Posted on 09/19/2007 4:58:59 AM PDT by Kaslin
Few opinions I've expressed on air have produced a more indignant, outraged reaction than my repeated insistence that the word "genocide" in no way fits as a description of the treatment of Native Americans by British colonists or, later, American settlers.
I've never denied that the 400 year history of American contact with the Indians includes many examples of white cruelty and viciousness --- just as the Native Americans frequently (indeed, regularly) dealt with the European newcomers with monstrous brutality and, indeed, savagery. In fact, reading the history of the relationship between British settlers and Native Americans its obvious that the blood-thirsty excesses of one group provoked blood thirsty excesses from the other, in a cycle that listed with scant interruption for several hundred years.
But none of the warfare (including an Indian attack in 1675 that succeeded in butchering a full one-fourth of the white population of Connecticut, and claimed additional thousands of casualties throughout New England) on either side amounted to genocide. Colonial and, later, the American government, never endorsed or practiced a policy of Indian extermination; rather, the official leaders of white society tried to restrain some of their settlers and militias and paramilitary groups from unnecessary conflict and brutality.
Moreover, the real decimation of Indian populations had nothing to do with massacres or military actions, but rather stemmed from infectious diseases that white settlers brought with them at the time they first arrived in the New World.
UCLA professor Jared Diamond, author of the universally acclaimed bestseller "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies," writes:
"Throughout the Americas, diseases introduced with Europeans spread from tribe to tribe far in advance of the Europeans themselves, killing an estimated 95 percent of the pre-Columbian Native American population. The most populous and highly organized native societies of North America, the Mississippian chiefdoms, disappeared in that way between 1492 and the late 1600's, even before Europeans themselves made their first settlement on the Mississippi River (page 78)....
"The main killers were Old World germs to which Indians had never been exposed, and against which they therefore had neither immune nor genetic resistance. Smallpox, measles, influenza, and typhus rank top among the killers." (page 212).
"As for the most advanced native societies of North America, those of the U.S. Southeast and the Mississippi River system, their destruction was accomplished largely by germs alone, introduced by early European explorers and advancing ahead of them" (page 374)
Obviously, the decimation of native population by European germs represents an enormous tragedy, but in no sense does it represent a crime. Stories of deliberate infection by passing along "small-pox blankets" are based exclusively on two letters from British soldiers in 1763, at the end of the bitter and bloody French and Indian War. By that time, Indian populations (including those in the area) had already been terribly impacted by smallpox, and there's no evidence of a particularly devastating outbreak as a result of British policy.
For the most part, Indians were infected by devastating diseases even before they made direct contact with Europeans: other Indians who had already been exposed to the germs, carried them with them to virtually every corner of North America and many British explorers and settlers found empty, abandoned villages (as did the Pilgrims) and greatly reduced populations when they first arrived.
Sympathy for Native Americans and admiration for their cultures in no way requires a belief in European or American genocide. As Jared Diamond's book (and countless others) makes clear, the mass migration of Europeans to the New World and the rapid displacement and replacement of Native populations is hardly a unique interchange in human history. On six continents, such shifting populations – with countless cruel invasions and occupations and social destructions and replacements - have been the rule rather than the exception.
The notion that unique viciousness to Native Americans represents our "original sin" fails to put European contact with these struggling Stone Age societies in any context whatever, and only serves the purposes of those who want to foster inappropriate guilt, uncertainty and shame in young Americans.
A nation ashamed of its past will fear its future.
One of the most urgent needs in culture and education for the United States of America is discarding the stupid, groundless and anti-American lies that characterize contemporary political correctness.
The right place to begin is to confront, resist and reject the all-too-common line that our rightly admired forebears involved themselves in genocide.
The early colonists and settlers can hardly qualify as perfect but describing them in Hitlerian, mass-murdering terms represents an act of brain-dead defamation.
Indian customs and society don’t help today Native Americans to claim anything. Their brutality had but a few parallels in recent history (except Saddam Hussein’s torture)
Indian customs and society don’t help today Native Americans to claim anything. Their brutality has but a few parallels in recent history (except Saddam Hussein’s torture)
Indian customs and society don’t help today Native Americans to claim anything. Their brutality has but a few parallels in recent history (except Saddam Hussein’s torture)
Primitive hunter gatherer societies cannot support dense populations. Never have, anywhere in the world. Nomadic herdsmen have denser populations, and new stone age farmers have an order of magnitude larger populations, let alone modern industrial societies.
The ones that disease did not carry off were simply inundated by far more numerous members of a more advanced civilization. Which they were perfectly able to join, and most eventually did so.
this article on Lincoln and Sherman stinks political correctness
Article 2
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html
According to the United Nations, I believe that’s your bubble popping now.
7-10 million on the whole continent is a low estimate. It appears now from pretty good recent work, that there were maybe that many in California alone, up until the early 1700’s.
