Sep 19, 2015 - DON’T TELL ME TO ‘GET OVER IT’ AND ‘STOP LIVING IN THE PAST’ – WHEN YOU ARE PART OF WHAT IS DENYING ME AN EQUITABLE FUTURE! by Damon Corrie

It is estimated by most modern scholars that in 1492 the entire native population of the western Hemisphere (North, Central, South America & Caribbean) was 100 million native people, and at that time we were 20% of the entire population of the world, within the first 40 years of European arrival & invasion – 90% of the native population was dead from European diseases that they had no immunity to (because these diseases did not exist in the Americas), it was the greatest genocide in all of recorded human history.

So when you non-natives tell people like me to ‘get over it’ as if it was some minor incident to be casually dismissed….I tell people like YOU – to go shove the longest & rustiest flagpole up your backside – without any Vaseline too!

Thanks to YOUR ancestors, mine were reduced from 20% of humanity as God had made us, to less than .05% (half of one percent) of humanity alive today as Europeans have reduced us…..and as if that was not bad enough, just about everyone else has seen their land Decolonized (you don’t see Europeans ruling countries in Africa or Asia anymore – but in the Americas yes), but we native landlords in the Americas STILL have to live – in most places – under the Neo-Colonial rule of FOREIGNERS who inherited the theft of our entire Hemisphere (or were trained & brainwashed to become replacement imitation European clones and maintain a de-facto status quot of military occupation over us).

Your people can celebrate ‘liberation day’ on your continent and ’emancipation day’ in my peoples lands …but my people are still waiting for our ‘liberation day’ to come….free of YOUR illegitimate rule over us.

It is NOT a matter of ‘living in the past’ for us, it IS a matter of when the hell are WE going to finally be able to truly live in OUR Future? Not merely struggle to ‘exist’ under your armed occupation. A life where we enjoy the same rights and freedoms to sovereignty and political independence as our ancestors had that your people and every other people on Earth has and still enjoys to this day….did you expect we would be content to forever live with the fictitious liberty of ‘citizenship’ in YOUR artificial political Nation states built in our lands and on our backs – where we the native TRUE landlords will always be outnumbered and outvoted & ruled by other people unlike us who do NOT treat us fairly, but always as second class citizens IN OUR OWN HOME!

Let me give you a little history lesson in what WE experienced after welcoming the strangers from Europe into our lands & homes with open arms & open hearts:

This is what Columbus wrote about us when he first landed in the Caribbean and we were still following only our traditional spirituality – not any foreign book or religion:

“The people of this island and of all the other islands which I have found and , seen, or have not seen, all go naked, men and women, as their mothers bore them, except that some women cover one place only with the leaf of a plant or with a net of cotton which they make for that purpose. They have no iron or steel or weapons, nor are they capable of using them, although they are well-built people of handsome stature, because they are wondrous timid. . . . They are so free with all they possess, that no one would believe it without having seen it. Of anything they have, if you ask them for it, they never say no; rather they invite the person to share it, and show as much love as if they were giving their hearts; and whether the thing be of value or of small price, at once they are content with whatever little thing of whatever kind may be given to them.”

Then this is what Columbus and his ‘Christian’ men said to us after that:

“I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of Their Highness’s. We shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as Their Highness’s may command. And we shall take your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey and refuse to receive their lord and resist and contradict him.”

(a statement Spaniards were required to read to Indians they encountered in the New World)

Then this is what Columbus and his ‘Christian’ men DID to us:

Wherever the marauding, diseased, and heavily armed Spanish forces went out on patrol, accompanied by ferocious armored dogs that had been trained to kill and disembowel, they preyed on the local communities- already plague-enfeebled-forcing them to supply food and women and slaves, and whatever else the soldiers might desire. At virtually every previous landing on this trip Columbus’s troops had gone ashore and killed indiscriminately, as though for sport, whatever animals and birds and natives they encountered, “looting and destroying all they found,” as the Admiral’s son Fernando blithely put it. Once on Hispaniola, however, Columbus fell ill-whether from the flu or, more likely, from some other malady-and what little restraint he had maintained over his men disappeared as he went through a lengthy period of recuperation. The troops went wild, stealing, killing, raping, and torturing natives, trying to force them to divulge the whereabouts of the imagined treasure-houses of gold.

