HOW WE WEAPONIZED RELIGION AGAINST NATIVE AMERICANS

 

The Song of Hiawatha

XXII. Hiawatha's Departure

By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Then the Black-Robe chief, the Prophet,

Told his message to the people,

Told the purport of his mission,

Told them of the Virgin Mary,

And her blessed Son, the Saviour,

How in distant lands and ages

He had lived on earth as we do;

How he fasted, prayed, and labored;

How the Jews, the tribe accursed,

Mocked him, scourged him, crucified him;

How he rose from where they laid him,

Walked again with his disciples,

And ascended into heaven."

(After the priests had gone to sleep, Hiawatha left his village on his canoe and departed west.)

"If the Americans were a providential people destined to regenerate the other peoples of the world, then the American Indians became the first test. They occupied the land which they intended to transform into an empire for liberty.

"From the beginning of the English settlement in America, there had been a dual image of the North American Indians. There had always been an admiration for the supposed simple life as well as hatred for the "savage" violence. The Puritans at first had high hopes of saving the souls in North America and at first thought in terms of Indian acculturation. Their position was, of course, ethnocentric. They believed the Indians would readily give up their way of life and gladly accept the God and the civilization that was being offered to them.

"A rapid disillusionment set in as the Indians came to be viewed as a stumbling block to civilization, and in New England they were viewed with particular hatred as agents of the devil. In general the Indians by the latter years of the 17th Century were despised because they had tried to remain Indian and had shown little desire to become Christian gentlemen. 

"The Indians could therefore be thrown off the land, mistreated, or slaughtered, because in rejecting the opportunities offered to them they had shown that they were sunk deep into irredeemable savagery. In practice, like the blacks, they were regarded as different human beings even when there was general rationale to explain any racial differences..."

"In shaping an Indian policy the Americans of the Revolutionary generation had their first experience of discovering what the creation of an American empire for liberty meant to other peoples. A great new nation was to rise on the North American continent. 

"What was to be the place of the Indians within this nation? From the time of the Revolution it was apparent that the attitude of the actual empire builders, and ultimately the attitudes of the empire builders, not the leaders of the Revolutionary generation, were to prevail."

"Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism": Reginald Horsman, Harvard University Press, 1981