Posted by Raman from internet.walgreens.com (63.73.199.69) on Wednesday, April 10, 2002 at 1:21PM :
In Reply to: WAGING GENOCIDE posted by Turkish Delight from ? (66.42.91.31) on Tuesday, April 09, 2002 at 1:35AM :
I believe it was the British who gave the natives blankets infected with the smallpox vaccine. Entire villages were wiped out because they didn't fathom that another human being could be so evil.
: WAGING GENOCIDE
: CHRISTIAN MISSIONARIES & SMALLPOX,
: THE ANDREW JACKSON CONNECTION
: WE ARE GUIDED BY OUR READERS, AND WE RESPOND, A READER'S STATEMENT GETS HISTORY BACKWARDS:
: "In 1831 it seems that the Cherokee Nation forbade any white man to reside in the state of GA without first taking an oath to the Cherokee Nation. Some missionaries were arrested including Worcester, Butler, Thompson and Proctor because they refused to take the oath, (page 119)."
:
: OUR RESPONSE:
: This is backwards, the State of Georgia forbid, by legal text only, those who were not Cherokee to live in the Nation. This test of allegiance was government initiated for certain legal cases. The Cherokee were not out to imprison missionaries, though the record shows they should have, the US and state governments were out to exterminate the Cherokee and any who stood up for them.
: CAREER MAKING & PSEUDO SCIENCE-
: Your reference is to page 119, James Mooney's, History, Myths and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Among traditionals Mooney is not regarded as a reliable source. For one thing he was building a career which paid off eventually when he established ethnology as a "scientific" department of the Smithsonian Institute which he got to be the head of. This was while that institution was debating whether the "Indian" has a brain big enough to be considered human. The Smithsonian still holds over 7,000 bodies of Native Americans in boxes for the curious. It had already been determined the African American, entertaining and educable though he was, was actually closer to the monkey than the white man.
: FOR THE MISSIONARY, TOUGH CHOICES- JESUS, THE DEVIL AND A DOLLAR- HE SUCCESSFULLY WORSHIPPED ALL THREE:
: Referring to the oath of allegiance to the Cherokee Nation which is included in your message above, you can well imagine how a Christian missionary whose life revolves around the teachings of Jesus Christ might respond to the United States government's requirement to swear allegiance to what he viewed as a heathen and barbarian religious culture. He had gone there to convert what he thought were savages. What he achieved was the revelation of his savage heart for it was the missionary who loved his evil and hateful vision of god.
: This oath of allegiance was a simple way to prove the intentions and dedication of any individual by the government. If the Cherokee Nation had required this allegiance to the Cherokee religious spiritual traditions in order to receive tribal recognition and kept doing it as the old ones did back at the time of contact, few of the traditions and knowledge of the religious heritage that is truly Cherokee would ever have been lost. No Christian would have denied their Christ and given up their place in heaven by declaring their belief in the Cherokee philosophy of the ancestors, not Jesus as the path to the Great Spirit.
: Greed drove over a hundred thousand intruders into the area by 1825, few of whom were ever expelled. Though protection from intruders was a guarantee to the Cherokee by treaty, which the State of Georgia and the federal government were supposed to uphold it was never given the slightest honor by white interests. Forts were established to police against intruders but what they did was to harass the Cherokee and provide safety and protection for whites from those who tried to protect their families. The State of Georgia insured no Cherokee would ever receive justice by forbidding the testimony or presence of any Native American in a court of law, period, just like the Nuremberg Laws of 1936 against Jews in Germany. This gave all whites free rein to terrorize, steal and kill any Native person they wanted to. No Cherokee "removed" because they wanted to, it was because the protection they were assured by treaty obligation was never provided.
: The missionaries who entered Indian country were sent there to "civilize" the native people. They acquired this position by negotiation through treaty and were given vast amounts of land and guaranteed subsidies administered by the federal government out of tribal money. This money never touched the hands of the Cherokee and most often none was left after missionary, Indian agents, superintendents and corrupt tribal government leaders got done with it.
