For most part, land was NOT stolen from American Indians. Amerinidans used violence.

A theme that is commonly rerun is that land was stolen from the American Indians. This is for the most part wrong. 1st, most of the Americas was uninhabited except for
the plants and animals who lived there. But Amerindians were not noble savages who lived in peace-incidentally I'm not White. American Indians including the Tainos
and Caribs (or Canibs) lived mostly like street gangs. Each tribe had their own land-many tribes were nomads. When an American Indian tribe wanted land from another
American Indian tribe, they used violence to get the land. American Indians killed eachother with tomahawks (ax), bows and arrows,etc. to get land from eachother.
American Indians also had scalpings. In Iberoamerica, some American Indian tribes such as Aztecs, Incas and Mayans had human sacrifices. But with the land, when
American Indians got the land by wars, they were proud winners. Creek Indians waged and won wars against Choctaws and Chickasaws and the Creeks were proud
winners. Apaches took land from other Indian tribes in Texas and were proud winners. Comanches came in and took the land from the Apaches by war and the Comanches were proud winners.

The Spaniards & the Portuguese in Brazil were the last groups to arrive in Iberoamerica. Since the Spaniards had ships, horses, military dogs, guns, crossbows and
cannons, they did a better job, but only some of the soldiers who took part in the conquest of Nueva Espana were Spaniard. In the conquest of Mexico, 1,000 of the
soldiers were Spaniards while the remaining 75,000 or so were Tlaxcallans, Choulatecs and Totonac Indians who fought on the side of los conqustadores against the
Aztecs. No, don't agree with everything the Spaniards & Portuguese did whether it's el sistema de castas in Iberoamerica, but the Spaniards treated the Amerindians
better to @ worst no differently than the way Amerindians treated eachother. Most Spaniards married Amerindian women, thus Mestizos. Most of the deaths of
American Indians in Iberoamerica was by diseases but it's debatable whether the diseases were native or foreign. The main point is that when Amerindians won land by wars, they were proud winners. But when American Indians lost the land by wars, they became sore losers complaining about 'stolen land'. American Indians don't have
to live on reservations. They get best of both. They don't have to pay property taxes. If American Indians don't like the reservations, they have a right to move
out. American Indians have the same right to jury trials and they have the same chance to become a lawyer, engineer or accountant if they're smart enough to.
What's past is past. It can be said that American Indians got more by losing the wars. Had this not happened, then their practices of
human sacrifices which some tribes had would have gone on much longer. American Indians wouldn't have the technical advances such as cars, computers that
we have today as American Indians were primitive. What matters is what is happening today. If an American Indian is discriminated when it comes to jobs, housing
and schools, then that's wrong & must be solved by legal system. If an American Indian commits a crime, then they must get = punishment as non-Indians do
for the same crime and if an American Indian is a crime victim, then there must be = punishment for the crime as if it were done to a non-Indian. What matters is
what is happening today because right or wrong, what is history is past.

 

Both the Tainos & Canibs or Caribs had been fighting eachother for territory before their discovery in 1492. It's possible that both tribes were not the 1st inhabitants. Neither tribes
had written language. It's possible that there were other tribes who had lived there before the Tainos and Canibs but who were killed by both tribes. History about both Tainos and
Canibs goes back to late 1400s but it's possible that other tribes had been there before the Tainos and Canibs were but went extinct by wars. Finally most of the deaths of
American Indians was again by diseases and there was no genocide program against American Indians. It's wrong to call it a Final Solution like Nazi Germany's extermination program of Jews.

 

Do you have a point or should we just fast forward to the "Trail of Tears", maybe the Black Hills, Oklahoma, the purposeful introduction of Small Pox the broken treaties, or perhaps Wounded Knee?

