Speaking at the Naval Academy commencement this past week, President Donald Trump said,
“Together there is nothing Americans can’t do, absolutely nothing. In recent years, and even decades, too many people have forgotten that truth. They’ve forgotten that our ancestors trounced an empire, tamed a continent, and triumphed over the worst evils in history. America is the greatest fighting force for peace, justice and freedom in the history of the world. We have become a lot stronger lately. We are not going to apologize for America. We are going to stand up for America.”
Before Europeans arrived in what became the United States, Native Americans occupied the land but were forced to relinquish territory as the new Americans pushed westward as part of what was termed “manifest destiny.”
By the time Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean in 1492 it is estimated that there were 10 million indigenous peoples living in what would become the United States. By 1900, the number had been reduced to less than 300,000.
One of the reasons for Natives’ decline was the diseases to which they had no immunity brought to the New World by those who either survived or descended from those who survived multiple European plaques because they had the immunities that those who died in the plagues did not. They could carry a disease without succumbing to it.
Also, not having had to share close quarters with each other or domesticated animals, Native Americans were easy targets for those pathogens spread by domesticated cows, pigs, sheep, goats, and horses.
They were decimated by what Europeans and modern day Americans would consider harmless illnesses- measles, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, scarlet fever, and syphilis.
This death by disease was not always accidental
In 1763, a particularly serious Native uprising threatened British garrisons in Pennsylvania, and worried about limited resources, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, requested of Colonel Henry Bouquet at Fort Pitt:
“You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians [with smallpox] by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method, that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.”
As a resultm distributing blankets previously owned by contagious patients killed off much of the Native population in the area..
In the Northeast, proclamations made ‘redskins’, or scalps of Native Americans prizes that earned money. The 1775 Phips Proclamation in Massachusetts, called for “subjects to embrace all opportunities of pursuing, captivating, killing and destroying all and every of the aforesaid Indians.”
Colonists got paid for each Penobscot person killed, fifty pounds for adult male scalps, twenty-five for adult female scalps, and twenty for scalps of boys and girls under age twelve..
The 1830 federal Indian Removal Act of Andrew Jackson, one of Trump’s favorite presidents, called for the removal of the ‘Five Civilized Tribes’ – the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole, and between 1830 and 1838, federal officials working on behalf of white cotton growers forced nearly 100,000 Indians out of their homeland.
This was responsible for The Trail of Tears in which 4,000 Cherokee people died of cold, hunger, and disease on their way to Indian Territory which was eventually modified to the benefit of white settlers and the disadvantage of the Native American there to become the state of Oklahoma whose name could be seen as a cruel joke as it means “land of the Red Man”
As the United States expanded westward, violent conflicts over territory multiplied.
With the California gold rush of 1848, 300,000 people migrated to San Francisco from the East Coast and South America, and mining brought toxic chemicals into the waters and ruined traditional Native hunting and agricultural practices as did tearing up the land with mines. This brought starvation to those who had relied on the water for fishing and drinking, and the topography for hunting and agriculture.
Taking overdose of the medicine would not benefit cialis on sale you, but yes, it can cause severe health problems. This is the reason one must use http://www.devensec.com/rules-regs/decregs105.html on line levitra in order to secure their second national championship. It happens due to many generic price viagra reasons which is responsible to failure of sexual activity. I personally have used this type of on-line driver’s lowest prices viagra education for low prices and time needs. The California state government passed the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians in 1850 that addressed the punishment and protection of Native Americans which actually not only destroyed their cultures while stripping them of their land, but also became the basis for the buying and selling of Native children into slavery.
As California Governor Peter H. Burnett put it in 1851,
“A war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct.”
Manifest Destiny became the excuse to remove Native Americans from their lands whether by deceit or battle.
On November 27, 1868, Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer led the 7th U.S. Cavalry on a surprise dawn attack on a Cheyenne village led by Peace Chief Black Kettle. The Cheyenne were required to move south from Kansas and Colorado to Indian Territory (Oklahoma) where the land assigned was hardly arable and away from buffalo, their main source of meat and a center of their culture. The men were out on a hunting party so the only people in the village were women, children, and old men.
In 1873 General George Custer ordered his 700 soldiers of the 7th Cavalry of the United States Army to attack the Indian war party consisting of members of the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho and other tribes who had united because of intolerable abuse by the U.S. Government. He lost the Battle of Little Big Horn, but he is hailed as a hero.
When Chief Joseph’s southern branch of the Nez Perce refused to give up their ancestral lands on the Oregon-Idaho border and enter a reservation, negotiations broke down and the 1st Cavalry was sent to compel them to come into the reservation. Chief Joseph chose to resist and traveled 1,600 miles through Idaho, Yellowstone Park, and Montana during which he engaged 11 separate commands of the Army in 13 battles and skirmishes in a period of 11 weeks. However, having only a remnant of his tribe left, Chief Joseph vowed to “fight no more forever”, and surrendered to Colonel Nelson Miles on October 4, 1877 at the Bear Paw Mountains.
In 1890 at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in North Dakota, believing chief Sitting Bull was a Ghost Dancer, someone who rejected “the ways of the white man” and believed that the gods would create a new world without non-believers, federal officials actually ended up killing him instead of just arresting him, and this led to the deaths of over 150 Natives in Pine Ridge.
There were more such battles.
At the turn of 20th century, the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. government had the right to overturn all Cherokee laws in the precedent-setting decision Cherokee Nation v. Hitchcock.
This eventually led to the end of the communal culture of the Cherokees with tribal communal lands being divided into allotments to each tribal member alive at the time, reducing the size of their territory, allowing for more non-Native settlers to move into Indian Territory, and the scandalous theft of Indian owned land by state and federal laws that favored the settlers and supported the land swindling.
Assimilation of the tribes into the American way of life introduced poverty and starvation, and to speed up the assimilation of the tribes their children where sent to “Indian Schools” away from their parents and tribes where their hair, a cultural symbol, was cut short, their cultures disparaged, and their native language replaced with English so that when they returned home, they were foreigners in their own tribes who could no longer communicate with their elders.
The United States government killed their histories and their cultures while promoting and honoring the people who destroyed them as heroes and those who defended them as demons.
In 1950 the Commissioner of Indian Affairs began to implement ‘withdrawal planning’, which forced the relocation of thousands of Natives to cities.
It is estimated that over nine million Natives died from violent conflict or disease during our quest to honor Manifest Destiny.
Truly, we’ve “forgotten that our ancestors trounced an empire, tamed a continent, and triumphed over the worst evils in history.”