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To: boxlunch

Some of the very early English settlers (at least in Massachusetts) had the dream of evangelizing the natives, and were even writing grammars the way the Spanish missionaries were doing, but realpolitik very soon got in the way of that. Once the English Crown took over the settlement efforts, the evangelization aspect disappeared.

But you have to look at the tumultous religious history of England to understand why. Spain, on the other hand, had evangelization as one of its primary goals, it had only one church, for better or for worse, and it was actually the private expeditions that were the worst in their treatment of the Indians.

On the whole, however, it’s not a matter of good or bad treatment. There was plenty of that on either the Spanish or the English sides. What I was talking about was the overall goal - and oddly enough, that’s one of the problems of Latin America. The Spanish didn’t consciously wipe out the Indian populations, and the result was that they were left with a large non-European population which, in its day, was being very slowly brought into the European-American cultural mold. The thing that really set them back, however, was the rise of the left, which has used the “idigenist movement” and the native populations of Latin America to advance its agenda throughout the continent (even though, of course, most of the leaders are of upper-middle-class European origin!).


63 posted on 10/08/2012 4:02:00 PM PDT by livius
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To: livius
The English Crown ~ was not brought into questions of American settlement until around 1676 ~ prior to that it was all private ventures.

Regarding Spanish treatment of the Indians as compared to English treatment, depends on how you ascribe motive to the hanta virus ~ recurring plagues occurred in the 1500s and 1600s, and by 1648 had so weakened the Indians throughout the Americas that Europeans had the upper hand.

One of the best things to happen was the arrival of the domestic pig, domestic cattle, domestic chicken, domestic ducks, and HORSES. Within half a century of the first landing of the first horses in the New World the only great city on the plains in North America, Cahokia, was dissipated with virtually every tribe in that vast complex having ridden off to somewhere else with more buffalo, better climate, or just fewer competitors or enemies. Wide ranging Spanish explorers and precious metals hunters figured out how to create the Comanche Indians ~ the one group you really gotta' read about. Often overlooked because of their raiding parties and slave raids, they became incredibly Europeanized in short order ~ they were still raising cain long after the Republic of Texas was formed.

Something frequently overlooked is that Columbus arrived in the Caribbean islands on the heels of Indians from the mainland arriving and killing off all the males. There was a reason the ladies were friendly to Columbus' men ~ they needed friends in high places Fur Shur. This was a pattern repeated all over the Americas with Europeans leveraging themselves into positions of authority simply by allying themselves with existing Indian societies.

Sometimes that didn't work out ~ Champlain screwed things up for a couple of centuries when it came to French dealings with the Iroquois.

67 posted on 10/08/2012 4:51:18 PM PDT by muawiyah
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