Posted on 03/08/2007 5:24:52 AM PST by SJackson
Next move will be to stop honoring the D-Day invasion.
I stand corrected on which government did it; however, I still maintain that the Indians have received less than honest treatment from the Americans.
Of course it is. But it is equally absurd to think that all Indians needed to be dealt with fairly. We took the world as we found it and made it better. I look at it much the same way I look at the fire bombing of Dresden or Tokyo or the use of the atomic bomb when a demonstration in Tokyo Bay may have sufficed. Taken alone, these actions are morally reprehensible but in context with the depravity and barbarity they stopped, they are understandable and even laudable. At the time they were necessary. We take an action and reflect on an evil for a century or more. To the Indians depravity and barbarity was the epitome of their warrior society.
Sub-humans? Of course not. But the actions that they engaged in were the cruelest and most heinous assaults on anything decent that I can imagine. Assigning collective guilt to individual actions is a dangerous business but as a society they had accustomed to the barbarity. No government could ignore or whitewash the jaw-dropping torture and mayhem that they produced. Sand Creek and Washita were travesties in that we committed them but even Black Kettle admitted that murderers and rapists were in his camp and that he could not control them. For a settler who had seen his wife and 9 and 12 year-old daughters gang raped (passed on the plains) and then murdered by having their heads bashed in with rocks, I doubt that Sand Creek had any great moral considerations.
The Indians always had sympathetic people and groups speaking for them in Washington (the Indian Lobby). These groups grew stronger as the frontier moved west and the threats and dangers grew more distant. There was outrage at each individual atrocity but the government, in general, attempted to treat the Indians fairly. Circumstances and conditions changed constantly, as could be expected in a growing, developing country, and mistakes were made and policies were tried and abandoned. In this turmoil the one constant was the governments good faith in trying to balance a response to the Indian problem.
Almost from its inception the United States had the power to exterminate the Indians. In a hundred years of warfare the military killed relatively few. Rummel uses an implausible estimate of 3000 for the minimum and the 1890 census uses an equally implausible guess of 40,000. My guess is 15,000 to 25,000 and I am guessing on the high side. That’s 150 to 250 per year. Many, if not most, of those were on punitive missions for atrocities committed. The government may have treated the Indians as a step-child but it did not treat them as an implacable foe.
I meet a lot of European tourists and occasionally one will ask about or impolitely mention what we did with the Indians. If they stick their noses in the air and sniff at our inhumanity I take those same noses and rub it in their own putrid history, There are damn few European countries who can match our record of tolerance. Mistakes, yes. Confusion, yes. Uncertainty, yes. But if we had to do it over again we could do a lot worse that how we did it the first time.
The great speech by Chief Joseph
I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead. Toohoolhoolzote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say, "Yes" or "No." He who led the young men [Olikut] is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are -- perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.
Not long afterward another relief party left Grangeville to find the Chamberlins. Not more than a few hundred yards from where the wagon had been, they found the body of John Chamberlin. Both children were with him. Hattie, the older girl, was dead, but the other child was still alive. She was in bad condition, however, suffering from an ugly neck wound. She had also lost the tip of her tongue, probably severed in a fall, although some claimed that an Indian who had grown tired of her crying was responsible for the deed. When Cash Day found the little girl, she was trying to hide behind the corpse of her father. Remembering back to the scene, J. G. Rowton wrote: "May such trials be forever gone." [16] Within a mile of the wagon Rowton found Mrs. Chamberlin in an hysterical condition. She had been shot in the breast with an arrow and raped repeatedly.
The saddest story, in my opinion, is the demise of the Catawba Indians.
The great Catawba Chief King Haiglar was as noble a man as any who led an Indian tribe.
Tradition has it that Thomas Spratt was the first white settler in the area of the Catawbas, and was befriended by them. He supposedly was planning to move on and settle elsewhere, but the Catawbas were quite taken with him and convinced him to settle among them. Thomas Spratt fought together with the Catawbas, and they bestowed on him the name “Kanawha” supposedly on account of some adventure they had together in the area of the Kanawha River.
