Ethnic Cleansing

6 Pages 1388 Words

Jon Giraudo

Ethnic Cleansing
Ethnic cleansing is a term that most people in the United States find unfamiliar. This seems a bit odd, being that ethnic cleansing is the way in which we acquired this fine nation from the natives that had been living here for who knows how long. While researching this topic, three definitions seemed to stand out in best describing this atrocity. Ethnical cleansing: 1) “is the systematic removal of a group of people identified by ethnicity from a certain area. This may be done through genocide (killing) or forced migration,” 2) “the removal or extermination of a racial or cultural group,” and 3) “the mass expulsion and killing of one ethnic or religious group in an area by another ethnic or religious group in that area.” It is safe to say that the term ethnic cleansing is a euphemism. It is euphemistic because the term cleansing implies something good. Murdering of women and children, or the act of genocide does not sound like a righteous act of cleansing.
This paper is not a cry out for the loss of the Native American people’s land, but to illustrate the fact that ethnic cleansing is not merely limited to everywhere in the world except the United States. It is true that there is a constant battle that certain ethnic groups must fight in countries such as Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, Yugoslavia, and several others, but northern Americans are no strangers to this battle. The act of ‘population removal’ has been happening since the beginning of time, however, the following pages will be used to give an account of the situations contained in United States history.
The Trail of Tears illustrates ways in which the North American legal system has been known to systematically violate their own laws in the expropriation of Indian land. In the early nineteenth century powerful Indian nations, including the Creeks, Cherokee and Chickasaw, constructed elaborate constitutions and c...