 

As said, don't agree with everything which happened to the American Indians, but with small pox & other diseases, most of it was unintended & it has been debated whether it was intended. Main point
is that American Indians were killing eachother for territory long before European contact (I'm not European) & the idea land was stolen from the American Indians is mostly not the case. American Indians
got more because they lost the wars. American Indians after 1530, could not be enslaved and there were American Indians who owned slaves. Slavery of African Americans continued. Anyhow when
American Indians won territory by wars they were proud winners but when American Indians lost territory by wars, they were sore losers. Indian tribes such as Shawnees, Apaches & Comanches are among
those who have no right to complain about 'stolen land' as they had no problem with 'stolen land' when they won it from other tribes by wars. It's like if I have a house & you come and take it from me
by force & then justify your victory, you have no right to complain if some1 more powerful comes in and takes your house (which used to be mine) by force. Finally here is a post by John T. Reed who is part
American Indian where he disputes the land stealing idea and says American Indians have no right to complain http://johntreed.com/headline/2010/11/24/did-whites-steal-natve-american-land/

 

"Amerindians used violence"

So if i break into your house, start chopping down your furniture , give infected blankets to your kids while i try to force convert you all to mutmekepism any act of self defence from your side will make my acts perfectly legal.


Ha!

 

It's more complicated & complex. In most cases, it didn't happen the way. Most land again was uninhabited except for plants and animals who lived there. But you're assuming
the land & house belonged to that Amerindian tribe when quite often that tribe took it from other tribe by force. Land that Comanches had was taken from another Amerindian tribe by force. Creek Indians
got much of their land and houses waging wars against Choctaws and Chicasaws. So when both Comanche and Creek Indians lost their lands and houses by wars, they have no right to complain as both tribes
were not the original owners. Again, it's more complicated because in many cases the Amerindian tribes living on that land & house were not the original inhabitants. What's meant by Amerindians used violence is that Amerindians used violence to get land from other Amerindian tribes as the Comanches, Creeks, Aztecs, etc. did to other Amerindians.

 

It is true that tribes like the Sioux were once woodland Indians that took land from other tribes as they expanded west and were pretty brutal about it. There were also southern tribes that were cannibals, probably up from middle America where they had hunted out larger animals and cannibalism allowed them to easily accept the pig brought over from Europe as it tasted the same as what they were used to.

People do focus only on what white settlers did when what they did was not much different than what Indians did to each other.

 

Almost every indian tribe had a culture of war and a history of conquering other tribes. The Sioux were Woodland Indians---but were crushed and chased into the plains by the Chippewa. They devised a whole new lifestyle from being pushed in an unfamilier environment.

Ultimately Europeans conquered North America through war and peace treaties. With a clash of two cultures---the stronger won. Clash of cultures takes place in every part of the world....and is happening today. . Eventually...one people will succomb to another people if their cultures are adverse to each other.

It might be interesting to note that in Oklahoma, the Muskogee Creek, Cherokee and Choctaw nations are doing very, very well. When an Indian nation buys a piece of ailing property or chunk of real Estate as investment everyone cheers because they are well funded, are great business people and have a wide variety of resources to get a job done. They give back to Oklahoma in the way of jobs and infrastructure and tourism. And they have the resources to preserve their language and culture and history. With the unfair way they were pushed into Oklahoma---there isn't that poisonous bitterness or anger that tends to keep a people down.

 

Every culture on Earth has a war culture.

But more to the point, Whites had a lot of advantages, and those advantages make it not much of a fight. Whites had much better technology, and they had much larger numbers. If the tribe itself was maybe 100 people, they would be outnumbered by a single platoon. Add to that the huge technological advantages -- repeating rifles and an industrial society to produce lots of said rifles, railroads for resupply from an industrializing East vs. a nomadic culture living off of local foods and hunting with bows and arrows on horseback. It's like saying that a small group of people armed with sticks were "fighting" with a modern army. Just keep fighting while we load the bazookas and fuel up the B-2 bombers. I suppose since you threw a rock, you "lost fair and square".

