There was certainly one predictable political outcome
to their playing with semantics. By coining the term “Native
American” -- with the capital “N” -- the idea had
been implanted that no one else can ever be called a “native
American” ... that no one else can ever call this land his
“native soil” ... and that for all other residents this
land belongs only to him who owns it, having paid his monthly
mortgage to the bankers and his annual land taxes to the
government. Our “America” has been taken from us and
turned into “Land for Rent”. The Indians will get to
keep their squalid little “reservations” (though notice
how the “Tobacco Settlement” grabs their cigarette
profits in lieu of taxation), while we are dispossessed from our
homeland -- and heritage -- which become the property of others
... and from which they, too, will be dispossessed until Mammon
owns everything.
Within this context of a third-party manipulator
(Capitalism-Marxism) playing native Americans off against the
Indians in order to rob us all of our heritage, it begins to make
sense. I can well understand how the Indians fell for the gambit.
After all, there is a deeply embedded racial hatred against
whites, which has been carefully-cultivated in everything from
school books to TV, and all of it prejudicial to our heritage.
The popular myth is that all whites are “thieves” and
“immigrants” who came here from Europe ... that this
land was a bountiful cornucopia for the Indians, until we came
and stole everything from them, destroyed all nature, worked our
black slaves to death and then gone on to ruin the whole world.
This popular ingrained (“politically-correct”)
sentiment rests entirely upon a false reading of history.
To begin with, there are only about 4 million Indians in North
America today -- more than at any time in prior history -- and
this includes a very high percentage of half-breeds of dubious
authenticity. And yet, despite such unprecedented numbers, if
everybody else were to leave this continent and give it all back
to them, the Indians could barely achieve a population density of
1 person per square mile, or roughly 2,560 acres to be cultivated
by a family of four. That is too much land for them ever to hold
onto -- even if half of it were wasteland: within twenty years
the pressure from Mexico alone would sweep them all into the sea.
And yet such a profound truth as this flies in the face of
deeply-ingrained racial prejudice against white native Americans.
We are the bad guys, and the cause of everyone else's suffering
throughout the world. It's easier to hate and get drunk than it
is to think.
At no time prior to the twentieth century had there ever been
more than two million Indians living in North America! That would
have been a population density of about one person for every 2
square miles. At the time of the English Colonization the Indian
population was less than an eighth of that -- less than one
person to 16 square miles, more than 64 square miles to be
“occupied” by a family of four! Now it is true that in
Central America the Aztecs, Mayans, and others achieved high
population densities for a brief while; but in every case these
“early civilizations” were short-lived because they
farmed-out the soil. The Indians had never learned crop rotation,
and without this technique, permanent cities could not be
sustained. Neither had the the Indians developed a mechanical
wheel for bulk transport. They had never developed the technology
of urbanization. The reason why the Indians had never been very
numerous in North America is that the continent had never been
capable of supporting a larger population until the arrival of
Europeans. This continent had always been a wilderness!
The idea that the Indians had been wise,
environmentally-conscious “caretakers” of the earth is
a misrepresentation, a false reading of the past, a myth cleverly
nurtured by the media and supported by academe, in order to
convey a “New Age” moral argument. Its presumption is
that the Indians were “civilized” because they were
savages (a restatement of Voltaire and Rousseau's argument that
Nature is superior to Religion)! This is not a clear-cut
articulation, but rather a “feeling” about the past,
colored by Marxist “social criticism”, indicting us
because our forebears are suddenly presumed to have been brutally
“unjust” toward the Indians, the poor and the
environment. We are even accused of genocide -- a patently absurd
notion -- and yet people are believing it because we have been
spoon-fed a faked historical argument that is supposed to make us
feel “guilty” about the past. By claiming that we
“stole” this land from the Indians, and then abused it,
they argue that this land can never be called “ours” --
that somehow our claim to the land in “America” is
invalid -- making it permissible for anyone else to migrate here
and claim the land as their own. No nation can tolerate this and
expect to survive.
This argument -- that we native Americans have “stolen”
our land from the Indians -- has been advanced on purely cultural
grounds. Late 19th century American popular culture had glorified
the “gunfighter” and “Indian-fighter”
stereotypes, creating an image of the “Wild West” that
was “insensitive” to the Indians. As the turn of the
century dime novel became the Hollywood “Western”, this
cultural bias was amplified to the extreme cartoon stereotype of
the Indian as a pot-bellied goof with a feather in his head and a
jug on his arm (notwithstanding the similarity of this to the
“Hillbilly” stereotype). Painfully succumbing to
political pressure, Hollywood (and New York) compensated in the
1970s by creating a whole new genre of “authentic”
Westerns (and dime novels) where the Indian is portrayed as the
noble, valiant, and eternally-wise shaman-healer, while the white
man is reduced to a filthy drunken sot who is driven by violence,
greed and cruelty. The argument is purely cultural and entirely
fictional, but it set us up for a new cultural bias, under which
we are living today.
