It
so happened that an 11-year-old boy came home from school one day and
told his parents that the first European white people who came to
America were so mean that they tried to kill the Indians by giving them
blankets with smallpox germs.
The boy’s father tried to use this as a teachable moment. He
asked his
son to think if that made sense, even if the first white settlers were
that evil. How would they avoid getting smallpox
themselves? The boy
then let it be known that the American Constitution was written by the
Iroquois Indians. The father informed his son that the Iroquois
did
not have an alphabetic written language, so they could not have written
our Constitution. The boy thought about the smallpox contagion
problem
but would not be dissuaded from his conviction that Iroquois Indians
wrote the Constitution.
It also happens that this boy is a direct descendant of those same
earliest colonials he had been taught in the public schools to
despise. The miseducated schoolboy (now older and wiser) is a
14th-generation American. He descends from an Englishman who,
with his
wife and eight children, in 1638 sailed on the Susan and Ellen to the
land that came to be called New England. The boy’s forbears
established the oldest privately deeded homestead in the United States
in Windsor, Connecticut. Let us hearken back to that fateful
moment on
the rough dock in Braintree, England and picture Joseph turning to his
wife Mary, as harried husbands do when embarking with a large brood on
a lengthy journey: “Honey, didst thou remember to pack the smallpox
blankets?”
Over the centuries, smallpox did have devastating effects on the
populations of American Indians. However, hard evidence is
lacking
that Indians were intentionally handed smallpox-infested blankets by
white settlers. The globalization of disease is a natural
consequence
of human adventuring. For example, there is substantial
scientific
evidence that Christopher Columbus brought syphilis back to the Old
World. Ward Churchill, that poster boy of leftist mendacity, was
fired
from the University of Colorado because he fabricated claims that
American soldiers conducted a smallpox genocide against the American
Indians. To the extent that that belief persists, it contributes
to a
collective dissociative state.
[Racial
Revenge: Infected Immigrants as Human Smallpox Blankets continued]
Ahem...the Iroquois were evil in that they mostly fought on the anglo side...
ReplyDeleteRemembered in Canada as genocidal maniacs...they were thanked for their efforts by getting kicked out of the USA to Canada where they are still troublesome...now they are better known for their building of New York's skyscrapers.
1638? Newbie. My 'cestors got over here in 1635 with Reverend Hull.
ReplyDeleteOh, and germs were barely conceived of in those days; it wasn't until the 1800s that they were proven to cause disease.
And while the Five Nations had a peace treaty, they hardly had anything you'd call representative government or democracy.
My immigrant ancestor arrived at Jamestown in 1608. The Virginia Company didn't fool around with smallpox blankets, because they hardly had any blankets. They did shoot injuns as necessary though, and the injuns massacred whole settlements from time to time as they saw fit.
ReplyDeleteThey weren't "feelings" then; just survival of the fittest.
I sure would like to confront the "educator"*spit* who put that bilge on that poor kid. I hope the kid's father did.
Lt. Col. Gen. Tailgunner dick
My ancestors didn't get here until the early/mid 1800s and they had to travel all the way to the Dakota Territory to find any natives to get uppity with...
ReplyDeleteWabano, If memory serves me right, it is the Mohawks who were the steeplejacks who built the NYC skyscrapers. Perhaps the Iroquois are a branch of the Mohawks, like there are a number of branches of the Sioux nation. But, I was born and raised in the western U.S., so really don't have a lot of knowledge about the eastern Indian tribes.
ReplyDeleteScottiebill