By Juan Montoya
Just over 526 years ago, natives of a Caribbean island woke up to find three boatloads of hungry (and lost) Europeans announcing to them that they had been discovered. What’s more, they said the land now belonged to them and their king.
The next five centuries would be devastating for the natives, who shared their food and resources with the new arrivals.
From the very start, no matter how generous the natives (whom the Europeans called Indians in the mistaken belief they had reached India) were, the white visitors always seemed to want more.Over time, the leader, one Christopher Columbus, not only took their food and shelter, but he also implemented a system of tribute. The natives were perplexed at why the Europeans were so greedy for the yellow shiny metal avaricious in the quest for gold, they started demanding that they hand over the metal objects they used as decorations.
As the Europeans become more desperate for gold, they forced the natives to dedicate their entire days working in mines and river beds to search for the shiny metal. As time went on, the natives begin dying off from over work, new diseases against which they had no immunity, and at the hands of their cruel new masters.
Needing more labor as the gentle tribes were decimated at the hands of the avaricious conquistadores, they persuaded Queen Isabella to issue a writ ordering that any so-called caribs, or cannibals, could be used as slave labor in their mines. Any native who resisted, it turned out, could be classified as a carib.
Further north, the story would be repeated against the natives there. This time, the new arrivals ostensibly came seeking religious freedom. But while they were seeking tolerance for their views, they afforded the natives little, if any.
Illustrative of this missionary zeal to convert the heathens into Christians is Henry Wordsworth Longfellow's Hiawatha, where toward the end of the poem Hiawatha hosts a missionary who tells them about their white God. In the morning, the missionaries wake up go find themselves alone in the empty lodge.
Now, that Hiawatha knew something.
Now, that Hiawatha knew something.
Columbus died convinced he had discovered India and that China was not too far over the next mountain range. Subsequent conquistadores spread across the face of a land they called America and laid waste to entire tribes looking for treasure and plunder. The annals of the conquista are full of narratives where natives were torn apart by war dogs or burned alive when Spaniards thought they were holding out on gold deposits.
In one relato, a burial area that was on a platform was torn apart and the remains relieved of their gold burial ornaments.Mexico City was leveled, as was the Inca nation. Unspeakable cruelty was perpetrated in the name of God, King, and civilization.
The so-called “Columbian Exchange” was a lopsided affair. The Old World got the riches of these nations, and “America” got disease and slaughter in return. The Old World got unimaginable wealth in the form of foodstuffs that saved entire European nations from famine (potatoes) gave humanity a crop that would in time become the most important addition to the world’s granary – corn.
Today, corn, a wild grass domesticated by the natives some 15,000 years ago, is now the biggest cash crop in the United States, if not the world. The native nations had no immigration policies, a slight oversight in retrospect.
The United States, in turn, also adopted a policy of genocide against its natives. Those it could not kill outright, were dispossessed of their ancestral lands and forcibly moved across the country to unimaginably uninhabitable terrain.
The Cherokees and Seminoles were moved from the semitropical Southeast to the arid plains of Oklahoma. The eastern tribes were moved into the Black Hills and plains of South Dakota.
The rest were packed into squalid reservations. To this day, some Native activists will not accept a $20 bill because it bears the face of Andrew Jackson, the president who defied the U.S. Supreme Court and removed the people from their lands at huge cost in lives of the old and young alike.
Somehow, the native people have been able to survive and their Great Spirit looked over them.
The Cherokees in Oklahoma found out that their reservations lay atop underground oceans of oil. And in the Black Hills, uranium and gold were discovered. And, as they were sovereign nations in treaty with the United States, they could have gaming on their squalid reservations. And they built casinos, and the people came. And they are still coming.
Next time you’re in Indian country and have a chance to visit one of their pow-wows, do yourself a favor and go. The beat of the drum and the chanting of the dancers resonate as one with the very rhythm of their Mother Earth just as it has since long before Columbus stumbled upon this continent and made his “discovery.”
