American Indians: Who to blame?

[darthmaulnj1975]

@AgentSmith:

You both missed the point of the above post. A necessary component of genocide is that it must be a conscience effort in the case of native americans this is suspect. The biggest problem I see with you arguments is that they are based on the same flaws in thinking about the native Americans. Originally, people posted why they thought the native americans lost etc, but this generalizes a situation that was unique to every tribe and every time period. To compare the events of the Pequot War to that of the events of Wounded Knee homogenizes the plight of Native Americans too much. In the case of the Pequot as I said they were an Algonquin people and as such their final doom was brought about not so much by the English, but by their Iroquis allies.

In fact many of your examples of atrocities towards the native Americans come from the plains/western indian area, and aren’t applicable to the first 250 years of European/Native American encounters. The phrase “the only Indian is a dead Indian” has been attributed to Phil Sheridan circa 1875. I also believe there is some doubt as to whether or not he actually said it.

It is definitely true that each conflict is unique, especially since in many cases there are decades separating the events in question, and no one would deny that each Native American nation constitutes a distinct cultural and linguistic unit, just as any European ethnic group does. Nevertheless, certain generalizations can be made which hold true in all cases, especially when we are talking about the kinds of philosophies which motivated the white Americans. These are worthy of comparison with the racist attitudes of the Third Reich. The idea that one group in superior in race and culture (white Americans/Germans) and has been ordained by a higher power (God/Providence) to displace and conquer the other (Native Americans/Slavs) is certainly a common theme. Of course, how this idea was applied in each case was radically different.

I did not accuse the Americans of engaging in a systematic programme of genocide comprable to that of the Nazis, but there can be no doubt that attempts at wiping out entire Native tribes were made by certain groups of colonists at certain times (And that a general attitude was prevalent that the Natives should alternately be assimilated or annihilated). I don’t think that the colonists can be exonerated simply by blaming their Indian allies for their role in the destruction of the Pequot. Consider these words by Cotton Mather:

“In a little more than one hour, five or six hundred of these barbarians
were dismissed from a world that was burdened with them.”

“It may be demanded…Should not Christians have more mercy and
compassion? But…sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their
parents… We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.”

-Puritan divine Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana

The Pequot are not extinct, but they certainly feel that an attempt at genocide was made against them. I e-mailed a Pequot friend of mine about this discussion, and he recommended the book AMERICAN HOLOCAUST, CONQUEST OF THE NEW WORLD
Oxford Press, 1992 for anyone interested.

I never compared the slaughter of the Pequot to Wounded Knee, but such a comparison could be made without homogenizing the Native American nations involved, just as one could compare the Armenian Holocaust to the Shoah without homogenizing Europeans. Such is the nature of historical survey.

Also, I am aware that some have attributed the “dead Indian” quote to Sheridan, but he was certainly not the first to say it. Vine DeLoria and other imminent historians have reported that it was prevalent in the 18th c., long before Sheridan’s time.

@AgentSmith:

But the idea that the Native societies became so eroded as to deserve displacement and removal to reservations is not only morally bankrupt and reprehensible, but also factually incorrect. This is especially true in the case of the Cherokee

I wasn’t implying they deserved removal only they were victims of larger socio-economic forces which they had no control over. The Cherokee for example did manage to resist white invasions for a long while. In fact if you look at the history of the settlement of the deep south, Alabama was the last state settled because the Cherokee presented a bulwark against settlement from Tennessee. The point I was making here was that white settlement caused dislocation of native peoples which eroded their concept of land ownership. In previous posts others mentioned the Indians were pushed off their because they had no concept of land ownership which isn’t true at all, but when your homeland changes 2-3 times in 100 years it becomes less important to hold on to for purely nostaglic reasons…

I don’t disagree with this, so long as it is not used as a justification for displacement after displacement. You realize that apologists for Americans expansion could warp this argument to suit their purposes.

@AgentSmith:

By in large comparing Indian displacement to Lebensraum is totally inaccurate when I think a better comparison is to that of land enclosure of peasants in England.

