The USA is a settler colony which requires the elimination of the natives in order to take over as private owners of the land which had been shared in commons by the natives. If the natives exist there in great numbers, they can claim rights to the land, so they have to be taken out. The colonizers of the lands known as USA committed widespread genocide and enslavement of the natives in order to depopulate them, including intentional use of bio weapons. Other ethnic groups can't lay claim to the land so their populations being high doesn't really have the same problem as far as land claims go, aside from maybe New Afrikans although I don't think most USAians are considering that claim seriously anymore/yet.
Daily reminder hitler literally quotes the American bath riots as being the inspiration behind the construction and gas used in the gas chambers in the Nazi Holocaust.
I also unexpectedly uncovered other information at the National Archives that took my great-aunt’s personal recollections beyond family lore or microhistory. These records point to the connection between the U.S. Customs disinfection facilities in El Paso-Juárez in the 20s and the Desinfektionskammern (disinfection chambers) in Nazi Germany.
The documents show that beginning in the 1920s, U.S. officials at the Santa Fe Bridge deloused and sprayed the clothes of Mexicans crossing into the U.S. with Zyklon B. The fumigation was carried out in an area of the building that American officials called, ominously enough, “the gas chambers.” I discovered an article written in a German scientific journal written in 1938, which specifically praised the El Paso method of fumigating Mexican immigrants with Zyklon B. At the start of WWII, the Nazis adopted Zyklon B as a fumigation agent at German border crossings and concentration camps.
Later, when the Final Solution was put into effect, the Germans found more sinister uses for this extremely lethal pesticide. They used Zyklon B pellets in their own gas chambers not just to kill lice but to exterminate millions of human beings.
Source https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/bath-riots
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So there was (and currently ongoing) the whole, genocide, thing that wiped out a huge chunk tribes.
The reservation system sequestered a significant chunk of those that survived.
Early US census takers didn't care so much about the genealogy of the people who they were collecting demographic information on and if a person looked white passing they'd be recorded as white. So you'd have a mixed race couple with several kids and a census taker totally had the option to mark any of the kids as "white" if they were passing enough.
The whole American Indian Boarding schools, where children of Turtle Islanders were kidnapped and/or send by their parents who were convinced to send them for an education, whose whole purpose was to ... well... abuse them until they either died or abandoned all of their Native heritage to become USA'ians.
Blood Quantum. There was a time where the USA federal government was pushing really hard to not recognize anybody as a "Native American" if they didn't have more than a certain percent of "Native American blood." Effectively trying to say that a person stopped being a member of a tribe if they were too far removed. Some of the bigger tribes went along with this, some still do, I'm pretty sure most have abandoned this as just being ... well... a continuation of genocidal policies.
Being racist as fuck against any members of a tribe, people from reservations, or people who might "look" like they could be of Native American heritage. With the reservation system often being a pretty shitty place to live, being able to pass as hispanic or mexican or any other nationality to get a job/education or maybe a different kind of racism, a person could just stop claiming they were part of any particular tribe on a census or make no effort to get their names on any tribes member rolls.
And like, if you've got some Potawatomi in your family tree from a great great grandparent but nobody tells you, and you look white as white can be, you're gonna answer the "What Race Are You?" question in a very 'white' wink way.
Also, if you DID know you had some link to a tribe(s) its not like "Potawatomi but white passing" is an option on the USA census questionnaire.
As a very white Potawatomi, I always select "two races" if it's an option, and "Native American" if it's not. But that's not shifting the demographic much, sadly.
Doesnt sound a hundred miles from what i know of the treatment of Australian Aborigines. Its so wrong, and yet so covered up.
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Its a horribly effective strategy.
Oh shit... I forgot to mention something in my OP
Tribes that did manage to survive and were given "land" somewhere in the USA were expected to pay property taxes on that land.
So a displaced people, who had lost everything, were expected to immediately set up profitable businesses to pay that bill. When they couldn't pay the taxes they'd either had the land confiscated and were evicted from the land or they'd sell the land and become displaced again.
