America - Conquest of the Native Americans
Students in America have been told the white man killed the Native Americans and took their land. What they are NOT told is the Native Americans did the same thing - killed thousands of fellow indians and drove them off their land for centuries prior to the arrival of the white man.
This is how the world operated in the past. Conquering someone else’s land was what people did since time began - including American Indians. The issue with the Indians was they lost to the white man and can’t get over it. Indians DID manage to get over it when they were run off their land by another Indian tribe.
The whites crimes - such as the Trail of Tears is well documented. Indian massacres are not. Between 1647 and 1649, the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy (Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca) esssentially exterminated the Huron Indians.(1) When Native Americans exterminated other Native Americans, political leftists and Indians ignore it. It only matters if the white man did it. If the Indians had been responsible for the Trail of Tears, it wouldn’t be an issue.
Some Native Americans claim that the ‘white man’ is living on stolen land. Some Indians demand land back from hundreds of years ago. These Native Americans are not being honest. No Indian tribe ever considered the land they conquered from another Indian tribe to be ‘stolen’ or pay reparations to the defeated tribes. The white man won this land using the same rules of conquest used by the Native Americans. That means ownership of land in the U.S. is permanently settled. The white man’s ‘crime’ was he won.
You can’t undo the past. There are 320 million non-Indians in America. We aren’t going anywhere but we can all easily co-exist. Indians can live anywhere in America or live their own culture on the reservation. We should acknowledge that the U.S. ended the incessant warfare between Indian tribes - saving the lives of thousands of Native Americans.
The conquest of the Native Americans was inevitable. The only question was who would do the conquering. The Spanish believed their conquest of the New World was God ordained. The Spanish conquered Central America, South America (except Brazil), parts of North America and the Carribean Islands. The English and French conquered parts of N. America. Russia conquered Alaska.
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Native Americans were not superior human beings. Some Indian tribes owned slaves and there was also slave trading between tribes.(2) Indian men had three duties: hunt for food, make babies, and go to war with a competing tribe. In some tribes a young Indian male was only considered a man once he had killed his first human foe.(3)
Slavery, torture killings, rape, pillage — all of these were brutal features of Indian conflict. Nearly all tribes tortured their captives to some degree - the common form of execution was being burned at the stake.(4) But some tribes developed grisely torture methods. Torture sessions could last days - and it didn’t matter if prisoners were a woman or a child. Indians didn't torture for information. The torture was pure sadism.
Indian torture was one reason Americans viewed the Indians as savages. On occasion, tribes would adopt a prisoner into the tribe. Usually this wasn’t the case. Had the Indians just killed their prisoner instead of using brutal torture, relations between Indians and whites could have been much friendlier.
The Comanche Indians arrived at San Antonio TX on 19 March 1840 for peace negotiations. As a ‘peace gesture’ they returned a 16-year-old girl held captive for 18 months. Her once beautiful face was disfigured beyond recognition. ‘Her head, arms and face were full of bruises and sores,’ wrote one witness, Mary Maverick. ‘And her nose was actually burnt off to the bone. Both nostrils were wide open and denuded of flesh.’ The Indians were oblivious to the effect the girl’s appalling condition would have on the Texans.
Once handed over, Matilda Lockhart broke down as she described the horrors she had endured — the rape, the relentless sexual humiliation and the way Comanche women had tortured her with fire. It wasn’t just her nose, her thin body was hideously scarred all over with burns.
When she mentioned there were 15 other white captives at the Indians’ camp, all of them being subjected to a similar fate, the Texan officials said they were holding the Comanche men as hostages until the white prisoners were returned. The Comanches tried to fight their way out. Texan soldiers opened fire, killing 35 Comanche, injuring many more and taking 29 prisoner. Seven Texans were killed.
The next day a commanche woman was freed and instructed to tell the Indians they had 12 days to return the white captives or all the hostages would be killed. The Commanches ignored the ultimatum and tortured every one of the captives to death. ‘One by one, the children and young women were pegged out naked beside the camp fire. They were skinned, sliced, and horribly mutilated, and finally burned alive by vengeful women determined to wring the last shriek and convulsion from their agonized bodies. Matilda Lockhart’s six-year-old sister was among these unfortunates who died screaming.
The torture killings of the white children destroyed the small amount of trust that had existed between the Comanche and whites. Decades of bloody fighting and horrific killings followed until 1874 when the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon ended the Comanche Indians’ domination of the Southern Plains.(5)
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There has been a human presence in the Black Hills of South Dakota since prehistoric times. Around 1500 AD, the Arikara tribe - who loved to scalp their enemies for war trophies - moved in. The Cheyenne, Kiowa, Crow, and other tribes all arrived later to fight for their own share of the mountain range. Finally, the Lakota — the alleged “original occupants” — came in around 1780 and drove out the Cheyenne.
