I don’t think you can really have the same conversation about the New World and Australia. Australians suffer from a sort of collective denial about treatment of Aboriginals. Things like the Lost Generation are now well documented and taught in schools but I gather that the wholesale murder of Aboriginals barely merits a mention. These small markers are basically all that remains to tell the story (and there are dozens of sites that don’t even have markers).
The idea that most of the deaths of Native Americans were the result of a deliberate campaign of genocide by the white man is a myth. 75-90% of the deaths were due to diseases like smallpox and measles, and, despite the Fort Pitt letters, I don’t think anyone serious suggests that all or most of the epidemics were engineered.
That Ward Churchill moron says they were, but he’s a bigger liar than Limbaugh ever was.
Yes, there were massacres and atrocities, but that’s not what killed most of the Indians. Given the state of medical knowledge at the start of the European colonization of the New World, a massive die-off of the epidemiologically naive populations was almost unavoidable.
Regards,
Shodan
Since it was Van Buren, we can take a really good guess at depraved indifference, corruption and incompetence. Esp corruption.
Maybe a few Officers wanted some Indians to die, but it seems like most of the rest (there were some noble exceptions) just didnt care and were willing and eager to cash in- at the Native’s expense.
I want to say that I am sounding a bit like a defender of Andy Jackson. But *depraved indifference, corruption and incompetence *wasn’t Jacksons style. If Jackson wanted to kill the Indians, he’d have just done it with grapeshot and bayonets. It wouldnt have been 3000 Cherokee dead, it would have been all 10000.
Throwing out the phrase “‘scorched earth’ campaign” does not actually remove the action from the realm of genocide. I noted that the Sullivan raid was executed as reprisal in my post. While the attack at Cherry Valley, (and the far worse one at Wyoming Valley), were horrible examples of warfare, the reaction of the Sullivan campaign ratcheted up the level of violence by an order of magnitude by not merely attacking civilians, but by making their lands and farms uninhabitable.
[QUOTE=ILikeForeignLanguages;17639512There was also some guy in Australia who denied their** genocide of indigenous people, simply known as “Aboriginals.” (And, yes, that is the pc term for those that don’t know). What do you dopers think?[/QUOTE]
Around here, if I wanted to be PC I’d call them Koori, or Woiworung.
Without knowing who the ‘some guy’ is, or what he said, I can’t comment specifically: the general idea is within the bounds of respectable discourse, but Australia is a big country: people were more genocidal in areas where the population had rebounded from disease (northern Australia) or not been decimated by disease (Tasmania), but that puts most of the big Australian cities, and most Australians, in the “less genocidal” areas.
Yeah, my people here in Oklahoma currently reside in a lower-genocidal area. We were on the East coast - Philly, New York corridor - a high-genocidal area. So, circumstances and greed conspired to our advantage in that respect.
I shouldn’t complain, though. A lot of the tribes that lived around us in our ancestral homelands no longer exist. No complaining there.
Been following this thread with interest. How could I not, given the title?
Also - not to rag on you, Melbourne.
I think the actual controversy, in academic circles, is whether we arr talking about a 95% reduction over 500 years, or like a 93% reduction. Note that that isn’t just from deaths. . . .its the accumulation of deaths and the resultant lower birth rate that follows. It matters, because even a small shift in that percentage, over centuries, leads to a really different initial population estimate, and so a really different picture of pre Columbian America-was it a thriving continent full of diverse cultures, or was it largely a sparsely settled wilderness with a handful of relatively more advanced groups taking baby steps towards real civilization?
There are political implications to both visions.
When I think about it, I can’t help but believe a large reason for the white people becoming a majority in the US was because of high birth rates, not just because of the massacre of other people. Whites multiplied like rabbits in the old days, with such large families and all. And I don’t mean families with three or four children - I mean families with at least six, at most ten, twelve, sometimes even fifteen children. Maybe if the indigenous people start practicing this type of procreation, they will some day become the majority again, and ultimately end up undoing the “genocide.”
