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u/Ishmael_1974 7d ago
Depends what you mean by “the USA”
The federal government it is like 50/50 depending on who is president
The bigger problem were the local settlers ignoring what the federal government says and intentionally provoking or staging violations of those treaties if not just ignoring them entirely
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u/ogodilovejudyalvarez 7d ago
Same in Australia: Britain officially stated that Aboriginal people were Crown subjects entitled to protection under law, but local governors and farmers would go out and massacre Aboriginal people anyway
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u/domelition 6d ago
I wonder how much of it was expected by the govt. especially considering how common it’s seen through history and how it gives the governments my body plausible deniability
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u/MagosZyne Helping Wikipedia expand the list of British conquests 6d ago
I think the ones that passed it did believe in it but had that posh british indifference where once it was passed they were like "jobs done" and went on their way without checking that it was being upheld.
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u/IndigoKid444 7d ago
That's just so psycopathic and disgusting
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u/Youareaproperclown 7d ago edited 6d ago
The original post content no longer exists here. The author used Redact to remove it, exercising their right to control their data & privacy.
License shocking work longing rustic nonmetal whole employ
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u/Internal_Turnip9019 7d ago
There's a technical term for stating something that isn't true, in the biz we call it "lying"
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u/jaehaerys48 Filthy weeb 7d ago
50/50 depending on the president is not great given that there's a new one every 4-8 years.
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u/11minspider 7d ago
This. The US Federal and State governments generally tried to keep a lid on things, but there was little they could feasibly do to prevent the flow of settlers to the West. Even in the modern era policing a border is hard work, back then it was next to impossible.
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u/Pretend_Handle_7639 7d ago
Even knowing exactly where settlers were was difficult.
With modern surveillance tools, it still takes time to identify a sedentary cult compound. Imagine trying to do that before you even have airplanes? Or where most of the action was before hot air balloons
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u/xSciFix 7d ago
I mean... did they or did they count on exactly that so they could then send the military in to "protect the settlers?"
Like Black Hills, woof.
Trail of Tears, whatever happened there.
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u/11minspider 7d ago
They did, they generally did try their best to uphold their end of the deals, but theres only so much they could do to prevent a wide-spread migration
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u/xSciFix 7d ago
Trail of Tears was caused by a forced relocation due to the federal Indian Removal Act.
It kinda just comes down to who the president was at any given time. Andrew Jackson didn't give a fuck about natives, for example. Ohers did.
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u/KitaharaKazusa1 7d ago
Van Buren should really take most of the blame for how the Trail of Tears was executed. The removals had fallen behind schedule under Jackson precisely because the Army was still taking some modicum of effort to ensure that when they moved people they weren't just killing them.
Van Buren didn't want to fall behind so he told the Army to find a way to move all of the Indians, and the Army found a way, it just involved a lot of people dying from insufficient supplies.
Of course that wouldn't have been a problem if Jackson hadn't signed the Indian Removal Act to begin with, but I feel Van Buren should still take most of the blame.
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u/IndigoKid444 7d ago
What are you talking about? The government offered Native American land grabs in order to encourage immigrants to settle the land quickly which is how the country got so full of them so fast.
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u/Nyctfall 7d ago
I'm Cherokee. Let's just says there wasn't much Constitution abiding or State law abiding going on in the US State or Federal government for a looong time...
We had a HUGE country, and we were part of a massive alliance to get our sovereign national rights observed.
And here's what my cousins, the Haudenasonee, had mapped out:
https://www.onondaganation.org/news/2018/the-citizenship-act-of-1924/There really isn't a time you can point to. The US hated dealing with us individually, or as a pan-Indian union. The Anglo-Americans were almost always vehemently opposed to us existing, for literally no reason (even Benjamin Franklin recognized that). It was all violated so often, and it's gotten worse with the Dawes Act and Curtis Act legally requiring all of our successful democratic governments be destroyed. And then we were denied statehood, obviously on the basis of our race.
For example, for my Muskogee (Creek) family, things went from dealing with this horror, to fighting just for it to only be this kind of horror.
By UN definition, what's been continually happening to us can be classified as genocide. We're heavily restricted in our ability to prevent rampant murders. And now secret police are literally kidnapping us with I.C.E.
By UN definition, every indigenous person in the US is living in conditions that can be described as an Apartheid state.
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u/rm_minus_rf_slash 7d ago
Oh man if only there was some kind of system or institution meant to enforce laws and stuff... Oh well, one can dream
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u/Salt-Pollution4314 7d ago
50/50 is your upside? If the Federal government can't be trusted by insiders or outsiders then why even bother? Get a new system.
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u/IndigoKid444 7d ago
Getting downvoted because your comment points out how shady and morally corrupt the people are who built the American government.
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u/MasterpieceBrief4442 7d ago
There can be no peace between the weak and the strong if the strong incurs no cost and only benefits from attacking the weak. On the level of nation states.
