The dark history of forced starvation as a weapon of war against Indigenous peoples

(The Conversation) — There is increasing evidence that “widespread starvation, malnutrition and disease” are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths“ in Gaza, a group of United Nations and aid organizations have repeatedly warned.

A July 29, 2025, alert by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a global initiative for improving food security and nutrition, reported that the “worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip,” as access to food and other essential items is dropping to an “unprecedented level.”

More than 500,000 Palestinians, one-fourth of Gaza’s population, are experiencing famine, the U.N. stated. And all 320,000 children under age 5 are “at risk of acute malnutrition, with serious lifelong physical and mental health consequences.”

U.N. experts have accused Israel of using starvation “as a savage weapon of war and constitutes crime under international law.”

They are calling on Israel to urgently “restore the UN humanitarian system in Gaza.”

Israel is not the only government in history to cut off access to food and water as a tool of war. As an Indigenous scholar who studies Indigenous history, I know that countries – including the United States and Canada – have used starvation to conquer Indigenous peoples and acquire their land. As a descendant of ancestors who endured forced starvation by the U.S. government, I also know of its enduring consequences.

Dismantling Indigenous food systems

From the founding of the U.S. and Canada through the 20th century, settler colonizers often tried to destroy Indigenous communities’ access to food, whether it was their farms and livestock or their ability to access land with wild animals – with the ultimate aim of forcing them off the land.

In 1791, President George Washington ordered Secretary of War Henry Knox to destroy farms and livestock of the Wea Tribe that lived along the Ohio River valley – a fertile area with a long history of growing corn, beans, squash and other fruits and vegetables.

Knox burned down their “corn fields, uprooted vegetable gardens, chopped down apple orchards, reduced every house to ash, [and] killed the Indians who attempted to escape,” historian Susan Sleeper-Smith noted in her 2018 book, “Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest.” Women and children were taken hostage. The goal was to destroy villages and farms so that Indigenous people would leave and not return.

Seventy-two years later, General Kit Carson conducted a scorched-earth campaign to remove the Navajo from what is now Arizona and New Mexico. Similar to Knox, he destroyed their villages, crops and water supply, killed their livestock and chopped down over 4,000 peach trees. The U.S. military forced over 10,000 Navajo to leave their homeland.

Indigenous famine

By the late 19th century, numerous famines struck Indigenous communities in both the U.S. and Canada due to the “targeted, swift, wholesale destruction” of bison by settlers, according to historian Dan Flores; this, too, was done in an effort to acquire more Indigenous land. One U.S. military colonel stated at the time: “Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”

There were an estimated 60 million bison before U.S. and Canadian settlement; by the 1890s, there were fewer than 1,000. Indigenous communities on the northern Great Plains in both the U.S. and Canada, who believed bison were a sacred animal and who relied on them for food, clothing and other daily needs, now had nothing to eat.

Historian James Daschuk revealed in his 2013 book, “Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life,” that between 1878 to 1880, Canadian Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald did little to stop a multiyear famine on the Canadian Plains, in what is now Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Macdonald did not hide his intentions. He and his government, he said, were “doing all we can, by refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of starvation.”

Indigenous peoples on the Canadian Plains were forced to eat their dogs, horses, the carcasses of poisoned wolves and even their own moccasins. All the Indigenous peoples in the region – an estimated 26,500 people – suffered from the famine. Hundreds died from starvation and disease.

Malcolm C. Cameron, a House of Commons member at the time, accused his government of using “a policy of submission shaped by a policy of starvation” against Indigenous peoples. His denunciation did little to change their policy.

What my great-grandparents experienced

Many Indigenous peoples’ families in the U.S. and Canada have stories of surviving forced starvation by the government. Mine does, too.

In the winter of 1883-1884, my grandmother and grandfather’s parents experienced what is remembered as the “starvation winter” on the Blackfeet reservation in what is now Montana.

Similar to what happened in Canada, the near extinction of bison by American settlers led to a famine on the Blackfeet reservation. In an effort to slow the famine, Blackfeet leaders purchased food with their own money, but the U.S. government supply system delayed its arrival, creating a dire situation. Blackfeet leaders documented 600 deaths by starvation that one winter, while the U.S. government documented half that amount.

As historian John Ewers noted, the nearby “well-fed settlers” did nothing and did not offer “any effective aid to the Blackfeet.”

My family survived because a few men and women within our family were able to travel far off the reservation by horseback to hunt and harvest Native foods. I was told the story of the “starvation winter” my entire life, as were most Blackfeet. And I now share these stories with my own children.

Weapon of war

Thousands of children in Gaza are malnourished and dying of hunger-related causes.

Due to mounting international pressure, Israel is pausing its attacks in some parts of Gaza for a few hours each day to allow for some aid, but experts have noted it is not enough.

“We’re talking about 2 million people. It’s not 100 trucks or a pausing or a few hours of calm that is going to meet the needs of a population that has been starved for months,” Oxfam official Bushra Khalidi told The New York Times.

“This is no longer a looming hunger crisis – this is starvation, pure and simple,” Ramesh Rajasingham, director of the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said on Aug. 10, 2025.

Many might assume that the use of starvation as a weapon of war happened only in the past. Yet, in places like Gaza, it is happening now.

(Rosalyn R. LaPier, Professor of History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)