I disagree, based on the similarities that I pointed out in my previous post to Janus. The feelings of racial and cultural superiority over the displaced which was present in both Hitler’s move east and America’s move west was lacking in the land enclosure of the English peasants. Perhaps my comparison would seem a little more accurate if Hitler’s move east would have been more successful, and the area was now populated by Germanic settlers.

[Guest]

The Americans regarded the Native Americans as “savages” who had to, as you say, “deal or die”

And many native americans thought they were superior to the whites. Does that mean they to were guilty of the same crimes. What you continue to ignore as the crucial difference between Nazism and Manifest destiny is that nazi policies were state policy for Germany and cannot be explained away to lessen guilt. However, manifest destiny was never an enacted policy in American gov’t. Sure it was a belief many held, but MD didn’t begin to develop until after the Eastern woodlands were secured up to the Mississippi, but most telling is the natives west of the Mississippi tend to have retained greater cultural and ethnic identity than did those in the East. However, to conclude the fate of the Pequot was the result of this idea, manifest destiny, which did not even exist yet is unfair. In terms of interation between whites and Indians there tends to be a great deal of revisionist history in that wrongs committed on the Plains get applied to what happened in the East despite the reality that the two time periods are seperated by almost 150 years. This is akin to trying the Spanish at Nuremburg for the Inquisition because it was too much like what the Germans had done during WWII despite that it was a historical anachronism.

[darthmaulnj1975]

@AgentSmith:

The Americans regarded the Native Americans as “savages” who had to, as you say, “deal or die”

And many native americans thought they were superior to the whites. Does that mean they to were guilty of the same crimes.

That is a ridiculous question. Some Jews may have felt superior to the Germans, but they cannot be accused of being guilty of a Holocaust. There is a big difference between feelings of superiority and putting those feelings into action.

@AgentSmith:

What you continue to ignore as the crucial difference between Nazism and Manifest destiny is that nazi policies were state policy for Germany and cannot be explained away to lessen guilt. However, manifest destiny was never an enacted policy in American gov’t. Sure it was a belief many held, but MD didn’t begin to develop until after the Eastern woodlands were secured up to the Mississippi, but most telling is the natives west of the Mississippi tend to have retained greater cultural and ethnic identity than did those in the East. However, to conclude the fate of the Pequot was the result of this idea, manifest destiny, which did not even exist yet is unfair. In terms of interation between whites and Indians there tends to be a great deal of revisionist history in that wrongs committed on the Plains get applied to what happened in the East despite the reality that the two time periods are seperated by almost 150 years. This is akin to trying the Spanish at Nuremburg for the Inquisition because it was too much like what the Germans had done during WWII despite that it was a historical anachronism.

First of all, I don’t believe that you can “explain away” or “lessen” American guilt any more than you can German guilt. Secondly, although the term Manifest Destiny may not have been an official state policy, it was certainly a de facto policy, and you cannot deny that feelings of racial and cultural superiority contributed to American treatment of Native peoples in all of the incidents we have discussed. American westward expansion and displacement of Native Americans was certainly policy whether it was termed Manifest Destiny at a given time or not. And it was certainly glorified and reveled in.

Also, if someone doing a study of anti-Semitism through the ages were to compare and contrast the Inquisition and the Holocaust and examine the common underlying current of anti-Semitisim latent in both incidents, that would not be tantamount to trying Torquemada alongside Goering. Comparisons of philosophies can be made without saying that they are the exact same thing.

My bottom line is that Europeans conquering and killing Europeans is not worse than Europeans conquering and killing non-Europeans. Unfortunately, some seem much more disturbed by the one and willing to offer a defense of the other.

[Guest]

The Pequot are not extinct, but they certainly feel that an attempt at genocide was made against them. I e-mailed a Pequot friend of mine about this discussion, and he recommended the book

Umm actually they are. There is a group that claims to be Pequot, but in actuality they are people of European descent that use distant Indian heritage to gain advantage, primarily casinos. The Pequot war in and round 1630 from which the end result was the decimation of the tribe. For over 150 years, in fact over 200+ years no group claimed tribe affiliation as Pequot, yet now they’ve come back. Did the Pequot have some secret time traveling technology we didn’t know about? Your friend should try reading the “the Pequot War”

And that a general attitude was prevalent that the Natives should alternately be assimilated or annihilated).