Many Indians made a great pretence of speaking of whites as their “brothers,” but the Catawbas were one of the few who really meant it. They backed their words with action, sincerely opened their arms and actually treated the white man this way. The Catawbas were open to advantages of civilization and often intermarried with colonists.
Sadly, the Catawbas were devastated by exposure to new diseases such as smallpox and this once-mighty tribe was reduced to a very small number. Alcoholism, that special bane of the Indians, also took its toll on them.
The Catawbas have a long and special tradition of service in our nation’s military, beginning even before the Revolution and continuing in every major war down to the present day. Catawba warriors fought with us in the Revolution, and during this time their women and children were moved to a position of safety in Virginia with the Pamunkey Indians.
The Catawbas, being a Southern people, fought with the Confederates in the Civil War and were brave and loyal to the bitter end. One researcher found only a single Catawba soldier who survived the war without being killed, wounded or captured. Grateful Carolinians dedicated a 10-foot statue in honor of the Catawba soldiers.
The Catawbas were not always treated well by their white “brothers,” but their honor was unstained.
There are about 10 million Mexicans here in the US who might be able to help with that question.
We Southerners have had to deal with this PC crap for many years now. I'm sure you've seen pictures of Leftist demonstrations with the signs that say "US Out of North America". That's what it's gotten down to.
The foundation of "sovereign title and dominion" to portions of the New World was the "right of first discovery" recognized among the maritime Christian European nations under International Law. This doctrine held that: (1) the initial discovery of lands unoccupied by any Christian Power; and (2) the setting up a mark of possession by subjects acting on authority of a European sovereign, conferred exclusive territorial title and dominion to that sovereign - good against all other European governments. http://users.sisqtel.net/armstrng/Indlegalhis.htm
According to Justice Story, in a conquered country, where there were no existing laws, or none adaptable to a civilized community, or where the laws were silent, or were rejected and none substituted, the territory must be governed according to the rules of natural equity and right. Englishmen settling there must be deemed to carry with them those rights and privileges that belong to them in their native country. [2 Salk. 411, 412; See also Nall v. Campbell, Cowp. R. 204, 211, 212; 1 Chalm. Ann. 14,15, 678, 679, 689, 690; 1 Chalm. Opinions, 194; 2 Chalm. Opinions, 202; Chitty on Prerog. ch. 2; 2 Wilson's Law Lect. 48, 49.]
The ideological legal foundation for the American colonists' assertion of the right to English liberties and common law rested upon the validity of the claim that the colonies were vacant lands or "wastelands" settled by Englishmen and subject to English law. It is upon this foundation, in part, that the colonists justified their right to revolt against English acts of tyranny in regard to their liberties and rights.
Under the law recognized among European nations, a Christian sovereign was the titled owner to land in the wilderness that was "discovered" in his/her name. It was deemed a right exclusively belonging to the European government in its sovereign capacity to "extinguish" the "Indian title" or "Indian right of occupancy" and dispose of the land according to its own sovereign will. Land could only pass into private hands directly or indirectly by charter or grant from the Crown.
European sovereigns came to exclude persons from any right to acquire the soil by any direct grant from the natives. (For instance, the government of the Virginia Colony outlawed direct Indian land purchases in 1658, and in 1662 declared all such transactions void.)
The indigenous peoples ceased to be its legal owners and became merely "occupants." If at any time thereafter, Indians made a cession of land to an official representative of the sovereign, actually, all they were ceding was the right of occupancy of the land and not the legal title, which had already vested in the Christian sovereign.
In effect, the system developed whereby the European sovereigns exercised the right to grant legal title to the soil by charter and letters patent, even though it was still arguably in the possession of natives. The European title so granted was universally considered to convey a sufficient title in the soil to the grantees in perfect dominion, or a transfer of "plenum et utile dominium."
In Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823), the Court held that Indian tribes were incapable of conveying their land directly to individuals. Chief Justice Marshall concluded that discovery conferred upon the European sovereign a title good against all European governments. The United States succeeded to that title to the extent that it was held by the British.
Marshall stated as to the Indians: "They were admitted to be the rightful occupants of the soil, with a legal as well as just claim to retain possession of it, and to use it according to their own direction; but their rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished, and their power to dispose of the soil at their own will, to whomsoever they pleased, was denied by the original fundamental principle, that discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it."