It's not only Turkey Day. It's time to be appreciative of the native peoples that made all we have possible. M'gwetch.
8 comments:
Interesting how you use the "European" explorers to insinuate that they were English Europeans.
When you know they were mostly Spaniards and a small amount of Italians.
Spain was responsible for the so called invasion.
Some 100 people, many of them seeking religious freedom in the New World, set sail from England on the Mayflower in September 1620. That November, the ship landed on the shores of Cape Cod, in present-day Massachusetts. A scouting party was sent out, and in late December the group landed at Plymouth Harbor, where they would form the first permanent settlement of Europeans in New England. These original settlers of Plymouth Colony are known as the Pilgrim Fathers, or simply as the Pilgrims.
The group that set out from Plymouth, in southwestern England, in September 1620 included 35 members of a radical Puritan faction known as the English Separatist Church. In 1607, after illegally breaking from the Church of England, the Separatists settled in the Netherlands, first in Amsterdam and later in the town of Leiden, where they remained for the next decade under the relatively lenient Dutch laws. Due to economic difficulties, as well as fears that they would lose their English language and heritage, they began to make plans to settle in the New World. Their intended destination was a region near the Hudson River, which at the time was thought to be part of the already established colony of Virginia. In 1620, the would-be settlers joined a London stock company that would finance their trip aboard the Mayflower, a three-masted merchant ship, in 1620. A smaller vessel, the Speedwell, had initially accompanied the Mayflower and carried some of the travelers, but it proved unseaworthy and was forced to return to port by September.
The native inhabitants of the region around Plymouth Colony were the various tribes of the Wampanoag people, who had lived there for some 10,000 years before the Europeans arrived. Soon after the Pilgrims built their settlement, they came into contact with Tisquantum, or Squanto, an English-speaking Native American. Squanto was a member of the Pawtuxet tribe (from present-day Massachusetts and Rhode Island) who had been seized by the explorer John Smith’s men in 1614-15. Meant for slavery, he somehow managed to escape to England, and returned to his native land to find most of his tribe had died of plague. In addition to interpreting and mediating between the colonial leaders and Native American chiefs (including Massasoit, chief of the Pokanoket), Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn, which became an important crop, as well as where to fish and hunt beaver. In the fall of 1621, the Pilgrims famously shared a harvest feast with the Pokanokets; the meal is now considered the basis for the Thanksgiving holiday.
Article Title
The Pilgrims
Author
History.com Editors
Website Name
HISTORY
URL
https://www.history.com/topics/colonial-america/pilgrims
Mexican mestizos killed native Americans not the English
Spain was responsible for the Trail of Tears in which Americans forced Native Americans to march hundreds of miles from their fertile homelands to the driest, most inhospitable land? Sounds like a Republican.
It is amazing to me how people just copy and paste nonsense as truth. The Pilgrams had zero tolerance for religious freedom. Rhode Island was the first truly religious free colony. My grandfather 11 generations removed, and I have the documents to prove this, was kidnapped from Rhode Island by the leaders of Massachusettes for return to England as a heretic for being a Baptist. The indigenous people, Narragansett, saved him in Conn and returned him safely to Rhode Island. How Thanksgiving came about may be true - not really since a harvest festival of thanks was already happening in civilizations all over the planet - Mass did not have religious freedom and the claim is 100% false. The Pilgrams came for their religion while prosecuting everyone who did not follow their religion. They were an intolerant people which is why the Narragansett people of Rhode Island were welcoming of those who sought true religious freedom and fought against the leaders of Mass.
And for the record like most of the original settlers of Rhode Island paid the Narragansett for the land
Bobby WC
If trump and Betsy DeVos stay you can be assure those comments above will become a thing of the past mark my word.
All we need now is somebody to say I am Roger Williams and I have papers to prove it...Ha
It always amuses me how these gringos always have papers for anything they purchase papers that are manufactured by charmin the island, cattle ranches agriculture lands the city of brownsville, fort brown etc on and on some might have been bought legally and some they quick deed and other scams but they do have the papers to prove whatever
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