The Treaty That Forced the Cherokee People from Their Homelands Goes on View
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Indians
“Spanish explorers arrived on California's coasts as early as the mid-16th century. In 1769 the first Spanish Franciscan mission was built in San Diego. Local tribes were relocated and conscripted into forced labor on the mission, stretching from San Diego to San Francisco. Disease, starvation, over work and torture decimated these tribes.”
...but the reaction to the current backlash will likely end with Andrew Jackson removed from our currency and the Oval Office.
The fact that most people acknowledge that what was done to Native Americans was bad is at least some small progress.
https://www.usnews.com/news/national/articles/2008/06/27/tow...
Thomas Jefferson on exterminating the natives.
"This unfortunate race, whom we had been taking so much pains to save and to civilize, have by their unexpected desertion and ferocious barbarities justified extermination and now await our decision on their fate."
General Sherman on exterminating natives
"After the 1866 Fetterman Massacre, Sherman wrote Grant that "we must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tecumseh_Sherman
The first governor of california - Peter Burnett.
Instead, the greed for gold wealth led to a second option which was, literally, termed a "war of extermination" by Governor Peter Burnett who declared warfare would not cease with Native Americans "until the Indian race becomes extinct"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hardeman_Burnett
The inescapable truth is this country ( and before if we include the pilgrims ) was subdued with conquest and series of genocides. Pretty much everyone political, academic and business leader implicitly or explicitly supported genocide. Of course some ( like Jefferson ) wanted to negotiate first but when push came to shove, they all supported explusion and/or genocide.
But they also did a lot of great things. You have to take the good with the bad. Else we are in an untenable position. Columbus was far more brutal to the natives and he didn't contribute anything to the growth of america ( like andrew jackson did ). George Washington was also far more brutal against the natives. What should we do? Rename Washington DC ( District of Columbia )?
The only reason Andrew Jackson is being targeted by the establishment today is because he was the most anti-central bank president we've ever had.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_War
In terms of his racist views and policies, he wasn't anything exceptional ( especially during the 1800s ). If we have to remove him, then we have to remove Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Sherman and an unending list of public figures. Where does it end? We should teach and accept that genocide and slavery was part of the making of america rather than try to hide it. And it's okay to praise Washington, Jackson, Franklin, etc for their part in founding and building the country and also condemn them for their wrongs.
"And it's okay to praise Washington, Jackson, Franklin, etc for their part in founding and building the country and also condemn them for their wrongs."
How do you convince people that current portraits, monuments, etc aren't praising the good and bad OR (and I think this is much more the case) are praising the good and turning a blind eye to the bad?
It sounds like we need new portraits, monuments, etc to replace what we have currently.
It probably wouldn't hurt to have commemorative objects of Indian leaders and country-shapers as well (of which I have no doubt there a good number), to present something more "complete" regarding American history (which, like any nation's history, is complicated and more like a series of connected creeks and streams than a single river sequence of events).
Any sort of large scale immigration is going to cause friction. That doesn't have to take the form of wars and ethnic cleansing though.
The Pilgrims showed up in 1620 and occupied land that had formerly belonged to a tribe that was wiped out with smallpox and generally had peaceful relations with the natives.
The Puritans started their caliphate (I'm unaware of a corresponding Christian term) in 1630 and shortly thereafter got into wars with the natives, engaging in literal witch hunts and were generally so disagreeable that they provided the motivation for people to settle further and further west (away from them) further encroaching on the natives. Everybody tends to white wash this because they had high literacy rates and treated women better than most at the time.
The early pre-US settlers varied widely in their relations with the natives. The French had a pretty darn good relationship with the natives until they sold out to the US but they didn't do much settling (which probably helped).
>The only reason Andrew Jackson is being targeted by the establishment today is because he was the most anti-central bank president we've ever had.
I agree this is definitely a large part of it. If Jackson was a highly regarded president for other reasons people wouldn't complain about his mistreatment of the natives but instead he opposed central banking which does not make people hold him in high regard today.
I don't think this squares with The Scarlet Letter being read in just about every high school in the US.
