American Indians: Church History Topics Essay, part 1

“Joseph Smith Preaching to the Indians” - William Armitage, 1890.

This is a 3 part of a series on the “Church History Topics Essay,” titled “American Indians” currently hosted on this Church’s official website. It contains a lot of passive voice that is used to render settler aggression as innocent and Indigenous resistance to their own genocide in the own homes as aggressive.
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Passive voice is really common in our news media, from framing US’s extractive capitalist imperial predation to police brutality. Look out for it! It’s super manipulative & gaslight-y.
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Where else do you see passive voice being used to render predation as natural, benign, or innocent?
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First, why is this essay still titled “American Indians”? America is the genocidal settler-occupiers’ name for thousands of Indigenous nations and Columbus was not in India. 
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“During the century before the Church was organized, the American Indian population in North America declined by about four hundred thousand as a result of warfare, exposure to disease, and the disruption of Indigenous economies caused by new settlers from Europe.”
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This sentence uses passive voice in multiple places. 

1. Do you think “declined” is an appropriate word to describe the massacre of 400,000 people in their own homes?
2. When you read that this “decline” was “a result of warfare, exposure to disease, and disruption of Indigenous economies caused by new settlers from Europe?” does this biological, military, environmental, and economic destruction read as intentional or happenstance–i.e. passive or active? Because this was not so much warfare as it was a military occupation meant to completely destroy Indigenous Peoples, or as our Declaration of Independence puts it: “the merciless Indian Savages”
3. The sentence does end acknowledging that all of this was “caused by new settlers from Europe,” but how different would it read if it said, “warfare, spread of infectious disease, and destruction of Indigenous lifeways was enacted by Euro settlers”? “Caused” removes intentionality, “enacted” includes it. 
4. How different would this sentence be if it read: “During the century before the Church was organized about 400,000 persons Indigenous to this continent were destroyed by European settlers as they committed biological, military, environmental, and economic destruction.”?

How does the way we write history reify myths of settler-innocence? Is the sinisterness of biological warfare disguised as a gift of blankets (known to contain the infectious smallpox) more captured or concealed in the phrase “expose to disease”? Is the open destruction of Indigenous land and lifeways captured in the phrase “the disruption of Indigenous economies”? 
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What is the goal of this paragraph? Who’s history does it tell? Who’s experience is centered? Who’s ideology? Who is made innocent?