Sorry, I just don't see it that way.
The indigenous people of North America were at worst Paleolithic, at best Neolithic, but adapted very quickly to dependency on Iron Age and then Industrial Age goods they could not produce, woven cloth, metal pots, metal axes, guns and bullets, which they were ready, willing and able to trade for furs and skins and maize and wild rice and dried berries and so on and so forth.
The ones that didn't die from smallpox and cholera had two choices, remain independent or assimilate. The ones who learned how to farm, built fixed dwellings, sent their kids to school, learned trades like blacksmithing, are all mixed in with everybody else, assimilated.
The ones who didn't assimilate -- well, some of them were killed off and some of them weren't.
I'm descended from some of the ones who assimilated. I could tell you how they tricked the BIA out of hundreds and hundreds of acres but that's off topic. ;^)
The concept we're talking about here is "agency." I think these people were free agents of their own destiny, not helpless victims (at least not all of them). Treating them as all helpless victims is disrespectful and ethnocentric, presupposing an all powerful "white man" and an infantile, helpless "red man." |