The massacres continued. Columbus remained ill for months while his soldiers wandered freely. More than 50,000 natives were reported dead from these encounters by the time the Admiral had recovered from his sickness. And when at last his health and strength had been restored Columbus’s response to his men’s unorganized depredations was to organize them. In March of 1495 he massed together several hundred armored troops, cavalry, and a score or more of trained attack dogs. They set forth across the countryside, tearing into assembled masses of sick and unarmed native people, slaughtering them by the thousands. The pattern set by these raids would be the model the Spanish would follow for the next decade and beyond. As Bartolome de Las Casas, the most famous of the accompanying Spanish missionaries from that trip recalled:

Once the Indians were in the woods, the next step was to form squadrons and pursue them, and whenever the Spaniards found them, they pitilessly slaughtered everyone like sheep in a corral. It was a general rule among Spaniards to be cruel; not just cruel, but extraordinarily cruel so that harsh and bitter treatment would prevent Indians from daring to think of themselves as human beings or having a minute to think at all. So they would cut an Indian’s hands and leave them dangling by a shred of skin and they would send him on saying “Go now, spread the news to your chiefs.” They would test their swords and their manly strength on captured Indians and place bets on the slicing off of heads or the cutting of bodies in half with one blow. They burned or hanged captured chiefs.”

At least one chief, the man considered by Columbus to be Hispaniola’s ranking native leader, was not burned or hanged, however. He was captured, put in chains, and sent off by ship for public display and imprisonment in Spain. Like most of the Indians who had been forced to make that voyage, though, he never made it to Seville: he died en route.

With the same determination Columbus had shown in organizing his troops’ previously disorganized and indiscriminate killings, the Admiral then set about the task of systematizing their haphazard enslavement of the natives. Gold was all that they were seeking, so every Indian on the island who was not a child was ordered to deliver to the Spanish a certain amount of the precious ore every three months. When the gold was delivered the individual was presented with a token to wear around his or her neck as proof that the tribute had been paid. Anyone found without the appropriate number of tokens had his hands cut off.

Since Hispaniola’s gold supply was far less than what the Spaniards’ fantasies suggested, Indians who wished to survive were driven to seek out their quotas of the ore at the expense of other endeavors, including food production. The famines that had begun earlier, when the Indians attempted to hide from the Spanish murderers, now grew much worse, while new diseases that the Spanish carried with them preyed ever more intensely on the malnourished and weakened bodies of the natives. And the soldiers never ceased to take delight in killing just for fun.

Spanish reports of their own murderous sadism during this time are legion. For a lark they “tore babes from their mother’s breast by their feet, and dashed their heads against the rocks.” The bodies of other infants “they spitted . . . together with their mothers and all who were before them, on their swords.” On one famous occasion in Cuba a troop of a hundred or more Spaniards stopped by the banks of a dry river and sharpened their swords on the whetstones in its bed. Eager to compare the sharpness of their blades, reported an eyewitness to the events, they drew their weapons and began to rip open the bellies, to cut and kill those lambs-men, women, children, and old folk, all of whom were seated, off guard and frightened, watching the mares and the Spaniards. And within two credos, not a man of all of them there remains alive. The Spaniards enter the large house nearby, for this was happening at its door, and in the same way, with cuts and stabs, begin to kill as many as they found there, so that a stream of blood was running, as if a great number of cows had perished…. To see the wounds which covered the bodies of the dead and dying was a spectacle of horror and dread.