 

The weak point for Indians wasn't necessarily numbers as Custer found out, but logistics and organization. They lived off of hunting (at least the plains Indians did and could not group together in large numbers for very long without running out of food (logistics) and they were extremely disorganized in the sense that each tribe and sub tribe worked separately.

 

Whether Amerindians fought each other or not, the point is they were there long before European settlers were.

 

Yes. But again, much of the Americas was uninhabited except for the plants and animals which were there, so if a place gets settled by some1, then they'd be the 1st people. Some of the Amerindian tribes were nomads & often when they abandoned a place, they no longer owned it. Also if a place is not known to you, then you can't claim ownership to a place you didn't know existed. If an Amerindian tribe let's say lived on land in Wyoming & that tribe had never heard or been to Florida, then they wouldn't own land in Florida. So again, it's more complex & complicated. Incidentally Hoosier8, with Lieutenant Col. George Armstrong Custer, he did not ask any1 to do anything he wouldn't do and he would go to the front line to fight for his beliefs as he did in Little Big Horn. What matters is what's happening today. If an American Indian is discriminated against when it comes to jobs, housing or education, then that is wrong and must be taken care of by legal system. American Indians have for a long time the same chances as non-Indians do to succeed and they have same rights to jury trials which non-Indians have. American Indians don't have to pay property taxes on reservations and they can profit from casinos. They have the right to work outside the reservations and bring money they earn to the reservations with tax breaks. Non-Indians don't have a right to live on their reservations if the American Indians don't want them while American Indians have the right to live in and out of the reservation.

 

Which has nothing to do with the legitamacy of the Western claims. As I said, technology made it a forgone conclusion, so saying that because the tribes tried to fight back, that the land was "won" is like saying that the Cardinals could win the little league world series fairly, and that legitamacy of such a win would come by the fact that 10 year olds took the field against a professional baseball team. There's no way that "fighting back" with inferior technology and inferior logistics makes the theft legitamate. It does not. For the "fighting back" claim to make sense, it would have to be army against army with roughly comparable technology. You roll tanks over civilians, that's not a "battle" even if the civilians were throwing pebbles. It's a massacre, and only cowards would claim that fighting in that manner is a fair fight.

 

Actually, most of the land was being used by the Indians but they were virtually all hunter-gatherers and many of the midwest and western tribes were also nomadic. That means that by the standards of the immigrants from Europe the natives were grossly underutilizing their land so it was almost a sacred duty to take it away from them and make something much more productive. Besides, they weren't white or Christian.

 

There was a group which preceded the American Indians and those are the Solutreans. Solutreans are from Europe and are believed to have arrived in the Americas (East Coast) 17,000 years ago during the Ice Age. In Europe they hunted wild horses for food and in the Americas they survived by hunting seals, mammoth, deer and bear for food and clothes using spears made of flint stones. 25% of DNA of Native Americans are European and it's believed that Europeans were the first Native Americans. It's believed most Solutreans died off either because of disease, starvation, accidents or they were killed by American Indians. American Indians hunted hunted buffalo, deer, wild birds, and the same animals as the Solutreans did. Most American Indians didn't have written languages but Solutreans are found in some American Indian art and drawings. The Aztecs had a White god Quetzalcoatl and it's a good guess that there were Europeans living in Mexico before the Aztecs and that Quetzalcoatl is an eg. of a Solutrean. It's more complex but American Indians were not the 1st Native Americans. Don't be surprised if there were Solutreans who onced lived in places which Columbus discovered. The Canibs and Arawaks or Tainos fought eachother for land, but it's possible that there were other Amerindian tribes who lived there before the Canibs (Caribs) and Tainos killed them and it's possible that there were once Solutreans there.

 

awww, the poor warlike indians lost a war to a superior group.....

you mean war is supposed to be honorable and humane?

Total war sucks.... I could not handle the horrors of either side, giving or recieving.... but to try and villianize one group who partook better than the second group who got beat is simply the result of reading too many history pamphlets at the Indian Casino.

small pox on blankets.... like it or not, it worked. It also worked with minimal casualties to the side that unleashed it. Seems that's one of the main objectives of war... kill as many of them as you can while suffering as few casualties on your side.