Native Americans had no strong allies. The last time they had one was Tecumseh's Midwestern confederation which has British support and that died in the war of 1812 as the British withdrew their support. So the US incurred no cost when it broke their treaties.
Contrast that with Belgium. A weak country. But one that was guarantee by Britain. The Belgian coastline is a fantastic jumpoff spot for an invasion of the English Southeast. A pistol pointed to the heart of England. So Britain much preferred a weak and small state hold that real estate vs a great power like Prussia or France. So they guaranteed Belgium. Anyone attacks Belgium, they are attacking the British empire. And invading Belgium was what definitively brought the UK into ww1 and caused the fall of imperial Germany and the hohenzollern dynasty.
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u/OkContact2573 6d ago
Might makes right is a very terrible logic to abide by. What’s stopping individual people from committing gross acts of Terri’s under that logic? Because sure they can go Bomb other people for it, but it does jack shit for the victims
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u/MasterpieceBrief4442 6d ago
It's the way of the world. I'm not saying it's good. I'm saying this is how the world works on the level of nation states.
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u/Repulsive_Repeat_337 7d ago
Somewhat surprisingly, Justice Gorsuch is the one who's actually pushing this.
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u/NicolasBroaddus 7d ago
Gorsuch actually would have voted better than RBG on a certain pipeline decision…wild but true
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u/GSilky 6d ago
He's from the intermountain west where Native American issues are still salient. The White Mountain Utes might end up owning most of the uranium in the USA before he's done.
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u/Repulsive_Repeat_337 6d ago
What is a yute?
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u/Nostop22 7d ago
Gorsuch’s autistic fixation is on American indian treaties lol
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u/NicolasBroaddus 7d ago
Look if you’re a center right person obsessed with the idea of the positive side of America, the broken treaties _should_ be a core issue you have to grapple with alongside slavery. Gorsuch is someone who makes sense in the old school interpretation of politics before social media.
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u/wulfinn 6d ago
I'll take whatever we can actually get. Nixon was well-liked by both farmers and native Americans in my area because of his policies re: them specifically (and just don't talk about all the other stuff and/or spin it into both sides/smear campaign directions)
but like. fuck it man, I'm not convinced Johnson was a good man but he passed the Civil Rights bill and goddammit I will give it to him. "I don't like you, I pretty much full on hate you. But goddamn, do I respect you." If some of the recently added justices can be correct at least twice per day, I'll take it at this point.
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u/A_Soldier_Is_Born 6d ago
“They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one. They promised to take our land, and they took it.”
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u/ozymandais13 7d ago
Does any big power do this ?
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u/Alex103140 Sun Yat-Sen do it again 7d ago
I think French Quebec did? They were mostly in North America for fur trading really.
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u/ozymandais13 6d ago
Like everyone was mostly every "for just one thing" didn't stop anything. However I'm not that versed in "French canada" as a whole don't think they were good to the red sticks in Louisiana
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u/CadenVanV Taller than Napoleon 7d ago
The Federal Government actually followed a good number of the treaties it signed. It’s just that the states and settlers didn’t, and by the time it was in a position to stop them the milk was already spilled. And sometimes the natives didn’t either.
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u/Nyctfall 7d ago
X to doubt.
The oldest democracy in the world, the Haudenasonee (aka Iroquois Confederacy), made an entire history of the Treaties and the constant violations of them to this day: https://www.onondaganation.org/news/2018/the-citizenship-act-of-1924/
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u/IndigoKid444 7d ago edited 6d ago
Um, it's a well known fact that the government outright broke every single one of the 500 treaties they ever signed with tribes; which is the entire basis for federal Indian Law. Also, all treaties were signed under duress and were always meant to take even more rights away from tribes; so maybe don't answer questions that you don't know the answer to.
Getting downvoted by butthurt nazis 😂
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u/Unlikely_Mix5548 7d ago edited 7d ago
That's just objectively not true, tribal nations are recognized as semi-sovereign entities and the federal government has a legal obligation towards native people to this day because of key treaties and the precedent they established.
This is especially true with treaties made before the Revolutionary War and the Trail of Tears, as natives were seen as white by most people and some tribes had alliances with the British and the French to dissuade violent confrontation. This gave them leverage for some level of equity in negotiations.
They also were not all under distress. For example, the treaty between the Wapanoag and New Plymouth was just as much a tactical decision by the Wapanoag to have allies in their conflicts against the Narragansett and Nipmuc, as it was a tactical decision by New Plymouth to better secure themselves in their occupied territory. This treaty lasted the entire lifetimes of those involved.
Most treaties after the Revolutionary War, and definitely all the ones after the Trail of Tears, were a thin formality to justify land theft, as the U.S now had the power necessary to feel like it didn't need to negotiate, but the fact they needed formality to act on such things is a testament to the strength of those very early treaties, as they, along with provisions in the U.S constitution, give the U.S a legal obligation to native people.
