And now:[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: the following was posted to the First nations list and is reposted here by permission of the author. thank you to David Rider..:) ------------------------------------------ I sat in the office of the History prof, no longer chair of the department, who teaches US History at Xavier. He'd been away and I covered his class while he was gone last week. We talked about my lecture. I was telling him about Virginia Governor Berkeley who settled the question long debated there - whether to exterminate or enslave Indians - by a compromise: Kill all the men and ship the women and children to the Caribbean as slaves. That way, they covered the expenses of colonization by the money earned from slaves. Same thing in New England, although there they were a bit more smug about it, always dreaming up clever ways of justifying "war" with Indians. Still, they shipped the survivors to the islands and paid for their colonization by the money earned from slavery. I told the prof about Hatuey's refusal of heaven because there were christians there. I told him that the dead bodies in Tenochitlan were so thick - 40,000 killed in a single day - you had to walk on them to go about in the city, then the largest non-Asian city in the world. He asked me "when" enslavement of Indians was outlawed here. I said it depends on where the "here" is. In Louisiana, it happened in 1763 when the Spanish took over. But I told him the "why" question was more important: Indian slaves, accompanied by African slaves, were noted for their resistance against the colonial government when they ditched the plantation and made a run for it.They essentially started their own little towns - called "maroon" towns - with fellow African runaways and raided the settlers' livestock, burned homes, and raised hell. So it was finally decided to stop using Indian slaves here, but ship them to the Indies for money they could use for African slaves, who would have a tougher time making it on their own in the Louisiana swamps. Finally, the history prof said to me: David, this is very interesting. Why don't they put that in the history books. Ah, I said, because somewhere down the line, someone doesn't want our students to know this stuff. Either the guys who write the books, or the guys who taught them in grad school, or the guys who taught the guys who taught the guys...They want our students to believe in American justice and goodness, expansion with honor, all that stuff that makes people proud to be American. I don't know what it was, but this man I spoke with seemed to change today while I was with him. Maybe I'm wrong. I've had plenty of talks with him, I've guest lectured for him for years. He has heard me speak in the classroom and at public forums. But something struck home with him today, i think. i certainly hope so. He had a look of helplessness that you don't find on the face of professors often. He had a look that told me America was even worse than he had imagined when he immigrated here from Bangla Desh. He had a look that gave me hope that he believes it is his duty to tell the truth in history class, instead of the white-washed rubble they can in history textbooks like the nuclear waste they can and ship to some Indian reservation out west... dave Reprinted under the Fair Use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html doctrine of international copyright law. &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit) Unenh onhwa' Awayaton http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/ UPDATES: CAMP JUSTICE http://shell.webbernet.net/~ishgooda/oglala/ &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
