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Imagine invaders from another country forcing us from our homes and slaughtering those who resist, suppressing our religious beliefs in favor of their own, stripping us of our language and placing our children in government-run boarding schools to teach them the ways of the new order.

These acts are easier to imagine today than before terrorism hit our shores, Chris Mato Nunpa, associate professor of American Indian and Dakota Studies at Southwest State University said during a recent lecture entitled "Genocide and the Native Peoples of the United States."

"On Sept. 11, 2001, the people of the U.S. were terrorized, attacked and killed on our own land," Mato Nunpa said. "I want to suggest to you that it's happened once before. In the past 500 years, the indigenous people, the native people of the U.S., have been terrorized, attacked and killed on our own land.

"People are ignorant of the true, historic experience of native peoples and the U.S. role in that, and it can provide insight into contemporary affairs," Mato Nunpa said. "When I was in first grade, I always shuddered when the teacher was going to talk about, quote, Indians, because I knew that whatever came out of her mouth was going to make me feel sad, bad and mad."

Eric Markusen, SSU professor of sociology and social work said that while today's teachers talk a great deal more about diversity, lessons about American Indian history still need teaching.

"It's part of our history that many people don't know anything about, and we, to understand who we are as a country, need to understand our history," Markusen said.

A lack of understanding can breed racism, said Markusen, who has experienced first-hand the results of intolerance in a sophisticated society during time spent in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

"We find even in our country during periods of bad economic times, anti-Semitism and racist episodes on campuses increase," Markusen said.

Although racist incidents across the country remain relatively few since the terrorist attacks, the fact that it happens at all indicates racism, prejudice and stereotyping still exist, Markusen said.

Mato Nunpa read aloud numerous accounts of early European treatment of American Indian men, women and children, detailing how they were hanged, disemboweled, decapitated, burned and shot.

An article in the Winona Daily Republican from Sept. 24, 1863, reported: "The state reward for dead Indians has been increased to $200 for every dead redskin sent to purgatory."

Historians estimate native people numbered anywhere from about one million, up to 18 million when European explorers first set foot in the U.S., Mato Nunpa said. Within four centuries, their numbers declined to 237,000, based on the 1900 U.S. census.

Extermination at the hands of and diseases carried over by Europeans account for most of the decline, he said.

For American Indians, many issues are more than ancient history. It took the 1990 federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to give American Indians the right to retrieve the remains of ancestors kept at museums and to bury them in their places of origin, Mato Nunpa said.

"Does the science museum of Minnesota, or the University of Minnesota, or the historical society keep Norwegian-American bones, or German-American bones? I'm just asking that rhetorically," Mato Nunpa said. "So, why do they keep the bones of indigenous people? It's a complex thing, but certainly related to an attitude of the Western Europeans and the Euro-Americans, how they view native peoples."

The United Nations in its 1948 Genocide Convention defined genocide as acting with the intent to destroy in whole, or in part, a national, ethnic or religious group, such as: killing group members; causing them serious bodily or mental harm; deliberately inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction; imposing measures intended to prevent births and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The U.S. failed to ratify this convention until 1986, Mato Nunpa said.

As recently as the late 1960s and early 1970s, involuntary sterilization was imposed on Native-American women. American Indians who occupied the office of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1972 during the Trail of Broken Treaties march on Washington discovered files that revealed this practice, Mato Nunpa said.

A 1974 study by Women of Red Nations (WORN) concluded that as many as 42 percent of all American Indian women of childbearing age had been sterilized without their consent, Mato Nunpa said. He said a subsequent study by the General Accounting Office confirmed the WORN study.

"People need to learn about what happened and then try not to repeat it again, to learn what any human being is capable of and any country is capable of doing," Mato Nunpa said. "We must all join our voices and our hands together. The potential of our liberation, yours and ours, are linked together, are inextricably joined together. Even though we may come from totally different traditions, world views and value systems, we must sing to the same drum and be locked together in our common humanity and our common destiny."

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