I'm surprised to learn that the native tribes on the east coast were wiped out by diseases imported by trappers before European settlers arrived. I would have thought that the trappers who brought diseases that wiped out the native population would have been Europeans themselves. Perhaps the "Indians" who the European settlers encountered when they arrived were actually trappers in disguise.
St. Augustine, a city in Florida, has been in continual occupation since its founding in 1565. It was founded by Spanish settlers, sent by the same government that sent Columbus and enslaved native people we often call Indians. If we want to define a "project" by the modern boundaries drawn by Europeans, we miss the point: Europeans came to the Americas and enslaved "Indians" before they imported slaves from Africa. All slavery is bad, and all victims of it deserve recognition for that. And the last time I looked, St. Augustine is part of the U.S. If Chris' thesis were to reflect actual history, or even what has been purported to be history by the racist historians we learned from in school, we would have a European settler population who arrived to find no native population. We have a slogan for that thesis, one that has been popularized by European settlers in South Africa and Palestine: "A land without a people for a people without a land". Sorry, I don't buy it. Not the slogan, not the re-write of history, and not the dismissal of the plight of native people. The 1619 Project's thesis that the U.S. revolution was largely, or even mostly, about the perpetuation of slavery is an important correction to our country's myopic vision of its self-manufactured greatness. But for one representative of one of the groups victimized by slavery to implicitly ignore another group's genocide, including slavery, is simply wrong. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#887): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/887 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/76437371/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES<br />#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.<br />#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.<br />#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
