Church Government Undermine Indian Religious Governmental Kinship Systems

 Moreover, such removals and relocations destroyed Indigenous people’s ways of life, which resulted in substantial additional loss of life.49 Other devastating assaults on these ways of life included the Spanish missions in California, Florida, and Texas; the U.S. government’s attempts to make Plains Indians into cattle ranchers and southern Indians into American farmers…efforts by churches and governments to undermine Indian religious, governmental, and kinship systems… the often-deliberate destructions of flora and fauna that American Indians used for food and other purposes…the near extinction of the buffalo…50 Widespread starvation and malnutrition, the deleterious effects of forced labor, alcoholism, demoralization and despair, declining fertility, and other factors also contributed to the Indigenous Holocaust.51 As remarked earlier, the demographic collapse of the Indigenous population in the Western Hemisphere and in the United States ended at the beginning of the twentieth century, but the cumulative human costs of invasion, conquest, and colonialism by Europeans and their descendants have continued to grow. Governments in Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, Peru, and other Latin American countries have continued to murder Indigenous activists and other Indigenous people.52 In comparison, the level of violence has been lower in the U.S., but the federal government and vigilantes have killed Native people intermittently since 1900. 53 Indigenous people living in the U.S. have also died in wars abroad and continue to be murdered by police at a higher rate than any other demographic group.54 Moreover, highly disproportionate levels of extreme poverty, unemployment, poor housing, preventable diseases, poor health care, drug abuse, and suicide have continued to plague Indigenous populations throughout the Western Hemisphere, including in the United States.55 Not population.56