The U.S. should immediately act to investigate human rights violations against Indigenous people, seek redress for the victims of genocide and completely eliminate discrimination, Jiang Duan, minister of the Chinese mission to the UN in Geneva, said during the 49th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) on Monday, calling for international human rights organizations like the UNHRC and Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to take action on race-based genocide in the United States.

The U.S. should change laws and policies related to violations against Native Americans' human rights, he said.

Native Americans were expelled from their land and slaughtered during the so-called Westward Expansion nearly 100 years after the country was founded. 

"Their population dwindled from 5 million at the end of the 15th century to 237,000 at the beginning of the 20th century," Jiang said, adding that today many Native Americans live on isolated and desolate reservations in the U.S.

Many Indigenous kids were forcibly sent to "residential schools" or white adoptive families for assimilation, and many of them were abused to death, he added.

Genocide in the U.S. is not only a historical issue but also a long-term and ongoing systemic racism problem. Today, Native Americans, having the shortest life expectancy and the highest poverty rates among ethnic groups in the U.S., suffer from widespread and systemic discrimination across the U.S., and are marginalized in political, economic, cultural and other fields, Jiang continued.

(Cover: Jiang Duan, minister of the Chinese mission to the UN in Geneva, speaks during an Interactive Dialogue titled the Prevention of Genocide at the 47th Session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, June 28, 2021. /CCTV)