It was more a cultural genocide then hitlery kill them all genocide. we did put them into boarding schools and do the whole "kill the Indian save the man" thing. but a genocide non the less. also they don't care what you call them, though if your knowledgeable they would probably prefer their tribe name.
Seriously, the boarding schools were legendarily horrific.
That isn't in dispute, nor is is the notion that Europeans exploited their higher technology and cultural cohesion to gain significant advantage over the natives. All I am saying is that the modern "The innocent Native Americans were an enlightened society that were butchered by the barbarous Europeans for no reason other than greed" story is every bit as racist and demeaning to the natives as the old "It is the White Man's Manifest Destiny to spread out and bring civilization to the godless heathens". This is because it deprives the natives of any agency in their own fate, and reduces them to nothing more than a helpless victim.
Also, "genocide" means "trying to kill every last one of them". If there was no deliberate effort to do that, then there was no genocide.
And yet people say historical revisionism is bad. Changing "It is the White Man's Manifest Destiny to spread out and bring civilization to the godless heathens" to "The innocent Native Americans were an enlightened society that were butchered by the barbarous Europeans for no reason other than greed" is historical revisionism. Changing it *back* to the Manifest Destiny is historical revisionism. Adjusting it to reflect the actual diversity of native societies and their responses to European colonialism? Historical Revisionism.
Like, it's a fucking academic field, it's not a bunch of bureaucrats in Downtown Head Office just fucking with history to make a point. Any multiple of legitimate reasons exist to revise the historical record, from the Obvious of new data coming to light, or new methods of cataloguing and working with old data, to a culture previously relegated to the backwater achieving national prominence and a focus on their history that was previously unremarked on and wasn't bothered with by academia, to other fields of science opening up new possibilities of data collection, like DNA samples (as opposed to like, finding a new stone tool that changes when humans first entered an area, which would be an example of new data, this is new *types* of data) to debates about causation; The facts aren't in dispute, A happened then B happened then C happened, but whether A caused B caused C or B and C were both caused by A or if they were all caused by like, sub-A or something that was previously considered unimportant? That's stuff that can and should be thought about, debated, revised, and worked on.
And that's not even getting into that it's less A B and C, and more B, F, and H, and all the intervening letters are just not focused on as "unimportant," historical revisionism could just as easily be going through those unimportant events and shining new light on them and going "see, yeah, this actually matters, doods."
You know who else hated historical revisionism? HITLER!
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