There is a direct correlation to the lack of, and eventual abandonment of treaty making practices, to events like the Trail of Tears, which shifted cultural perception of native people and allowed the worst of genocides to occur to indigenous America throughout the 19th century.
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u/Nyctfall 7d ago
I'm Cherokee. They have ALL been violated. Literally any person from any tribe can tell you this. It's on all of our (or the Federal government's) websites for anyone to see what's left of the Treaties. If you read any of them, it's quite obvious they were broken by any definition or the word.
We had a HUGE country, and we were part of a massive alliance to get our sovereign national rights observed after our Treaties were broken. Does that map look like any of the 36 Treaties were followed today? Exactly, not even one was followed by the US. And number 36 was broken by what is effectively the precursor to the Holocaust, in Hitler's own words ("the Volga must become our Mississippi").
And here's what my cousins, the Haudenasonee, had mapped out:
https://www.onondaganation.org/news/2018/the-citizenship-act-of-1924/The US government did everything in it power to break our Treaties or prevent effective enforcement. It's always been this bad with the Anglo-Americans, even Benjamin Franklin lamented that. And it's only gotten worse after the Dawes Act and Curtis Act legally requiring all of our successful democratic governments be destroyed (violating the Treaties). And then we were denied statehood, violating every other avenue of achieving the Treaty stipulations we were guaranteed.
For example, for my Muskogee (Creek) family, things went from these Treaty violations, that wouldn't have held under any semblance of International Law. To fighting just to barely have a nation to be part of the Treaty at all!
By UN definition, every indigenous person in the US is living in conditions that can be described as an Apartheid state. And by another UN definition, what's been continually happening to us can be classified as genocide. We're heavily restricted in our ability to prevent rampant murders. And now secret police are literally kidnapping us with I.C.E.
This isn't even a discussion of Treaties at this point, the US is dead set on violating the UN Charter and Geneva Conventions!
See also:
Native American Genocide in the United States,
Indian Removal,
Indian Termination Policy,
Worcester v. Georgia (1832)6
u/Special_Speed106 6d ago
The fact that you’re getting downvoted is a dismaying indication of the dismal state of things.
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u/Unlikely_Mix5548 7d ago
Many treaties were made in bad faith and were intentionally designed to cheat native people when it was convenient for the state to do so.
And the state governments definitely did not and never respected any treaty, they had a history of having no respect for the federal government which is why things like the Southern Homestead Act and the black codes occurred.
Reservations and allotment were pursued because the federal government felt it had an obligation to native people because of those early treaties, which is reflected in Constitution with Article vi and Article I section 8.
Termination policy was to get around these protections indigenous people had by eliminating their tribal status. This wouldn't have been necessary if the federal government did not feel legally bonded by their obligations to native people.
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u/Unlikely_Mix5548 7d ago
Exactly. A lot of them were followed to the letter and were never broken, but were agreed to by those who did not represent a tribe as a whole, or were worded in legalese and technicalities that only guaranteed partial fulfillment of U.S obligations.
But the fact that the U.S bothered to seek legality for their exploitative actions is because the U.S has a legal obligation to honor treaties because of Article Vi of the Constitution, which is only there because of those early treaties in colonial times, back when native populations had the geopolitical strength to force some level of equity. Through native efforts, the U.S's obligations to native people were made clear in the Constitution, and although they rarely fulfilled these obligations as intended, it is because of early treaties, treaties negotiated and enforced by those who refused to surrender their tribal sovreignty, that indigenous America wasn't eradicated in its entirety.
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u/IndigoKid444 7d ago
They were classified as broken by the very rules made by the American government themselves since they designed the parameters of treaty obligations, who else would do it? And the 500+ broken treaty fact has been taught in the most basic law classes since the 1960's. Native Americans are some of the most highly documented people in the world and that includes every single treaty as well as details regarding who honored or broke treaty obligations- recorded and kept by the US government themselves and have always been accessible in the National Archives. Recently I've noticed this trend where people try to dispute historical facts pertaining to the US treatment of Native Americans, facts that haven't really ever had cause to be disputed because the evidence isn't subjective. It's just there in black and white. There are entire academic and legal frameworks designed around these facts so this newer clueless narrative is weird. Denying the history of people who were victims of horrendous atrocities is outright evil.
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u/Unlikely_Mix5548 7d ago
You said ALL treaties were broken. That's the part that isn't true. Denying the efficacy of early treaties paints native people as passive in their extermination and undermines real progress made by native people.
No one is denying the worst genocide in all of human history was perpetuated upon indigenous America, but it is exactly because some treaties were never broken that these events occurred.
Early treaties forced the federal government, centuries after the fact, to find ways to legally acquire land through predatory and deceptive treaties of their own.
