Quote:
lcpiper said:
The ones who peacefully adjusted to new ideas and joined themselves living among the white people were peacefully assimilated. Those that resisted violently were destroyed.
|
That's an absolutely preposterous assertion. You need to research your claim. Numerous tribes, particularly in the east and the Ohio Valley, attempted to "Europeanize" themselves. Many even converted to Christianity.
These tribes were still forced, along with the others, to walk the "trail of tears."
If they weren't marked for extermination, they were definitely marked for segregation. In fact, our excuse for moving them onto reservations was to centralize them in order to convert them to Christianity. The irony was that many of them had already converted.
We wanted their property and their resources. Period. We never intended them to become part of us.
And the reason we were able to do all of this was not because they didn't have guns. It was more fundamental than that.
The early Native American was fiercely individualistic. That's what the white policy makers couldn't comprehend, viz. that no one Indian had the power to make a treaty that would be binding over all other Indians.
But if those early Indians had had the foresight to band together and follow a single leader, this might have been an entirely different country.
They were just too fragmented to oppose us.