Audience members entered 282 Lillis Sunday with maroon napkins and coffee cups as they took their seats to listen to a discussion of genocide in the Americas.
A three-day genocide symposium addressed the topic of witnessing genocide and analyzing its representation and responsibility. Although the symposium, organized by the Oregon Humanities Center, was primarily centered on issues of genocide surrounding the Holocaust, the panel tackled the seldom-discussed issue of genocide in the Americas, from the United States to Guatemala.
More than 60 people sat and waited for the panel to begin, while moderator and associate professor of history Carlos Aguirre greeted people in softly spoken Spanish before introducing professor of history Jeffrey Ostler and his topic of the genocide of Native Americans.
“Despite the increase in claims about genocide in America, most mainstream scholars of genocide are critical of using the term genocide,” said Ostler.
Ostler went on to note that only a fraction of Americans believe that genocide is in their history and that the dominant trends of American history have worked against talking about genocide in terms of the deaths of Native Americans after colonization.
“We don’t want to believe that we have a history founded on genocide,” said Stephanie Wood, an early Mesoamerican history expert from the University’s Center for the Study of Women in Society.
Beth Piatote, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University, said a welcome in the Nez Perce dialect and told the audience of her concerns for Native Americans with tears in her eyes.
Piatote talked about her interpretations of the Native American perspective of genocide through Leslie Silko’s book “Almanac of the Dead.”
The book’s gritty and violent themes say to the reader, “‘read this and be worried, and then don’t let it be this way’,” said Piatote.
Victoria Sanford, an assistant professor of anthropology at the City University of New York: Lehman College, spoke about contemporary genocide in Guatemala from her first-person account. In an emotional testimony, she chronicled the violations of human rights in the 1980s and today. From 1982 to 1984, the Guatemalan government began a campaign of oppression and violence that ended in the death of more than 200,000 people and the massacre of 626 villages – the majority were native Mayan people.
“All of those people (responsible for the genocide) live with impunity,” said Sanford. “None of those people have been brought to justice.”
In Guatemala today, Sanford said, high rates of murder and violence have created an atmosphere of terror that things could once again spiral into genocide.
“We can all agree, despite the discourse, that the outcome of genocide is tragic,” said Wood.
“The terrors of genocide in the Americas has been silenced and I am grateful that a panel was put together that brings the issues into light,” said senior Marsha Ondaro.
Origins of the Word: Genocide
First coined by Polish-American lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1943 to describe the Nazi Holocaust
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