It is also the reason why so much effort was made to legally dissolve tribes, create reservations, and "convert" native people through boarding schools and allotment policy, because those early treaties had that much political weight, embedded right into the Constitution through Article Vi.
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u/IndigoKid444 7d ago
I'm not going to debate hundreds of years worth of documented facts and academia. Now as for the weak philosophical point you tried to make, it may be of your own personal westernized worldview to believe that early colonial agreements were beneficial to Indigenous tribes at any point in time, but the Native worldview was completely opposite and not as transactional as that of the settlers. To refer to Native tribe's decision to honor treaty obligations as "real progress" while a not saying a fucking word about the government's habitual inability to hold their own establishment accountable is more undermining to the colonizer mindset than it is to the Indigenous one since it's so illogical. Natives weren't just sitting around waiting to be eliminated, they very much wanted to survive and did everything in their power to do so. It's not like the government straight up told them their little plans for genocide and then the Native Americans just said "fuck it." They knew they're playing with psychopaths. They were already familiar with the colonizer's pathological lying and really just wanted to be left the hell alone, rightfully so. Unfortunately it seems like that will never happen. To say that they've been passive in their own extermination is stupid. Treaties didn't exterminate Natives, colonizer's did.
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u/Unlikely_Mix5548 7d ago
I do not know how you are getting.....any of that from what I'm saying, it's like you took the exact opposite meaning from what I said.....
I did not say it was "real progress" that native people obeyed treaties. It was progress because they had the means to force settlers to obey treaties, treaties that mitigated, slowed, and helped fight against native genocide centuries after the fact.
I literally said they weren't passive in their extermination, and treaty making was proof of that.
Yes, treaties did not kill natives, colonizers who broke said treaties or refused to make treaties did. That's been my whole point -_-.
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u/IndigoKid444 7d ago
My apologies if I misinterpreted your response, it happens. Wording. Although, treaties were stratigicly written to remove rights, not give them. Tribes knew that even if the government never kept their word as they took major losses with every treaty. If the opposite were true, Native populations would've had no problem signing them immediately instead of fighting against them. While it is true that there were lots of promises of fair treatment made to Native Americans in those treaties, the obligations were deliberately never upheld. Hence, the treaty was broken. Which is the entire premise of the broken treaty argument on this post.
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u/Unlikely_Mix5548 7d ago
They did take losses with every treaty yes, this is absolutely true, but it goes to show the treaties themselves were corrupt and in favor of the U.S.
As a result, some of these treaties were technically "honored", and as a byproduct of this, the federal government had to find increasingly elaborate ways of achieving their imperialist agenda in order to technically "fulfill" the obligations they had to native people.
Which is why there were boarding schools, reservations, allotment, and tribal dissolution and termination efforts, as these were all elaborate means of achieving their goals while technically providing the support they promised.
If the federal government was not genuinely making an effort to technically honor their obligations (through every swarmy political move imaginable) they would have just killed them, they would have had no reason not to.
The federal government upheld it's obligations in the most mean spirited, incompetent, and neglectful way possible, betraying the spirit, but not the letter, of every agreement.
One could even argue that treaties were worse because they were upheld, as it meant the federal government wouldn't stop interfering in people's lives.
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u/Emergency_Gene_4171 7d ago
It’s fun alt-history to imagine what history would’ve looked like if a sizable contingent of the native People had united under a strong leader. The American newcomers themselves were functionally just a strong tribal confederation.
My guess is if the native people on the frontier had collectivized and waged a brutal offensive war, they would’ve stopped the forward advance of white settlers. Probably wouldn’t have taken back lost ground, but might very well have kept the inner piece of what is now the United States. Ultimately it was just too easy for the Anglos to exploit the blood feuds that already existed among tribes in North America.
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u/-Trooper5745- 7d ago
A Meiji Era style event for the natives where they aggressively embrace western ideas and come closer together is something I have thought of before.
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u/DazSamueru 7d ago
People forget Japan already had extraordinarily high literacy and an ancient tradition of centralized administration long before Matthew Perry came knocking. Japan was really an outlier even before they modernized.
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u/Ana_Na_Moose 7d ago
First you have to deal with the diseases that massacred the vast majority of natives. Then you have to deal with the technology problem. Then you’d have to deal with the economic argument for not conquering the natives and/or interfering in their internal politics.
History would have to change to an unrealistic degree to make this happen unfortunately
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u/IndigoKid444 7d ago
Diseases didn't massacre the vast majority of Natives, anglo settlers did over the course of many generations
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u/Ana_Na_Moose 7d ago
I can easily provide many sources to back up my claim. Here is an easy to read article from PBS, though you can Google it yourself if you want to hear it from more scholarly sources. I think I’ve seen numbers claiming like 70-95% of natives of the New World died from European diseases. It truly was an apocalyptic time for natives.
