Results indicate that death penalty jurisdictions have exposed American Indians to lethal sanctioning when Indians challenged U.S. Government policies in campaigns to annihilate tribal people through deliberate contact with virulent diseases and violent military conquest, and the forceful removal and relocation from sacred tribal territories to inhospitable reservations. After more than 500 years of massacres, forced relocation of tribes, attempts to wipe out Indian languages and cultures, ethnic cleansing, the violent brutalization of children in boarding schools, and the elimination of traditional tribal governments, the head of the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs apologized for the agency's legacy of racism and inhumanity to American Indians. This legacy of racism and inhumanity has resulted in the high rates of alcoholism, suicide, and violence in Indian communities. Apologies by government officials to its wrongs inflicted upon American Indians are inadequate, while the United States continues its marginalization of American natives. The research record on capital punishment in the United States is void of any empirical analysis of American Indian executions. This paper presents a descriptive profile of American Indian executions within a historical-contextual framework of the American Indian experience in U.S. society. The paper suggests that the history of American Indian executions is nested within the sociopolitical context of internal colonialism calculated to dispossess American Indians from their sacred tribal territories, disruption of their cultures, and continuation of their marginalized status. A brief history of internal colonization is presented followed by 15 case histories of U.S. Government executions of American Indians. References