History Booklet on Native Indian Genocide Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee Columbus discovers America 1492 (October 12, San Salvador), giving the Native Americans the names Indios. "So Tractable, so peaceful are these people, that I swear to your majesties there is not in the world a better nation. They love their neighbours as themselves, and their discourse is ever sweet and gentle, and accompanied by a smile; and though it is true that they are naked, yet their manners are decorous and praiseworthy." However Columbus being a righteous European was convinced they should be "made to work, sow and do all that is necessary to adopt our ways." Over the next four centuries (1492-1890) several million Europeans and their descendants undertook to enforce their ways upon the people of the New World. Columbus kidnapped ten of his friendly Taino hosts and carried them off to Spain. One died shortly after arriving and being baptized. The Europeans were so pleased with this that they hastened to spread the good news throughout the West Indies. The Tainos and other Arawak People did not resist conversion, however, they did resist when hordes of these strangers began scouring the land for gold and precious stones. They burned and looted villages, killing or kidnapping any who resisted, shipping them off to Europe to be sold as slaves. Arawak
resistance brought on the use of guns and sabres; whole tribes were destroyed. Within a single decade, hundreds and thousands of people had already been killed.Because communication between tribes of the New World was slow, and use of the European barbarities spread as much the same speed as the European conquest. However, it was known that English men had much subtler methods then Spaniards. An example of English methods was when the English in Virginia in 1607 crowned Wahunsonacook as King Powhatan and convinced him that he should put his people to work supplying the white settlers with food. When ...
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resistance brought on the use of guns and sabres; whole tribes were destroyed. Within a single decade, hundreds and thousands of people had already been killed.Because communication between tribes of the New World was slow, and use of the European barbarities spread as much the same speed as the European conquest. However, it was known that English men had much subtler methods then Spaniards. An example of English methods was when the English in Virginia in 1607 crowned Wahunsonacook as King Powhatan and convinced him that he should put his people to work supplying the white settlers with food. When John Rolfe married his daughter, Pocahontas, he apparently decided that he was more English than Indian. However, when he died the Powhatans rose up in revenge to drive the Englishmen back into the sea from which they had come, but the Indians underestimated the power of English weapons. In a short time 8000 Powhatans where reduced to less than a thousand.The English landed in Plymouth In Massachusetts in 1920. If not for the aid received from friendly natives of the New World, the Englishmen would probably have starved to death. They shared corn with them from the tribal stores, showed them where and how to catch fish, and got them through the first winter. When spring came they gave the white men some seed corn and showed them how to plant and cultivate it. The English and the Indians lived in peace for several years, but shiploads of white people continued coming ashore. Settlements began crowding each other and in 1625 the first deed of Indian land to English colonists was made: 12,000 additional acres of Pemaquid land. By 1662, settlers were coming in by the thousands and did not bother to go through such ceremonies. The Wampanoags were being pushed back into the wilderness. Although the English settlers flattered the tribe leader (Metacom) by crowning him King Philip of Pokanoket (a tribe of the Wampanoag peoples), he devoted most of his time to forming alliances with the Narragansetts and other tribes in the region.In June 1675, the heavy-handed treatment of the Indians caused King Philip lead his Indian confederacy into a war meant to save the tribes from extinction. The Indians attacked 52 settlements, completely destroying 12 of them, but after months of fighting, the firepower of the colonists virtually exterminated the Wampanoags and Narragansetts. 1-Native soldiers siding with the colonists helped turn the tide of the war, however they were later rewarded by being interned in outlanded islands under inhumane conditions.-1 King Philip was killed on Mount Hope in August 1676 and his wife and young son were sold into slavery in the West Indies. The Five Nations of the Iroquois, the mightiest and most advanced of all the eastern tribes, strove in vain for peace. When they finally admitted defeat, some had escaped to Canada, some fled westward, and some lived out their lives in reservation confinement. In the 1760s the Ottowas united tribes in the Great Lakes country in hopes of driving the British back but failed. This was largely because of an alliance with French-speaking white men who withdrew a from the Indians during the crucial siege of Detroit. 2Between 1795 to 1840 The Miamis, after a thorough defeat in 1794, were forced to sign at least 17 treaties in which they relinquished their rights on tribal homelands, beginning with the treaty of Greenville in 1795 and ending with the last treaty signed on November 28th 1840. This brought on the forced removal of the Miamis from their homelands to the west and several years later those that remained were put in canal boats for transportation to an unwanted reservation in Kansas (October 6th 1846). Meanwhile in 1830 the Indian Removal Act was issued. A permanent Indian frontier was established from the Mississippi River to the 95th meridian ( a line running from the Minnesota-Canada border, to Galveston Bay in Texas.) Soldiers were garrisoned around this area to prevent unauthorised white men from crossing it and to keep control of the Indians beyond the 95th meridian. More than three centuries had now passed since Christopher Columbus landed on San Salvador, more than two centuries since the English colonists came to Virginia and New England. In that time the friendly Tainos who welcomed Columbus ashore had been utterly obliterated. Long before the last of the Tainos died, their simple agricultural and handicraft culture was destroyed and replaced by cotton plantations worked by slaves. The white colonists chopped down the tropical forests to enlarge their fields; the cotton plants exhausted the soil; winds unbroken by the forest shield covered the fields in sand. When Columbus first saw the island he described it as 'very big and very level and the trees very green... The whole of it so green that it is a pleasure to gaze upon.' The Europeans who followed him there destroyed its vegetation and its inhabitants-human, animal, bird, and fish-and after turning it into a wasteland they abandoned it. The very earth was being ravaged and squandered. To the Indians it seemed that the Europeans hated everything in nature-the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy glades, the water, soil, and the air itself.On the mainland of America, the Wampanoags were reduced to around 400 people in King Philip's War, the Chesapeakes were exterminated by the Powhatan chief because of a prophesy, the Chickahominys , and the Potomacs of the great Powhatan Confederacy had vanished. Scattered or reduced to remnants were the Pequots, Montauks, Nanticokes, Machapungas, Catawbas, Cheraws, Miamis, Hurons, Eries, Mohawks, Senecas, and Mohegans. 1 http://www.pilgrimhall.org/philipwar.htm 2 Shackel, Paul A. Places in mind: public archaeology as applied anthropology Routledge, 11 New Fetter Lane, Page 140