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Old May 1, 2013, 06:27 PM   #56
btmj
Senior Member
 
Join Date: November 1, 2011
Location: Near St. Louis, Missouri
Posts: 864
When English colonists first came into contact with Native Americans in the Massachusetts bay region, they were not interested in enslaving them, fencing them in, or manipulating them. The English found the Indians to be skilled negotiators, politically sophisticated, and just plain smart. The Indians rapidly learned English and French, and yet the English had a very hard time learning the native languages.

Indians and English would go on to live through periods of relative peace, interspersed with war. Often the English and some Indians were at war with the French and some different Indians.

The oppression came much later, after the wars had mostly played out and the English-Now-Americans were victorious in the wars.

Don't confuse the wars with the oppression. Wars between cultures happen, and there is plenty of blame to go around in regards to who instigated the various Indian wars. The Indians were not saints, and when they had the upper hand they often slaughtered civilians including women and children. The oppression of each tribe almost always occurred AFTER the war against that tribe was won. It is a horrid bit of our history, but as I pointed out before, the way the Indians were treated between 1800 and 1900 is not really any different than what was going on in the Caucasus, or Egypt, or Ireland, or Armenia, or anywhere in Africa or South America.
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