Correction on blood quantum: the vast majority of tribes still rely on blood quantum for enrollment. The requirement can range anywhere from 1/32 to 1/2. Blood quantum is still in use because it's often a necessity to receive federal recognition that opens up the tribe to certain forms of economic support. Most tribes that use blood quantum also require proof of lineal descent. There is a movement to do away with blood quantum in favor of lineal descent as more of us wake up to it's genocidal purpose. But this is a slow battle as we still have to get this knowledge into the minds of our comrades and then past our tribe governments, councils, etc. which tend to be stacked with corrupt liberals.
I know the real background so you cannot fool me. The Native Americans could not evade persecution and property right violation from assimilation. The Indian Residential schools are actually a series of slave camps, human experiential camps, and death camps that the Indigenous parents were tricked into funding under the lie that their children will receive high quality education, luxurious living conditions, and the promise to be elites in European immigrant society. The British diaspora now still commit forced imprisonment in harsh barren land, planned starvation, planned chemical attacks, cheating, and slander that frame the fruit of your labor as "free stuff" to you.
Reminder for everyone to read:
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - An indigenous people's history of the US.
You can find the audiobook on torrents.
The way colonizers try to justify their crimes: "the Natives were killing each other anyways"
Also "most of them were already dead from disease" and "it was a different time, we know better now."
Be careful what you say.
There's nothing more violent than a western liberal who's been forced to face the reality of the West's crimes.
Started typing up an answer but don't feel like sourcing it and someone better informed is going to give a better answer eventually, but here's a start...
Whereas the Spanish significantly intermixed with the indigenous populations and created a mestizo (mixed) racial group, the US colonists maintained separation from the native population. In both cases, smallpox/disease reduced the native population by about 90% [relevance to question?]. The long running goal of the decision makers in America was to either force the natives to assimilate or be killed; the reservation was everyone's last choice.
Someone smarter, your turn
In both cases, smallpox/disease reduced the native population by about 90%
It should be noted; it wasn't just disease, or rather, disease (as always throughout history and till today) only got far, far worse when natives were also subjected to constant war, violent encroachments, and man-made (American-enforced, rather) famines.
Subject any population- European populations included- to such pressures and their immune systems will be greatly compromised. It wasn't just disease- these went hand-in-hand with systemic policies, ideology, and rhetoric that encouraged disease and killed and terrorized the natives in many other ways, with the end goal of- as you said, assimilation or death (ie. genocide)- and even the question of how much "assimilation" was actually on the table is another matter- they wanted to erase their cultures, religion, livelihoods, rights, etc. yes- but even those who had adopted much of the western customs like the "5 civilized tribes" eventually were driven west in forced marches (the trail of tears- ie. another form of genocide, akin to what was inflicted on the Armenians) despite the US law itself being on their side.
Because no amount of "assimilation"- by natives, by blacks (as one can see with "black Wall Street"/Tulsa, Oklahoma), by other minorities- changed the guiding ethos of the US- if white settler society wanted what you had, or simply wanted you out of the way and saw you as an eyesore to be culled, or wanted you as a slave- one way or another it would take what it wanted through force. And white settler-colonial and imperialist society wants everything the world over and more (and even that would not quench it IMO- because it is a all-devouring, monstrous system that, without new lands to conquer or peoples to subjugate and enslave, would likely collapse in on itself as it is doing now)- still does to this day, as should be clear to anyone sensible as well.
Did Native Americans not have any diseases thay were picked up by white colonisers?
It's believed they had syphilis. But no other major diseases come to mind- perhaps because of the comparative lack of domesticated animals, or the smaller and less connected geographic area (compared to Afro-Eurasia), and perhaps because severe disease mutations would likely burn themselves out within such regions rather than travel the length of Afro-Eurasia like old world diseases...
The vast majority of the 90% killed by disease were killed over a hundred years before any of the tribes had ever even heard of a white person or European. Smallpox spread like wildfire since the arrival of the Spanish. The diseases just appeared seemingly out of nowhere and annihilated millions of people without them even knowing what hit them or where it came from.
I know you didn't bring it up but the 90% thing is a myth. Rates were different for different outbreaks and many of the deaths chocked up to disease that contributed to the depopulation of Mesoamerica and the Gulf region (now US South) was due to mass slavery by the Spanish and Portuguese who were destroying villages and capturing slaves to work them to death mining silver and gold for a 7 year life expectancy in captivity.