This particular slaughter began at the village of Zucayo, where the townsfolk earlier had provided for the conquistadors a feast of cassava, fruit, and fish. From there it spread. No one knows just how many Indians the Spanish killed in this sadistic spree, but Las Casas put the number at well over 20,000 before the soldiers’ thirst for horror had been slaked.
Another report, this one by a group of concerned Dominican friars, concentrated on the way the Spanish soldiers treated native infants:

Some Christians encounter an Indian woman, who was carrying in her arms a child at suck; and since the dog they had with them was hungry, they tore the child from the mother’s arms and flung it still living to the dog, who proceeded to devour it before the mother’s eyes…. When there were among the prisoners some women who had recently given birth, if the new-born babes happened to cry, they seized them by the legs and hurled them against the rocks, or flung them into the jungle so that they would be certain to die there.

Or, Las Casas again, in another incident he witnessed:

The Spaniards found pleasure in inventing all kinds of odd cruelties, the more cruel the better, with which to spill human blood. They built a long gibbet, low enough for the toes to touch the ground and prevent strangling, and hanged thirteen [natives] at a time in honor of Christ Our Saviour and the twelve Apostles. When the Indians were thus still alive and hanging, the Spaniards tested their strength and their blades against them, ripping chests open with one blow and exposing entrails, and there were those who did worse. Then, straw was wrapped around their torn bodies and they were burned alive. One man caught two children about two years old, pierced their throats with a dagger, then hurled them down a precipice.

If some of this has a sickeningly familiar ring to readers who recall the massacres at My Lai and Song My and other Vietnamese villages in the not too distant past, the familiarity is reinforced by the term the Spanish used to describe their campaign of terror: “pacification.” But as horrific as those bloodbaths were in Vietnam, in sheer magnitude they were as nothing compared with what happened on the single island of Hispaniola five hundred years ago: the island’s population of about eight million people at the time of Columbus’s arrival in 1492 already had declined by a third to a half before the year 1496 was out. And after 1496 the death rate, if anything, accelerated.

But death seized these imported slaves as quickly as it had Hispaniola’s natives. And thus, the islands of the Bahamas were rapidly stripped of perhaps half a million people, in large part for use as short-lived replacements by the Spanish for Hispaniola’s nearly eradicated indigenous inhabitants. Then Cuba, with its enormous population, suffered the same fate.

With the Caribbean’s millions of native people thereby effectively liquidated in barely a quarter of a century, forced through the murderous vortex of Spanish savagery and greed, the slavers turned next to the smaller islands off the mainland coast. The first raid took place in 1515 when natives from Guanaja in the Bay Islands off Honduras were captured and taken to forced labor camps in depopulated Cuba. Other slave expeditions followed, and by 1525, when Cortes arrived in the region, all the Bay Islands themselves had been entirely shorn of their inhabitants.

In order to exploit most fully the land and its populace, and to satisfy the increasingly dangerous and rebellion-organizing ambitions of his well-armed Spanish troops, Columbus instituted a program called the repartimiento or “Indian grants”-later referred to, in a revised version, as the system of encomiendas. This was a dividing-up, not of the land, but of entire peoples and communities, and the bestowal of them upon a would-be Spanish master. The master was free to do what he wished with “his people”-have them plant, have them work in the mines, have them do anything, as Carl Sauer puts it, “without limit or benefit of tenure.”
The result was an even greater increase in cruelty and a magnification of the firestorm of human devastation. Caring only for short-term material wealth that could be wrenched up from the earth, the Spanish overlords on Hispaniola removed their slaves to unfamiliar locales-“the roads to the mines were like anthills,” Las Casas recalled-deprived them of food, and forced them to work until they dropped. At the mines and fields in which they labored, the Indians were herded together under the supervision of Spanish overseers, known as mineros in the mines and estancieros on the plantations, who “treated the Indians with such rigor and inhumanity that they seemed the very ministers of Hell, driving them day and night with beatings, kicks, lashes and blows and calling them no sweeter names than dogs.” Needless to say, some Indians attempted to escape from this. They were hunted down with mastiffs. When found, if not torn apart on the spot, they were returned and a show-trial was held for them, and for the edification of other Indians who were made to stand and watch. The escapees were brought before the visitador [Spanish inspector-magistrate] and the accuser, that is, the supposedly pious master, who accused them of being rebellious dogs and good-for-nothings and demanded stiff punishment. The visitador then had them tied to a post and he himself, with his own hands, as the most honorable man in town, took a sailor’s tarred whip as tough as iron, the kind they use in galleys, and flogged them until blood ran from their naked bodies, mere skin and bones from starvation. Then, leaving them for dead, he stopped and threatened the same punishment if they tried it again.

