Native American genocide in the United States

The destruction of Native American peoples, cultures, and languages has been characterized by some as genocide. Debates are ongoing as to whether the entire process or only specific periods or events meet the definitions of genocide. Many of these definitions focus on intent, while others focus on outcomes. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide", considered the displacement of Native Americans by European settlers as a historical example of genocide. While description as genocide has found increasing acceptance within Indigenous and genocide studies, mainstream scholarship on US and Native American history has largely rejected it, preferring to describe it as ethnic cleansing or certain events as genocidal.

Historians have long debated the pre-European population of the Americas. In 2023, historian Ned Blackhawk suggested that Northern America's population (Including modern-day Canada and the United States) had halved from 1492 to 1776 from about 8 million people (all Native American in 1492) to under 4 million (predominantly white in 1776). Russell Thornton estimated that by 1800, some 600,000 Native Americans lived in the regions that would become the modern United States and declined to an estimated 250,000 by 1890 before rebounding.

The virgin soil thesis (VST), coined by historian Alfred W. Crosby, proposes that the population decline among Native Americans after 1492 is due to Native populations being immunologically unprepared for Old World diseases. While this theory continues to receive support in popular imagination and academia, recently, some scholars argue that many Native American populations did not plummet after initial contact with Europeans, but only after violent interactions, including wars, removal, confinement to reservations and forced assimilation, and that these exacerbated the effects of disease.

The population decline among Native Americans after 1492 is attributed to various factors, including Eurasian diseases like influenza, pneumonic plagues, cholera, and smallpox. Additionally, conflicts, massacres, forced removal, enslavement, imprisonment, and warfare with European settlers significantly contributed to the reduction in populations and the disruption of traditional societies. Historian Jeffrey Ostler emphasizes the importance of considering the American Indian Wars, campaigns by the U.S. Army to subdue Native American nations in the American West starting in the 1860s, as genocide. Scholars increasingly refer to these events as massacres or "genocidal massacres", defined as the annihilation of a portion of a larger group, sometimes intended to send a message to the larger group.

Native American peoples have been subject to both historical and contemporary massacres and acts of cultural genocide as their traditional ways of life were threatened by settlers. Colonial massacres and acts of ethnic cleansing explicitly sought to reduce Native populations and confine them to reservations. Cultural genocide was also deployed, in the form of displacement and appropriation of Indigenous knowledge, to weaken Native sovereignty. Native American peoples still face challenges stemming from colonialism, including settler occupation of their traditional homelands, police brutality, hate crimes, vulnerability to climate change, and mental health issues. Despite this, Native American resistance to colonialism and genocide has persisted, both in the past and the present.