I get so sick of white people saying that Native Americans were killed off.
See this link? This is where my great-grandmother came from. She wasn't genocided, she married a white man, mostly German, and her blood got diluted, just like his did.
tmbci.net
Best selling author Louise Erdrich is related to the same tribe, but her father was German. She writes about him in her latest book. I assume she's got more Chippewa blood than I do, but don't know that for a fact.
harpercollins.com
I'm Cajun-French-English-German-Croatian-Cherokee-Chippewa-Irish-Welsh. The Chippewa is on my mother's side, the Cherokee on my father's side. My husband is also part Cherokee. There are millions of Americans whose ancestry is part Native American. Marrying, or having sex with, attractive members of the opposite sex, is human nature, especially for settlers who tended to be disproportionately male. Americans, who tend to be egalitarian in disposition, appear to have done plenty of intermingling.
The vast majority of Native Americans were killed off early by diseases for which they had no natural immunity, especially smallpox. Tribes which lived close together suffered the highest death tolls, as high as 90% or greater (estimated). Plains Indians who lived nomadically had lower death tolls, as low as 10% (estimated). I've read of tribes where every person in the village died, most of them fell to the ground and died very shortly after exposure. The Native Americans who colonized the New World split off from Europeans and Asians before smallpox became endemic in the New World, and smallpox, as you know, was a terrible disease.
These days the tribes deliberately exclude people with only small percentage of Native American ancestry so that they don't have to share casino revenue, and the like.
Fine by me, I don't feel like I need to be admitted to any tribe. I am that quintessential American, the Heinz 57. The first of my ancestors to arrive here from Europe came here circa 1670. The last of my ancestors to arrive, the Croatians, came here circa 1880. When the kids were supposed to dress up for Ancestry Day, I sent them to school in T-shirt and jeans.
The Native Americans I feel sorry for are the ones that the Mexicans killed in the silver mines, but nobody ever bitches about Mexican genocide of Native Americans, nor about the tribes that were totally wiped out in Cuba and Hispaniola, nor the ones who were so badly mistreated in South America, forced to work on plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean. Not even Canadians get blamed for their treatment of Native Americans. Only Norteamericanos get accused of genocide. Tell me that's not political.
I have never read Karl Marx but have a suspicion that somewhere in his tomes there are passages about the poor Native Americans being exploited by the capitalists or something. Or maybe it's from watching Western movies? |
