[5] Although some scholars use the Genocide Convention definition,[15] others have "criticized [it] as a highly flawed law for its overemphasis on intent, the imprecision of a key phrase 'destruction in whole or in part,' and the narrow exclusivity of the groups protected"—factors which reduce its applicability to anti-indigenous violence.

[32][33] Some scholars regard the colonization of the Americas as genocide, since they argue it was largely achieved through systematically exploiting, removing and destroying specific ethnic groups, which would create environments and conditions for such disease to proliferate.

[34][35][36] According to a 2020 study by Tai S. Edwards and Paul Kelton, recent scholarship shows "that colonizers bear responsibility for creating conditions that made natives vulnerable to infection, increased mortality, and hindered population recovery.

[44] According to the UN, for an act to be classified as genocide, it is essential to demonstrate that the perpetrators had a specific intent to physically destroy the group, in whole or in part, based on its real or perceived nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion.

[89] As detailed in American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present (2015),It is also apparent that the shared history of the hemisphere is one which is framed by the dual tragedies of genocide and slavery, both of which are part of the legacy of the European invasions of the past 500 years.

[95] UCL Geography Professor Mark Maslin, one of the co-authors of the study, states that the large death toll also boosted the economies of Europe: "the depopulation of the Americas may have inadvertently allowed the Europeans to dominate the world.

[21] It is estimated that during the initial Spanish conquest of the Americas up to eight million indigenous people died, primarily through the spread of Afro-Eurasian diseases,[98] in a series of events that have been described as the first large-scale act of genocide of the modern era.

[101][102] Historian Andrés Reséndez at the University of California, Davis asserts that even though disease was a factor, the indigenous population of Hispaniola would have rebounded the same way Europeans did following the Black Death if it were not for the constant enslavement they were subject to.

[89] However, historian Jeffrey Ostler has argued that Spanish colonization created conditions for disease to spread, for example, "careful studies have revealed that it is highly unlikely that members" of Hernando de Soto's 1539 expedition in the American South "had smallpox or measles.

In theory, the encomienda placed groups of indigenous peoples under Spanish oversight to foster cultural assimilation and conversion to Catholicism, but in practice it led to the legally sanctioned forced labor and resource extraction under brutal conditions with a high death rate.

[110]: 3  According to ecologist Simon Lewis and geologist Mark Maslin, the scope of these genocides was so extensive that it prompted the global temperature decrease between 1550 and 1700 as forest regeneration resulted in additional carbon sequestration.

[110]: 3 According to Clifford Trafzer, UC Riverside professor, in the 1760s, an expedition dispatched to fortify California, led by Gaspar de Portolà and Junípero Serra, was marked by slavery, forced conversions, and genocide through the introduction of disease.

[140][141] The Canadian government implemented policies such as the Indian Act, health-care segregation, residential schools and displacement that attempted forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples into Euro-Canadian culture while asserting control over the land and its resources.

During the 1870s, President Julio Argentino Roca implemented the Conquest of the Desert (Spanish: Conquista del desierto) military operation, which resulted in the subjugation, enslavement, and genocide of Mapuche individuals residing in the Pampas area.

[178] In 1977, Marie Sanchez, chief tribal judge of the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation told the United Nations Convention on Indigenous Rights in Geneva, that Native American women suffered involuntary sterilization which she equated with modern genocide.

In addition to the Gold Rush slaughter, there was also a large number of state-subsidized massacres by colonists against Native Americans in the territory, causing several entire ethnic groups to be wiped out.

[211][212][213][214][215] Mohamed Adhikhari argues that the Canary Islands were the scene of "Europe's first overseas settler colonial genocide", and that the mass killing and enslavement of natives, along with forced deportation, sexual violence and confiscation of land and children constituted an attempt to "destroy in whole" the Guanche people.

[250] In a 2009 news story, Japan Today reported, "Many Ainu were forced to work, essentially as slaves, for Wajin (ethnic Japanese), resulting in the breakup of families and the introduction of smallpox, measles, cholera and tuberculosis into their community.

[253] In 2004, the small Ainu community living in Kamchatka Krai, Russia wrote a letter to Vladimir Putin, urging him to reconsider any move to award the Southern Kuril islands to Japan.

[267] Under the command of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, Dutch soldiers and Japanese mercenaries massacred and enslaved thousands of Bandanese islanders and destroyed several villages in order to force the natives to surrender.

While most died due to the introduction of infectious diseases that accompanied colonization, up to 20,000 were killed during the Australian frontier wars by British settlers and colonial authorities through massacres, mass poisonings and other actions.

[279] Historian Niall Ferguson has referred to the case in Tasmania as follows: "In one of the most shocking of all the chapters in the history of the British Empire, the Aborigines in Van Diemen's Land were hunted down, confined, and ultimately exterminated: an event which truly merits the now overused term 'genocide'.

"[327] On 5 June 1959, Shri Purshottam Trikamdas, Senior Advocate of the Indian Supreme Court presented a report on Tibet to the International Commission of Jurists (an NGO): From the facts stated above the following conclusions may be drawn: ... (e) To examine all such evidence obtained by this Committee and from other sources and to take appropriate action thereon and in particular to determine whether the crime of Genocide – for which already there is strong presumption – is established and, in that case, to initiate such action as envisaged by the Genocide Convention of 1948 and by the Charter of the United Nations for suppression of these acts and appropriate redress;[328]According to the Tibet Society of the UK, "In all, over one million Tibetans, a fifth of the population, had died as a result of the Chinese occupation right up until the end of the Cultural Revolution.

[372] In the protracted conflict in Colombia,I groups such as the Awá, Wayuu, Pijao, and Paez people have become subjected to intense violence by right-wing paramilitaries, leftist guerrillas, and the Colombian army.

The Santa Cruz massacre, as the event became known, drew a significant amount of international attention to the issue (it was highlighted when the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Catholic Bishop Carlos Belo and resistance leader José Ramos-Horta).

[citation needed] Following the international outcry, the Indonesian government began to organize a host of paramilitary groups which continued to harass and kill pro-independence activists in East Timor.

[399] A 2004 report by the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School identified both the mass violence and the transmigration policies which encouraged mostly Balinese and Javanese families to relocate to the area as strong evidence "that the Indonesian government has committed proscribed acts with the intent to destroy the West Papuans as such, in violation of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Between 1954 and 1989, when the military dictatorship of General Alfredo Stroessner ruled Paraguay, the indigenous population of the country suffered from more loss of territory and human rights abuses than at any other time in the nation's history.

In early 1970, international groups claimed that the state was complicit in the genocide of the Aché, the charges being kidnappings, sale of children, withholding medicines and food, slavery, and torture.

The state specifically targeted rural, impoverished, and indigenous populations through the use of bribes, threats, and deceitful tactics in order to perform tubal ligations and vasectomies without the individuals' informed consent.