Not　in everyone`s eyes. For example, the majority of US POWs who died in Japanese hands died from starvation or disease. This was also the cause of the deaths of HALF of the Japanese troops who died in WWII. This is due to incompetence (and a lack of regard for human life, including the lives of Japanese troops) but there are similarities with mass killings on a moral level that mean they should at least be talked about in the same way. The Bataan Death March has serious similarities with the Trail of Tears and both should be talked about in the same way (although not, obviously, exactly the same).

`As for reservations being concentration camps, that’s a bit of overstatement`

Its also something that I didn`t say. Many native Americans were put into concentration camps before reservations. For Americans, the term concentration camp conjures up images of the Nazi death camps but that is not the only way to use the term – it really refers to just what it says – a large area where a population are `concentrated` by force. For example, there is nothing wrong with calling the camps where Japanese Americans were placed `concentration camps` as it does not, by any means, imply elimination. The points that you make are valid but the historical concentratoin camp to reservation process is also.

As for reservations being concentration camps, that’s a bit of overstatement. As I speak, the Seminole tribe is running an add on the telly promoting their new Las Vegas style slot machines at the Seminole Hard Rock Cafe in Tampa, Florida. (As an aside, the Seminole tribe has a nice web site explaining their history, and the origin of the term “Seminole”) From 1983 to 1986 I worked in the Mountain West (New Mexico up to Montana and Idaho), and my work put me in contact with numerous aboriginal Americans and their reservations, and a lot of those societies are alive and well. Yet the problems you note are widespread and serious, both on and off the “res”. But they are also widespread among their corresponding socio-economic slices of other American groups.

“The more efficient culture wins out” is merely a statement of the obvious. My apologies for the term “idiotic”, by the way. That bordered on ad hominem and was unjustified.

That is, of course, a perfect justification for violence and cultural destruction.

`If you counted up all the real massacres that took place, (three) you’d still have less than a thousand.`

Wikipedia reports 20,000 deaths as a result of various forced relocations and if that were wrong, I`m sure some hot-headed American jingoist would have edited it by now.

The societies of native Americans were destroyed, those left were put first into concentration camps and then into reservations and their descendents continue to suffer from huge rates of poverty, infant mortality, drug and alcohol abuse, etc.

It is to America`s credit that there have been efforts at restitution, cultural preservation, etc. While `genocide` may not be a suitable term, there is no need to whitewash the past either.