I know that in New England, very early settlers came with their own legal understanding that wasteland - land not enclosed by a fence, was open and available for establishment of a right in property. Continuous beneficial use ripened after the statute of limitations into a prescriptive right good against all but the sovereign. In many cases, colonists went out of the way to pay indigenous "owners." Unfortunately, tribal people who were often seasonal hunters and gatherers, did not have the same Western frame of property rights. They did not understand what they were selling and often would not have been the proper party to "sell it."
It should be noted that in the Indian Wars and raids, the Indians were not the only folk to be injured. In my family tree, I can name 10 people who were killed over a span of 200 years by Indians on the frontiers.
There was plenty of subhumanity to go around. Colonists and Indians burned and pillaged each other's settlements, especially in the Jamestown years, and both sides killed their share of non-combatants, including old men, women and children. The rules of engagement got a little more civilized, but only a little, in the years after.
I haven't seen any convincing evidence that there was a concerted effort to distribute smallpox-tainted blankets to the Indians. Smallpox was endemic in Europe, but not in the Americas, even among the European-born population.
One of my recent reads was Joseph Ellis' "His Excellency," a bio of George Washington, and one nugget from that was that during the sieges of Manhattan and Boston, he sent only troops with visible pockmark scars, those who had been exposed to and survived smallpox, because they had some immunity. Washington himself was one such man, having survived an adolescent bout with smallpox. Washington was ahead of his time in embracing Dr. Pasteur's theories.
I do not doubt that European colonists exposed a lot of American Indians to smallpox, to which the Indians had no prior exposure and no natural immunity. I have very serious doubts that blankets would be a reliable vector for same, or that anyone with 18th-century medical knowledge could have come up with a strategy to weaponize smallpox. The far more likely scenario is that someone sneezed at the wrong moment.
The peace accorded the settlers by Pocahontas' conversion and marriage was brought to a sharp close with the death of her father, Powhatan.
I believe that Smallpox was rampant among the troops in the Continental Army and returning soldiers spread it amongst their own famlies when they returned home. I read that there was an epidemic after the Revolution.
I have always wondered if that disease hit my GGGGGGGrandfather's Plantation in Virginia shortly after the Revolutionary War because his will mentioned something about "succumbing to the scourge that is sickening my household".
Brainwashing by the public school system and mainstream media.
My Swedish ancestor, Peter Anderson, who came to new Sweden as a youth in the 1640s on the Kalmar Nyckel as a young seaman, stayed to skipper the Governor's yacht around his private island. Anderson learned to negotiate with the local Indians as the Governor's aide.
In fact the Swedes kept peace between the Dutch and the British and the Indians. After the Governor left, Anderson returned to Sweden to collect his wages, marry his bride, and brought her back to New Sweden to purchase his farm on the Schuykill River near Philadelphia. He was often called upon to negotiate with the Indians, even after the numbers of colonists increased and the colony became strong.
Eventually, Peter Anderson's descendents (named Peterson) took the name Longacre after the British took charge of the area and forced both the Swedes and the Dutch to stop using their Patrynomic custom of assigning names. (Peter Anderson's children would be called Peterson; Petersdotter.)
I've seen the map of his farm, and it is a long, skinny piece of land on an island in the Schuykill River. It is not known by his many descendents whether he took his name because of the geographic shape of his farm, or because his brother-in-law, who had the neighboring farm, was an Englishman named Longshore.
In any case, it has confused his descendents for years. My mother still doesn't believe that she's Swedish, but she's 93 and too old to argue about it.
So what are they going to attack next? Will Our Thanksgiving become UnThanksgiving? What will Independence Day be called? This is becoming Not the Country I grew up in. We have gone soft, The American people have lost thier Will. Take God out of the Country and the Country will fall. We are falling.
Precisely. Apologists for America should be gagged.
Tis reminds me of the frog in the cooking pot....the water gets so slowly heated that the frog never gets enough warning to jump out....until its too late.
I think its too late for America....I don't think that conservatives stand a chance of surviving another 10 years....eventually we will be hunted down.
And we are too fractured to organize anything other than debates on forums....all the while the water gets hotter and hotter...and we don't even smell the smoke.
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