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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsOne reason I had a juice and water fast on Thanksgiving Day...
http://www.alternet.org/culture/no-thanks-thanksgiving
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Warpy
(111,383 posts)Columbus was hardly the first European to bump into the Americas, he was just the first imperialist.
And nobody even gets the day off out here.
At least Thanksgiving is a day off work.
But yeah, that story we all got fed in grammar school is a load of horseshit. I've been privileged to hear Wampanoags tell their side of it and it's not pretty.
Still, one of the things I'm thankful for is that despite the horrors of the last 500 years, so many American tribes are still here.
littlemissmartypants
(22,839 posts)littlemissmartypants
(22,839 posts)littlemissmartypants
(22,839 posts)littlemissmartypants
(22,839 posts)"There is nothing I know of that's anything like the Wampanoag case."
— Noam Chomsky
http://video.pbs.org/video/2149660933/
BlueMan Votes
(903 posts)it was plague.
http://www.cracked.com/article_19864_6-ridiculous-lies-you-believe-about-founding-america.html
There's a pretty important detail our movies and textbooks left out of the handoff from Native Americans to white European settlers: It begins in the immediate aftermath of a full-blown apocalypse. In the decades between Columbus' discovery of America and the Mayflower landing at Plymouth Rock, the most devastating plague in human history raced up the East Coast of America. Just two years before the pilgrims started the tape recorder on New England's written history, the plague wiped out about 96 percent of the Indians in Massachusetts.
In the years before the plague turned America into The Stand, a sailor named Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed up the East Coast and described it as "densely populated" and so "smoky with Indian bonfires" that you could smell them burning hundreds of miles out at sea. Using your history books to understand what America was like in the 100 years after Columbus landed there is like trying to understand what modern day Manhattan is like based on the post-apocalyptic scenes from I Am Legend.
Historians estimate that before the plague, America's population was anywhere between 20 and 100 million (Europe's at the time was 70 million). The plague would eventually sweep West, killing at least 90 percent of the native population. For comparison's sake, the Black Plague killed off between 30 and 60 percent of Europe's population.
While this all might seem like some heavy shit to lay on a bunch of second graders, your high school and college history books weren't exactly in a hurry to tell you the full story. Which is strange, because many historians believe it is the single most important event in American history. But it's just more fun to believe that your ancestors won the land by being the superior culture.
European settlers had a hard enough time defeating the Mad Max-style stragglers of the once huge Native American population, even with superior technology. You have to assume that the Native Americans at full strength would have made shit powerfully real for any pale faces trying to settle the country they had already settled. Of course, we don't really need to assume anything about how real the American Indians kept it, thanks to the many people who came before the pilgrims. For instance, if you liked playing cowboys and Indians as a kid, you should know that you could have been playing vikings and Indians, because that shit actually happened. But before we get to how they kicked Viking ass, you probably need to know that ...
littlemissmartypants
(22,839 posts)Cracked.com is one of the most popular comedy sites on planet Earth.
Read more: http://www.cracked.com/write-for-cracked/#ixzz2DPbVnaPG
BlueMan Votes
(903 posts)Thanksgiving Myths
By Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D.
...he English settlers inferred from the plague that God was on their side and sanctioned their takeover of the land. John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634, wrote that the plague was "miraculous." He said "God hath thereby cleared out title to this place..." Is it any wonder that our political leaders of today ask for God’s blessing and protection as they go to war to kill?
Between 1520 and 1918, there were 93 epidemics among Native Americans.
Indian home in what is now New York state. The indigenous people had no resistance to European diseases. (Photo courtesy Town of Colonie)
The effect that these plagues had on the native populations reached into their psyches as well. They felt that the Supreme Being had abandoned them. Some survivors of the Cherokee lost all confidence in their gods and priests and destroyed the sacred objects of the tribe. Indian healers could do nothing and their religion provided no cause. But the Whites usually survived and their religion seemed to save them. Many Indians turned to alcohol, Christianity or simply committed suicide. So it was a psychologically and physically devastated people that for the first 50 years of European occupation presented no real opposition to the invaders.
Prior to the arrival of European invaders, the native population of North and South American was 100 million in 1492. The entire population of Europe at the time was 70 million. If colonists had not been able to take over lands that the Indians had already cleared and cultivated, and if the Indian population had not been devastated by disease, there might not have been any colonization at all.
