According to conventional wisdom in the United States and elsewhere around the world, the term “genocide” describes the treatment of American Indians by the dominant race and its government. The genocidal creed arises from the guilt Americans have come to feel over the centuries-long ordeal of the native Americans. It has gained constant reinforcement from motion pictures, television, and popular literature, such as the immensely popular and influential polemic of Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. It also has been encouraged by the tribal activism that began in the 1960s with the Red Power movement; “Custer Died for Your Sins,” proclaimed one bumper sticker. Today, a large segment of both Indian and white populations perceive this experience as having been genocidal.

However fashionable, the formulation in the conventional understanding of the word is nonsense. The dictionary definition of “genocide” is “the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group.” In the public mind, genocide is equated with the Holocaust - the intentional obliteration of a people by means of mass physical annihilation. No more than a tiny portion of the white population of the United States, mainly in the West, ever advocated such a measure. No government official ever seriously proposed it.