But we digress. Returning to our argument, the reason why this
land had remained pristine was because the Indians had never
farmed it beyond poking holes in it with sticks. They were nomads
who had not even learned the arts of animal husbandry. To the
Indians, animals were here to be hunted, not bred; to be eaten,
not fed. It had been the Indians themselves who nearly extincted
the beaver and bison (the depredations of “Buffalo
Bill” and the Union Army in the 1870s notwithstanding),
selling their pelts to Jewish furriers for tin-pots and guns.
This had gone on for centuries. One of the reasons why the
Indians had been so willing to “sell” vast tracts of
wilderness to colonial land speculators is that the wildlife had
already been nearly extincted by Indian fur-trappers.
As regards agriculture, whenever the Indians had tried their hand
at farming, they ended up with an ecological disaster on their
hands because they had never learned the skills of crop-rotation
and preserving the fertility of the soil. Seemingly prescient of
those other primitives who are today burning down the rain
forests to create marginal farmland that goes barren in three
years, the Indians knew only that they must keep migrating, lest
they deplete the forests and the soil. There are fields in Europe
that have been farmed continuously for over three millennia, and
are still fertile as ever. There was nothing at all like that in
the Americas until Europeans came here.
It is man who makes the earth fertile. Nature in her primeval
state is harsh and unyielding, and the Earth gives her bounty
begrudgingly. Any survivalist knows this, whether he steals
acorns from the squirrels or honey from bees: it is better to
plant potatoes and beans than to live off the land as a
scavenger. It is man who makes the earth bear fruit, so that she
can support bountiful life. Because of farming, there are more
deer in upstate New York today than there were a thousand years
ago. When our ancestors came here, this continent was so barren
it could barely support a million Indians, much less feed half
the world as it does today. If the Indians have lain here for
400,000 years with “Mother Nature”, then she truly must
be their sister or mother; because it was the White Man who
impregnated her. If the Indians can lay claim on the earth as her
“children”, then the White Man may be considered her
“spouse” -- as in husbandry.
The Pre-Columbuan “civilizations” in the Americas had
all collapsed within a few generations because they had
farmed-out the land, destroying its fertility. They were failed
civilizations because they were failures: the Europeans found
these people brutal savages: wicked, bloodthirsty and vile as
any, who delighted in acts of abomination. They would make public
festivals of human torture and mutilation ... inventing the most
horrifying methods of vivisection that drew out their victims'
agony for days -- and usually ended with the little children of
the village finishing-off their hapless mutilated corpses ...
because the Indians believed that it was good for their children
to be taught how to kill without mercy, and they wanted these
little children to grow up to become fierce, bloodthirsty and
cruel.
Neither did the Indians suffer any “unfair” advantage
in military technology, short of sailing vessels. No sooner had
the whites established a foothold in the Carolinas in the 17th
century, for example, than the Cherokee were arming themselves
with the most modern rifles. This held true for virtually all the
tribes, who also, at various times, were armed at our expense to
help as allies in several colonial wars. They were a formidable
fighting force, and they often took man-for-man in battle. Our
ancestors paid for this land in blood. Those who accuse us of
“stealing this country from the Indians” are committing
slander, beyond ordinary insult, and deserve to be deported with
contempt.
The land belongs to him who occupies it, tends to it, and holds
it, as a wife belongs to her husband. That is the foundation of
ALL civilization and, in this respect, the Indians had never
managed to cut the cloth. They “lost” this land because
they could not populate it: they barely tended it, vaguely
occupied it, and couldn't hold it. If we lose this land -- which
is ours as a wife belongs to her husband -- then it will be for
much the same reason. Countrymen, take heed!
As regards those who charge us with genocide, accusing the white
races of intentionally infecting the poor Indians with smallpox
and plague, this too is a lie and a slander. The simple fact of
the matter is, that the Amerindians themselves contained a
biological time-bomb within their own genes, combined with
pathetically poor “medicine-magic”. It is absurd to
imagine that the Indians could have lived forever in their own
isolated and protected little biosphere. Sooner or later they
would have been exposed to the fevers and flu. The microbes could
have come from a shipwrecked sailor, a dolphin or a migrating
goose. Just as the Black Plague had wiped out more than a third
of the European population in the 14th century -- and nobody
cries today over the Asian, African and Muslim invasions that
followed in its wake -- it was inevitable that, someday, the
plagues would break out among the Amerindians. No one could have
prevented it. Because the plagues were inevitable, the agents who
transmitted them are irrelevant. There is no axe to grind and the
Indians may as well accept the fact that it was their own genetic
deficiency and medical malpractice at fault. They can only blame
nature, their gods and themselves.