What makes you think the indigenous people had significantly smaller families than the European settlers?
Historians say that there were only about one million indigenous people when the settlers first came. That’s not a huge population, and it leads me to believe that the natives didn’t have a very procreative culture.
Which historians say that? Tenochtitlan alone had an estimated population of 200,000 when Cortes got there, and Central Mexico anywhere from 10-20 million, at least. If you believe Las Casas (which I don’t, I think his estimates are too high), Hispaniola itself had a population of a million people.
I am talking about the indigenous people of what is now the United States, not the rest of the American continent.
A million was Mooney’s estimate for the US and Canada, but pretty much everybody now agrees that’s too low. The current low estimates are around 4 million. Russell Thornton, an anthropologist at UCLA focusing on Native American population numbers, estimates the population when the Europeans came was about 7 million, 5 million in the contiguous US, 2 million in Canada, Greenland, and Alaska.
Believe what you like, but details of our “procreative culture” are nobody’s damn business.
I wasn’t personally targeting you or anyone else; I was just explaining to the person who asked me why I think indigenous people had lower birthrates than white people.
On the Trail of Tears. I dont know the specifics but the Cherokees were told to gather food and move out early while the weather was good but someone told them to wait and they would get a better deal later on.
On treaties - part of the problem with treaties with Native Americans is the whites really had no good way to communicate with the Indians. They had to use interpreters who were not always reliable or had the language ability they claimed so often times the Indians signed treaties they really did not understand. This lead to many conflicts.
The thing is in history one has always had to protect your land from outsiders. Both in North America and Australia the Europeans came, saw the land, and wanted to take it plain and simple. The Indians and Aboriginals were divided up among small tribes with no coherent government and military means to stop them. Their simply was no way to stop them. And if the Europeans hadnt done it you can bet that an Asian power would eventually have taken Australia or the Aztecs would have taken North America.
Look, we cannot change the past. I live in Kansas on land that once was the land of the Shawnee Indians but I’m not going anywhere. Nor is any resident of Sydney. The best we can do is honor those that are left.
Oh, by the way. Their is nothing stopping anyone who truly feels bad about the past from selling all their property, giving it to an Indian tribe, and moving to Europe.
I appreciate that but
A) You didn’t say anything about why you “think indigenous people had lower birthrates than white people”, now did you? You just made the unsupported claim.
B) Regarding the indigenous population of what is now the US when white settlers began arriving. There is pretty strong agreement that by that time smallpox (and other diseases, but pretty much smallpox) had decimated the native population. 9 times over. The population was roughly 10% of what it was at first contact by white [del]devils[/del] people.
Finally
C) You can post whatever you like, but I would prefer not to read any very detailed explanation of A). It would probably be getting a little skeevy for me.
Thank you.
This is almost certainly referring to Keith Windschuttle, epic loser of The History Wars. His thesis is essentially that only a handful of Aboriginal deaths in the colonial era were actually proven to be deliberate murder, so therefore there was no genocide. The possibility that the people committing genocide in the Australian bush might not be considerate enough to record their actions, a la the Nazis, fazes him not a bit.
Here are documented examples of colonists giving aboriginals poisoned flour on two occasions, killing 70 or more each time, plus two other massacres of 200 and 120 (this is all in just one state, Queensland) among many others, totally something in the region of 20,000 killed (out of perhaps 300,000 to 750,000 total population) quite aside from the unknown (but certainly high) numbers killed by disease.
In Tasmania they organised a sweep of the whole settled part of the island to “round up” the natives; while it’s not 100% clear whether they intended to kill or merely “Trail of Tears” them (as it was an epic failure, catching a whole 2 people and killing 3 more) the fallout would have been effectively the same, no doubt.
But how long could the aboriginals hoped to have held out?
They were very primitive, even more so than native americans. They lived in these small, family clans and were constantly nomadic. No unifying governments or even language. Carrying little or nothing with them and most were always naked.