So the U.S. did not take the Black Hills from its original occupants. The original occupants had long since been conquered by another Native American tribe, who received the same treatment from the next tribe, and so on. The truth is the U.S. took the Black Hills from the most recent conquerer of the land.
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Some people believe the Indians had the right to kill anyone who settled in North America. Using this logic, we would have the right to kill all illegal aliens who enter the U.S. Using this same logic, Native American tribes who attacked other tribes and took their land would be under the same death sentence. The Spanish conquistadors would be under this same death sentence. The Spanish conquistadors were responsible for the deaths of literally MILLIONS more Indians in the New World then the other Europeans who conquered what became the U.S.
The claims of genocide against the Native Americans are not true. If genocide was the goal there would have been no need for reservations, peace negotiations or vaccination programs.
In 1830, Indian agents hired physicians to vaccinate Indians and treat diseases. In 1831, an especially vicious strain of smallpox began savaging Indian tribes. Indian agents appealed to Congress and In May 1832, Congress passed the Indian Vaccination Act. By February 1, 1833, more than 17,000 Indians living along the frontier had been vaccinated against smallpox.
Critics claim the only reason the Indian vaccination Act passed was to enable Indian removal to the west by the federal government. This assertion is baseless. Had the vaccination program NOT been passed, there would have hardly been any Native Americans left alive to move.
The first permanent English settlement in the New World was at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. The company financing the settlement told the settlers “Do not offend the naturals” so they didn’t build fortifications, living in tents until houses could be built. However, within two weeks of landing, settlers were attacked by Indians who killed one settler and wounded 11 more. Following the attack, fortifications where hurriedly built around the settlement. (6)
Following the wedding of Pocahontas to John Rolfe, there was a period of uneasy peace in eastern Virginia. However in March 1622, an Indian chief named Nemattanew lured an Englishman away from Jamestown and was never seen again. When Nemattanew appeared again at Jamestown, he was confronted about the missing man and then killed. The Indians used this as their reason to launch their attack on Jamestown and surrounding settlements. On March 22, 1622, a large number of Indians showed up with food to sell the settlers. Without warning, the Indians turned on the settlers and massacred 347 people, including women and children, a quarter of the population. The massacre at Jamestown set an ominous tone for future relations between Indians and settlers.
The U.S. does not have a good record with treaties signed with the Indians but there are factors involved very few recognize. The biggest reason for broken treaties with the Indians was because the U.S. was such a wonderful country that MILLIONS of immigrants came to the United States and they needed somewhere to go. Failure was NOT an option. The Native Americans were pushed out of the way.
Spain/Mexico never had to deal with millions of immigrants because the country was so dysfunctional. If millions of immigrants HAD gone to Mexico, they would have done what the earlier Spaniards did - taken whatever land they wanted from the Indians. If the U.S. would have had minimal immigration like Mexico, treaties with the Indians would not have been violated.
Some tribes have a huge amount of land. The Rosebud Sioux Reservation in S. Dakota has a population of 12,763, and a total land area of 1,442 square miles. (7) Pine Ridge Reservation, home to the Oglala Sioux Tribe has a land area of 2.1 MILLION Acres. About 20,000 Indians live on this reservation. (8)
Some people want to place everlasting guilt on the Spanish and other Europeans for the diseases they brought to the New World - as if they had a choice. Smallpox, Malaria, the flu and bubonic plague all originated in either Africa or Asia. The Europeans were victims of these diseases in the past just like the Indians. If Asians or Africans had been the first people to explore the New World, they would have brought the same diseases with them.
Syphilis, dysentery, viral influenza, pneumonia and others diseases were already present among Native Americans. Syphilis was brought back to Europe by the Spanish. Syphilis was first reported in Europe in 1495 and raged in Europe and Colonial America until the advent of antibiotics.
Some people claim ‘white Americans’ or ‘Anglos’ were illegal aliens 400 years ago and WE should be deported. This is a flawed argument and will not happen anyway:
a) To single out “White” people is deceitful and inaccurate. The Spanish were the first invaders to the New World. If some people want White Americans to leave, we must be consistent and send ALL non-Indians back: Spanish, blacks, Asians and whites. If all non-Indians left the U.S., the country would be depopulated, the world economy would collapse and lots of people in Africa would starve to death. The US military would disappear, Russia would rule the world and occupy what used to be the U.S. and take all the land from the Indians.
b) There is no rule on how long someone has to live in a place before they become a ‘native.’ Many whites have been here for over a century. That’s long enough to be a native.
c) All of white America’s inventions would go. The Indians would have to live the way they did before the white man arrived - in teepees and only bow and arrows to hunt for food. No horses (they were imported from Europe), no firearms to hunt with, no screens to keep bugs out of your teepee, no air conditioning, cars or hospitals.
d) What about Americans who are part Indian? Can they stay? Would they want to stay?
May 2022