Hey spoke, I’m not going to argue your authority. Thanks for the cite. This certainly is not an area I am in any way expert at. I think your initial post struck me as somewhat inconsistent with what I recalled from reading “The Invasion of America” by Francis Jennings. I believe quite a bit in that book predated Jamestown, but it has been a while since I read it. And quibbling over “who did it first” on a case-by-case basis likely isn’t going to shed too much light on this topic.
I’m not trying to pick a fight with you, Dinsdale. I’d be interested in any info you cite.
My concern with this whole topic is that entertainment media in particular, and to a lesser extent even published scholarship, have in recent years been a bit one-sided in portraying the “victimized Indian” while downplaying the less-than-honorable actions of Native Americans themselves. This results in a popular perception of “evil white bastards eradicating noble savages.” The truth, as they say, is more complicated than that.
Yes, there were many wrongs committed by an expanding nation. (The Trail of Tears being chief among those wrongs in my book.) But the Indians were not plastic saints themselves.
And let’s look at the settler’s perspective for a moment. Most arrived here because [Bill Murray] they got thrown out of every decent country in Europe [/Bill Murray].
A typical Scots-Irish immigrant in the early colonial period would have arrived penniless, and would then have served a period of 7 years as an indentured servant (little better than a slave) to an eastern planter or merchant for the dubious privilege of eventually claiming title to a piece of land on the westernmost edge of the expanding frontier. Once there, being on the frontier of European settlement, he and his family would naturally bear the brunt of Indian attacks. Indeed, these expanding layers of former indentured servants on the western frontier were viewed as a sort of buffer against the Indians.
Now what were that immigrant’s choices?
Small wonder that the Indians attacked him, since he was intruding on their territory. Small wonder that he responded with equal or greater ferocity, since he had no options but to win or perish.
For professional reasons, I need to stay the hell away from this debate. However, Dinsdale makes an interesting point:
This is almost exactly the terms of a great many of the agreements that the United States and the colonial powers before them made with American Indians (except for that last bit about “market value”–that didn’t often happen).
Let me just crack open Kappler’s Treaties at random here to show an example…
The boundaries described happen to be in what was then known as “Indian Territory,” and what is now Oklahoma. Looking at my map of Indian lands in the U.S., I see that the Cheyenne/Arapaho Tribe no longer has land held in trust in Oklahoma. I wonder where it went?
[rant deleted, spittle wiped up]
The treaties are the key, my friends. If you want to learn how America was taken, why American Indians are still here, and why they are justifiably pissed off, as I often am when it comes to this subject, look to the treaties.
Sorry I can’t stick around for this one, but I wouldn’t be much fun anyway.
No argument from me, Sofa King. The US should have lived up to its treaty obligations.
“Why didn’t we?” is the next logical question.
> With regard to the activities of Columbus in Hispanola, well yeah, Columbus wreaked havoc among the Carib Indians
spoke, can you explain this? AFAIK, Columbus sailed around but never settled anywhere in the Caribbean. He never had any authority or command on land that I know. In fact, after his fourth voyage he pretty much had no authority of any kind.
spoke,
Thanks for pointing out the two way street. I am well aware that Native Americans were also the agressor in many situations. Both sides were victims of broken promises, false friendships. Perhaps most tragically, both settlers and Native Americans who were peaceful and intended to live harmoniously together were slaughtered by the less peaceful - in some cases set up by their “own kind”.
To add to Spoke’s comments, the Powhattan Confederacy when Jamestown was founded was extremely aggressive and expansionistic. When Chief Powhattan became chief of the Powhattans, the confederacy consisted of 6 tribes, the Powhattan, the Pamunkeys, the Mattaponis, the Arrohatecks, the Appomatucks, and the Yough-ta-munds. Through conquest and diplomacy, by his death, the Powhattan Confederacy consisted of 30 tribes. Powhattan also exterminated the Chesapeakes, and fought constant wars with other neighbors. The Jamestown colonists served to disrupt an already tense situation.
Because we wanted the land, and they were “only Indians”, and not civilized white people or anything. I think that can pretty much sum the attitude up.
As someone not at all familiar with Native American history, thanks to everyone for such an even-handed and informed discussion.
In Australia, the doctrine of terra nullius was adopted by colonists, revoked only by case law in 1992 (in a storm of controversy as it recognised Aboriginal land rights). To this day Australian Aborigines desire a treaty with the Australian Government, which flatly refuses. From the anecdotes above, and the New Zealand experience, it seems that even if the colonists had entered into a treaty or treaties (since there were at least 600 sub-groups) with native Australians back in the 1800s, it would have been unlikely to be honoured.
Indeed, the outcome was inevitable. But I disagree strongly with your generalization of all Native Americans as a “warrior race.” What most posters seem to be forgetting here is that native tribes did not make up some greater Indian whole. There were in fact dozens of individual nations across what is now the US.