: ANDREW JACKSON GENOCIDE BY WITHHOLDING SMALL POX VACCINES-
: In 1832 Congress appropriated $12,000 dollars to begin the fight against smallpox in Indian country. 20 years after they did the same for whites. Significantly, actual vaccination expenditures that first year "for smallpox and certain other things" amounted to only $1,786, as opposed to $5,721 for "missionary improvement" and $9,424 for the "civilization of the Indians." One year later, in 1833, actual expenditures were down to $721. (ed. Stuewe, Paul K., KANSAS REVISITED: HISTORICAL IMAGES AND PERSPECTIVES, article by Unrau, William, The Depopulation of the Kansas Indians") This is why most Native Americans today who are knowledgeable of their history are pointing out the United States Government waged genocide against their people. When medicine to heal children and families from a deadly and mortal disease is withheld, that agency which does this crime against humanity is committing genocide.
: MISSIONARIES LOVED TO DESTROY FAMILIES BY MOLESTING CHILDREN-
: "Civilizing" meant taking children away from their parents at the ages of 5-12 years and forcing them to live without father, mother, sister, brother in missionary schools, if you can imagine that done to a little child. This practice was not exclusive to the early years of American history but continued up until the mid 1970's in this country. Children were beaten and given forced labor during their stay in school. Participation was "optional" but missionaries controlled the annuities of food and trust money through their relationship with superintendents and the military. Families that did not surrender their children did not receive food or payments that were supposed to be guaranteed to them.
: Very young children caught in this situation were brainwashed to treat their parents as savages and barbarians and they suffered terribly under this psychological torture. By this method through several generations Cherokee, like most Native Americans were stripped of the knowledge of their heritage, religious beliefs and trust of their family supports. You must remember too, that lynching by European Americans as the finely tuned entertainment and terrorizing event that it came to be in the 1920's had it's proving grounds in the shadowy morality of seizure of Native American lands in order to force African Americans to be enslaved to work it. This is the furnace of economic development that fueled America's so called growth until post civil war days and was not restricted just to the South.
: RED HOLOCAUST-
: This is why it is called a Red Holocaust and fits the United Nations accords for genocide. Any people whose children are taken from them in order to destroy the religious, spiritual, racial and cultural heritage of that people are victims of genocide. Legally little of the South has ever passed into ownership of non Native people because the obligations of the treaties were never honored. This will eventually come to justice in the South as it already has in the state of Maine.
: OUR READER CONTINUES
: FALSELY CLASSIFYING THE CHEROKEE AS AGGRESSORS:
: "The part that seemed interesting was that Worcester's defense was that he was a citizen of Vermont, and had entered Cherokee by approval of the President. His defense succeeded and he was freed and returned to VT(?) Even though the names don't match Vermont is a long way from Cherokee Country and I don't imagine that tons of people made that particular trek. But I'm no expert on history either."
:
: THOMAS JEFFERSON CALLS FOR EXTINCTION-
: To the contrary "tons of people" from Thomas Jefferson's, Vermont did make the trek to the Cherokee Nation. That is why the pressure to build a genocide slave based empire on Native Cherokee soil was so successful. Jefferson who wrote the removal policy and openly supported genocide of Native Americans declared, "If ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or is driven beyond the Mississippi....they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them."
: Missionary work was very big business. It afforded the building of careers, growth of denominational influence in regions that formed economic bases of support. Churches were established through lucrative payments from Indian funds and lands which were deeded for use as farms, timber production and for sale in financing further ventures not the least of which was buying selling and working their slaves. Churches and missionaries were aggressively competing for government contracts among the Native American people all the way up until the 1970's when Native American Education legislation made it too difficult for the government to sever lands for missionary work without compensation.
: To give some insight on the abuse of law that the State of Georgia in the early 19th century used to terrorize the Cherokee, the banishment of "intruders" was only enforced when whites who stood up for the Cherokee by representing their interests. It was also used by whites through the
: spoils system to get rid of squatters whose land was coveted by another white. Those whites who took public stands for Native people in the area were thrown out. Worcester was one such missionary. He returned and was thrown into prison for a year for his stand on Cherokee rights.
-- Raman
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