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The entirety of the Americas was full of people before Europeans, whole and rich civilizations with cities and artwork and histories that settlers almost or in some cases completely succeeded in destroying. It’s too great a tragedy to put into words. https://twitter.com/JohnBrownsBody2/status/1328732946904338432
The intentional genocide never gets talked about so all there is is this sense that everything from before 1492 just kind of petered out. Wars were fought over this land. Horrific massacres of whole populations. Forced conversions and mass enslavement.
Look at the amount of labor it took to destroy a society’s source of food. This took tremendous, intentional effort.
50-100 million people lived here before Columbus.
Look at that picture and then tell me “They weren’t using the land.”
And they were also *warriors.* It took centuries before the last open conflicts with tribes gave way to European hegemony.
In 1537’s Sublimis Deus papal bull, Pope Paul III declared Indigenous Americans to be fully rational beings, which resulted in the Spanish armies reading a Spanish-language statement of Christian dogma to them and making them infidels if they did not immediately convert.
This was a real legal strategy used for conquering the Americas. Every one since has been just as flimsy. Europe never had a claim to any place here. This is stolen land.
“Genocide” doesn’t really convey the enormity of what happened here.
Everybody kind of “knows” that this is stolen land but almost nobody takes the time and makes the effort to understand the scale and the bloodshed. Human suffering on an apocalyptic level.
And this isn’t even touching what they did to the continents of Africa, Australia and Asia.
And it continues. There were 5,712 reports of murdered or missing Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) in 2016. The 3rd-leading cause of death for Indigenous women/girls aged 10-24 in the US is homicide. In some places Indigenous women are murdered at ten times the nation average.
Many of these victims are thought to be due to human trafficking and murders—there have been at least a few white serial killers caught in Canada who killed mostly Indigenous women.
Education about settler-colonialism is what helped make me an anti-imperialist, but it could just as well not have happened because I was certainly never taught this in school. I only happened to encounter it on my own, and only in my mid-20s. It’s so much easier not to know.
