“We Don’t Deserve This”

Jack R. Noel
September 16, 2023

It is common today to see blame-aiming ideologues blaming either “White people” or “Europeans” for “destroying” Native American cultures, which, according to them once had “thriving cultures and human values.”

The blame-aiming is what triggered me. On the face of it, this is divisive and creates hard feelings all around. It’s also inaccurate and unneeded unless someone has an interest in dividing us all. Which of course they do.

Let’s do a brief review of actual events. Starting with the original occupants. Archeologists and anthropologists are still trying to pin down the time when humans first arrived in North and South America. But so far the consensus is about fourteen thousand years ago. In other words, about 10,000 years before there was a pharaonic Egypt, any such thing as a nation of Isreal or a Roman empire.

So the native Americans of four to five hundred years ago had barely begun to build a few settlements with as many as 50,000 people.

And it was no more than five centuries ago that Europeans even became aware of North America and South America. And they did what every human does, they used “Finders Keepers” as their founding assumption.

Especially because the North American indigenous people were behind their South American neighbors in that there were no megalithic structures north of the current border with Mexico. The northern tribes were still deep in the Stone Age and had been since when the Stone Age was the latest thing. What were the European colonists of the time to think, that these primitive tribesmen were worthy of having so many millions of miles of virtually unoccupied land?

There were many kinds of wealth just out there, while the indigenous people of the time didn’t even have a means of smelting ores.

Deserve has nothing to do with it.

But today many are using the morals and ethics of today to base a claim that the indigenous people are being treated unfairly. But it’s always ignored that, of the millions of indigenous people, not one has achieved what first-world countries have been doing for generations. And that’s with the advantage of having living examples around them every day.

One cannot use a tiny number of exceptional people as being representative of an entire population of people. They are indeed human and have been given full rights (plus hunting and fishing privileges worthy of a Safari operator).

About destroying cultures, there is something that’s also ignored. Let any representative of North American Indian culture speak to this question: Of what value is your culture other than as a museum exhibit? And maybe: Why should a culture with still includes ancient tribal wars that were just as savage as anything Europeans have done be preserved?

You don’t deserve to have your culture destroyed by anyone? Deserve has nothing to do with it, all of humanity doesn’t deserve floods or hurricanes but we must find survival nonetheless. You don’t deserve what others have done to you, individually or as a population. Neither do any of us. We can find survival together, nonetheless.