Jensen: "But in the United States, this reluctance to acknowledge our original sin -- the genocide of indigenous people..."
Most Native American deaths in the Americas were due to disease. Smallpox killed biologically unprepared indigenous people much more efficiently than Spanish conquistadors, destroying 90 percent of those infected, and most of its victims never saw a white man.
Englishmen had less use for natives than the Spanish. The English were not interested in gaining gold from the Indians. Instead the English and Native Americans competed for land. Sometimes, as in the cases of the Pilgrims and the Quakers in Pennsylvania, both sides cooperated, but most of the time, the two sides descended into armed conflict.
Jensen: But it's also true that by 1637 Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children, part of the long and bloody process of opening up additional land to the English invaders.The Powhatan Indians started the war against the English in Massachusetts, massacring women and children. The English responded with "Irish tactics," using the same scorched earth policy that successfully broke the Irish resistance. What's more, infectious disease took a great toll on the tribes, and total war and disease was responsible for pretty much wiping them out. Disgraceful, terrible, but not genocide.
Jensen: The pattern would repeat itself across the continent until between 95 and 99 percent of American Indians had been exterminated and the rest were left to assimilate into white society or die off on reservations, out of the view of polite society.Jensen fails to account for disease in his statistics, and the Indians of the Great Plains killed a fair share of white civilians as well, fighting bravely against the U.S. army with stone-age technology, and then later, with rifles (bye, bye, General Custer).
The Native Americans were doomed by European diseases and the sheer numbers of land-hungry English colonists and, later, American citizens. The cooperation between natives and whites during the Pilgrims' first winter shows how things could have been and should be celebrated in the holiday of Thanksgiving.
Thanks, Mike. In the interest of fairness and historical accuracy it should noted that some of the lethal spreading of disease was intentionally administered to the Native Americans. Here is one source...
ReplyDeletehttp://people.umass.edu/derrico/amherst/lord_jeff.html
Mark,
DeleteThanks for reading. You are correct. Germ warfare goes way back and was used by the British in the French and Indian war. The history I am referring to here is not the mid 18th-century but the 16th and 17th centuries. The white man's germs annihilated 90 percent of the native population in Mexico during that time, for example. I do not think that was purposeful genocide. I am not convinced that Europeans had any idea how plagues worked in that pre-Enlightenment age.