Why is it that when WHITE people go after reources, it's "pillaging"? Did indians "pillage" the resources before the whites arrived?
Native Americans lived on the plains for a couple thousand years before Europeans arrived; during that time, they lived largely off the massive herds of migratory buffalo. Within one hundred years of earnest American expansion westward, that buffalo became effectively extinct.
Native Americans largely made use of renewable resources in ways that did not deplete them; Europeans and Western culture in general favors sucking renewable and nonrenewable resources dry, using up the finite amount of the latter and damaging the renewable supply of the former, turning them into nonrenewable resources. That's why it's pillaging.
To think that each new group which arrived didn't provoke conflict makes indians appear racist - it's only when the latest immigrants were WHITE that trouble started?? Yaaaa surrre.
There were plenty of conflicts, just not on the same scale as the conflict with Europeans.
Think of it this way. Europe itself, in the 20th Century, had a number of large but localized conflicts that, when you look at a map, didn't have huge repurcussions. It was big for them - we even call them "World Wars" even though they were predominantely European conflicts - but to an outsider looking in, not a whole lot changed as a direct result. Then 1945 rolls around, the second World War ends, and suddenly the United States and the Soviet Union have Europe by the balls. With our superior tech (namely atomic weaponry) and dualistic "war of ideas" (which is what the Cold War was, in essence) we could have flattened Europe at any given time. The stakes were raised and they weren't ready for it - and they got subjugated.
And when the whites arrive in north america, the indians were superb warriors limited only by their primitive technology. So the peaceful indians in paradise became expert warriors overnight when the whites arrived?? Yaaaaa riiiiiight.
Again, fallacy. You're attempting to creat a straw man for us - it'd be easier for you to rip apart our arguments if we were arguing that Native Americans were just a bunch of entirely peaceful and spiritual peoples with no sense of warfare who were blatantly attacked by European settlers. That is not the argument being presented. Native American tribes were like any other human associative groups - they had internal problems, when their social norms conflicted with human nature they either experienced bouts of criminality or resorted to behavior that would seem inexplicable to us today, and they didn't always get along with their neighbors.
Don't extend a partial statement to an absolute end, especially when discussing historical context. It reveals the weakness of your argument.
When the euros arrived in Jamestown, one of the first things that happened was that the head of the local Powhatan confederacy tried to enlist their help to steal another tribe's land. Give up the "peaceful indian" myth.
None of us is purporting a "peaceful indian myth." How many times does he state "wars were fought" in the post you were quoting? Do you believe that Native American tribes were in a constant state of bloody, gruesome warfare? Do you believe this to have been universal amongst them, or restricted to a few tribes?
I don't care if you're Hiawatha - come to the table with facts and logic or shut up. And the appelation "native american" is silly.
Insisting that an ideological opponent "shut up" on an internet forum is rather silly, too.
It was "there" by force of arms, and nothing else, and stolen from the previous tribe.
And that gives Europeans justification to "steal" it?
Do we generally kill illegal aliens? Does settlement justify killing??
No, we deport them (unless you'd prefer to have it another way?). We send them back to the squalor and poverty they were attempting to escape so they can watch their children starve to death.
As for whether settlement justifies killing, how do you suppose the American government would react if the Chinese government sent a bunch of people over, planted a flag and claimed Northern Oregon
You're historically uninformed. The first settlement in the western hemisphere, La Navidad, on Hispaniola, was founded by Columbus on his first voyage. When he returned on his second voyage, his men had been wiped out by the indians.
"The island was inhabited by the Tainos, one of the Indigenous Arawak peoples. The Taino were at first tolerant of Columbus and his crew, and helped him to construct Fort Navidad on what is now Môle Saint-Nicolas, Haiti, in December 1492. European colonization of the island began in earnest the following year, when 1,300 men arrived from Spain under the watch of Bartolomeo Columbus. In 1496 the town of Nueva Isabela was founded. After being destroyed by a hurricane, it was rebuilt on the opposite side of the Ozama River and called Santo Domingo. It is the oldest permanent European settlement in the Americas. The Taino population of the island was rapidly decimated, owing to a combination of disease and harsh treatment by Spanish overlords. In 1501, the colony began to import African slaves, believing them more capable of performing physical labor."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispaniola#History
Once again, the natives initiated violence at Plymouth, at Jamestown, and at Hispaniola. The indians stupidly took on a technologically superior civilization and lost. If you pick a fight with someone bigger than you, and get knocked on your ass, who is there to blame? The indians should have realized the world was changing around them, and learned from the whites and taken advantage of it. Instead, they reached for their tomahawks. Bad move.
One: They did not "pick a fight." Most aggression towards Europeans was triggered by European mistreatment of Native Americans.
Two: A large degree of the vivisection of the Native American population was due to disease. That's no one's fault - at the time no one in Europe could have predicted that the New World wouldn't have any of the Old World's diseases.
Three: Several tribes did attempt to learn from whites. Today, we arrogantly refer to them as the "Five Civilized Tribes." Look what happened to them:
"The tribes were relocated from their homes east of the Mississippi River during the series of removals, authorized by federal legislation, over several decades and moved to what was then called Indian Territory and is now the eastern portion of the state of Oklahoma. The most infamous removal was the Trail of Tears of 1838, in which President Martin Van Buren enforced the highly contentious Treaty of New Echota with the Cherokee Nation to exchange their property for land out west."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Civilized_Tribes
If you read Andrew Jackson's speeches on "Indian Removal" I think you'll find that his entreaties to the necessity of "living space" for the more "civilized" white citizens of the United States bears an alarming resemblance to Hitler's call for "lebensraum" for Germans in foreign nations, particularly those of Eastern Europe.