The underestimate is due to the difficulty of discovering settlement remains even from semi-sedentary cultures. California Indians had large populations with not particularly “advanced” cultures because of the bounty of the land. (Some things never change! LOL)
Beware that the numbers bantied about are politically charged. Those persons wanting to show how bad the white “invaders” were, use a high number. Those who want to downplay the event, use a low number.
It’s probably best to just let the numbers be numbers and use other issues and priciples as the basis of the discussion.
IMHO
Oldplayer
(Choctaw)
And what value did your ancestors put on the children they butchered, and slaughtered? Much The holier than though in touch with nature crap might play in 1970s public service ads to put your garbage in the can... but it just doesn’t jive with reality.
How much value did your ancestors place on the Hopi and Pueblos they slaughtered and massacred?
Please don’t try this line of crap, it doesn’t fly.
I was tutored at the knee of a grizzled old Sioux (Lakota) Tribal Leader who explained the pictographs in a "Winter Count" painting, a Tribal Calendar marking the most important event of the year. One of the years show buffalo carcasses at the bottom of a cliff sometime near the start of the 19th century. The old tribal leader explained that the elders had admonished their young repeatedly not to harvest buffalo in this wasteful manner. But the herds seemed so thick and the chore of shooting a dozen or so buffalo to supply the tribal needs with bows seemed so troublesome. In the end, the admonishments of the elders (who had seen the herds increase and decrease in cycles) were not heeded.
1) If not for this conquest, there would be no America strong enough to save the world from Hitler, Stalin, and Bin Ladin, allowing it to be completely enslaved THREE TIMES, thank you very much. And...
2) For every AmerIndian society, which of course did it's own share of enslaving, exploiting, and killing OTHER AmerIndian societies, let me make this non-apology: My people were better warriors than you. If you could have, today the continent would be teeming with huge native American cities, had you been more successful in fighting my ancestors. We won...no apologies for that.
Yeah, right!
We all use the PC outrage in our own ways, don’t we!
Hahahahahaah... bubble popping? By that definition every war is genocide. We committed Genocide against the Japanese and Germans in WWII by defeating htem by this UN PC claptrap definition.
The claim of Genocide against the native Americans is laughable. A massacre is not genocide, being defeated is not genocide.
If the Europeans wanted Genocide against the Native Americans there wouldn’t be reservations filled with them today. Being conquered is not Genocide.
Genocide (n) the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group.
What Germany did with the Jews was attempted GENOCIDE.. what happened to the native americans was not Genocide. If it was we wouldn’t have so many casinos out west.
Sorry, but know your LANGUAGE... not what PC UN decides to try to redefine it as.
See Prehistoric Tuberculosis in the Americas, by J.E. Buikstra (1981).
The standard population estimate for California is in the range of 300,000-310,000 individuals in 1770. That is from Sherburne Cook's The Population of the California Indians, 1769-1970 (1976).
That figure is likely to be low because of diseases advancing ahead of the Spanish and coming from coastal visits by the Manila galleons. We don't yet know how low that estimate is.
Your experience should be publicized nationally. It erodes one of the myths of the Euro-Indian culture clash, and sets the record straight for anyone interested in the TRUTH of history.
The article doesn’t deny significant mistreatment. But what Sherman encountered, if your article is fair (and I am not competent to assess it), are not the Indians who had populated the New World, but rather the last ragged remnants thereof. Indeed, the Great Plains would have been uninhabitable to the the Indians whom Sherman abused, had not the horse been introduced from Eurasia: The Sioux, for instance, were not native to the Dakotas, but to the upper Allegheny.
Don’t forget King Philip’s War, beginning in 1675, an Indian attack at Plymouth Colony a year later and eventually spreading to Rhode Island by 1677. More than 600 colonists, 3000 Indians and 12 villages were destroyed.
Louis and Clark made their journey began in 1804, they describe quite well the carcasses off the cliff.... I believe there are other known references to such finds by other explorers as well, but I will stick to just Louis and Clarks accounts.
I will concede that the native americans did not stampede herds over cliffs from the begining of time... they lacked the techonology to do so. It was not until the horse was introduced to the americas and mastery of horsemanship by the native americans that they had the technological ability to create and guide a stampede to a cliff.
I will not dispute your claims that elders councilled against such behaviors... I have no way to know if they did or did not. The point I am trying to make is simple that the native americans were not the ideolized and romanticized peoples that political correctness has made them out to be.
Sadly factual truth is lost to romanticized political correctness, just as Pirates have been romanticized as well... they were far worse than even the most savage of Indian tribes, but today most people look at them as just likeable cads.
They were gathered by the ton and shipped off to make fertilizer. Bonetrail, North Dakota (near ghost town, now) got its name from the trade.
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