Occasionally, when slaves were so broken by illness, malnutrition, or exhaustion unto death that they became incapable of further labor output, they were dismissed from the mines or the fields where they worked. Las Casas estimated that perhaps 10 percent of the Indian conscripts survived long enough for this to happen. However, he continued:

When they were allowed to go home, they often found it deserted and had no other recourse than to go out into the woods to find food and to die. When they fell ill, which was very frequently because they are a delicate people unaccustomed to such work, the Spaniards did not believe them and pitilessly called them lazy dogs, and kicked and beat them; and when illness was apparent they sent them home as useless, giving them some cassava for the twenty- to eighty-league journey. They would go then, falling into the first stream and dying there in desperation; others would hold on longer, but very few ever made it home. I sometimes came upon dead bodies on my way, and upon others who were gasping and moaning in their death agony, repeating “Hungry, hungry.”

In the face of utter hopelessness, the Indians began simply surrendering their lives. Some committed suicide. Many refused to have children, recognizing that their offspring, even if they successfully endured the Spanish cruelties, would only become slaves themselves. And others, wrote Las Casas, saw that without any offence on their part they were despoiled of their kingdoms, their lands and liberties and of their lives, their wives, and homes. As they saw themselves each day perishing by the cruel and inhuman treatment of the Spaniards, crushed to the earth by the horses, cut in pieces by swords, eaten and torn by dogs, many buried alive and suffering all kinds of exquisite tortures . . . [they] decided to abandon themselves to their unhappy fate with no further struggles, placing themselves in the hands of their enemies that they might do with them as they liked.

Other natives, in time, did find ways to become reunited with whatever remained of their families. But when most wives and husbands were brought back together, they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides that they had no mind for marital communication and in this way they ceased to procreate. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7,000 babies died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation, while others caused themselves to abort with certain herbs that produced stillborn children. In this way husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk, while others had not time or energy for procreation, and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile, though so unfortunate, was depopulated.

By 1496, we already have noted, the population of Hispaniola had fallen from eight million to between four and five million. By 1508 it was down to less than a hundred thousand. By 1518 it numbered less than twenty thousand. And by 1535, say the leading scholars on this grim topic, “for all practical purposes, the native population was extinct.”

In less than the normal lifetime of a single human being, an entire culture of millions of people, thousands of years resident in their homeland, had been exterminated. The same fate befell the native peoples of the surrounding islands in the Caribbean as well. Of all the horrific genocides that have occurred in the twentieth century against Armenians, Jews, Gypsies, Ibos, Bengalis, Timorese, Kampucheans, Ugandans, and more, none has come close to destroying this many-or this great a proportion of wholly innocent people.

And then the Spanish turned their attention to the mainland of Mexico and Central America. The slaughter had barely begun. The exquisite city of Tenochtitlan was next.

The gratuitous killing and outright sadism that the Spanish soldiers had carried out on Hispaniola and in Central Mexico was repeated in the long march to the south. Numerous reports, from numerous reporters, tell of Indians being led to the mines in columns, chained together at the neck, and decapitated if they faltered. Of children trapped and burned alive in their houses, or stabbed to death because they walked too slowly. Of the routine cutting off of women’s breasts, and the tying of heavy gourds to their feet before tossing them to drown in lakes and lagoons. Of babies taken from their mothers’ breasts, killed, and left as roadside markers. Of “stray” Indians dismembered and sent back to their villages with their chopped-off hands and noses strung around their necks. Of “pregnant and confined women, children, old men, as many as they could capture,” thrown into pits in which stakes had been embedded and “left stuck on the stakes, until the pits were filled.” And much, much more.