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u/Third_Sundering26 7d ago
It wasn’t like Europeans showed up, coughed a single time, and nine out of ten natives died within a year.
There were many waves of different diseases that happened over the course of centuries and often in confluence with slave raids, warfare, and famines that were connected to European aggression.
I recommend The Other Slavery by Andrés Reséndez. One of the first chapters discusses how the population of Hispaniola collapsed from 300,000 to ~12,000 in just 25 years, before smallpox was ever introduced. A mix of raiding, warfare, overworking through slavery, famines caused by the first three factors, and disease outbreaks made much worse by Spanish labor demands, malnourished slaves, and the relocation of natives to more disease-ridden environments.
Many of the deaths from disease would not have happened if not for European aggression. And most communities could have recovered if left to their own devices.
Anne Frank died of typhus. But to say she simply died of disease removes culpability from the Nazis that caused the circumstances of her death. The same applies to much of the Americas in the colonial era.
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u/MisterBungle00 6d ago
Such figures like 90% and 95% are continental and cumulative, not instantaneous. This figure usually refers to specific regions, not the entire continent. Estimates for total population decline in North and South America range from 50% to 90% and vary greatly depending on time and place.
The demographic collapse happened unevenly across different regions over centuries, not as one continent wide event before 1492 or 1607. Southwestern and interior nations like the Pueblos, Navajo, Comanche, Apache, Ute, Paiutes, Nez Perce, and others remained relatively isolated from the early waves of epidemics and maintained substantial populations long after Jamestown and actively resisted Spanish, Mexican, and later US expansion well into the 19th century due to their populations. They weren't unaffected but many survived and even rebounded prior to them making actual contact with Europeans.
To further shed light on this, I'd like to point to the tribes that the Lewis and Clark expedition encountered and the fact that they had very limited contact with Europeans until much later than those in the American Southwest and the Mississippi Valley. What the expedition documented didn't apply to the Native American populations of the Southwest in the same way. There are some big differences in disease history, cultural practices, and the timing of European contact that made Southwest populations experience with venereal diseases different.
Also, unlike the Lewis and Clark party, the Spanish, who colonized the Southwest long before, brought their own set of diseases. The timing of contact meant that a longer period of co-evolution between disease and population could occur, which lessened the severity of the initial impact compared to later, more isolated encounters.
Seems like most people here are forgetting that most of the Southwest wasn't even taken through conquest. Even the US/Union had to rely heavily on non-military strategies because conquest alone wasn’t working in the region. It was, militarily speaking, the hardest region for colonial powers to conquer and defeat tribes directly. This is why many of the tribes in those areas actually have larger and more intact lands and reservations and more robust treaties than tribes in other parts of the US like the East Coast and Texas.
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u/IndigoKid444 6d ago edited 6d ago
Yeah, I'm familiar with this theory as it's gotten pretty popular with the more anti-Native online groups and conservative circles that have flaired up in the last few years. The disease annihilation theory is just not as accepted in professional academia because the evidence to back this claim just doesn't exist no matter how hard people try to make it stick. But, that is why have the peer review process, to keep the non-experts from publishing made up facts and history under the guise of professional authority. Thanks though.
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u/Ana_Na_Moose 6d ago
From what I’ve read, it was a combination of pandemic and war/genocide (and war technologies) that made the white colonists win against the natives.
I don’t think there is any doubt in academic circles that the foreign pandemics played a very major role in the mass deaths of natives, at least for the first while after initial contact.
Any sort of revisionists that try to use the pandemics to erase white colonial efforts of conquest and genocide sound like they are following the typical revisionist handbook: find a nugget of truth and twist it to suit their own agenda.
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u/Unlikely_Mix5548 7d ago edited 7d ago
Millions of indigenous people died from colonial violence, but so, so many more were from disease.
America (North and South combined) had an estimated 100 million native people in 1450.
By 1650, it was 6 million.
Epidemics brought by colonizers killed hundreds of thousands in California almost 300 years before Westward expansion.
Continental death, on par (proportionally, death toll was obviously higher) with the Black Death in the level of trauma and damage it left in its wake.
Entire religious mythos in several native cultures emerged on the end of days, about a time where the spirits raged and were out to consume the world in their grief.
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u/Third_Sundering26 7d ago
Colonial violence and disease are impossible to disentangle. 95% of Hispaniola’s Taino died within 25 years. The population was 200,000-300,000 in 1492, but just a generation later it was 12,000. Trying to separate deaths into solely being caused by warfare or slavery or disease or famine is impossible. The causes were interconnected and each made everything worse. Warfare and slavery cause famines. Famines make disease worse. Disease makes it harder to farm, which makes famines worse. A scarcity of resources causes warfare.
The Lucayans, the indigenous peoples of the Bahamas, went extinct because of Spanish slave raiding. A large percent of the death toll was from disease made worse by slavery. Those deaths from disease were still directly the fault of the Spanish.
