The term “genocide” was coined following the Shoah, or Holocaust, and its prohibition was enshrined in the United Nations convention adopted in 1948: the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The convention is not retroactive but is applicable to US-Indigenous relations since 1988, when the US Senate ratified it. The terms of the genocide convention are also useful tools for historical analysis of the effects of colonialism in any era. In the convention, any one of five acts is considered genocide if “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”:

killing members of the group;

causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life

calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.11

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' Hist…, loc. 30310