The true history of America
Politicians and scholars today can present a certain picture of the world that is different from God’s view. Just as the secular theory of the creation of the world differs from the Biblical truth, so in the history of countries and nations, we see how everything can be distorted. The true Church must have a free and independent view and voice – the voice of God’s truth.
Native American demographic disaster
The colonization of America happened by eviction from their native lands and the extermination of the indigenous population of America.
On August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed off from the city of Palos de la Frontera on three ships: Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria, in search of India. After 70 days of sailing, he reached several islands of a new, unknown continent.
October 12, Columbus, with his crew of 90 people, landed on one of the Bahamas. On the same day, the first contact with the native people of the island took place. In his personal diary on the same day, Christopher Columbus leaves a record of his first impressions:
“These people had no need. They took care of their plants, were skilled fishermen, canoeists and swimmers. They built attractive homes and kept them clean. Aesthetically, they expressed themselves in woodcrafts. They had free time to play ball, dance and play music. They lived in peace and friendship. … These people walk in no clothes, but are good-natured … they can be made free and converted to our Holy Faith. They will make good and skillful servants ”.
Later, Columbus repeatedly described in the logbooks the beauty of the islands and their friendly, happy, peaceful inhabitants, and two days after the first contact, on October 14 of the same year, an entry was made in one of the logbooks:
“50 soldiers are enough to conquer them all and make them do whatever we want. Native people allow us to go where we want, and give us everything we ask of them. ”
March 15, 1493 Christopher Columbus returned to Spain. From his first trip, he brought plants, animals, and six Indians.
September 25, 1493 Columbus sailed to America on 3 karakas, 17 caravels with 1,500 people on board. It was with this expedition that a large batch of mastiffs and greyhounds trained to attack people was brought to the New World. Mass hangings were also used, punitive campaigns were organized.
During the second expedition, Columbus was searching for gold and the “Great Chinese Khanate” along the southern coast of Cuba, as well as selling Indians into slavery. Armed with harquebuses and fighting dogs, the detachment traveled on horseback to Indian villages to exchange gold. When resisting, the Spaniards took gold by force, and people were enslaved.
After the royal expedition to the “New World” many “gold hunters” appeared in Spain, who organized private expeditions. The Spanish monarchy charged 1/3 of them, and later 1/5. The kings endowed the colonists with lands and allowed them to force the natives living on them to sow the fields and plant gardens for the “new owners”. The Spaniards not only established laws by which Indians were executed, but often made bets on who could cut a man with one blow of a saber from top to bottom. For one killed Spaniard they killed one hundred Indians. Starting the day dogs were brought into the continent, the Spaniards fed them with the dead bodies of Indians. One Spaniard’s letter reads:
“… when I returned from Cartagena, I met a Portuguese named Rojé Martin. On the porch of his house hung pieces of chopped-up Indians to feed his dogs, as if they were wild beasts…”
During this campaign, Bartolome de Las Casas arrived in Hispaniola. Bartolome assessed the condition of the locals and the Spaniards themselves as terrible and, upon returning to Spain, reported to the monarchs about the poor state of affairs run by Columbus and his brothers. Subsequently, he repeatedly stood up to protect the indigenous population of America. His book The Brief Relation on the Destruction of Indias (Spanish: Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias), published in 1552, provides a vivid description of the atrocities committed by the conquistadors in America – in particular, in the Caribbean, Central America and the territories, which today relate to Mexico – among which are many events that he witnessed, as well as some events that he reproduces as retold by eyewitnesses. Largely thanks to his efforts in 1542, New laws were adopted to protect the Indians in the colonies.
A little later, the Spanish monarchs sent Juan Aguado for a check up , who reported at the end of 1495 about the high mortality of the Indians due to the brutal policy of the colonists. Columbus passed a law that obligated all Indians over 14 years of age to quarterly (every 3 months) pay the Spaniards gold or 25 pounds of cotton (in areas where there was no gold). Those who paid such a “tax” were given a copper token with the date of the last payment. The token thus extended the right to live for three months. If the date on the token was expired, then the Indians were chopped off the hands of both hands, hung them on the neck and sent to die in their village.
