It started in the 15th Century. It happened on both continents, north and south. It was a time of exploration, colonization, and exploitation. The Europeans thought of themselves better because of their embrace of the terrible fraternal twins: Christianity and gun powder. If only they practiced what Jesus taught. They were greedy, rapacious, arrogant, and ignorant. It was the beginning of the Amerindian genocide. Can we learn from yesteryear, grow better from that knowledge, or are we doomed to repeat the worst of our past?
Royals of that day demanded spoils. But their agents in the colonies were no less complicit. So, they stole what they could. They killed those who opposed them, and worse. They eventually destroyed whole cultures, while proclaiming themselves inherently superior, a God-given birthright — promulgating another Big Lie. They excused themselves for their excesses. They called the inhabitants savages, while taking what was not theirs. In a strange twist of fate, the North Americans later became the progenitors of liberty in the world, the planet’s first written Constitution based on democratic ideals, even while tenaciously clinging to the dreadful economic system of slavery. They stood strong against the old nobility, who were badly infected with the cancer of greed, and then, while the invasion across the continent continued apace decade after decade — eventually spreading the contagion they had fought so hard against.
The convenient justifications in broad brush strokes are well known. The natives were uncivilized. They did not deserve the bounty they inherited. They failed to make productive use of the land. They were the Iroquois, Huron, Cherokee, Seminole, Comanche, Sioux, Arapaho, Navajo, Apache, and a hundred others of which you have never heard. They were defeated battle after battle. Whole populations were decimated by European diseases. They were ultimately forcibly removed from their ancestral lands. The treaties they signed with successive governments in Washington, DC, weren’t worth the paper on which they were written. Nearly every treaty was violated, and most promises betrayed by those claiming the mantle of moral superiority.
The paradox, these were the inheritors of freedom, and the sons and daughters of liberty bestowed upon them by the Founders. Ironically, the abused became abusers. The truth reflected both need and greed. It became imperialism by another name — cloaked in self-serving phrases like “manifest destiny.” The appalling result meant slow death for the Amerindian population, and for those remaining alive, degradation, hopelessness, and despair. The terrible end state engineered by the victors — reservations. These open-air prisons reflected our capacity for cruelty. The many clear and egregious injustices, now called crimes against humanity, still haunt us.
The path to that more enlightened state — toward empathy and a recognition of shared humanity — has followed many a dark and bloody passage, taking centuries and countless inequitable wars captured for posterity as victories over the “uncivilized” by the winners’ chroniclers, the historians. Millions were either slaughtered in battle or died of diseases to which the native population had no immunity.
Despite the unvarnished truth of the previous paragraphs, Western liberal democracy, that includes America as its founding member, is the birthplace of the human rights movement. The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights was largely authored by Americans. If there is a lesson to be learned here, could it be that we might come to recognize ourselves in the reflection of the Amerindian genocide?
We might like to think today that we are more enlightened… more empathetic… more ethical than once we were. Tragically, looking around America I see greed aplenty; the spread of ethnic hatred; religion exploited to justify questionable political objectives; and cruelty used as a cudgel to beat the weak further into submission. The horrors perpetrated on the native American population by our forebearers strikes me as every bit as real today as they once were. Regrettably, humankind — all of humankind — seems represented equally by both saints and sinners. My question is, can we learn from our ignoble past? Can we better live up to the aspirations found in our own founding instruments where “…all men are created equal…?” Or are we doomed to repeat the worst of our history?
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