I guess I should have said "My Massachusetts public school education tends to white wash the Puritan regime".
I've made comments about it before but getting most of my high school education in a different state as well as having my siblings get their education in different states really opened up my eyes to how politically tilted school curriculum are. Anything that's politically inconvenient gets covered at an age to young to think critically about it or covered to fast to have time to think about it. I assume the southern states whitewash everything pre-1865 and the plains states whitewash the Indian wars.
https://www.history.com/news/were-witches-burned-at-the-stak...
In any case I have edited my original comment to be technically correct.
It's an interesting mental exercise.
My mother intentionally never got us properly set up for tribal membership because she didn't want us anywhere near the negative aspects of the culture. (I'm also not even sure if I could qualify despite tracing my ancestry back to the baker rolls.) And she didn't even grow up on the rez, just in Appalachia. It's been a blessing and a curse.
They're teaching it in reservation schools right now.. hopefully in another 15 years there'll be an active speaker community!
It’s similar to native Hawaiians. Despite significant effort, that culture is being drowned by tourists and the massive non-native population influencing them. Sure, you can celebrate the culture and the language, but it doesn’t even begin to give you a glimpse of what it could have been without European invasions.
Of course, the specific cultural practices would be different, since the European and indigenous cultures in the US would have been different than they were in Mexico and Brazil.
White landowners pretty much did what they liked: murder, rape, theft, kidnapping, forced labor, mass-murder, destruction of whole villages, forced relocation, ...
Within living memory, indigenous people would have their property stolen or destroyed by Spanish-speaking thugs with no legal recourse, would be forced into labor, would be murdered or raped on a whim by wealthy landowners. Until recently, indigenous people were not allowed in some Mexican cities after dark and had essentially no political representation. Etc.
* * *
By contrast, in the USA we just killed all of the indigenous people and took their land.
The difference is that in Mexico & Central America the whole economic system was based on a colonial overseer class who used indigenous labor to produce goods for export, whereas in the USA the economic system was originally based on European immigrant settlers farming their own plots of land (or in the US South, based on plantations worked by African slaves), and indigenous people were economically extraneous.
Never hear of that one, but reminds me of the North Carolina "Great Dismal Swamp maroons[0]"
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Dismal_Swamp_maroons
The eventual presence of large groups of west african laborers, combined with a tradition/economy of chattel slavery among the Carolina natives that predated the settlers to create a very economically effective slavery system that spread across the southern US.
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sidenote: They also bought people who knew how to cultivate indigo for dyes. This meant that indigo was the dye most-available for the continental army in 1775.
The interesting part is that the gradient is self-sustaining and even self-exacerbating over time because it's based on perceived ancestry, and perceived "European ancestry" becomes a very real signal of privileged status. It's kinda ironic; it shows us that 'structural racism' and 'white privilege' can be very real social mechanisms, and what they actually look like on the ground, in a society where they've been around for many centuries! If you didn't know any better, you'd predict that SR and WP are concepts created by scholars in Latin-American Studies, to explain these societies (much like, say, the Clientelism concept was). The reality is somewhat different!
Also, American Indian tribes are not a monolith so the contrast would be interesting. Given the migration of some tribes, I would expect a lot more tribal wars.
The big difference between the USA and regions further south is that in the USA white settlers just mass-slaughtered most of those who remained post-disease so they could steal their land, whereas further south they were instead pressed into forced labor in service of a relatively small group of white colonial overseers.
It’s kind of like the difference between bison and cows. The former are economically extraneous so mostly got wiped out, whereas the latter are economically important domesticated slaves and therefore survive. (If this metaphor seems racist, note that throughout the Americas the ideology of ruling whites held that indigenous people were subhuman and undeserving of basic rights.)
This seems to be at odds with the fact that the US colonies (some of them, at least) imported African slaves. In theory, if they needed slave labor, why not make slaves out of the indigenous? Which leads me to believe that there's another distinction at play. I like umanwizard's explanation that the North America was settled by families whereas Central and South America were settled by single men. This would seem to jive with the genetic evidence from Central and South America that there is a high degree of admixture between Europeans and indigenous people, but that it is heavily skewed toward European males mating with indigenous females.