Fulfilling the requirement of the law was unrealistic, because the Indians had to quit cultivating their fields and hunting, and do only gold mining. Famine began. Weakened and demoralized, they became an easy prey for infections introduced by the Spaniards.
In 1498, a law came into force legalizing forceful labor of Indians for Spaniards. The reason was the dissatisfaction with the income received from the collection of gold and the sale of Aborigines into slavery.
In July-September 1539, conquistador Francisco de Chavez razed the kingdom of Carua Conchukos, which was part of the Inca Empire until 1533 (the Finkuko people occupied the territory that now corresponds to the provinces of Palasca and Corongo, in the north of the Ankash department, Peru) and killed 600 children under the age of three, which was the biggest massacre of children in history.
In 1598, in response to the killing of 11 Spanish soldiers, don Juan de Onate carried out a punitive expedition and in a three-day battle near Mount Akoma (the name of the mountain comes from the name of the tribe that lived on it) destroyed 800 Indians and ordered to cut off the left leg of every male of the tribe older 25 years.
In the years leading up to 1835, the Brazilian government tried to subjugate the Indian by creating a “local government.” As a result, a rebellion broke out in several tribes in Belen, which was supressed.
The reason for the numerous victims among the Yanomami Indians who lived in the Amazon River Delta was the territory rich in minerals in which the tribe lived. A large number of Indians died from infections brought there by builders and soldiers. Today, the number of Yanomami is about 500 people; for comparison – in 1974 their number was approximately 2000 people.
North American Colonies
On the evening of May 26, 1637, the British colonists, under the command of John Underhill, in alliance with the Mohicans and the Narragansett tribe, attacked the village of the Pecot tribe (in the territory of modern Connecticut) and burned alive about 600-700 people.
In 1740, a French traveler wrote:
“… hundreds of miles of river banks without a sign of human life and once prosperous villages that were devastated and empty”
During the US War of Independence on March 8, 1782, 96 baptized Indians were killed by American militia from Pennsylvania. The incident occurred in a Moravian brothers’ mission called Gnadenhutten, which was located near the current city of Gnadenhutten in Ohio.
During the Revolutionary War and after the declaration of the US independence, armed clashes between settlers and Indians were not uncommon. Some events were brutal or tragic, and received wide publicity. April 30, 1774 there was a massacre at the Yellow Creek, near modern Wellsville (Ohio). During tensions and regular conflicts between residents of the most remote communities of the United States and the Indians, at the hands of a group of 22-30 Virginian border settlers led by Daniel Greathouse, at least a dozen Indians from the Mingo tribe, were killed and according to some sources, also the wife, nephew, and sister of Logan. Logan’s murdered sister, Kunai, had a 2-month-old daughter with her, who was left alive and handed over to her father, John Gibson, then one of the noble white merchants in the area, and, in the future, the manager of Indiana territory.
In 1825, the US Supreme Court in one of its decisions formulated the Doctrine of Discovery, according to which the right for the “open” land belongs to those who “discovered” it, and the indigenous population retains the right to reside on it, but not land ownership. On the basis of this doctrine, the Law on the Relocation of the Indians was adopted already in 1830, the victims of which were the Five civilized tribes.
On February 26, 1860, six local residents, landowners, and businessmen, massacred the Indians of the Viyot tribe on Indiana Island off the coast of northern California, killing with axes and knives at least 60 men, and possibly more than 200 women, children and the elderly.
In 1867 comes out a law of the Resettlement of the Indian population into reservations. Native American reservations were often created in unsuitable areas for agriculture. Large reservations are located on the Colorado Plateau in Arizona (Navajo tribe), in the mountains in northern Utah, on the Great Plains in North Dakota and South Dakota, along the Missouri River (Sioux tribe), on an intermountain plateau in Wyoming and in foothills of the Cordillera in Montana (Cheyenne Indians). A large number of reservations are located along the border of the USA and Canada.