In the sixteenth century, virtually all people (both Indians and
Spaniards) believed that plague was caused by bad air, vapours
and evil spirits, or it was a punishment from God. Microbes
weren't discovered until the 19th century, when Louis Pasteur
tried to convince surgeons to wash their hands before cutting
people open. The idea of an intentional genocide committed
against the Indians, using biological agents on a massive and
organized scale, is patently absurd.
By the time our people arrived, the plague had already done its
work, and the surviving Indians had developed substantial
immunity. It is well-recorded that, during the 18th century and
as far back as Pocahontas, a number of Indians were able to
survive quite healthily in England. The Indians continued to die
from disease in America because of their own perverted
“medicine-magic” -- plunging sick people into ice-cold
rivers and the like. The idea that the Indian shaman was some
kind of a wonderful mystic healer is another Hollywood hoax.
It is important to understand that, not only had the depopulation
of the North American Indians occurred before the arrival of the
settlers from Northwestern Europe who built America, but that the
North American Indians had never been that populous. North
America at the time was a barren wilderness, and it had never
supported a large population of either people or animals. The
“vast grazing herds” and “forests teeming with
wildlife” are a myth. There may have been a few large herds
of buffalo -- but so rare and few that the Indians themselves
were lucky to encounter them once or twice a year! Neither is any
forest that is regularly hunted rich in game. That's why Indian
hunting parties would be often gone for weeks! There never was a
vast population of North American Indians to begin with, because
the land had always been a primeval wilderness.
If, at the time of Columbus, there had been (at most) one million
Indians east of the Mississippi (a very high estimate), by the
early 1700s there were barely 200,000 -- and this we know. At the
time of the American Revolution, there were only about 35,000
Indian warriors in all of the lands between the Mississippi and
the Atlantic, and yet 95% of this land was unsettled by whites!
How can you call this “genocide”? If whites had wanted
to wipe out the Indians, it would have been easy for us, except
for the vastness of empty land to be traversed! The Indian Wars
of the 17th and 18th centuries were hardly more than skirmishes,
with rarely more than 200 combatants on either side. The issues
at stake were horse and cattle theft, trespass of hunting and
trapping grounds, private vendettas and the like ... but genocide
was hardly an issue. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 -- which
created the territories of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and
Wisconsin -- contained special provisions that whites were to
stay away from the Indians and keep off Indian lands. This is
hardly compatible with a plan of genocide. In 1806, when my
ancestors settled in the Indiana territory to clear the land for
farms that would make it bountiful and productive, the Indians
had already left, and the land was uninhabited. That is why there
is no record in my family history of anyone having killed an
Indian, even though my people were the first whites to settle
there.
Neither is it true that there were no protections granted the
Indians. The treaties of Paris (1783) and Ghent (1814) contained
special provisions on behalf of the Indian Nations. They were
granted recognition (moreso than “white Nationalists”
today). If the Indians can claim “rights” based on
early treaties, how can they also claim that the treaties were
unfair? You can't cut the cake both ways, other than to pick a
bone of contention. Why bother, and what more to gain? Anyone who
visits an Indian casino understands how amply they are being
recompensed.
Now it is true that there were a handful of individuals, from
Benjamin Franklin to Hayman Levy and Samson Simpson, who had
plans to build an empire in America, and who may have been quite
happy to see the Indians disappear (though not really necessary,
since there were hardly enough to be found). But here I admonish
the reader that my own people have been as much victims of this
conspiracy as the Indians.
I reflect on the story of how the “Indians” (Mohawk?
Algonquian? Who remembers who it was?) sold Manhattan to the
Dutch for $24 worth of glass. It was not a clean deal because the
Indians knew that they would lose Manhattan in the end, and
therefore the transaction had been made under duress. They simply
were not strong enough to successfully defend it, and they
accepted a fee for not contesting the matter at the time.
Presently, it is the Indians who are getting reimbursed more
prodigally through government sanction of tribal monopolies over
gambling, tobacco and gasoline (perhaps they hadn't been so
foolish), while it is we who are about to lose everything.
As I reviewed the home pages of various Indian Nations, I am
impressed with their apparent cultural vitality and prospects for
economic growth. They are reaping the best of both worlds, and
all avenues of advancement are now open to them. The sufferings
of the past are past, and I can hardly imagine any other peoples
in North America -- not even the Jews -- who can face the future
with greater confidence, security and optimism. The only cloud I
can see in their sky is a nagging presentiment that it is all too
good to be true, that a worm is lurking somewhere in their bed.
Maybe it came in with all the plastic tomahawks (made in Taiwan)
that they sell to tourists in their tribal hotel/casino gift
shops.
Excerpted from the overly-long 'Who are the native americans' by
'Grugyn Silverbristle'
http://www.servtech.com/~grugyn/tlc-63.htm
* * Back to the Home Page of John "Birdman" Bryant, the World's Most Controversial Author * *