The conquered often begged to differ.
The zeitgeist was no more an excuse then than it should be today. There were people who saw things as they really were:
“But now things have come to such a pass in offence of God, owing to the bad example we have set them in all things, that these natives from doing no evil have turned into people who can do no good.. I beg God to pardon me, for I am moved to say this, seeing that I am the last to die of the Conquistadors."
— Mansio Serra Leguizamon
Yet by the time there was a USA, all of those things had been lost or destroyed so no one who mattered had to ever think about them.
That’s the convenient lie* I was taught in the 50’s and 60’s. ‘In any case it’s all over now, the Indians are long gone’ –
Some of them are. So are the passenger pigeons, and a lot of places, But there are still Native Americans/Indians, and there are still Native Nations, even now. Including in the state in which I was taught that.
For that matter, there are still buffalo, though it was a near thing for a while.
So we had better think about them; even if the people who think they’re the only ones who matter don’t want to, and don’t want anybody else to.
*ETA: I don’t mean to accuse Expano_Mapcase of lying, or even of repeating a lie that they believe; they may mean that ironically, or may mean to say that’s what the Manifest Destiny people wanted to have believed.
Yes, I’m saying that this was true in 1872, the date I’ve been talking about, and for generations thereafter.
Whatever we - or really, some of us; unfortunately a large percentage of the population still disagrees - think today about Native Americans, virtually nobody with power could imagine that mentality in the 19th and 20th centuries and therefore nobody with power did much of anything. Not that much of anything is being done in the 21st century.
For the pedanticists in the room: The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 did finally grant citizenship to Native Americans born in the country. Some states nevertheless didn’t permit them to vote until later. And of course they obviously got oil and casinos, so nobody is allowed to look back at history. /s
You may have heard the figurative expression “off the reservation”? Before 1924 that was a literal state of affairs: Native Americans who didn’t otherwise have status as citizens were confined to the reservations in a manner similar to how in apartheid South Africa the native blacks had to have work visas to live outside the “homelands”.
Yeah.
There were entire towns sitting on 99-year leases. They assumed that the people they were leasing from would be gone long before 99 years were up; or, at most, would have to renew at a pittance, being in no position to do otherwise.
You mean, like London?
One nation that gets short shrift are the Haida of the Pacific Northwest. Total badassses. The Westerners were themselves divided between Americans, Russians and British, but weren’t overtly hostile so the dynamic of British vs French on the native peoples in the East weren’t the same. The Haida were set to be canoe Comanches, calling the shots for the entire region, but invasive viruses from the Whites nearly wiped them out.
Lewis and Clark passed through a native city at Mandan. There were still Pueblo cities in the Southwest. A bit further south, what we now call Mexico City never stopped being a great city, and it’s still inhabited by people who are mostly descended from the natives.
They did not. Even in 1804 there were only a few villages and the entire population was the size of a small town. Nor did they pass through. They established a winter camp called Ft. Mandan near but not in the villages and stayed there until 1805.
Name one 19th century Pueblo “city” and its population.
Please go on. I want to hear all about the American history of Mexico City.
They should have designated it Mideast. Then we might not have all this fightin’…
You might want to compare the American Progress painting to the old Minnesota state flag and seal. As in the painting, natives are portrayed riding into the sunset, while a hard-working settler tames the land by plowing it. Besides being an atrocious design for a flag, it was so controversial that it was replaced with a simple white star on a blue/darker blue background.
As long as we’re discussing flags, what about Minnesota’s
In the 1890s, the starving natives began to believe that if they performed the Ghost Dance and wore Ghost Shirts their ancestors would return from the dead, the bison herds would be replenished, and the whites would disappear. Not unique: the Boxers in China and the Mau Mau in Kenya also had rituals of their own promising similar ends. In the 21st Century, a section of the population of the US also believed that a combination of wishful thinking and violent behavior would turn back the mechanisms of history.
Something similar but worse happened in South Africa as well.
Just to take the contrarian position (though not full Ann “we didn’t kill enough Indians” Coulter), the first time I saw the OP painting was in a history book. The caption read how until that time, Russia (read Ukraine) was the breadbasket of the Western World, but with the cultivation of the Great Plains was soon surpassed by the US and Canada.
One of those pro-Western Civ history books to be sure, but not inaccurate. Forward to 1945 and a billion people in Europe and Asia are facing famine. Millions in Bengal have already starved. They wouldn’t just die quietly: this would certainly reignite war. Ukraine is no more able to feed these people than the Nile Delta. But the US and Canada can’t do anything about it because those buffalo herds that Ken Burns rhapsodizes over are just so damned magnificent, and the horse tribes who (in an evolutionary reversal) abandoned settled agriculture to migrate and hunt are just too noble to disturb. That wasn’t going to happen.
A more equitable outcome, of the type that even today Civilization is unwilling to adopt, would look more like this: “say, you folks have really adapted well to the horses we brought over. You keep this land, but now put your horses onto these McCormick reapers.” But that would require compromise on both sides.
Keep in mind that this painting is from 1872. This was still very much the Wild West and Manifest Destiny time. It’s almost certain that it was the former - this was a patriotic and proud painting in its day, I’m sure.
Driving the Indians out of the way was considered a good thing back then, as was settling the west, farming, driving railroads, stringing telegraph wires, and so forth. Hell, if you look at the lighting of the photo, Columbia is literally bringing light to dark lands.
In a world in which Native nations continued to hold most of the area actually taken by the United States, so many things would be different that your supposed 1945 famine might well never have occured. Chances are WWII wouldn’t have, either; because chances are that WWI, if it had happened at all, would have gone considerably differently.
Plus, of course, those nations might have found a way to combine developing agricultural technology with continuing buffalo herds. The European settlers of the time weren’t interested in that; they were interested in taking over.
The only thing about your post I’ll disagree with, the only one word is “supposed.” Otherwise you’re correct. If, quite realistically, the Aztec and Inca had repulsed the Spanish; if someone like Pontiac or Tecumseh had come along 150 earlier to bring the nations together and fight the Europeans when they were on a more equal footing; and North America acquired European technology on better terms and developed accordingly. The world would be a much better place today. The might still have been sucked into each other’s wars, or they might have provided a counterbalance to prevent them (I’m too cynical to make a fair assessment of that).
Not you @thorny_locust, but years ago on this board largely populated by 1980s computer nerds, the “they can just learn to code” mentality was something couldn’t be argued against here. Spoiler: they didn’t learn to code. The American workers had to stay on for longer duration and under worse conditions until their bodies were destroyed by opiates. I don’t listen to these same people’s outrage over the treatment of the Indians.
It might simply have required creating an economic system in Europe that was not entirely based on profit-seeking, exploitation of land and people, and constant expansion.