On December 29, 1890, around 150 Indians were killed and about 50 were injured as a result of a chaotic shootout that began as a result of a random shootout during the disarmament of the Lakota tribe by the US Army, around the city of Wounded-Ni, South Dakota. Here, the Indians gathered to hold the “dancing of spirits” popular with them.
In the 19th century, there was a large-scale extermination of bison, weakening many tribes of the prairies. According to researchers, in 1800 the number of bison was 30-40 million animals, and by the end of the century they were almost completely exterminated: less than one thousand remained. American General Philip Sheridan wrote: “The bison hunters have done more in the past two years to solve the acute Indian problem than the entire regular army in the past 30 years. They destroy the material base of the Indians. Send them gunpowder and lead, if you like, and let them kill, flay the skins and sell them until they kill all the buffalo! ” Sheridan proposed in the US Congress the establishment of a special medal for hunters, emphasizing the importance of extermination of bison. Sheridan is also the author of the saying, “A Good Indian is a dead Indian.”
In 1850, the California State Legislature passed the Indians Management and Protection Act, which outlined the principles for the future relationship between whites and Indians. Providing the Indians with some legal protection, the Act nevertheless stated the inequality of whites and Indians before the law and laid the foundation for widespread abuse regarding the use of Indians as labor force, although allowing them to live on private lands. During 1851 and 1852, the California Legislature approved the allocation of $ 1.1 million for arming and maintaining militia to “suppress hostile Indians” and issued bonds in the amount of $ 410 thousand for the same purpose in 1857. These payments, theoretically aimed at resolving conflicts between whites and Indians, only stimulated the formation of new volunteer groups and an attempt to destroy all Indians in California.
In 2009, the US Congress included a statement in the Defense Expenditures Act bringing apologies to US Indians for “the many incidents of violence, abuse, and neglect suffered by the indigenous nations from the United States citizens”
It is impossible to establish the exact number of victims, because the population number before the arrival of Columbus is unknown. However, a number of Indian organizations and historians in the United States state that the number of Indians from the year of 1500 to 1900 decreased from 15 million to 237 thousand.
It is believed [by whom?] that the population of America before the discovery by Europeans ranged from 40 to 100 million people. But according to Venezuelan Spaniard Angel Rosenblat (Ángel Rosenblat) in his study “The Population of America in 1492: Old and New Calculations” (1967), the population of America did not exceed 13 million people and was concentrated by large groups in the empires of the Aztecs and Incas. According to Braudel, the minimum estimates of the population of all of America by A. Rosenblatt are 10-15 million people on the eve of the conquest and 8 million after the end of the conquest, and the maximum estimates of the population of all of America are around 1,500 based on a study of the Mexican population of 25 million people immediately after Spanish conquests amount to 80-100 million people for the entire continent, but Braudel doubts the plausibility of the maximum figures (although he still admits a sharp and catastrophic drop in numbers of Indian population after the arrival of European colonizers). According to V. A. Surnin, according to the most plausible estimates, more than 25 million people lived in pre-Columbian America: by the end of the 15th century. 1.5-2 million Indians in North America, 4.5-6 million in Mesoamerica, 1 million in the modern territory of the United States, 0.3 – 0.5 million in the Caribbean, and 6-8 million in the Andes. John White estimates the total number of Indians in pre-Columbian America at 0.75-1 million people.
The population of the New World amounted to 46 million people by 1500, according to Braudel; in 1650 the population of America was from 8 to 13 million, by 1750 the number of indigenous people decreased several times, most language families and isolate languages became extinct in 250 years (whole groups of peoples). The vast majority of Indians (up to 100 million, according to some estimates of the decrease in the area of cultivated fields) died due to lack of immunity to diseases, involuntarily or deliberately (through blankets saturated with cadaveric poisons or belonging to smallpox patients) brought in by European colonists.
In the 1960s, in Spain, Carl Sawyer discovered a historical document in the archives written by Bartolomeo Columbus (brother of Christopher Columbus), who was then governor of the island of Hispaniola. The document recorded that in 1496 there were 1 million 100 thousand Indians on the island. However, the Spaniards owned half of the island and did not include women and children. From this we can conclude that there were about 3 million Indians in the Spanish-controlled territory alone. In just one generation (about 30 years, around 1526), the Spaniards counted only 11 thousand Indians, while the Spanish possessions expanded.
