Mutt

You're an idiot, there's not a person of normal intelligence who doesn't know that the Native Indians were fucked over. Where do we learn this from? Books, movies, television programs. There's a time for kids to learn about that and it's not in the first grade.

And do you think this only happened in America? Look north, Canada, many of the same Indian nations were north of the 49th parallel. Canadian settlers took their land too and treated them like savages, set up reservations for them to live and die on. Every country on this planet with aboriginal people that was settled by Europeans has the same blood on its hands.

We are talking hundreds of years ago, I don't know how people think there was a better option. We should have come to these vastly undeveloped massively under populated continents and upon seeing there were natives already living there said 'Oh sorry, we didn't know there was anybody here, we apologize for intruding, we shall be going now. Toodles' and gotten back on their ships and never returned? That's ridiculous. So what could we have done? Negotiate with them? Lots of that was done, the island of Manhattan was bought for 24 dollars and some other crap. Bleeding heart liberals are ridiculous people - there view of history is as idiotic as the Thanksgiving story told to 6 year olds, except they try to force their views on adults, educated adults. The Native Indian tribes weren't just these peaceful hunter gathering spiritual cultures the bleeding hearts romanticize about. They were killing each other. To Europeans of the time they were savages just like the bush people of Africa - if you were European a few hundred years ago you'd think they were savages too. So if these new lands were to be settled at all, bloodshed was inevitable, it went both ways.

As far as the millions of Native Americans who died from plagues of diseases. Horrible as it is was it's not like the settlers planned that, it wasn't biological warfare, millions of the European settlers also died from them. Diseases like smallpox had been in Europe for hundreds of years, Europeans had built up some immunities to them. The Indians had never encountered these diseases, had no immunity to them and they wiped them out.

It's a sad tragic story but it's not reasonable to believe it could have been much different.

One neat thing I never knew until a few years ago - horses, so much apart of all the movies we see about the settling of America, Indians on horseback. i always thought horses were indigenous to North America, that American Indians always had horses. They weren't indigenous animals, the Europeans brought horses from Europe. Horses would escape and they bred and spread like crazy in the wild.

And for all the injustices and violence suffered there were many instances of the Indians and white man cooperating. Indians fought along side white men in every war fought on North American soil, most notably the American Civil War.

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