But this is true of all cultures. All cultures inherently seek to annihilate other cultures, and assimilate its followers, but this is not genocide. Genocide is a systematic state level attempt to wipe from the earth an entire group based on ethnic or religious identity. The reality is that the Americans preferred to put Indians on reservations rather than exterminate them. By no means does this exhonerate what happened, but don’t belittle the greatest human tradegy, the holocaust, by arbitrarily throwing around the word genocide.

The feelings of racial and cultural superiority over the displaced which was present in both Hitler’s move east and America’s move west was lacking in the land enclosure of the English peasants. Perhaps my comparison would seem a little more accurate if Hitler’s move east would have been more successful, and the area was now populated by Germanic settlers.

I guess this is the point of debate then did European racial beliefs cause colonialism or did they merely use them to justify current socio-economic trends. Again I feel you over simply the plight of native Americans, and underestimate their willingness to accept outside influences. Forget what you know about colonialism during the 17th century Europeans were not the global hegemonic force they were in the 19th century. In fact the Portugese were confined to minor trade outposts in Africa, China totally rebuffed European influence, and India had nothing more than a few small trade outposts. The primary enclaves of early european colonialism were the Americas, and trade with the Indians there helped to cause economic development in places like England, Holland and France. The Spanish however cared very little for trade with the natives, and consequently became one of the poorer countries in Europe. In the end though while this trade caused great economic development in Western Europe it led to dependence by the natives on Europeans. A trend very analogous to Americans and the Arabs today in that we are dependant upon their supply of oil. In the end this early example of ‘globalization’ caused the Indians to become susceptable to the larger socio-economic forces they had no control over, and is why they lost out in the long run. I’m sure racism didn’t help, but even with a kinder gentler form of colonialism the end result would’ve been the same.

Also, I would add that you overemphasize racism in the historical context. Up until very recently racism was common and accepted among virtually every single race on Earth. In fact the Iroquis and Algonquin had some very racist view towards each other, yet you haven’t marginalized their conflict as genocide or a race war. To understand something as a race war you have to be able to proove there exists an us versus them mentality, and since I have shown there was no such thing as a cohesive understanding of ‘Indian’ there were hardly racist motives. In fact the Europeans tended to treat Indian tribes as they would any other nation in Europe which led to many of the problems you describe. The English for example would always make peace with the Iroqois tribes they met because to them the Iroqois were like any other nation in Europe friendly to them.

[Guest]

My bottom line is that Europeans conquering and killing Europeans is not worse than Europeans conquering and killing non-Europeans. Unfortunately, some seem much more disturbed by the one and willing to offer a defense of the other.

Yes and I agree many do put a great emphasis on the former rather than the latter.

Secondly, although the term Manifest Destiny may not have been an official state policy, it was certainly a de facto policy, and you cannot deny that feelings of racial and cultural superiority contributed to American treatment of Native peoples in all of the incidents we have discussed.

Yes it was de facto, but your statements are still inaccurate. True MD was later used as a justification, but was it the cause of? I still assert there were greater socio-economic forces in play here. Its particulary inaccurate to talk about MD prior to 1800 as American hegemony west of the Alleghenies didn’t exist then. So prior to that what was the motivation? It couldn’t be purely racism as the whites coexisted with certain tribes, but not others. If you are so racist that you want to exterminate an entire race you don’t make peace with and therefore let exist many of the people you hate.

[darthmaulnj1975]

Agent_Smith,

Despite our voluminous writings to the contrary, we really don’t disagree on all that much as far as the facts are concerned. In a way, we have been talking past one another because we are analysing two different aspects of the same question. You seem to be primarily concerned with the hard facts of each individual case, while I am more concerned (in this instance) with the philosophical and moral underpinnings of the communities involved and how that contributed to their behavior in a broader sense. Historical case study vs. historical survey, if you will.

This being the case, I suggest that we take a repast from the battlefield, and concentrate on other endeavors. I, for one, have finals to grade (and unfortunately, most of their authors are not as erudite a yourself! :wink: ) In any case, well met, my friend!