One favorite sport of the conquistadors was “dogging.” Traveling as they did with packs of armored wolfhounds and mastiffs that were raised on a diet of human flesh and were trained to disembowel Indians, the Spanish used the dogs to terrorize slaves and to entertain the troops. An entire book, Dogs of the Conquest, has been published recently, detailing the exploits of these animals as they accompanied their masters throughout the course of the Spanish depredations. “A properly fleshed dog,” these authors say, “could pursue a ‘savage’ as zealously and effectively as a deer or a boar…. To many of the conquerors, the Indian was merely another savage animal, and the dogs were trained to pursue and rip apart their human quarry with the same zest as they felt when hunting wild beasts.”

Vasco Nunez de Balboa was famous for such exploits and, like others, he had his own favorite dog-Leoncico, or “little lion,” a reddish-colored cross between a greyhound and a mastiff-that was rewarded at the end of a campaign for the amount of killing it had done. On one much celebrated occasion, Leoncico tore the head off an Indian leader in Panama while Balboa, his men, and other dogs completed the slaughter of everyone in a village that had the ill fortune to lie in their journey’s path. Heads of human adults do not come off easily, so the authors of Dogs of the Conquest seem correct in calling this a “remarkable feat,” although Balboa’s men usually were able to do quite well by themselves. As one contemporary description of this same massacre notes:

The Spaniards cut off the arm of one, the leg or hip of another, and from some their heads at one stroke, like butchers cutting up beef and mutton for market. Six hundred, including the cacique, were thus slain like brute beasts. …Vasco ordered forty of them to be torn to pieces by dogs.

Just as the Spanish soldiers seem to have particularly enjoyed testing the sharpness of their yard-long rapier blades on the bodies of Indian children, so their dogs seemed to find the soft bodies of infants especially tasty, and thus the accounts of the invading conquistadors and the padres who traveled with them are filled with detailed descriptions of young Indian children routinely taken from their parents and fed to the hungry animals.
Overall in central Mexico the population fell by almost 95 percent within seventy-five years following the Europeans’ first appearance – from more than 25,000,000 people in 1519 to barely 1,300,000 in 1595.

For the Andean society as a whole … within a century following their first encounter with the Spanish, 94-96 percent of their once-enormous population had been exterminated; along their 2000 miles of coastline, where once 6,500,000 people had lived, everyone was dead.

During the course of four centuries – from the 1490s to the 1890s – Europeans and white Americans engaged in an unbroken string of genocide campaigns against the native peoples of the Americas.

The earliest European mariners and explorers in California … repeatedly referred to the great numbers of Indians living there. In places where Vizcaino’s ships could approach the coast or his men could go ashore, the Captain recorded, again and again, that the land was thickly filled with people. And where he couldn’t approach or go ashore “because the coast was wild,” the Indians signaled greetings by building fires-fires that “made so many columns of smoke on the mainland that at night it looked like a procession and in the daytime the sky was overcast.” In sum, as Father Ascension put it, “this realm of California is very large and embraces much territory, nearly all inhabited by numberless people.”

But not for very long. Throughout the late sixteenth and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Spanish disease and Spanish cruelty took a large but mostly uncalculated toll. Few detailed records of what happened during that time exist, but a wealth of research in other locales has shown the early decades following Western contact to be almost invariably the worst for native people, because that is when the fires of epidemic disease burn most freely. Whatever the population of California was before the Spanish came, however, and whatever happened during the first few centuries following Spanish entry into the region, by 1845 the Indian population of California had been slashed to 150,000 (down from many times that number prior to European contact) by swarming epidemics of influenza, diphtheria, measles, pneumonia, whooping cough, smallpox, malaria, typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, dysentery, syphilis, and gonorrhea-along with everyday settler and explorer violence. As late as 1833 a malaria epidemic brought in by some Hudson’s Bay Company trappers killed 20,000 Indians by itself, wiping out entire parts of the great central valleys. “A decade later,” writes one historian, “there still remained macabre reminders of the malaria epidemic: collapsed houses filled with skulls and bones, the ground littered with skeletal remains.”