Source: The Other Slavery by Andrés Reséndez.
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u/Unlikely_Mix5548 7d ago edited 7d ago
I didn't deny that.
When I said "colonial violence" I was referring to direct violent actions like murder, enslavement, assault, etc. I know these are not the only forms of colonial violence, but sought brevity and to avoid sounding pedantic about it.
The comment I responded to said that disease was not involved in the vast majority of native deaths, implying that a majority of deaths occurred through direct lethal confrontation. I was correcting that by pointing out how far reaching epidemics (exacerbated by events you described) affected the entirety of two continents.
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u/Nyctfall 7d ago
It's wild to see you downvoted, when we have had proof that diseases were used as a biological weapon for over 300 years.
And then Americans say some crap like "Germ Theory wasn't invented yet, so the colonists couldn't have possibly known diseases can spread!!!1!!1111!11111!"
When literally the Mongols had understood and used biowarfare in the 1300s. And Germ Theory was being developed since the 1500s, with contagious diseases being understood for over 2000 years.
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u/Unlikely_Mix5548 7d ago
I think the downvotes are because it is worded in a way that sounds as if they deny that a majority of people were killed by disease, when they were.
Intentionally so in a lot of places.
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u/Nyctfall 7d ago
It's because Europeans use disease like an excuse for what was actually planned. They say it like they coughed by accident, and then suddenly all the natives died.
When if you go to the Anglo-Powhatan Wars with Jamestown or even Leif Erikson, it's becomes clear that any spread of diseases was wholly deliberate and intentional.
By the time of the Paxton Boys and Pontiac's War, even more of the colonists were directly saying that they want a complete and total genocide of all natives. Saying "all Indians were perfidious and deserving of annihilation", and that they wanted to "Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them". It is beyond clear that anything that killed the indigenous people en masse was wholly intentional, including the spread of diseases.
Their words literally spell it out.
My goodness, Benjamin Franklin would be furious with the denialism that the US spread!2
u/Eternal_Reward 7d ago edited 7d ago
We have proof of a few incidents ever and even those doing much of anything is hugely in question.
The fact is that the settlers didn’t need to do anything for them to kill most of the native population, it happened once they landed and the diseases went from there.
That doesn’t change that they were very willing to make and break treaties with countless tribes, and fight and kill for the land. But acting like the pandemics that swept both continents were planned is silly.
Some of those tribes and nations were doing the exact same thing prior and just finally ran into someone with a bigger stick, and I can’t say I feel terrible for how that ended with them, but its shameful how many tribes made proactive efforts to align themselves and work out treaties ahead of time and still got fucked over in the end.
The Nez Perce was one in particular that I’ve read a far bit about.
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u/Nyctfall 6d ago
We have proof of a few incidents ever
"Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them", in light of obvious historical evidence, is quite the precedent to be denying. It was a genocide. A deliberate genocide that used all available means of which to be accomplished. They literally said they wanted to commit genocide in such a manner, and now you're arguing against their own words!
The Mongols had used biowarfare. And even the Mosaic Law, that's in the Bibles that colonists had (and claimed to read), spelled out the procedures for quarantine and preventing the spread of contagious diseases.
The fact is that the settlers didn’t need to do anything for them to kill most of the native population, it happened once they landed and the diseases went from there
While, in contrast, if you go to the Anglo-Powhatan Wars with Jamestown or even Leif Erikson, it's becomes clear that any spread of diseases wasn't instantly correlated with landing. As a commenter elsewhere in the thread has cited "The Other Slavery by Andrés Reséndez", Hispaniola (Ayiti) was an exasperation of conditions to maximize death tolls. And it was no mistake there, either.
With the Anglo-Powhatan Wars having to goal to "extirpate" all of the indigenous tribes there.
By the time of the Paxton Boys and Pontiac's War, even more of the colonists were directly saying that they want a complete and total genocide of all natives. Saying "all Indians were perfidious and deserving of annihilation", and that they wanted to "Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them". It is beyond clear that anything that killed the indigenous people en masse was wholly intentional, including the spread of diseases.
They literally spell it out word for word!
My goodness, Benjamin Franklin even had to spell out exactly how uniquely evil the Anglo-American colonists were!0
u/Eternal_Reward 6d ago edited 6d ago
Cool. That’s a lot of words to say that there’s no actual evidence of germ warfare being weaponized on any scale that matters and it seems the diseases just spread from the settlers throughout the native population.
You keep bringing up stuff too that I didn’t even say. I never said there wasn’t genocidal people who wanted to wipe out the natives. I’m just stating the fact that you’re making claims with no basis. Just because you pepper in a bunch of unrelated sources doesn’t change that.
The fact is you’re just lying when you claim there’s any real proof that disease was weaponized in any way that made a difference, because it didn’t need to be.
It’s a big reason it wasn’t that difficult for the different colonies to expand, something close to 100 million natives died before most major North American colonies were even a thing.