Certainly some communities were hit extra hard by outbreaks, whole villages wiped out like the one the Mayflower colonists would inhabit with homes and food stores ready-made by the deceased.
However disease was consistently the largest killer during wars in the Colonial period. Outbreaks would kill half the population in the aftermath of wars throughout pre US and US history like that in the north east during the 1776 events and those in Oregon country right after Plateau wars in the 1850s and 60s.
Being displaced from sources of medicine, being displaced from clean water and food, losing elder knowledge keepers to the diseases, those elders were also more likely to be killed in a Conquistador's raid. There are many compounding reasons why disease was so rampant and deaths due to war usually came in the form of disease, for instance, some estimates put half the deaths in WW2 to disease and famine.
It is true, in a plainly quantitative sense of body counting, that the barrage of disease unleashed by the Europeans among the so-called "virgin soil" populations of the Americas caused more deaths than any other single force of destruction. However, by focusing almost entirely on disease, by displacing responsibility for the mass killing onto an army of invading microbes, contemporary authors increasingly have created the impression that the eradication of those tens of millions of people was inadvertent - a sad, but both inevitable and "unintended consequence" of human migration and progress. This is a modern version of what Alexander Saxton recently has described as the "soft side of anti-Indian racism" that emerged in America in the nineteenth century and that incorporated "expressions of regret over the fate of Indians into narratives that traced the inevitability of their extinction. Ideologically," Saxton adds, "the effect was to exonerate individuals, parties, nations, of any moral blame for what history had decreed." In fact, however, the near-total destruction of the Western Hemisphere's native people was neither inadvertent nor inevitable.
From almost the instant of first human contact between Europe and the Americas firestorms of microbial pestilence and purposeful genocide began laying waste the American natives. Although at times operating independently, for most of the long centuries of devastation that followed 1492, disease and genocide were interdependent forces acting dynamically - whipsawing their victims between plague and violence, each one feeding upon the other, and together driving countless numbers of entire ancient societies to the brink - and often over the brink - of total extermination.
Stannard, D.E. 1992. "American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World." Oxford University Press.
Even if the diseases brought by the colonizers were spread unintentionally which they werent it was all intentional. They spread it intentionally.
I'm surprised nobody has brought up the smallpox blankets yet when talking about the disease...
The native Americans, Inuits, and Metis do not even have the option for assimilation unless their surrender all their properties, land, citizenship, and inheritance to the European immigrants. The Indian residential fake schools in Western European diaspora are actually death camps that Nazi German world later copied in the Nazi holocaust. Cultural assimilation only existed in name only and the real purpose of the fake school genocide are child labour, child abuse, human trafficking, unethical human experimentations, crimes against humanity, amas inheritance thief. The demonic worship and hypocrisy is the reason why Yahweh is selling the British diaspora to the Liberals and people of color and why the Western European became so parasitic that they need betray their own people and import tons of immigrant of colors.
Couldn't agree more. That children were stolen from their families for "assimilation," only to turn up in mass graves or abused in all sorts of horrendous ways really shows what the "assimilation" narrative was really about. And it must be noted that there were oftentimes unofficial, other times explicit starvation policies (such as in Canada) against the indigenous peoples, similar to what was done within the concentration camps, and today is done in occupied Palestine. And even to this day indigenous people are targeted by police brutality- assimilated or not- and many women go missing, and anecdotally as someone who's lived in the Canadian prairies frankly I never knew a first nations kid there in my childhood, who wasn't adopted (and I knew many, close friends, schoolmates, etc).
To this day there are mass graves being found at the "residential schools." And in regards to the Metis- it really shows the depths of intolerance and greed of the settlers, that even the half-white (and if you've seen Metis- by all means they tend to look considerably white) Metis were targeted the way they were. Look at a picture of Louis Riel- he was of 7/8ths white ancestry and they slaughtered him and his people. The Anglo-Saxon "one drop" mentality was more strict, more horrific in its implementation than even Nazi Germany's notions of racial purity...
Because as cruel and horrific as Israel is, it still pales in comparison to the OG. Easily 10 million natives were slaughtered and dozens of nations eradicated.