PART ONE
Rather than domesticating animals
for hides and meat, Indigenous communities created havens to attract elk, deer,
bear, and other game. They burned the
undergrowth in forests so that the young grasses and other ground cover that
sprouted the following spring would entire greater numbers of herbivores and
the predators that fed on them, which would sustain the people who ate them
both.
By the time of European invaders,
Indigenous peoples had occupied and shaped every part of the Americas,
established extensive trade networks and roads, and were sustaining their
populations by adapting to specific natural environments, but they also adapted
nature to suit human ends.
The culture of conquest didn’t start with
Europeans crossing the Atlantic.
European institutions and the worldview of conquest and colonialism had
formed several centuries before that. … In addition to seeking wealth,
colonizers expressed a Christian zeal that justified colonialism.
Part of the Christian colonizers’ outlook
was a belief in white supremacy…. Whiteness as an ideology involves much more
than skin color.
According to current consensus among
historians, the wholesale transfer of land from Indigenous to Euro-American
hands that occurred in the Americas after 1492 is due less to European
invasion, warfare, and material acquisitiveness than to the bacteria that the
invaders unwittingly brought with them. … Such an absolutist assertion render
any other fate for the Indigenous peoples improbable. … If disease could have
done the job, it is not clear why the European colonizers in American found it
necessary to carry out unrelenting wars against Indigenous communities in order
to gain every inch of land they took from them – nearly 300 years of colonial
warfare.
Gold fever drove colonizing ventures….
Thus was born an ideology: the belief in
the inherent value of gold despite its relative useless in reality. …
Subjugating entire societies and civilizations, enslaving whole countries, and
slaughtering people village by village did not seem too high a price to pay,
not did it appear inhumane. The systems
of colonization were modern and rational, but its ideological basis was madness.
With the onset of colonialism in
North America, control of the land was wrenched away from the Indigenous
peoples, and the forest grew dense, so that later European settlers were
unaware of the former cultivation and sculpting and manicuring of the landscape. Abandoned fields of corn turned to weeds and
bushes. Settlers chopped down trees in
New England until the landscape was nearly bare. … Anglo-Americans who did
observe Native habitat management in action misunderstood what they saw.
Native peoples had created townsites,
farms, monumental earthworks and networks of roads, and they had devised a wide
variety of governments, some as complex as any in the world. They had developed sophisticated philosophies
of government, traditions of diplomacy, and policies of international
relations. They conducted trade along
roads that crisscrossed the landmasses and waterways in the American
continents. Before the arrival of
Europeans, North America was indeed a “continent of villages”, but also a
continent of nations and federations of nations.
The US still invades countries under
the guise of rescue.
Bounties for Indigenous scalps were
honored even in absence of war. Scalps
and indigenous children become means of exchange, currency, and this
development may even have created a black market. Scalp hunting was not only a profitable
privatized enterprise but also a means to eradicate or subjugate the Indigenous
populations of the Anglo-American Atlantic seaboard. The settlers gave a name to the mutilated and
bloody corpses they left in the wake of scalp hunts: redskins.
Neither superior technology nor an
overwhelming number of settlers made up the mainspring of the birth of the
United States or the spread of its power over the entire world. Rather, the chief cause was the colonialist
settler-states willingness to eliminate whole civilizations of people in order
to possess their land.
The continuity between invading and
occupying sovereign Indigenous nations in order to activate continental control
in North America and employing the same tactics overseas to achieve global
control is key to understanding the future of the United States in the world.