On the other hand, the average number of flat tribes after mass epidemics, according to Yuri Stukalin, was about 3-4 thousand people. And although it is believed to be reliably established that the number of Indians in the United States at the end of the 19th century was 250 thousand people, however, their number at the time of first contacts with Europeans remains a matter of debate. In 1928, ethnologist James Moon estimated the total number of Indians north of Mexico at 1,152,950 people at the time of the advent of Europeans, in 1987 Russell Thornton put forward a figure of more than 5 million people, and Lenor Stiffarm and Phil Lane Jr. – 12 million. In 1983, anthropologist Henry Dobins estimated the Native American population of North America at 18 million people and the Native American population in the future US at 10 million people.
In general, the numbers of researchers range from 6 to 112 million people. According to Dmitry Samokhvalov, the differences in estimates are associated with different population densities in different regions of America – during agriculture, the population density is very high and vice versa, hunters and gatherers have a low population density. The tribes of hunters and gatherers of several thousand people occupied areas equal to the territories of the average European state. The number of ancestors of the Eskimos was 2-2.5 thousand people. Before horses appeared on the continent, the Great Plains of North America and Patagonia in South America were almost uninhabited. In contrast, the agricultural areas of Mexico, Peru, and the Mississippi valleys were densely populated.
According to geneticist Brendan O’Fellon from the University of Washington (Seattle) and German anthropologist Lars Feren-Schmitz from the University of Gottingen at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the 16th-17th centuries, the indigenous population of North and South America declined even if not by 90 %, but about twice.
Epidemic depopulation
Infectious diseases characteristic of the Old World, such as smallpox, typhoid, measles, flu, bubonic plague, and others, were brought to America along with European settlers in America. It is postulated that European settlers had a higher immunity to at least some infectious diseases that were obviously absent among the Indians. The opinion is based on the hypothesis that all the epidemic diseases of Eurasia and Africa were ultimately obtained by humans from domestic animals – this was a kind of payment for the development of cattle breeding, which was practically not developed in pre-Columbian America. According to some estimates, mortality among small Indians with smallpox disease reached 80–90%. It is believed that up to 95% of the indigenous population of America was destroyed by diseases introduced by Europeans.
A large part of the deaths was associated with smallpox diseases. Already in 1507, the first case of smallpox was noticed in Hispaniola (Haiti); in 1520, along with Spanish immigrants from Hispaniola, smallpox followed on the mainland. According to the testimony of Toribio de Benavente (Motolinia), the Indians were helpless in front of smallpox, which had a monstrous effect on them – the sick were covered with terrible ulcers; extinct to half the population of the provinces of Central Mexico. Mass epidemics of smallpox have largely led to the fall of the Aztec and Inca empires. It is noteworthy that smallpox reached the Inca lands earlier than the Spanish conquistadors – in 1526, five years before the Spanish invasion, the Inca ruler Waina Kapak died from it. According to modern estimates, from 1524-1527 out of 6 million people of the Inca empire, at least 200 thousand people died. Smallpox epidemics recurred on the South American continent every ten to twenty years; by 1578, they even affected inaccessible inland areas of Brazil, where missionaries brought the disease. In the Jesuit settlements established on the banks of the great South American rivers – up to 100,000 Indians – not later than 1660, 44 thousand inhabitants died from infectious diseases, and another 20 thousand died in the epidemic repeated in 1669.
The establishment of settlements on the east coast of North America in the 17th century was also accompanied by devastating smallpox epidemics among the Indians and subsequently among colonists born already in the American land. Large Indian cities at the mouth of the Mississippi, described by Hernando de Soto in 1540, no longer existed by the second half of the 17th century, when the first permanent French settlements appeared here. The place for the foundation of Plymouth in 1620 – the first English colony in the New World – was “cleared” by the terrible epidemic of smallpox among the Indians in 1617-1619.