To pick and choose incidents, as spoke does with Jamestown and justin does in rambling about marauding bands, is exactly the rationale used by those who inflicted the genocide: namely, that “Injuns” would kill you and everyone you care about if you didn’t take care of them. To be sure, there were several very aggressive tribes, but to use their isolated actions to justify wholesale slaughter was as reprehensible then as it is ignorant now to forgive those sins (many tribes only turned to war when their treaties were violated… read any good biography on Geronimo to learn about probably the most famous instance of this). A far more common US tactic was to make land grabs and violate treaties.
And no, I’m not of Native American descent, but did get one of my degrees on the subject.
There is something that seems to be missing in this discussion and that concerns the people of the times and their history with colonization along with their mental maturity.
Firstly, when America was colonized, most of the colonizing nations of the world had a favorite way of dealing with native inhabitants; conquer, enslave, subjugate. Spain was by far the worst of these with their infamous Conquistadors but the British had a reputation also and France was not exactly a slouch in this area either.
Now, the people of the times were not exactly as mature as we are today. They had the mental maturity of teenagers, even though they were mature in the ways of their world and used to much harder living conditions. Read your history. Everybody was ready for a fight and everybody fought everybody else at the drop of a pin. The world was full of intrigue, Kings and Queens were married before they were 18, people were considered old if they reached 35, there were unjust taxes, the educated lorded it over the common, poorly educated masses, and people like the famous Musketeers just loved to get into brawls where dueling was common and considered honorable.
Now what do teens and people in their early 20s do most? Get into trouble, even today, especially guys. They feel that they are immortal, full of energy, experimentation, eager for adventure, and full of themselves. Back then, those in power were usually egotistical and used to getting their own way at the expense of others.
Now, no one whines about the destruction of the entire Mayan civilization by the Spanish Conquistadors, who were out for adventure, exploration and treasure. They lied to the natives, betrayed them, spread disease among them, slaughtered them, and enslaved them. They did this in most areas they landed.
Columbus, after landing at America and making his mark, became a dealer in slaves, even though in his writings he recognized that the natives were intelligent people. The money was in slaves. Back then, the explorers looked at these strange people running around with hardly any clothing, speaking an alien tongue, often using lands only for part of the year, appearing dirty, uneducated, and very very different and considered them barbaric, subhuman. Toss in the religious fanatics and the fact that these strange people worshipped strange gods and the position that every preacher or priest naturally seemed to feel superior to them and you have a problem in the making.
The early colonists were guided mainly by leaders who were egotists, used to having their orders followed, used to living in a cast system, used to feeling superior to others and interested in power and riches. They considered the natives as subhuman and exploitable. They did not see them as regular folks. They were savages and one dealt with savages differently than with civilized folk.
Look at England and the ‘little brown buggers’ of India, where they fought wars of empire for years and years. It became a status symbol to have been in the Indian wars and young officers were often sent there to get experience and they considered the natives as dirt. The English even fueled their steam engine trains with mummies dug up in the Egyptian dessert because they were so plentiful, without consideration that these were the dead of the natives.
So, the Americans were following a time accepted way of dealing with natives. By the time the great Western push was born, land speculators were lying to the pioneers about the dangers in order to sell the lands and make great amounts of cash and the suppliers of goods needed for these great wagon trains were not about to ruin the market by letting them know that they were settling in someone’s back yard. The politicians were corrupt, caring little about savages, taking their cues and bribes from major businessmen who wanted the expansion and the riches in the native lands. These powerful folks influenced the laws of the times.
Like, what city is it, Los Angeles? It’s right on a major Earthquake fault? Who would stupidly build there? When the major business powers discovered that their great city was built on a major fault, they lied to the people and doctored geological research to convince them that the land was safe because they did not want to loose millions in land and property sales, property and business loans and speculation and so, out of greed, condemned a city of hundreds of thousands to frequent disaster. By the time the City discovered that they were on chronically unstable land, it was too big to pull up stakes and go somewhere else. These businessmen condemned hundreds of people to death because of their greed.
It’s in the history books.
Now, take the Army of the time, which was treated like crap by the government, staffed with misfits, thugs, criminals and rawboned cowboys, guided by officers who had little experience, most of whom felt that they were not only far superior to their own men, but the common herd and especially the savages, and many of who were out to make a reputation for themselves through Indian fighting.
Toss in egotistical, arrogant, selfish people like General Custer, who in pursuit of self glory and power, had no problem with getting many of his men killed and you have a problem for the Indians.
See, they did not think like we do today. they were not as mature as you are today and most were not as well educated. Many of the people, settlers and pioneers, were uneducated with limited sources of information, limited sources of knowledge, and concentrating mainly on just making a living and surviving and the Indians were seen as a threat. Their friends told them the Indians were beasts and animals, their religious leaders assured them mostly that they were heathens, their local civic governors said they were a nuisance, and their government did not like them.