Like Indians are the only peoples to ever get overthrown and run out of their land in history.

 

That war sucks is not an excuse. And no one has claimed that the Natives are the only people ever thrown out of a land. What I'm saying is that you don't get to start a war with vastly superior technology for the express purpose of taking their land and then claim that because they didn't simply hand over the deed to the land that you "won it" because you rolled in with a tank. Fair and square would be roughly equal technology -- musket on musket with similar numbers. Then you could claim that they lost fair and square.

Otherwise, it's no different than saying that because I had a bazooka when I decided to kick you out of your house, I won because you slapped me on the face.

 

war is fair?

The way I look at it....Indians of N.A. should be THANKING the Europeans that came over. At least the Indians of TODAY should be. I'm sure Chief PullsOnSlots sure enjoys NOT living in a skinned buffalo ass sleeping on the dirt floor. I'm sure that house, with central air and heat, eating food that won't kill him, is just SO rough on him and he's SO oppressed.

Same with blacks that are descendants of slaves. Noone of them were beaten.... and now the blacks are living a pretty high standard of life, especially when compared to the Africans that did not get sent over. (Ironically, thedescendants of africans who sold the other descendants of africans into slavery, are the ones on Feed the children commercials while the Black americans are crying about how oppressed they are while watching cable tv and talking on their cell phones.)

 

Again Septimine, the topic is more complex and complicated. The Solutreans or Solutrians who came from Europe to Americas East Coast and immigrated southwards during Ice Age preceded the American Indians. American Indians to repeat were proud winners when they got the land by wars but were sore losers when American Indians lost the land by war. If American Indians such as the Aztecs had ships, they'd have conquered other parts of the world. Topic is more complex and complicated and in lands that people imply were 'stolen from Amerindians' is sometimes not the case as again, the Creeks, Comanches & Apaches are eg. of Amerindians who were not original land owners as they had won their land in wars with other Amerindians but after Creeks and Comanches lost their land in wars, they complained about how the 'land was stolen' when again, Creeks and Comanches weren't the original land owners.

 

There are complications, but the general principle does not change. You don't get to claim legitamacy simply because you have better weapons. I don't get to steal your house simply because you weren't the original owner of the house. How you got the house has nothing whatever to do with whether or not I can kick you out of your house. You don't fix one wrong by commiting another wrong.

 

Fine but my point is that if you got a house by using force to take it from some1 else, then IMO you have no right to complain if some1 stronger takes it from you by force. IMO, Aztecs, Creeks, Comanches are eg. of Amerindian groups who have no right to complain about the 'land being stolen' as again, they got most of their land by waging wars against other Amerindians & were proud winners but after they lost they became sore losers. That's just how the world was then and in some ways still now. My main point is that if you got something by stealing it from some1, then you have no right to complain if some1 steals that from you. Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez had no problem when Amerindians got their land by force but then complained after Amerindians lost their land by force. My main point is again, if you got something by stealing it from some1, then don't complain if some1 stronger comes in and steals it from you.

 

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Once Europeans arrived as colonialists in North America, the nature of Indian slavery changed abruptly and dramatically. Indians found that British settlers, especially those in the southern colonies, eagerly purchased or captured Indians to use as forced labor in cultivating tobacco, rice, and indigo. More and more, Indians began selling war captives to whites rather than integrating them into their own societies. And as the demand for labor in the West Indies became insatiable, whites began to actively enslave Indians for export to the so-called "sugar islands."

The resulting Indian slave trade devastated the southeastern Indian populations and transformed Native American tribal relations throughout the region. The English at Charles Town, the Spanish in Florida, and the French in Louisiana sought trading partners and allies among the Indians, offering trading goods such as metal knives and axes, firearms and ammunition, intoxicants and beads, and cloth and hats in exchange for furs (deerskins) and Indian slaves captured from other tribes. Unscrupulous traders, frontier settlers, and government officials encouraged Indians to
make war on other tribes to reap the profits from the slaves captured in such raids or to weaken the warring tribes.

