Originally Posted by htperr6565

Yes we do hear them classified by tribe and language, but you got to remember that the indians were classified by arrogant racists who could have probably cared less about what ethnicities may have existed within the native community (given that scholars estimate 95 million natives lived throughout all the americas prior to european contact, there is a good case that varying ethnicities existed). At any rate, since the whites did see differences in tribes, ethnic or not, and behaved toward them differently, it would be silly to say that if one tribe was target for extermination, it wouldn't have been genocide because in reality that tribe was part of a broader ethnic group. this is what i was getting at with the holocaust reference.

at this point we are merely splitting hairs and simply defining genocide in a manner that fits our arguments.

we also have to consider that in some cases ethnicity is just as imagined as it is real.