Ruth Schlein
The
Rhetoric of Extermination:
Scapegoating the Plains Indians
During the Crisis of the Civil War
Ruth explains that Rene Girard's notion of mimetic desire does
not quite explain the use
of the scapegoat mechanism to justify the massacre of Native American tribes
after the Civil War.
The reason is that European interest in occupation and cultivation did not "mirror"
the Indian interest in an undivided arena of action for nomadic hunting.
The original contribution of Ruth's project was to identify
other strategies of extermination
as instances of the scapegoat mechanism at work:
removal (exile), slaughter of buffalo, assimilation by education
and cultural suppression, and romanticizing.