The tragic mass shooting at the popular Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida early Sunday morning resulted in at least 50 dead, including the shooter, and 53 others injured.
The national media were quick to label it the "deadliest mass shooting" in American history.
American Indians responded on social media that the media failed to consider Wounded Knee where some 300 men, women and children were killed a few days after Christmas in 1890. Also, not mentioned was the Sand Creek massacre in 1864 where between 70 - 180 Cheyenne and Arapaho were massacred. It is estimated that two-thirds of the slain were women and children.
Many were clear they were not attempting to take away from Sunday's tragedy and the loss to the families of the victims, but thought the media should respect American Indian history — even though not pleasant for the media.
Comment: Aspects of American history that the media does not respect or report:
The colonization of America was genocidal by plan: Yes, Native Americans were the victims of genocide
Historian Woodrow Wilson Borah focused on the broader arena of European colonization, which also brought severely reduced populations in the Pacific Islands, Australia, Western Central America, and West Africa.xv Sherburne Cook—associated with Borah in the revisionist Berkeley School, as it was called—studied the attempted destruction of the California Indians. Cook estimated 2,245 deaths among peoples in Northern California—the Wintu, Maidu, Miwak, Omo, Wappo, and Yokuts nations—in late eighteenth-century armed conflicts with the Spanish while some 5,000 died from disease and another 4,000 were relocated to missions. Among the same people in the second half of the nineteenth century, US armed forces killed 4,000, and disease killed another 6,000. Between 1852 and 1867, US citizens kidnapped 4,000 Indian children from these groups in California. Disruption of Indigenous social structures under these conditions and dire economic necessity forced many of the women into prostitution in goldfield camps, further wrecking what vestiges of family life remained in these matriarchal societies.
Historians and others who deny genocide emphasize population attrition by disease, weakening Indigenous peoples ability to resist. In doing so they refuse to accept that the colonization of America was genocidal by plan, not simply the tragic fate of populations lacking immunity to disease. If disease could have done the job, it is not clear why the United States found it necessary to carry out unrelenting wars against Indigenous communities in order to gain every inch of land they took from them—along with the prior period of British colonization, nearly three hundred years of eliminationist warfare.
but piles and piles of it like garbage in NYC on a hot summer day.