Plus the Indians had the audacity to be on the best land and to fight back when attacked.
People did not see things the way we do today, often considering even each other as servile beings and beneath them. (See Bond Servants.) Plus the original colonizing governments were interested in the riches of the land and the produce which could be obtained from it and did not want any savages getting in the way of millions in revenue and taxes.
After independence, the local governments felt the same. Many of our great leaders had hard ideas concerning morals and the treatment of people they considered beneath them. Ben Franklin was a real dirty old man, believing in getting laid as often as he could, and enjoying his position. Meetings by powerful people were often accompanied by a major amount of drink, like wine and ale and these leaders were almost always major businessmen, interested in holding onto the money and powers that they had. (Who else would allow riders on unrelated bills that did not benefit the bill being voted on?) Jefferson, as we all know by now, was against slavery but owned slaves.
So, you take all of that into consideration and the Indians had very little chances of being treated differently.
It still goes on today, in South America, where the natives are being pushed further and further back into the diminishing jungle by encroaching land developers, who tear up the rain forest with the approval of local governments who are interested in the moneys to be obtained from these actions and impoverished farmers burning off ‘unclaimed lands’ to grow their crops on to try to survive.
I did mention in a previous paragraph that the wars started when the Eurotrash left the coast.
I do not believe that you think the estate system of land ownership is similar to the nomadic western Indian system. The rest of your post indicates that you know too much to think that. Fencing (no, not with swords) was enough to give many tribes consternation. C’mon, similarities in function do not beget good relations. Just ask the Israelis and Palestinians.
Logically, just how nomadic can you be when you live by the ocean? Seriously.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Beagle *
**
That would be anything, apart from demanding Germany withdraw its troops, and declaring War when they ignored us.
peepthis,
I know that not all the tribes were warriors but the ones that were gave the peaceful ones a bad name. What is a peaceful tribe any? Do they let you take their lands without fighting back? The Arapahoe were always considered peaceful and did survive but is that a function of their demeaner or is it because they lived on undesireable land (land that the expanding nation didn’t need)? I am not saying that the fact that the indians fought back caused their extinction. What was their alternatives? keep moving until they are pushed into the pacific ocean? No they would have starved long before that. They did what they had to do and the whites did what they had to do. result: the stronger group eliminates the weaker. game, set , match.
That was the point of this thread, the extermination was not do to a case of some bad whites doing the noble native a great disservice. It was the reality of 2 groups fighting over land.
OK9372,
great thesis on maturation. Never thought of it like that. where did you get the inspiration? did I sleep thru too many history classes?
You are mistaken, sailor.
On Christmas Eve, 1492, Columbus’s flagship the Santa Maria ran aground and capsized near Hispanola. Columbus took this as a sign from God and established the colony of La Navidad on the island. The 39 crewmen left behind were ordered to gather as much gold as they could before Columbus returned. None were alive when Columbus came back to the island on his second voyage. More here.
Columbus then founded a new colony on the island, La Isabela. More about the second colony here. (Scroll down.)
I was mistaken about one thing. Columbus and his men came into conflict with the *Tainos Indians on Hispanola, not the Caribs. Columbus did come into conflict with the Caribs at other points in his voyages.
It does, but (no offense) in a bit of simplistic way.
As a practical matter the situation on the ground often had a way of screwing up even the best-intentioned treaties. Uncle Sam might draw a border with an Indian nation on a map, but there was no border patrol. Settlers frequently just ignored the imaginary lines and settled in Indian territories.
Now how could Uncle Sam respond to this? Well, he could either:[ol][li]Send troops in to roust the squatters;[]Go to the affected Indian nation and try to renegotiate to acquire the land occupied by settlers; or[]Ignore the situation until the Indians (quite naturally) attack the settlers, then use that as an excuse to declare war on the Indians and take their land by force.[/ol][/li]
The first option was not politically realistic. Any President who sent in troops against white settlers would find himself bounced from office in a heartbeat.
This meant that options 2 and 3 were what actually happened, by default.
Wow, I’m amazed people still think like this: the Darwinist approach to international relations. Do you believe then that things turned out fairly? Is this how matters ought to be settled? I agree that this is how Americans viewed it at the time, and it is anachronistic to project our modern “civilzed” hindsight on the extermination of the Indians. Manifest Destiny was fueled by any number of things (land needs, “science” that declared natives inferior, gold, etc.), but certainly there were other options.
But the problem was fundamental: the US gov’t didn’t truly recognize native nations as nations, since they didn’t exist in the context of the European, post-Westphalian nation-state. Add to this racist mindsets, and it’s “hasta la vista, Tecumseh!”
