History is an interpretation of the past based primarily on written sources. It is entirely possible for many people to look at the same sources of information and reasonably come up with different conclusions. There’s just no objective way to tell history and you’re always going to be biased according to some.
Well, the thing is that the US told them that the treaties they signed with the white man were going to be respected.
That is, until gold or the real value of the territory they had was discovered.
I would agree that if we had just go ahead and take it you would be correct, but one can not ignore that US law and treaties means that not all was done playing with “the old rules”
Ah yes, the white man’s burden of civilizing the savages. :rolleyes:
Gosh, we’re better than the people who beat Jews and drove them out of town periodically. I have higher standards than that. Also, the men who created the Articles of Confederation and Constitution were not all tolerant of Jews and Catholics, and even if they had been, plenty after them weren’t.True
I’m sure Matthew Shepard will be happy to hear that what happened to him was minor.
Right. In my High School we were never taught the Native American tradition of raiding another tribe and stealing their women, children and artisans to swell their ranks. We were not taught that this was done also to the white people who resented that practice dearly.
Neither can one ignore the fact that the Indians took those treaties every bit as lightly as the United States did, and that the tribes happily allied themselves with whites against other tribes.
Sooner or later, the Indians of North and South America were going to collide with the more sophisticated, complex societies of the Old World. If it had not been Europeans, it would probably have been Asians, and I am immensely skeptical that the results would have been greatly different. It was a foregone conclusion. And that is why I consider it simple-minded moralizing to speak of the white man “stealing the land.”
We know that Rev. Marshall, preaches that Watergate, the Vietnam War and Hurricane Katrina were God’s judgments on the nation’s sexual immorality.
So what about the other members of the board of education that want to change the curriculum?
David Barton, is the founder of WallBuilders:
*Now a democrat, but here is another reason why he is not a republican now, he had a mind of his own.
Daniel Dreisbach by contrast is not a “Wall Builder” but a fellow that in essence argues that the wall between church and state should be removed.
Uh uh. Just try to pass that excuse on a modern court of law.
And sooner or later one can not continue using excuses from the past to continue injustice. As soon as legal treaties entered the picture one can not just go ahead and justify the stealing of the land because Indians were robbing each other in the past. **That **is simpleminded.
Yeah pretty much. You don’t hear about people being murdered for being gay very often. Sure people get picked on in school for it, and that’s unfortunate but I bet that’s not as prevalent now as in the past.
Oh? Then you shouldn’t have any trouble giving me 5 examples that happened in the last 12 months then.
You ignored the part where I said the Indians broke the treaties just as readily as the United States. To paraphrase H.G. Wells, was the red man such an apostle of mercy as to complain if the white man warred in a similar spirit? Trying to impose simplistic moral principles on a complex history is what is simple minded.
I’m not ignoring it, while there were cases like you describe it, it is more simpleminded to just said that **that **is enough to dismiss a treaty when in many occasions tribes had very little control of their members, the invaders had more power and then the tacit support of the authorities to get rid of the Indians.
Do you think that the average kid coming out of a high school history class today (especially in Texas) thinks Jefferson was an atheist or that Jefferson was a solid Christian? Do you think they learn that the Baptists in Virginia were one of the biggest proponents of separation of church and state? Do you think they learn about The Age of Reason and how Madison supported Paine?
I’ve never heard anyone claim that Jefferson was an atheist, except in the way that Teddy Roosevelt said Paine was an atheist - in the sense of not being Christian without the excuse of being Jewish. (Paine clearly said that he wasn’t an atheist either.)
Do you think that these guidelines would be used to teach the truth about the Founding Fathers, or to make it sound like they were all good Christians?
Tribes having little control over their members is highly relevant to the enforcement of a treaty. If I sign a treaty with Joe am I obligated to keep it if Sam and Vince say, “He doesn’t speak for me?”, this is part of what is at issue with non-state terrorists. It’s a problem as old as the nation-state. The nation-state has the apparatus to enforce its citizens to abide by a treaty if it wants. If it makes a treaty with a tribe then it is treating that tribe as a sovereignty unto itself. If that tribe doesn’t actually have sovereignty over it’s people then the treaty from both ends is rather meaningless.
You are essentially saying that the Indians should have gotten a pass simply because they were disorganized and their signing of a treaty was essentially worthless because there was no unity amongst the people in the tribe.