TexasBushwhacker
(20,222 posts)BlueMan Votes
(903 posts)to which the native Americans had no immune system resistance, never having been exposed to them.
http://www.manataka.org/page2334.html
When people began moving, the microbes that they evolved with moved along with them. Before the arrival of Europeans, the inhabitants of North and South America were remarkably healthy. But along with the Europeans came their illnesses and their livestock. The native inhabitants were then exposed to the many diseases that can be passed back and forth between those animals and humans - anthrax, tuberculosis, cholera, streptococcus, ringworm and various poxes.
The British and French had fished in southern New England for some time before the Pilgrims landed in 1620. It is likely that they came in contact with the Indians at that time. The native inhabitants had no resistance to the diseases brought by the Europeans and within three years, a plague wiped out between 90 and 96 percent of the inhabitants of coastal New England! This death rate was unknown in all previous human experience. For comparison, the Black Plague in the 1300s killed about 30 percent of Europe’s population.
This piece of history is usually omitted from most textbooks, yet these plagues, which ravaged the Indian population for the next 15 years, set the tone for the relationship of the European settlers with the indigenous people of America.
HangOnKids
(4,291 posts)Please keep going!!!!! Awesome.
Warpy
(111,383 posts)Diseases that Europeans had resistance to after being exposed to them for millennia like measles, flu, chicken pox, and smallpox were devastating to native people with absolutely no resistance to them. Something like 90% of them died within 2 years of first contact.
That's why the Plimoth Plantation settlers who arrived at exactly the wrong time of year survived. They found land cleared and some of it planted and structures that would protect them from the elements while they built "proper European" housing at Patuxent Village, which had been quickly abandoned when disease started to sweep through it 2 years earlier after first contact.
BlueMan Votes
(903 posts)perhaps at that point some of the european peoples had not been exposed to much yet either...? the actual plague didn't spread thru europe until a couple hundred years later.
Warpy
(111,383 posts)and that's why the Indians decided they needed to kick the disease reservoirs off the continent.
BlueMan Votes
(903 posts)and vikings settled here a lot more than many people realize. possibly as far south as current-day North Carolina.
Warpy
(111,383 posts)and they were after wood pulp, not much of anything the people living there had to trade. I doubt there was as much contact.
In any case, both groups were rather poor historians. We really don't know if there was a large native dieoff along the east coast 1000 years ago. We haven't even found many Viking era artifacts here. The supposition that they settled much of Vinland is based mostly on their mapmaking, something they'd have to do to point the way to the best timber south of NY.
BlueMan Votes
(903 posts)otherwise- they might have had the same story to tell as the vikings.
the early explorers, in the years between columbus and plymouth colony, really got the ball rolling on diseases.
Warpy
(111,383 posts)but quickly saw how "poor" the natives were and settled for furs. The point is that they had close contact during trading.
The Vikings were interested in trees. They didn't need to trade anything for those, just kill any natives taking potshots at them.
HangOnKids
(4,291 posts)
Don't worry your mind over this. BlueMan Votes
(903 posts)they also grabbed them some slaves.
the first chapter of zinn's 'a people's history of the u.s.' was kinda difficult for me to get thru. i kept getting very angry.
HangOnKids
(4,291 posts)Of course he did!!!!
BlueMan Votes
(903 posts)fucking asshole ancestors. 
BlueMan Votes
(903 posts)"The South will pillage again!"
After spending a couple decades sneaking ashore to raid Vineland of its ample wood pulp, the vikings made a go of settling North America in 1005. After landing there with livestock, supplies and between 100 and 300 settlers, they set up the first successful European American colony ... for two years. And then the Native Americans kicked their ass out of the country, shooting the head viking in the heart with an arrow.
So to recap, the vikings discovered America. They were camping off the coast of America, and had every reason to settle America for about 500 years. Despite being the biggest badasses in European history, one tangle with the natives was enough to convince the vikings that settling America wasn't worth the trouble. If you think the pilgrims would have fared any better than the vikings against an East Coast chock-full of Native Americans, you either don't know what a viking is or you're placing entirely too much stock in the strategic importance of having belt buckles on your shoes.
If the Indians had been at full strength in 1640, white people might still be sneaking onto the East Coast to steal wood pulp. That's as far as the vikings got in 500 years, and they were sailing from much closer than Europe and desperately needed the resources -- the two competing theories for why the viking settlements on Greenland eventually died out are lack of resources and getting killed by natives -- and, perhaps most importantly, they were goddamned vikings.
http://www.cracked.com/article_19864_6-ridiculous-lies-you-believe-about-founding-america.html