So, to answer your question, there were other options. But they would have entailed recognizing basic rights of the Indians – which was never going to happen. And when attempts were made to deal with tribes in traditional ways (e.g., treaties), it was easy to violate them since the American rule of law didn’t apply to “savages.” The same way Dred Scott wasn’t going to get a fair shake in any courtroom for his grievance, neither were the native tribes. And in the rare instances when they did, as in Worcester v. Georgia (which granted Cherokee tribal sovereignty), there was the US gov’t to make sure it didn’t stick.
IMHO, the US treatment of the native population was at least as dark as the history of slavery. Unfortunately, the former receives nowhere near the amount of classroom time it deserves (aside from hokey pre-Thanksgiving lessons), making many Americans only “knowledge” of them distorted generalizations of casinos and drunken-ness. (Just an observation, I’m not saying anyone here has done that)
I know, I was being overly simplistic and cynical. However, like you said, there was a general lack of recognition of the borders of the Indian lands.
Beagle,
You said
Well, I was addressing European settlement of North America, which was, with the exception of St. Louis and Mexico, pretty exclusively coastal. Most of the contact with the nomadic great plains tribes that caused conflict was made by the U.S. in the 19th century. However, when the English landed at Jamestown and Cape Cod, they met settled tribes, living in villages and towns who had similar ideas about land ownership that they did.
Fencing and the enclosure of land was enough to give a lot of western tribes consternation. It was enough to give a lot of non-Indians consternation. If you get the chance, study the range wars, when the invention of barbed wire fencing led to violence between farmers and ranchers.
I never argued that similarities in fuction beget good relations, and I don’t understand why you’ve brought the point up. Of course groups come into conflict with each other for all sorts of reasons other than having different attitudes about land ownership, and the point of my argument is that it’s overly simplistic to attribute Indian conflict to different ideas about land ownership.
peepthis wrote:
The Jamestown massacre is particularly significant, because it was among the first hostile encounters between English settlers and Indians. As such, it set the tone for the way in which future English settlers would view Indians.
Nor can the Jamestown massacre be lightly dismissed as an “isolated incident.” As I mentioned in my first post, attacks upon settlers were common enough that it was a ground for complaint in the Declaration of Independence. While the attacks were often small-scale assaults on individual homesteads, there were also other attacks on the scale of Jamestown. (Off the top of my head, I can think of slaughters of similar scale in Alabama and in North Carolina.)
I think it’s also reasonable to observe that the settlers found the style of the attacks shocking (in particular the habits of killing women and children and of mutilating corpses). (Granted, the Europeans very quickly took to the slaughter of innocents themselves, and even adopted the Indian custom of scalping victims.)
Combine these factors, and it’s not hard to imagine how hard-pressed settlers might come to take a dim view of Indians generally, without bothering to make fine distinctions among the various tribes. To be sure, there were always settlers who did take the time and trouble to make those distinctions, and to speak out against the mistreatment of Indians (see, Crockett, Davy) but their voices were often drowned out.
Again, none of this is offered to excuse the actions of white settlers or to justify the destruction of Indian cultures. All I am saying is that if you want to understand how it all happened you can’t just look at it from the Indian perspective. You also have to try to take a walk in the settlers’ shoes.
The Jamestown settlers, interestingly, had experimented with the idea of integrating with the Indians prior to the massacre:
Now obviously, the settlers were looking to integrate on their own terms, and took a distressingly (to modern eyes) paternalistic and racist approach, but still, they did at least make a stumbling, fumbling attempt at peaceful coexistence.
Just a minor observation, spoke, but I’m not sure the Declaration of Independence should be relied upon as a definitive and objective chronicle of events.
Moreover, would it be appropriate to distinguish between instances where Indian tribes acted violently towards settlers on their own initiative, as opposed to when they were manipulated by European nations?
I do believe that it is common for an invading peoples to attempt to characterize the population they are invading as somehow beneath them. Christian attitudes during the Crusades is an obvious example.
While native american societies were indeed different from European, I believe it was inaccurate to represent them as uncivilized savages. I understand that evidence exists to suggest that this (mis)representation of the Indians was intentional. Moreover, tho I may be overly cynical, such intentional misrepresentaion for commercial benefit seems consistent with what I understand about human motivations. In this respect, it may be that the settlers were quite “mature” in their use of propaganda and information.
I suggest Indians had highly developed civilizations, albeit far different from anything Europeans were used to. Nor were they any more savage than the Europeans. But my understanding is that the individuals and corporations responsible for exploiting N. America intentionally misrepresented the natives in order to advance their personal and corporate interests. It would be far more difficult (and less profitable) to encourage people to invest and participate in such ventures (and many of the initial settlements were economic ventures), if they thought they would have to share the nation’s wealth with another people who were already there and had a legitimate claim to the land and it’s resources.