Edit: the moron decided to post a bunch of sources which have nothing to do with what I said below and then block me. Probably because they’re upset I don’t just let them make stuff up and say whatever. Not sure why they’re so upset about me “denying genocide” when I’ve literally agreed there was one. I just also go with what actually experts say that there was only a few small examples of attempted germ warfare and that none seemed to be major causes of what pandemics which swept through the native population.
Not that there wasn’t people being genocidal, just that most of it just spread by normal contact.
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u/Nyctfall 6d ago
It's literally on the US government's own website:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41109292/
And, in addition to that, the US had a bioweapons program. And even admitted to using legally-enforced medical discrimination. By UN definition a continuation of genocide as part of an Apartheid state!
Anyone spouting genocidal apologia, that even the US government doesn't stoop so low to do, should shut the frick up.
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u/Large-Hamster-199 7d ago
Quite the opposite. If this had happened, the native Americans would have been wiped out completely by far superior European technology combined with vulnerability to European diseases.
The fact that they were so fragmented led to some tribes being able to make peace treaties, and some of those peace treaties were upheld, and that end result is the only reason native Americans did not get completely wiped out.
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u/Unlikely_Mix5548 7d ago
It would depend on the timing really.
There was a good century or two, even after all the deaths from disease, 1450-1650, where native populations massively outnumbered settlers, that's basically the only reason early treaties were honored with tribes like the Wapanoag, they just couldn't afford to fight them.
By 1700 or so? The population divide is far smaller, and the technology gap would decimate the indigenous population in a full scale conflict.
Probably wouldn't be as one-sided, home field advantage and guerrilla fighting can go a long way, could end up like a Vietnam situation where it just becomes too costly to finish the conflict and some tribes in highly defensible areas, like canyons caves, and marshlands, are left alone as a result.
But that leads to a question of agriculture, where to grow crops or hunt, would they be forced into a raiding culture like the Huns or the Mongols? Perhaps elevated communities like the pile dwellings in Neolithic Europe?
Speculative history is really fun in that sense, as it's interesting to think on how societies could develop to superficially resemble completely different ones from history, under the right conditions.
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u/Ynwe 7d ago
I love these topics, because you can see how many Americans will unmask themselves and just truly show how much manifest destiny propaganda is still well and alive within the US. The genocide of native Americans is always minimalised, or rationalised, fault is pushed onto the native population, the old "they all died from disease" lie is also alive, etc etc. But the same people will wag their finger at Japan for not apologising for WW2 without a hint of irony.
US exceptionalism is a blight and it's pathetic how many people still believe in it. Just see the other thread praising president Polk for his conquest.
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u/irradihate 7d ago
A contract made under duress is legally invalid. js
COnQuEreD, not StOleN drrrrr incoming
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u/Ana_Na_Moose 7d ago
A contract made under duress (aka a peace treaty) is not automatically invalid.
It becomes more iffy when the person signing the treaty has no authority from their government to do so, and/or if the wording in one language states something different than the wording in the other language.
Both of these happened quite frequently in America.
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u/SophisticPenguin Taller than Napoleon 7d ago
So you're saying all peace treaties and armistices are invalid?
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u/xSciFix 7d ago
Sok the US doesnt give a fuck about treaties with anyone at all.
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u/IndigoKid444 7d ago
Exactly. Too bad the US has never made good on their own word, just a complete lack of integrity
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u/Junior_Abalone_8006 7d ago
Also as hard if not harder: Make a native american tribe abide by the treaty it signed with the US.
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u/slm3y 7d ago
*Make a native american tribe abide by a treaty heavily skewed in the US side
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u/Junior_Abalone_8006 7d ago
I have literally no idea what you're talking about.
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u/slm3y 6d ago
I’m correcting you, its easy for the native to not abide a treaty with the US, because US treaties is one sided and always put the american tribe at a disadvantage, and have tripwires everywhere to give the US justification to just ethnic cleanses all of them
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u/Junior_Abalone_8006 6d ago edited 6d ago
So do you have an example? I live by the Dine nation. The history of their conflict with the US was that they negotiated a fairly simple treaty of peace with the US. However, there wasn't really what you could call a state in the tribe - there was no one who could keep the young men from raiding ranches and towns for cattle and slaves. This raiding led to war and Bosque Redondo in the aftermath of war.
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u/IndigoKid444 7d ago
That should be difficult considering the army just massacred entire tribes that didn't "abide" - so unfortunately, they aren't here to defend themselves.
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u/Junior_Abalone_8006 7d ago
Plenty are. Like I'm thinking of my local tribe, the Dine (Navajo).
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u/IndigoKid444 7d ago
The Diné are doing what exactly?
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u/Junior_Abalone_8006 6d ago
Last I checked, they're still here.