EDIT: Though now that I think about it, perhaps disease resistance in African slaves was an important factor in why they were preferred over indigenous.
It's a lot harder for an imported slave to run off than a local one. Local slave knows the land, knows where to run to, has a decent expectation that if they run there things will be better... An imported slave who runs doesn't really have that.
And where systems could be put in place to keep slaves from running, like the islands of the Caribbean? Well, those natives were worked to death, and then African slaves were imported to replace them. (And then more replacements came, because they were serious about that "working to death" thing)
Tenochtitlan alone was one of the biggest cities in the world at the time of the conquest (several hundred thousand people). There wasn't anything remotely similar in present-day US and Canada.
Another reason is that most Spanish colonists were single men whereas most English colonists of North America were families.
South America also had a lot less colonists (Portugal only had 2 million people and tried to restrict emigration) they also received a lot more slaves (North America got <10% of the slave trade) which mixed with with the native population.
2. There is a critical density of population below which the indegenous people's claim on land in relinquished
3. A density of population below this was seen in North America before mass immigration of Europeans.
4. If it were not so the Settlers would have been culpable of genocide of the Natives
5. We know that 4 can't be true hence 3
If a particular group with a narrow territorial claim is wiped out by disease (that is, population density drops to 0), it seems like 2 should apply to that narrow territory.
It's not like each the native of the Americas asserted a territorial claim on all territories of the Americas. There were different groups with different, sometimes competing, claims, and each enforced those claims with military power or lost them. This was true both before and after European arrival.
I think everyone here agrees that genocides did occur, especially in North America and the Carribean, but is pointing out that the overwhelming majority of the native population decline was due to diseases that few people understood and none could effectively control.
I think the argument is that when all the Taino are dead from disease, it's not clear that any of, say, the Algonquins have a better claim to any of the lesser Antilles than the Spanish crown does.
The physical documents are not PD, because the concept has no meaning in the physical realm.
Photographs are works separate from the objects they show, but the same limitation as to government works as above applies.
It may take some time for the Supreme Court eventually to rule on the matter, but the current property "owners" are criminal trespassers in my view.
I am not a constitutional law expert, but I believe that under article 6 section 2 (the supremacy clause) treaties are held to be equal to the constitution. Thus, there is a very high bar for a treaty to by nullified based on contradicting the constitution. There is very little case law on this, and I believe the only instance in which an international executive agreement (not a treaty) was thrown out by the Supreme Court was Reid vs Covert. In that case, it was throw out on the grounds that it violated 5th and 6th amendment protections of Americans in foreign countries.
Could I make a treaty with the U.S. that everyone in Connecticut loses their property and has to move to Utah? I was born in Connecticut. If the State of Connecticut explicitly rejected it, but I made a side deal with the Federal government?
Then don't be. No one is forcing you. Just leave.
Yes, terrible things were done in the founding of America, but terrible things happened all over the world throughout history (including between warring native tribes). But what we need to take from this isn't that our ancestors were horrible human beings, but that they did wrong things and more importantly, we need to strive to learn from it, not repeat their mistakes and generally be better people.
> the current property "owners" are criminal trespassers in my view.
Then pretty much every single American is a trespassers because basically the entire United States (or North America in general) was settled by native American before the Europeans "discovered" it, and in most cases, they didn't sell them their land.
It would be interesting to adjudicate whether kidnapping someone and removing them from their land and then selling it to another counts as a criminal conspiracy.
It would also be interesting to adjudicate whether "I didn't think I was stealing, because I don't believe that person is a human being with rights" counts as a good faith argument.
I could see it going either way, but I am excited to see how these cases are resolved. I hope they are brought in my lifetime. There is probably trillions of dollars of property implicated, at least half of which rightfully belongs to first nations people.
Virtue and compassion are not geographical traits.
We're still a work in progress and deeply divided on the subject of colonial occupation and its legal and historical meaning.