Stolen Land of Native Americans (15th C.)

How Was America Founded on the Remains of the Native Population?

The media often portrays American values ​​with optimism and glorification, typically highlighting the attractiveness of the American nation and its commitment to freedom, equality, and human rights, while simultaneously condemning violence, hatred, and bigotry. The United States adopts these values ​​based on its perceived global superiority, but this is not supported by facts or history. What if we go back in history to the origins of the United States, specifically to the 15th century, when Europeans began exploring the lands of North America?

We might ask, to what extent were the values ​​of freedom, justice, and non-violence applied to the indigenous inhabitants of the continent? Did Americans truly uphold these values ​​with Native Americans, or did they completely disregard them?

Native Americans: The Origin of the Name

The naming of the Native Americans came about completely randomly. In 1492, Christopher Columbus left Spain heading to India in Asia, but he got lost and settled in Central America. There, Columbus met the native inhabitants, but he did not know that he was lost, and so he called them “Indians,” believing that he was in Asia and that these were indeed the inhabitants of India.

It wasn’t long before Columbus realized that he was not in India but in a “new” land, but the name remained the same with the addition of the description “reds” for the Indians due to their reddish skin instead of the dark skin of Asian India. This insistence on renaming the indigenous people according to the Eurocentric vision, as if everything that is not European is something else that was previously defined by Europe, shows that the Europeans not only committed crimes against an entire people but also renamed and defined them entirely according to a purely colonial vision.

How Did Europeans View Native Americans?

The European occupiers had a diverse view of the Native Americans, but they all agreed on portraying them as beings who were inherently inferior and less worthy than the English, the Spanish, and Europeans in general. This condescending view can be considered the preliminary condition for stripping the indigenous people of their humanity and committing brutal massacres against them.

Some described the Indians as mindless, unthinking monsters who ate each other and even ate their wives and children.

Indians Were Slaughtered for Centuries

Christopher Columbus set foot on the lands of the American continent in 1492 AD, and since then wars have raged between the European occupiers and the native inhabitants of the country, and the wheel of blood did not stop until the beginning of the twentieth century, so the bodies accumulated and rivers of blood flowed.

Although there are no accurate statistics on the number of indigenous people who were present on the lands of North America at the moment of the arrival of the Europeans, some studies indicate that the number of indigenous people of the Americas ranged from 10 million to 100 million in the year 1500 AD, and many specialists believe that it was about 50 million, including about 15 million from the tribes and clans of the Native Americans in North America alone.

From the moment the Europeans arrived, the number of Native Americans began to decrease at an unimaginable rate due to wars, massacres, famines and epidemics, until it reached less than 238,000 Native Americans only by the end of the American Indian War in the nineteenth century, which means that European forces slaughtered more than 95% of the original population of what is known today as the United States of America, although some researchers believe that the total number of real deaths in the Americas may reach 300 million.

• This great extermination of the Native Americans, from 10 million people to 200,000 people, was not random or a mere coincidence but rather a deliberate operation planned by the colonizers.
• As Klaus Connor, a professor at Princeton University, sees it, the English “are the most genocidal of the European colonial powers.
  
• Their goal in the New World, such as Australia, New Zealand, and many of the regions they invade, is to empty the land of its people, take possession of it, and seize its wealth.”

Removing the Massacres From American Memory

“The History of the Victor is a Monster That Only Grows Stronger With the Flesh of Human Prey.”

When the term “genocide” is mentioned in American schools, Americans immediately think of the Holocaust or the massacres of Armenians, Soviets, or Bosnia and Herzegovina, but the massacres committed by the United States of America are never considered.

When the American University Council decided in 2012 to add the topic of American massacres of Native Americans to the American history curriculum for high school students, it was met with widespread objection throughout the country, until the Republican National Committee issued a statement demanding that Congress investigate “the new curriculum based on a false and inaccurate view of major events in American history, including the motives and actions of the conquerors between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries”.

Congress, however, joined those who rejected the new curriculum and issued a condemnation for the curriculum’s failure to address the justifications for the war, American exceptionalism, and America’s divine destiny in expansion.

Present Status of Native Americans

The occupation did not stop at the occupation of history alone but extended to the occupation of culture as well. Even now, the West portrays Native Americans in various media outlets in a naive image that is no different from the image that Europeans drew of them five centuries ago, so that the massacres of Native Americans are overlooked in American curricula and media in exchange for the continued dehumanization of Native Americans among Western masses.

This is how the lie of the United States of America being built on the values ​​of freedom, justice, and equality is revealed. The truth is that the American state began its first steps with the harshest forms of terrorism, exterminating millions of the country’s original inhabitants, committing the most heinous massacres against them, and inflicting all kinds of torture and suffering upon them. Then, after all that, they concealed the massacres and hid the historical truth from the masses so that the image of the Native Americans remained that of a primitive man who knew nothing of life, and the American crime against these people continues to this day.