes that were fighting to save their way of life and homelands from destruction by the merciless invaders.

Scalps were not the original required means for bounty hunters to prove to British colonial military government officials that they had killed Indigenous peoples (men, women and children). At first, in the early 1600s, colonial governments started offering bounties for Indigenous heads, then, around 1667, probably because transporting heads was too cumbersome for the bounty hunters, officials started offering bounties for scalps.

In many instances the monetary bounties paid for scalps was so lucrative that many bounty hunters got so carried away with ideas of riches that they became very indiscriminate about who they took the scalps from, Caucasian scalps were often included among the scalps that they brought into British forts for payment. Of course, for the barbarities that the Hunters visited upon their own, the American Indian was blamed. Prior to the European invasion of the Americas, scalping was not a widespread practice among the various Indigenous American Nations.

The following is how history Professor Geoffrey Plank, School of American Studies, University of East Anglia in England describes it:

“When Edward Cornwallis offered bounties for the scalps of Mi’kmaw men, women and children, he insisted that he was operating in accordance with “the custom of America.” Scalp bounties had been offered before. In various conflicts in North America, the French and the British had offered money for the scalps of their opponents, beginning as early as the late 17th century. But there were important innovations in Cornwallis’s declaration offering scalp bounties. Earlier scalp-bounty proclamations had been terse procedural orders, focused primarily on setting up mechanisms for payment. In general, scalping had been seen as an unpleasant military expedient, a disagreeable way to answer savagery in kind. Cornwallis, by contrast, saw scalping as a way of responding to crime and eradicating it. He identified the Mi’kmaq, like the Acadians, as rebels, and in a break with the practice of his predecessors in office, he refused to declare war on the Mi’kmaq because doing so would “own them a free people.”

Cornwallis devoted half his proclamation to enumerating specific offenses allegedly committed by the Mi’kmaq. Subsequent scalp-bounty proclamations issued by other colonial governments would be modeled on the one Cornwallis wrote. They would declare that Native warriors who took up arms against the colonists were “rebels and traitors” and by virtue of their disobedience deserved whatever punishment they received. Thus, as far away as Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Cornwallis’s new understanding of the purpose of scalp bounties contributed to widespread, sometimes almost random violence against locally resident Native peoples.

This marked an important break from past practice. In the 17th century a pattern had developed in which the colonists deployed collective violence primarily against “foreign” Native peoples residing at a distance from the zone of white settlement. After Cornwallis’s proclamation, in Nova Scotia and increasingly in other parts of North America, the pattern was reversed. The more insistently the British claimed sovereignty over a given territory, the more indiscriminate they were in their fight against local indigenous groups.”

For more information about the barbaric practice of scalping click Scalping

Historian John Stewart McLennan said about this practice:

"The punishments of the Indians for wrongdoing by the English were, as all punishments of that epoch, harsh, and in addition they were humiliating and irritated the Indians. The scalp bounties of the colonies included rewards for the killing of women and children . . . [This leads to] the strange conditions, in which we find a benign and devout clergyman praying that the young men who have joined the Mohawks in a scalping expedition against the French and Indians may go in fear of the Lord, and regard the bringing in of French scalps as a good omen."

Martin Niemoeller, a German Protestant theologian who was imprisoned during the Second World War years for his opposition to Hitler, says of silence when others are being persecuted: "When they came for the Jews, I didn't speak up; I wasn't a Jew. When they came for women, First Nation people and other minorities, I didn't speak up, since I wasn't any of them. When, finally, they came for me, there was nobody left to speak up for me."

In a critique of the mistreatment of Amerindians by Europeans, nineteenth-century historian Francis Parkman described how it varied at their hands: "Spanish civilization crushed the Indian; English civilization scorned and neglected him; French civilization embraced and cherished him." Parkman's observation about the English is true, but they also, like the Spanish, crushed the Indian.

Persecution

The barbarism employed by Great Britain, Spain, Portugal and other European Nations to subjugate Amerindian peoples during colonial times, and by the countries they begot in the Americas as a result of colonization, probably exceeds, or at the very minimum equals, the barbaric performances of the twentieth-century regimes of Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union combined.

Like the people who suffered horribly under those regimes, Amerindians at various times and places over the past five hundred years, have been imprisoned and executed without trial or recourse, enslaved, tortured, relocated without consent, treated as inferior human beings, subjected to deliberate genocide, and demonized to nonhuman status by monstrous lies; children were removed from families, properties were confiscated by the state without compensation, cultures were destroyed, and so on.

These inhumanities were carried out and condoned by a white supremacist population primarily under the guise of helping the Christian Church spread its version of enlightenment. To disavow that most of the white population was involved rings hollow, because the evil was known by everyone and largely unopposed-a fact verified by the historical record.

From the before-mentioned it can be easily deduced that the majority's mentality was warped by a combination of religious zealotry, greed, and White supremacist beliefs. This combination raised hate levels in Europeans toward Amerindians to the point where conscience died and no wrong was seen in crushing them.

The example given, along with hundreds of others, prove that there is an evil in most populations just waiting for the right circumstances to erupt. In modern times, the horrors committed during the conflicts associated with the breakup of the Yugoslav federation in the 1990s provided an excellent example of this mentality in action.

In addition to using scalp bounties Europeans have, at various times, used everything from germ warfare to mass slaughter in attempts to eradicate Native American populations.

Please visit these URLs to read more about British barbarities

http://www.danielnpaul.com/AcadianMi'kmaqContactsOutlawed.html
http://www.danielnpaul.com/BritishScalpProclamation-1744.html
http://www.danielnpaul.com/BritishScalpProclamation-1749.html
http://www.danielnpaul.com/BritishScalpProclamation-1756.html
http://www.danielnpaul.com/BritishGenocide-1759.html
http://www.danielnpaul.com/NewBrunswickCreated-1784.html

Click to read about American Indian Genocide