WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE NATIVE AMERICANS?

Today hundreds of millions of Americans, and thousands of tourists, will enjoy America.

Citizens in New England, South Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Oregon, and of the other 45 states of the United States of America will live and love, learn and laugh, be born or be aborted. For America is a utopia. Innit?

When English immigrants began to colonise what is now Massachusetts they were surrounded by native Americans. Not only did these immigrants bring their ideas they also brought their slaves. Over the decades more and more immigrants came, killing them with disease and/or driving the native Americans away from their ancestral lands where they had lived and hunted for centuries to make room for more immigrants.

This happened all along the east coast of America. Colonies became towns, which in turn became cities, some very influential like New York. The immigrants began to colonise inland, driving west where they encountered yet more native Americans.

Gold and land. That was what the white man wanted. Gold and land. And he got it.

And not by fair means either.

Before the US Civil War one man did more than most to herd the native Americans into reservations to make room for these white immigrants. He was the white man, Libertarian hero and slaveholder, President Andrew Jackson. He began and organised the herding of 5 tribes of native Americans into what is now Oklahoma. The lands that these native Americans had lived on and looked after for centuries was then given to slaveholders, and the states that these lands were contained in were among those that seceded from the Union to start the US Civil War (all seceding states cited the preservation of Jackson's beloved slavery as their casus belli) .

But after the US Civil War the victorious United States Army was used to herd yet more native Americans into reservations. And once in those reservations the native Americans were easy prey. Treaties were ripped up or ignored. Land reserved for the native Americans in their reservations was given to yet more white immigrants. The native Americans were used as lab rats. They could not be allowed to offer an alternative way of life in America, so they were forced to live like the immigrants, with their reservations partitioned into lots, and each native American and his family expected to live off that lot, even if the land on the lot was useless. This led a divide-and-conquer situation, weakening the native Americans further.

Oklahoma was initially called Indian Territory, and the native Americans who were herded there were expected to live off it. But after the Civil War the percentage of that reservation the native Americans were allowed to live on shrank and shrank to virtually nil.

When I hear Americans and their ilk today whine about immigrants, I think, "You ungrateful bastards! Your ancestors were immigrants who were complicit in this ethnic cleansing of native Americans, and may well have also used forced immigration, i.e. slavery, to make a living on top of that ethnic cleansing!".