The only reason the US isn't solidly in the first camp is because they really nailed the genocide over here. Just look at, say, this meme for an example of how they were so effective people don't even remember it happened to us.
this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2024
335 points (95.6% liked)
A Comm for Historymemes
1505 readers
121 users here now
A place to share history memes!
Rules:
-
No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, assorted bigotry, etc.
-
No fascism, atrocity denial, etc.
-
Tag NSFW pics as NSFW.
-
Follow all Lemmy.world rules.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Less it happened to us, and more we were still calling ourselves British when we started doing it to the people that weren't.
(oh sorry, I'm native (Iroquois) and I realize now that that 'us' in my first comment was not at all clear about that)
George Washington burned down the villages of native tribes that fought for the US in the revolution...
Source?
Not of Washington's conflict with Native Americans, that he burned down the villages of native tribes that fought for the US in the Revolutionary War.
https://www.oneidaindiannation.com/oneidas-and-the-birth-of-the-u-s/
That doesn't say anything about the Oneidas being attacked by the Revolutionaries during the Revolutionary War.
They tried doing that to the native people living in North America too. The only difference is that they largely succeeded.
Me, a Canadian full blooded Ojibway/Cree on all sides of my family joining this conversation ...
Ugh, I hope you're doing alright dude. My indig Canadian relatives have been having such a fucking time with the alt-right up there they're seriously considering moving to the US to escape the bullshit.
A bit of an easier time up here in Northern Ontario as we don't seem to get too many far right extremists ... we have them, just not as prevalent. The Canadian west have a hell of time with this mentality ... BC has a lot of denialism because that is where the whole Residential School awareness campaign started from ... Alberta is well Alberta ... and Saskatchewan and Manitoba are becoming more like Alberta-lite
I could always gauge the Canadian mentality by public washroom stalls. I took a motorcycle trip out west from northern Ontario to the BC interior in 2001. Great ride and a great public washroom stall education. In northern Ontario there is some racism, misogyny, a lot penises and generally just goofy humour ... Manitoba / Saskatchewan were more or less the same and had quite a bit of racism, Native humour, some penises, lots of boobs and some funny jokes ... Alberta was the worst and it felt like they had literal paid artists and writers painting the stalls with the most elaborate racist homophobic messages, notes and entire scripts with images on the walls (a common one was in labelling the toilet paper holder as a 'turban roll').
Our greatest protection up here is that we live in mushkeg which no one wants to live on. We have bitter cold winters and summers are filled with biting insects and the seasons in between are about the only times you can enjoy this land.
So all in all ... we're doing OK here ... we've always done OK here ... and I guess we'll do OK for the foreseeable future.
Wachiyeh doodem ... (greetings, my friend)
Out of the frying pan, into the fire?
Well compare the proportion of natives living in Canada/United States versus the proportion of natives living in India or Nigeria or South Africa and I think you'll agree I'm mostly right when I say that the British succeeded in displacing the indigenous population of North America.
All joking aside ... you are right ... for the most part. Almost all the communities,cities and towns in Atlantic Canada and southern Ontario and Quebec have basically wiped out all Indigenous people ... any that are left there are very diluted ancestry and can claim about 1/4 at best of Indigenous ancestry. I don't like playing genetic games with Indigenous ancestry and who is more Native than another - but it is a fact of life now so I can't avoid it .... and argue it any further and then you start playing Eugenics and purity games, which I never agree with.
Personally I know a lot of a variety of native people ... full blooded, quarter blood, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32 ... federally carded, non-identified and adopted ... I know so many that I even have family with blond hair / blue eyes who are fully recognized and members ... and conversely I know people who are full blooded or have majority Native ancestors but due to history, land changes and treaties, have no recognition at all!
More remote areas of Canada where people are not as likely to move to are mostly Indigenous ... far northern Ontario, far northern Quebec, far northern Manitoba/Saskatechewan/Alberta, NWT, Yukon is full of mostly Indigenous or large populations of them ... and Nunavut especially is almost all Inuit.
But if it isn't genetics that will eventually dilute our ancestry so much that you won't be able to tell who is native or not any more ... it will be through cultural and identity loss.
My first language is Cree/Ojibway and I'm fully fluent. The generation after me? They are only partly fluent and mostly speak English. The generation after them ... is almost all completely English. All our languages are dying out even in the remote areas because everyone wants FB, IG, Youtube and Tiktok, so there is no encouragement of the language.