It is not known how many Indians were enslaved by the Europeans, but they certainly numbered in the tens of thousands. It is estimated that Carolina merchants operating out of Charles Town shipped an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 Indian captives between 1670 and 1715 in a profitable
slave trade with the Caribbean, Spanish Hispaniola, and northern colonies. Because of the higher transportation costs of bringing blacks from Africa, whites in the northern colonies sometimes preferred Indian slaves, especially Indian women and children, to blacks. Carolina actually
exported as many or even more Indian slaves than it imported enslaved Africans prior to 1720. The usual exchange rate of captive Indians for enslaved Africans was two or three Indians to one African.

http://mmslibrary.files.wordpress.c...itish-north-america-and-the-united-states.pdf

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The first certain reference to African slavery (in Massachusetts) is in connection with the bloody Pequot War in 1637. The Pequot Indians of central Connecticut, pressed hard by encroaching European settlements, struck back and attacked the town of Wetherfield. A few months later, Massachusetts and Connecticut militias joined forces and raided the Pequot village near Mystic, Connecticut. Of the few Indians who escaped slaughter, the women and children were enslaved in New England, and Roger Williams of Rhode Island wrote to Winthrop congratulating him on God's having placed in his hands "another drove of Adams' degenerate seed." But most of the men and boys, deemed too dangerous to keep in the colony, were transported to the West Indies aboard the ship Desire, to be exchanged for African slaves. The Desire arrived back in Massachusetts in 1638, after exchanging its cargo, according to Winthrop, loaded with "Salt, cotton, tobacco and Negroes."

"Such exchanges became routine during subsequent Indian wars, for the danger of keeping revengeful warriors in the colony far outweighed the value of their labor."[2] In 1646, this became the official policy of the New England Confederation. As elsewhere in the New World, the shortage and expense of free, white labor motivated the quest for slaves. In 1645, Emanuel Downing, brother-in-law of John Winthrop, wrote to him longing for a "juste warre" with the Pequots, so the colonists might capture enough Indian men, women, and children to exchange in Barbados for black slaves, because the colony would never thrive "untill we gett ... a stock of slaves sufficient to doe all our business."[3]

http://www.slavenorth.com/massachusetts.htm

 

Thanks Woogs for your post. What was meant is that Spanish law forbade enslavement of Amerindians after 1530. Yes, the English had Amerindian slaves & the #s you cited was that 10s of thousands of Amerindians were enslaved (30 to 50,000). That # is small when compared to Black slaves who are around 1 to 2 million in 200 years of slavery in North America. Amerindians also practiced slavery and as you mentioned profited from this as some Africans profited from slavery by kidnapping other Africans and selling them to Europeans. Don't defend slavery but that was the world then and that Europeans, Africans and Amerindians all practiced slavery. Don't agree with el sistema de las castas which the Spaniards had in Iberoamerica but it wasn't until the 20th Century that it was decided that people have = chances regardless of ethnicity. But again with Amerindians what matters is what's happening today. If an American Indian is discriminated against when it comes to jobs, school and housing, then that is wrong and must be solved. If an American Indian's a crime victim or commits a crime, then there must be = punishment by facts and circumstances of case. American Indians today have same chance as all to succeed. It's best to focus on what's happening today.

 

"all's fair in love and war.... (unless I lose, then it's bad)"

 

lol, what flawed logic; wud u say every nation had the legitimization to conquer the US after the civil war, too?

america was a vast land, the whites predominately took empty land, but indians only stole from each other? lol

and besides that, u r missing the point that the indians in fact are the native americans, so the land was obviously stolen, no matter how they treated each other...

and what about more peaceful tribes, there must have been some without the goal to expand through war, how do u legitimize their demise?