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CHAPTER I NO ROOM FOR REDSKINS IF you're a real American-that is, an American Indian-you're lucky to be alive. For whether he really believed it or not, the white man has acted on the principle that "The only good Indian is a dead one". This was certainly one ofthe foundation stones upon which the white European invaders ofNorth America and their descendants established and built the republic ofthe U.S.A. When in 1492 Christopher Columbus opened the door to the white conquest of the Americas, there were nearly a million native Indians living in what is now the United States. Far from permitting this number to increase, the white man has vigorously pursued-both as individual enterprise and national policy-a genocidal campaign expressly aimed, until quite recently, at the effective extermination of Indians from the continent. This campaign-consisting of relentless warfare, massacre, confinement , starvation, and neglect-was so successful that by 1923 less than a quarter of a million Indians remained in the U.S.A. Since then the pressures have been relaxed somewhat, permitting a certain increase in the Indian population, but with intensified efforts being made to exterminate Indian culture. By 1958 their number was still only half what it was upon the white man's arrival. As has been characteristic of white imperialism, the European settlers and their descendants in America were inclined to look down th . Indian " ky dskin"" "d "h then" upon e natlve sas pes re s , savages ,an ea s. This attitude, coupled with an avowed desire to convey the blessings of Christianity and European civilization on the "benighted barbarians ", salved the consciences ofthose who went about the profitable business ofdivesting the Indians oflife, liberty, and property. The genocidal programme likewise called for expropriating or liquidating the Indians' culture. Four-sevenths of the agricultural production ofthe U.S.A. now consists ofplants which were originally domesticated by the Indians (the white man has failed to domesticate 10 JIM CROW GUIDE TO THE U.S.A. a single important staple on the continent). Numerous other things, including snow-shoes, toboggans, woodland garments, and even methods of warfare were appropriated from the Indians with scarcely an acknowledgment. On the contrary, American history books and Hollywood movies generally perpetuate the notion that the white man contributed all, the Indian nothing. However, one thing which the white man did introduce-Hollywood and the historybooks to the contrary notwithstanding-was the practice of scalping one's victims. Because the Indians were thinly scattered, "it was a case where the existing racial and cultural slate could be wiped relatively clean", the historian Dr. Everett Stonequist has observed. An early Pilgrim in Massachusetts, thanking God for a pestilence that wiped out an Indian tribe, wrote in hisjourna1: "By this means Christ, whose great and glorious works throughout the earth are for the benefit of his churches and his chosen, not only made room for his people to plant, but also tamed the hearts ofthe barbarous Indians." Evidently not content with the rate at which the white man's diseases decimated the Indians, one colonial general ordered his subordinates to wage bacteriological warfare as follows : "You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets in which smallpox patients have slept, as well as by other means that can serve to extirpate this execrable race." In like vein, a pioneer immigrant to California wrote at the time: "I often argued with Good regarding disposition of the Indians. He believed in killing every man or well-grown boy, but in leaving the women unmolested. It was plain to me that we must also get rid ofthe women." In the opening up of Oregon. to white settlement, even Methodist clergymen expressed no regret at seeing Indian women being clubbed to death and Indian babies dashed against trees by white settlers. One Oregon settler named Beeson wrote: "It was customary [for the whites] to speak ofthe Indian man as a buck; ofthe woman as a squaw; until at length in the general acceptance of the terms, they ceased to recognize the rights ofhumanity in those to whom they were applied. By Q very natural and easy transition, from being spoken ofas brutes, they came to be thought of as game to be shot, or as vermin to be destroyed." In Colorado, an early legislature seriously considered adopting a law providing for cash bounty payments for "the destruction of Indians and Sltunks". [3.17...

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