It’s that time again, Thanksgiving is upon us and as usual so
are the self-loathing left with their accusations of Indian Genocide and stolen
land. If anything they are predictable. So I compiled a few notes that draws
heavily upon “The 10 Big Lies About America” by Michael Medved, to dispel these
myths:
*The first Thanksgiving resulted in 50 years of peace with
the neighboring Indian villages.
*Neither the colonial governments nor, later, the U.S.
government ever endorsed or practiced a policy of Indian extermination.
*Disease overwhelmingly killed more Indians than war.
Infectious diseases brought about between 75 and 95 percent of Indian deaths
after European settlement began. 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 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.
*The notion of Small Pox blankets stems from an isolated
incident involving British officials,
not Americans, and remains inconclusive. Pontiac's Rebellion (1763) in which Chief Pontiac said “It is important
for us, my brothers, that we exterminate from our lands this nation which seeks
only to destroy us.” resulted in the natives wiping out eight forts and
murdering hundreds of troops and settlers, including women and children.
Victims were variously tortured, scalped, cannibalized, dismembered, and burned
at the stake. As a result of
desperation British Commander Field Marshal Lord Jeffery Amherst and Colonel
Henry Bouquet briefly discussed the idea of infecting the Indians with Small
Pox blankets. However there are no evidence indicating that Amherst actually
went through with the idea. At no point did the British commander issue orders
or make a policy declaration regarding extermination of the Indians. Both
whites and Indians suffered from Small Pox, which the Indians could have
received the diseases from a number of sources. Ultimately it was It was
Colonel Bouquet, not the smallpox virus, who finally rescued Fort Pitt.
*In addition to the massive numbers killed by disease,
Native American tribes lost untold millions to assimilation and intermarriage.
*Atrocities were committed on both sides. Lord Jeffery cited
the monstrous cruelty he had observed from his adversaries (scalping alive for
souvenirs, branding, cutting out and occasionally devouring hearts, torture
through slow skinning, piercing bodies with as many as a hundred arrows)
*Societies among the Indians and all other aboriginal
peoples conducted devastating wars against one another that at times became
struggles for domination, conquest, replacement, or even extermination. The
hundreds of native tribes that occupied North America warred against one
another for thousands of years, dispelling the myth of the "Noble Savage".
*The more developed New World cultures of the Maya, Aztec, and
Inca not only turned their slaves into brutalized and mutilated beasts of
burden but also used their conquered enemies to feed a limitless lust for human sacrifice.
*The U.S. experience with our indigenous populations
strongly resembles any and every encounter between peoples at vastly different
stages of development.
*Once a stone aged culture came in contact with a more
powerful and advanced civilization there became only two inevitable outcomes,
fight and lose or assimilate, either way their old life was finished.
*In the words of Mark Twain, ”There isn’t a foot of land in
the world which doesn’t represent the ousting and re-ousting of a long line of
successive “owners” who each in turn, as “patriots” with proud swelling hearts
defended it against the next gang of “robbers” who came to steal it and did—
and became swelling-hearted patriots in their turn. . . . Patriotism is a word
which always commemorates a robbery.”
