Limited IQ Redneck in PU said:
Redbrickbear said:
Waco1947 said:
Redbrick "To Waco European peoples who came to the land that would one day be the USA were dangerous/racist settler colonialists who stole Indian land. Yes, we were -- racist, puritanical religionists, and dangerous.
They sound a lot like the Muslims immigrants pouring into the EU and the USA.
*And I don't know who this "we" is that killed Indian populations with disease.
Humans accidently pass diseases to each other all the time. (and the brown skinned Spanish were the ones serving as the point of contact on those pathogens most of the time)
It certainly not the fault of any Europeans that Indian populations had been isolated for millennia and had no natural immunity to the deasses being passed around the Asia-Africa-Europe region.
You prolly forgot about this. Im pretty sure its taught in all high school history classes:
Smallpox blankets" refers to a historical practice where European colonists, particularly British officers like Sir Jeffrey Amherst, intentionally gave Native American tribes blankets contaminated with smallpox during the 18th century,
Its now pretty well established that most "Europeans gave Indians small pox blankets" stories are outright fabrications.
[
Some scholars doubt that General Jeffery Amherst intentionally distributed smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans during the French and Indian War.....19th-century historian Francis Parkman. Parkman came across correspondence in which Sir Jeffery Amherst, commander in chief of the British forces in North America in the early 1760s, discussed its use with Col. Henry Bouquet, a subordinate on the western frontier during the
French and Indian War.
For all the outrage the account has stirred over the years,
there's only one clearly documented instance of a colonial attempt to spread smallpox during the war, and oddly, Amherst probably didn't have anything to do with it. There's also no clear historical verdict on whether the biological attack even worked.]
[
In Indian Country, it is an accepted fact that white settlers distributed items, such as blankets contaminated with smallpox and other infectious diseases, aiming to reduce the population of Native people resisting their
Manifest Destiny. These accounts have left a legacy of trauma and distrust in Native communities that persist to this day.
It comes as quite a surprise to Indigenous people to learn that a controversy exists regarding the veracity of these events. This article aims to answer some of the lingering questions while shedding light on the controversy.]
Not to mention that the real massive decline in Western Hemisphere populations took place within 75-100 years after Columbus landed....so by the 1600s. By the time English colonists/Americans can into conflict in the 1700s and 1800s small pox was already long established in the Western hemisphere. And it took place through a natural process of non-immune Indian populations meeting European traders and sleeping in close proximity to them/living in close proximity to them and then spreading the disease on to more isolated Indian tribal groups further in the interior....not to mention many researchers now think it was domestic animals that were the biggest spreaders of such diseases.
[
According to a 2022 study, many of the most devastating diseases for Indigenous people in the Americas originated with domesticated animals, and although there is no evidence of nonhuman reservoirs for smallpox, the disease is thought to have evolved from horses. Furthermore, because horses were not domesticated in North or South America prior to the arrival of the European settlers, the disease was one that Indigenous people did not have prior exposure to.]
[
Smallpox was lethal to many Native Americans, resulting in sweeping epidemics and repeatedly affecting the same tribes.
After its introduction to Mexico in 1519,
the disease spread across South America, devastating indigenous populations in what are now Colombia, Peru and Chile during the sixteenth century. The disease was slow to spread northward due to the sparse population of the northern Mexico desert region....It reached the
Mohawk nation in 1634, the
Lake Ontario area in 1636, and the lands of other
Iroquois tribes by 1679.
Between 1613 and 1690 the Iroquois tribes living in Quebec suffered twenty-four epidemics, almost all of them caused by smallpox. By 1698 the virus had crossed the Mississippi, causing an epidemic that nearly obliterated the
Quapaw Indians of Arkansas.]
https://asm.org/articles/2023/november/investigating-the-smallpox-blanket-controversyhttps://www.history.com/news/colonists-native-americans-smallpox-blanketshttps://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/plag/5240451.0001.009/--did-the-us-army-distribute-smallpox-blankets-to-indians?rgn=main;view=fulltext