P.S. - I’ll mention your last remark to my Pequot friend. Amazing how this fact has escaped the US government! You’d think they’d be more careful in their classification.

[Guest]

I’ll mention your last remark to my Pequot friend. Amazing how this fact has escaped the US government! You’d think they’d be more careful in their classification.

Well don’t push it too hard most people don’t take too kindly to being called a fraud. :lol: The US gov’t sort of has its hands tied because these people do have a claim of sorts as Pequots because they are descendants of those Pequot who did intermingle with whites. However, there was no Pequot tribe for quite a long time recognized or seeking recognition.

This being the case, I suggest that we take a repast from the battlefield, and concentrate on other endeavors. I, for one, have finals to grade (and unfortunately, most of their authors are not as erudite a yourself! ) In any case, well met, my friend!

But does this have to necessarily be antagonistic? Are these high school finals or college finals? If these are college finals perhaps I should transfer to your school, take your class and you can give me an A. :wink:

I have finals to take, but I’m barely going to study, get little sleep beforehand, and probably still get an A. Ahh, the fun of college.

[darthmaulnj1975]

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t take it as being antagonistic! In fact, it has been fun. :D Quite honestly, if I had more time, I’d love to do a point by point rebuttal and keep it going. Unfortunately, after I get these finals graded, I have to start right away teaching a summer one course. You’d certainly get your A. I always tell my students, you can disagree with me or the text as vociferously as you like, so long as you can support your contensions with verifiable facts. Perhaps we’ll renew this discussion in July. I’m not teaching any summer two courses (that I know of).

[Guest]

You never answered me or perphaps you did, was this a college level course? If so what school?

[Janus1]

darthmaul, your hostility is very unnecessary.
im not “giving you my approval” and i dont “consider myself the authority” on it. i was expressing disapproval over people who have one “native” american ancestor, and try to exploit that by taking advantage of things granted to native americans (such as the right to open a casino).
i meant no disrespect to you, and sorry if i somehow offended you, but you know what, F*** off. you want to be offended by it, fine, go ahead

[MuthaRussia]

@Janus1:

i was expressing disapproval over people who have one “native” american ancestor, and try to exploit that by taking advantage of things granted to native americans (such as the right to open a casino).

I agree 100%, people with ancestry of native indians in them use it as an excuse to gamble, or be an achoholic! :roll:

Janus1, this i guess we could incorporate into our discussion in Fed Up…
This is one type of american that uses something to be lazy, and sit there like coconuts! :-?

I’m glad we finally found something we agree on!

[Guest]

Did you all miss the post where he said he’s a teacher? I believe possibly a college teacher, and in that case he either has a Masters/PhD or is working on one. Can any of you worker ants say the same.

If Darth Maul was using his heritage for anything it was to take an absolutist position against white colonialism in North America. I take it by your response you feel White actions were wholy justified.

[Guest]

@Janus:

i meant no disrespect to you, and sorry if i somehow offended you, but you know what, F*** off. you want to be offended by it, fine, go ahead

Janus, this line will pay off dearly for you, i guess.

[darthmaulnj1975]

@Janus1:

i meant no disrespect to you, and sorry if i somehow offended you, but you know what, F*** off. you want to be offended by it, fine, go ahead

Boy Janus, you sure picked the right name (i.e. the two faced god of Graeco-Roman mythology). Are you bi-polar or what? “Sorry if I offended you, but f*** you!”. Double your dosage buddy, and don’t bust a blood-vessel being so FED-UP! :lol:

Now if you and your moronic buddy will excuse me, I’ve got to get back to hitting the bottle and shooting craps at my casino on your tax dollar. :wink:

Agent_Smith - Its a small college, but I won’t get into which one. Too many psychos on the internet! :roll: Sorry I didn’t specify, but I thought that “college” was implicit in my statement about the summer semester. And yes, I’m in the abd phase of the Phd. You are correct that I was taking an absolutist position, but I thought that this simplistic and addle-brained poll/thread lent itself to such. My first instinct was to steer clear of it, but at least some intelligent discourse was generated.