Bokelskere.no

We have decided the real reason why our possessions are being taken from us is that we are human beings and not wolves or beras. The men from Washington have set aside many millions of acres on which wolves and bears may not be disturbed and nobody objects to that. Perhaps if we were wolves and bears we could have as much protection. But we are only human beings. There are no closed seasons when it comes to Alaska Natives.

-AMY HALLINGSTAD (Tlingit)
Letter to Ruth Bronson, the secretary of the National Congress of American Indians, 1947.

Against all odds, native Americans had survived into the twentieth century.

Before the white hunters ever arrived, it appears that disease and habitat destruction began seriously cut into bison numbers. The whites would only administer s msssive coup de grace.

Brothers - My people wish for peace; the red men all wish for peace; but where the white people are, there is no peace for them, except it be on the bosom of our mother.

TECUMSEH, SHAWNEE, ca. 1811

What is the matter, you Christian men, that you esteem a little bit of gold so much more than your own peace of mind?

-PONCIACO
(Cuna), 1516

Your emperor may be a great prince: I do not doubt it, seeing that he has sent his subjects so far across the waters; and I am willing to treat him as my brother. As for the pope of whom you speak, he must be mad to speak of giving away countries that do not belong to him. As for my faith, I will not change it. Your own god, as you tell me, was put to death by the very men he created. But my god still looks down upon his children.

-ATAHUALPA
Inka ruler's response to hearing that Pope Alexander VI had declared Peru to be the possession of Spain, 1533.

Smallpox, measles, and other common European diseases wiped out entire communities before most of their inhabitants had actually seen a European. Whole regions were depopulated. Only resourceful and flexible communities were able to retain enough of their integrity to survive one of these mysterious microbial attacks. But outlasting a single epidemic was often only the prelude to a series of epidemic onslaughts that attacked an increasingly weakened population. Sexual contact between the races led to the mutation of new forms of diseases like syphilis, which further decimated the native peoples.