No Genocide against Native Americans in past!

[azndndude]

According to this idiot, The US government had no PLANNED policy of extermination against the Native people of this land.
http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/MichaelMedved/2007/09/19/reject_the_lie_of_white_genocide_against_native_americans?page=full

[shance]

1. The white supremist privileged males think they can erase the truth

they think they can buy history.

They'll certainly try.

[jeff30997]

2. What an ignorant fool!

[Selatius]

3. I wonder what the Sand Creek Massacre was

An example of a government and government troops accidentally wiping out a bunch of people?

http://home.epix.net/~landis/sandcreek.html

[Heidi]

4. Removal policy alone proves Medved's a liar.

BQ is another government invention aimed at slowly eradicating the indigenous people of the US. :grr:

[Bassic]

5. In other news,

Adolf Hitler was a great guy to have a beer with. :sarcasm:

[warren pease]

6. I wonder what he'd call intentionally passing out blankets last used by...

...smallpox victims to individuals of various tribes, including Cherokees, under the guise of keeping them warm in winter? Just another fucking accident?

There were an estimated 12 to 15 million people living in North America around the time Columbus "discovered" Hispaniola and, to the detriment of millions, decided to take a right and sail north. By the time "the west was won," most of the original inhabitants had been slaughtered by "guns, germs and steel," as Jared Diamond's brilliant analysis of westward expansion by the same name makes clear.

If that's not a planned, well-executed program of ethnic cleansing, then my name isn't Manifest Destiny.

Oh wait... it's not. Well, you get the idea.


wp


edited for clarity (sort of)

[shain from kane]

7. "Sheridan was notorious for his supposed declaration that "the only good Indians I ever saw were

dead" -- an attribution he steadfastly denied."

Ronald Reagan played Custer in "The Santa Fe Trail". Another actor played Sheridan.

[L. Coyote]

8. They decided to sell Indian lands in Ohio when their first bank went bust.

The threw off King George, whose law would not allow invading Ohio.

There are more Revolutionary War officers buried in Marietta, Ohio, than anywhere else
(there near the first building, a fort with gun slots), because the officers got all
the best land grants in the new Northwest Territory. No Indian title was recognized.

[flashl]

9. Correct context?

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.

Contorted reasoning and revisioning.

[PDenton]

12. if you look at it from a technology standpoint

There is just no way you could have European contact and have the Native American cultures survive intact. Cultures like the Cherokee started changing soon after after European contact. Even the Plains Indians cultures were highly artificial/evolved, being created by horses introduced from the Spanish. Horses in North America had been extinct for thousands of years until the Spanish brought them to the plains. Yet the plains Indians had a mythology about horses, even though they had only had them for a few hundred years.

[acmavm]

10. This is such a disgusting article in so many ways. I don't even

know where to begin.

[PDenton]

11. I don't think the US had a policy of genocide

in a systematic manner throughout its history, though some campaigns that were carried out bordered on genocide, especially against plains Indians. Mostly the campaigns against Indians were based on forcing them to leave lands that white settlers were entering and comming into conflict with the native Indians. They were also moved onto reservations and often encouraged, directly or indirectly by the government, to adopt different ways such as farming vs. nomadic life. That is hardly a history to be proud of but it isn't genocide. "Ethnic cleansing" might be a better description.

The article is essentially correct, however I'd take issue with the last few paragraphs, as I believe it is important to remember that many of the lands in the US were not given up willingly or easily, and at least according to modern sensibilities, were taken with a great deal of brutality, rather unjustly. Accidental exposure to infectious disease destroyed most Native American cultures and individuals. You need to be very careful when you use a word like "genocide", because it has a specific meaning.

[Tsiyu]

15. Wow

Um, a cursory review says you are probably wrong.

Not only did the whites repeatedly break treaties and settle on Indain hunting grounds, when the feds rounded them up and put them on 'agency' property they failed to provide these former hunters with enough food to survive. Whites who felt they were more entitled let them starve. LET THEM STARVE.

They killed off all the buffalo and settled natives in places like Pine Ridge - oh yeah you red people can grow all sorts of crops IN DUST!

The slavery of entire tribes prior to the Revolution, the Trail of Tears, the many massacres of women and children, the relentless pursuit of those who only wanted to keep some acreage for hunting purposes. If that wasn't genocide, I don't know what the hell is.

And we don't have the excuse that 'their ways couldn't mesh with white ways." The Cherokee were living as white people in the South, farming, owning slaves (as bad as that is and it is evil), attending church, publishing their own newspaper, but when gold was discovered in Georgia, GREED said that native people had to go far, far away. And walk there in the dead of a brutal winter.

That's what they got for assimilating....death and misery. And genocide.

[annabanana]

13. Yeah.. those smallpox blankets were a "coincidence"

That's a disgusting rewrite...

[madrchsod]

14. i can not remember reading in my books about the indians

dieing of disease in the upper midwest that was brought in by the french...dam now i`m going to have to look this up tonight