(long pointless back and forth with Snapple deleted--ed.)
let us not forget the trail of tears. may be todays natives seem off base but there was 23 million of them when we got here and by the late 1880 there were down to a million...22 million is not a small loss of people. at least its twice the population of most states.
People like Robert Robideau, Glenn Morris and Ward Churchill are talking like this to undermine the country, not because they care about Indians.
These people are spewing hatred about Americans like Hitler spewed hatred against Jews--and for the same reason: to destroy them.
Indian nations spoke out against 9-11. What Churchill said was embarrassing to them because a lot of people mistakenly thought he was expressing the views of Indians. This could have made people hate Indians, not something they need.
It was Mowhawk Indians who helped build the World Trade Center. Indians have helped build all those big New York buildings and bridges. It is on my blog. Indians have derved in our armed forces and have played an important role in intelligence operations.
Illegal outrages like the Trail of Tears are in history books and not forgotten, but mostly Indians were killed by diseases, like smallpox.
A germ you get from a family member is more apt to kill you.
Because Indians were genetically fairly similar to each other, they were more apt to die of a communicable disease. They were like one big family. None of them had any exposure to these diseases,either.
The first time any population gets smallpox, it propbably wipes out many of the people. In the Old World this had already happened, so they had developed some immunities.
In Iceland, smallpox happened in recorded history, and they were decimated like Indians.
In Russia this happened in the far East and devastated those people.
When early explorers travelled into the interior of N. America, they came upon huge towns full of dead Indians.
There had been no war or fighting there. It is speculated that De Soto's pig got lose in the forest and infected forest animals and then Indians--long before white's came into the interior in any numbers.
There is no definite knowledge about how many Indians there were in 1492, but early observers report that whole tribes of Indians were dying of dieases. They thought God was doing this.
explorers...what a nice way to describe it...were they lost? and even bigger question why did they stay? on whose land did they stay?
say what you like about the pretenders of the faith but over all we are butchers and thiefs. they are only butchers.
No, they were thieves too, and they happily and repeatedly committed what Ward et. al would call "genocide," if Westerners did it, against rival tribes (oops, sorry, "nations")as well as enslaving, torturing, blah blah blah. It's the Rousseauian fantasy of the noble (and socialist!) (and environmentalist!) savage all these guys claim to believe and that they peddle to idiot college kids that makes them so pernicious.
Sorry, dougie, I missed your post in between Snapple's about how many Indians there were. S is right, everybody's guessing on that one, more or less. But do you agree with these guys' oh-so-smooth semantic move of calling the INADVERTENT bringing of disease "genocide"?
As I've pointed out before, they've made the word absolutely meaningless by applying it to almost everything.
Dougie,
In a book called 1491, the visit of some explorers to the midwest is described. They had heard about these big Indian cities, but where they got there, everyone had died. There were just bones lying around.
It is speculated that pigs that escaped into the forest infected the forest animals and spread across the country.
This was long before settlement of N. America's interior.
settlement snaps jeez you just keep putting your foot in your mouth..do you know how bad that sounds try thaton a navaho reservation sometime and see how that flys...by the by jgm you missed some part of my education because reaussoian i ain't...there is not evidence that their were other peoples here when they got here from france...neanderthal didn't make the trip...is it ok for a hominid to go where no hominid has gone before ...sure...is it ok for another hominid to come along and steal their land and kill them...nah can't make it nice no matter how hard you try...i mean geez it the same species for god sake...by the way inadvertant spread of disease thats almost as bad as "settlers" yah no makes it all pretty and nice..look in the mirror.
Ask the Hopis about Navajo settlement sometimes. The Navajos originated in Canada. Then they migrated south and genocided the Hopis silly.
I don't care how it sounds. I am describing something that a real scholar wrote in a book called 1491.
These early travellers were out west and went to these big Indian cities that had been described to them. All they found were piles of bones.
The amazing thing was that this was before any white people had lived there.
dougie, what the fuck are you talking about? "there is not evidence that their were other peoples here when they got here from France." Lay off the Wild Turkey before you post, pal.
Then you say, "is it ok for another hominid to come along and steal their land and kill them...nah can't make it nice no matter how hard you try"--as if I've spent one second, ever, trying to make it sound "nice," or "right" or "fair." .
And why is "inadvertent spread of disease" so bad, dougie, seeing as how it's the truth? You just don't like it because you can't call it "genocide." Well, you can, but it would be untrue. Or do you believe with Ward Churchill in his most famous lie that smallpox, etc. was deliberately spread? The word "genocide," dougie, meaningless as it's become, still carries the implication of PURPOSE.
That's not to deny that the Indian remnant left after disease raged through the hemisphere, however small, was treated horribly. I just deny that this was a unique result of capitalism and/or racist western culture, rather than of the inherent nastiness of the human species--Indians included. In other words, the Marxist critique is bullshit.
As far as the allegation of Rousseauianism--whatever. It's always been part of the total Marxist package, and you've always been the total Marxist. Redlands. Feh. Even Sangamo isn't socialist anymore, dougie.
Neither white people or Indians were perfect. I think it is man's nature sometimes to fight. It isn't capitalism. It isn't race. It is human nature.
The Indians fought each other so much in the Pittsylvania,VA area that they had about disappeared when European settlers came into the area. These Indians were not capitalists.
I read an article about this called "Rediscovering Pittsylvania's 'Missing' Native Americans."
Some Indians melded in with the first Europeans but it was very early.
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