So Europeans displaced us over the past 500 years ... but not completely ... we were able to survive through a lot but with the modern world of pop culture and internet culture, whatever we had left is slowly drying up. For hundreds of years, they tried to beat, kill and torture the culture out of us but they couldn't ... get us to watch a few million TikTok videos and we're willing give up our souls .... just like everyone else out there.
Nonsense, you'll be stone dead in a moment.
I laughed way too long and too much at this ... such dark, dark humour and I thank the universe for giving us Monty Python .... beautiful ... thanks for this ... lol
"They" started the job, then the US had a war of independence and then kept the job going.
Dont forget that one of the big "unforgivable" laws to the proto-USA wasnt just taxes.
But that the colonies had to respect the existing borders of the colonies to existing native groups
They didn't just try in NA
1770 The Great Bengal Famine occurs killing 30 million thanks to extractive taxation by England.
1775 America violently rejects extractive taxation policies and goes on to win independence from England.
1845 The Great Irish Famine kills 1 million with at least 2 million fleeing as refugees due to extractive policies on food. Which had Ireland continue to net export food during the famine.
The difference is America knew what came next and acted accordingly.
Well, I'd point at the difference being "America was organized and ready to take advantage of anti-British sentiment, while the other two were not".
People often want to think it's the scale or intensity of the injustice which triggers revolutions, but it's really not - it's the chances of success. People can suffer almost infinitely if they don't believe they can win. Britain's policy of 'benevolent neglect' bit them in the ass, because it forced us to organize ourselves, including in local companies, militia units, and colonial representative bodies, which came in handy once we realized that not being represented was a really shit deal.
America was organized and ready to take advantage of anti-British sentiment, while the other two were not".
I'd agree having knowledge of what happened in India enabled the Americans to foresee the inevitable outcomes of ignoring the taxes and take early action to organize and resist. 1770 and 1775 were very close in time. If not for the Great Bengal Famine perhaps the American Revolution would have gone much differently.
If the result of fighting and failing and not fighting are both the same suddenly 1% sounds like great odds.
What bit Britain was two things the excessive spending on the French Indian war and the fact that we weren't forced to have representative bodies and militias we wanted them. American considered themselves Englishmen and to have all the rights afforded to Englishmen. Americans fought most of 1775 and into 76 not fighting for independence but for the respect of those rights after England tried to dissolve our legislative bodies.
England had no more a right to tax the colonies than Russia has to tax a Frenchman. If America didn't reject a tax on tea (even though it actually made tea cheaper) they'd be accepting the notion that it was a just authority of England to tax them. And if they had authority to tax a penny they could tax a pound. As shown in Bengal the power to tax was the power to destroy.
I mean, while that is true, I don't know how much the news of a recent event like the Great Bengal Famine in a time of slow news and even slower analysis really impacted the American Revolution's internal support. Most American colonists were probably not particularly aware of the Great Bengal Famine, and those that were were probably not in possession of the full data of the event and its causes; and revolutionary sentiment had been on the rise all through the 1760s in any case.
I think calling the rising sentiment of the 1760s as revolutionary is a presentist perspective. The sinking of the Gaspee was in 1772 and the Tea Party in 1773 both are at most forms of uncivilized protest rather than revolt. At earliest revolution/independence wasn't even a firm niche view until 1775 IMO.
As for the pace at which word spread regarding India, here is an article from Sept 1771 on the matter published in a New Hampshire newspaper https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025582/1771-09-27/ed-1/seq-3/ (pg 3). I do not think it is unreasonable that by 1775 the American people would have been informed of the hazards of the extractive policies of Britain as evidenced by Bengal.
Obviously one newspaper article doesn't show full knowledge of the extent of the incident (despite that it was published in various other local journals). But thinking of the terrible conditions often unpaid men faced in the patriot camps avoiding what even this one article claims seems like a worthy hill to die on. Here's a section:
“On our arrival here, we found a river full of dead human carcasses floating up and down, and the streets crowded with the dead and dying, without anyone attempting to give them relief; so horribly has the famine raged here, that they who were able to walk and procure food for themselves were so accustomed to see their fellow creatures perishing before them, that it did not even create a painful emotion."
Left side clearly shouldn't have waited that long SMH my head
You forgot the no representation part.
We had representation. In each colony's own legislature before they started shutting them down. Representation would never happen in British parliament as it'd establish precedent for other colonies and Britain would soon be out numbered. Americans didn't want representation we wanted to prevent a precedent that we could be treated as an economic resource tile for the British to suck dry and abandon starving and sick.