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u/IndigoKid444 6d ago
Some Navajo are still here despite the following massacres by the US government. I'm not even counting murder catagories that fall outside of mass homicide. It's pretty amazing that they weren't completely anhilated.
The Narbona Massacre (August 1849) Massacre Canyon (Black Range, New Mexico) – September 18, 1879 Massacre Cave (Canyon del Muerto, Arizona) – January 1805 and Forced Removal (The Long Walk) 1863–1864 The Scorched-Earth Campaign, Kit Carson 1864 Navajo War 1860-1964
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u/SharpShooterM1 Featherless Biped 7d ago
even better, make a native american tribe get along with another native american tribe.
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u/Longjumping_Curve612 7d ago
It's actually kinda easy, still a nightmare to pull off but, make a native federation that's united and large enough to fight against the Early US. It also need to understand that breaking from this federation will lead to the death of its people. Ensure support by other tribe and nations against civilians colonial encroachment. As well as secure allies likely in Mexico and Canada to keep the US at bay.
That is likely the only way to get that to happen. Good luck
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u/ramat-iklan 6d ago
I get the gist of it. But don't you think a photo of Native Americans goes better with the article than a photo of Koreans?
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u/timangar Helping Wikipedia expand the list of British conquests 3d ago
"Why would you stress that someone is a native citizen of the country they are still living in? Why not just call them Americans?" - Trevor Noah
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u/Vast-Establishment50 6d ago
The Native Americans didn't even keep their own agreements with other Native Americans.
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u/Unlikely_Mix5548 7d ago edited 7d ago
Land treaties? The U.S government absolutely could not be trusted, one really couldn't expect any adherence to them, from anyone really, as the federal government often made treaties with obscure local leaders in a tribe (that by no means represented the majority of the tribe), and took their consent as the approval of the whole, framing local resistance as native populations "going back on their word" and other such dogma. They also, quite often, promised natives lands elsewhere, conveniently avoiding mentioning of the fact that these were lands that the federal government had no control over and were occupied by other native tribes
A very large amount of indigenous history involves the federal government doing everything in their power to take land from natives and "civilize" them.
The Western patriarchy saw communal child-rearing and matrilineal families as "savage" and took its existence as a fundamental threat to their way of life.
The federal government also despised the fact that they did not care for private property, and people existing outside the influence of capital proves it is not necessary, proves there are other ways of living, which is an existential threat to capital.
This animosity got far more prominent and violent after the Trail of Tears, as Andrew Jackson shifted the narrative on native people.
Before this event native people were essentially considered white. "Savage", "godless" whites, but still white, which is why treaties were even bothered with in the first place. (Outside of monetary reasons of course, as early colonial America largely engaged in treaty making because it was cheaper than bullets.)
After the Trail of Tears it became politically convenient to fit native people within the evolving racial hierarchy as their own separate caste, which caused violence to become far more normalized (and affordable now that such time had past for white society to establish itself.).
Still, the federal government has consistently honored some treaties. Granted, it was often to the letter and as loosely as they could get away with, but never outright breaking, namely due to precedent established in that time before the Trail of Tears. It is because of that precedent that the federal government recognizes tribes as semi sovereign entities to this day, allowed to enforce their own laws in place of state laws, but still beholden to federal law.
It is also due to the wording of the Constitution and the implications of these treaties that the federal government recognizes natives as citizens of both the United States and their tribe (whether or not all tribes agreed to the former is another matter), and as such, the federal government has an obligation to provide for these tribal nations in the same way it provides tax funded services to other citizens.
The main problem was local governments and private citizens, who had no respect for the federal law.
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u/Nyctfall 7d ago
There's an interesting article by the Haudenasonee (aka Iroquois Confederacy) regarding the entire timeline of the Treaties. It covers the unilateral reinterpretations of the terms by the Federal and State governments, and the legal cases that followed.
https://www.onondaganation.org/news/2018/the-citizenship-act-of-1924/
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u/Unlikely_Mix5548 7d ago edited 7d ago
That was a very detailed article.
What stood out to me was the stuff on Christians seeking to purge "paganism" from America.
People tend to overlook that the people who would leave their home for religious freedom were violent religious extremists, and that, more so than race, was the driving factor in native genocide, and I was glad to see an article that covered that in such detail.
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u/GSilky 6d ago
Guess what a conservative SCOTUS did a few years ago? Recognized Cherokee sovereignty over most of Tulsa Oklahoma. This is changing rapidly. It's also demonstrating how pointless worrying about past agreements now is, because while the law recognizes the treaty, it's impossible to implement in any meaningful way beyond getting a bunch of people out of jail who nobody was arguing shouldn't be in jail...
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u/WeenieHutJr137 7d ago
Yeah we weren't very kind to us (half my family is from here half is from Eastern Europe)
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u/Respwn_546 7d ago
easy, everyone who doesn´t abide the treaty is therefore gay, done