Terrible as such deaths must have been, if the lives that preceded them were lived outside the Spanish missions that were founded in the eighteenth century, the victims might have counted themselves lucky. Two centuries earlier the Puritan minister John Robinson had complained to Plymouth’s William Bradford that although a group of massacred Indians no doubt “deserved” to be killed, “Oh, how happy a thing had it been, if you had converted some before you had killed any!” That was probably the only thing the New England Puritans and California’s Spanish Catholics would have agreed upon. So, using armed Spanish troops to capture Indians and herd them into the mission stockades, the Spanish padres did their best to convert the natives before they killed them.

And kill they did. First there were the Jesuit missions, founded early in the eighteenth century, and from which few vital statistics are available. Then the Franciscans took the Jesuits’ place. At the mission of Nuestra Senora de Loreto, reported the Franciscan chronicler Father Francisco Palou, during the first three years of Franciscan rule 76 children and adults were baptized, while 131 were buried. At the mission of San Jose Cumundu during the same time period 94 were baptized, while 241 died. At the mission of Purisima de Cadegomo, meanwhile, 39 were baptized-120 died. At the mission of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe the figures were similar: 53 baptisms, 130 deaths. The same held true at others, from the mission of Santa Rosalia de Mulege, with 48 baptisms and 113 deaths, to the mission of San Ignacio, with 115 baptisms and 293 deaths-all within the same initial three-year period.

Between 1852 and 1860, under American supervision, the indigenous population of California plunged from 85,000 to 35,000, a collapse of about 60 percent within eight years of the first gubernatorial demands for the Indians’ destruction. By 1890 that number was halved again: now 80 percent of the natives who had been alive when California became a state had been wiped out by an official policy of genocide. Fewer than 18,000 California Indians were still living, and the number was continuing to drop. In the late 1840s and 1850s one observer of the California scene had watched his fellow American whites begin their furious assault “upon [the Indians], shooting them down like wolves, men, women, and children, wherever they could find them,” and had warned that this “war of extermination against the aborigines, commenced in effect at the landing of Columbus, and continued to this day, [is] gradually and surely tending to the final and utter extinction of the race.” While to most white Californians such a conclusion was hardly lamentable, to this commentator it was a major concern-but only because the extermination “policy [has] proved so injurious to the interests of the whites.” That was because the Indians’ “labor, once very useful, and, in fact, indispensable in a country where no other species of laborers were to be obtained at any price, and which might now be rendered of immense value by pursuing a judicious policy, has been utterly sacrificed by this extensive system of indiscriminate revenge.”

Between 95 and 98 percent of California’s Indians had been exterminated in little more than a century. And even this ghastly numerical calculation is inadequate, not only because it reveals nothing of the hideous suffering endured by those hundreds of thousands of California native peoples, but because it is based on decline only from the estimated population for the year 1769-a population that already had been reduced savagely by earlier invasions of European plague and violence. Nationwide by this time only about one-third of one percent of America’s population-250,000 out of 76, 000,000 people-were natives. The worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed, roaring across two continents non-stop for four centuries and consuming the lives of countless tens of millions of people, finally had leveled off. There was, at last, almost no one left to kill.

By 1845 the Indian population of California was down to no more than a quarter of what it had been when the Franciscan missions were established in 1769. That is, it had declined by at least 75 percent during seventy-five years of Spanish rule. In the course of just the next twenty-five years, under American rule, it would fall by another 80 percent. The gold rush brought to California a flood of American miners and ranchers who seemed to delight in killing Indians, miners and ranchers who rose to political power and prominence-and from those platforms not only legalized the enslavement of California Indians, but, as in Colorado and elsewhere, launched public campaigns of genocide with the explicitly stated goal of all-out Indian extermination.

Facts excerpted from the book excerpted from the book:
American Holocaust
by David Stannard
Oxford University Press, 1992