INTRODUCTION

The American Holocaust Website is based on three excerpts from the book "Lies Across America," by James W.
Loewen. Lies Across America details the inaccuracies and false accounting of history behind historical markers
and memorials across the nation, which are used perennially to distort the historic record in physical and material
ways. Loewen is also the author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me," which won the American Book Award.

"Lies Across America" was published by the New Press, which was established in 1990 "as a not-for-profit
alternative to the large, commercial publishing houses currently dominating the book publishing industry. The
New Press operates in the public interest rather than for private gain, and is committed to publishing, in
innovative ways, works of educational, cultural, and community value that are often deemed insufficiently
profitable."

The American Holocaust Website has been sponsored by the World FREE Internet, which has no ties with the
New Press, or Mr. Loewen. This Website, however, has limited its focus to the American Indians, and at that, it
is not meant to be a complete documentation of all the crimes that took place against them. Instead, this Website
addresses the general theme of European and Indian relations, as demonstrated through several high profile
events, that have become the subject of American mythology due to the erection of various monuments and
memorials which have distorted the way Americans understand their own history.

Also, there are other American ethnic groups that can legitimately claim that a holocaust was perpetrated against
them as well. The issues of other American ethnic groups, and the crimes committed against them, shall be
covered in separate websites, as materials are assembled. Anyone with pertinent information relating to the inter-
ethnic relations of the American people, are invited to contact the sponsors, for the purpose of the development
of further informational resources that will bring the true historic record of the United States republic to the
attention of the general public.

Dedicated to the Ideal that it shall never happen Again!

NEVER AGAIN!

DEHUMANIZING NATIVE AMERICANS

The names Americans use for many American Indian tribes are derogatory. European Americans often learned
what to call one tribe from a neighboring rival tribe. Sometimes whites simply developed their own
contemptuous names for groups of Native people. Markers in Arizona are full of these wrong names. Some
Native groups have responded to this confusion by accepting their new name even if it originally had negative
connotations. Others are mounting determined efforts to be known by the name they call themselves. Arizona
offers examples of both.

By far the largest and most populous Indian reservation in the United States is the Navajo reservation, which
occupies all of northeastern Arizona and extends into Utah and New Mexico. Navajo is the name given to these
once nomadic people by the already-settled Tewa Pueblo Indians. 1 It may mean "thieves" or "takers from the
fields." The Navajos came to the Southwest millennia after the Tewas and call themselves Dine, sometimes
spelled Dineh, which means "we the people." 2 Most Native American groups call themselves by names that
mean "we the people." Like most societies they were ethnocentric - seeing their own culture as the yardstick of
sound human behavior - and these names reflect that certainty.

The name of another famous Arizona tribe, Apaches, means "enemies." The Zunis named them that. Related
linguistically to the Navajos, Apaches too call themselves Dine. In southern Arizona, Papagos means "bean
eaters," a name given by the nearby Pimas. Papagos call themselves Tohono O'Otam, or "desert people." Pimas,
another southern Arizona tribe, refer to themselves as Ahkeemult O'odham or "river people." "Pima" actually
means "I don't know," apparently their reply when asked their name in Spanish by an early explorer!
Americans have learned to call the people who built the ancient cliff dwellings at Canyon de Chelly in Arizona
"the Anasazi." Anasazi is a Navajo word meaning "ancient enemies." Since the Anasazis have "vanished"
according to anthropologists, we cannot now ask them what they called themselves. In reality the Anasazi didn't
"vanish" but merged into the various pueblo peoples whose descendants still live in Arizona and New Mexico.
Most Pueblo Indians prefer to call the Anasazi "ancestral Puebloans" and still know which pueblo includes
descendants from which "Anasazi" site.

The use of derogatory names is hardly limited to Arizona. Native people living in far northern Canada and
Alaska call themselves Inuit - again, "we the people" - while the Crees to their southeast called them Eskimos,
"those who eat raw flesh." The Sioux call themselves Dakotas or Lakotas, meaning "allies" or "people," but their
ancient enemies, the Ojibwes, called them Nadouwesioux, meaning "little snakes" or "enemies," and the French
shortened it to Sioux. In turn, Ojibwes, sometimes written Chippewas, refer to themselves as Anishinabes,
"people of the creation." "Mohawk" means "cannibal" in Algonquian; they call themselves "Kaniengehagas,"
"people of the place of flint."

Some names take note of physical characteristics of Natives. Thus British Americans called the Salish ("we the
people") the Flathead Indians. The French called two groups of Indians "Gros Ventres," "big bellies," apparently
derived from their name in Indian sign language. The French also renamed the Nimipus ("we the people") the
Nez Perces, "pierced noses," because some of them wore nose pendants.

A few names were complimentary. On the east coast the British renamed the Lenape "Delawares." They didn't
mind once the British explained that Lord De La Ware was a brave military leader. Lenape means - you guessed
it - "we the people." 3 The most famous new name of all - "Indians," coined by Columbus for the Arawaks he
met in the Caribbean - was complimentary in a sense: Columbus either thought he was in the East Indies or
hoped to convince his supporters that he had reached that important trading destination by using the term. 4

Some whites claim that their practice of naming sports teams for Native Americans is complimentary. Thus we
have the Florida State University Seminoles, Cleveland Indians, Atlanta Braves, and worst of all, Washington
Redskins. Some Indians do consider some of these terms flattering. The Cleveland Indians defend their name on
that basis, claiming it stems from a popular member of the team in the 1890s. "Chief Wahoo," the bucktooth
Indian caricature that decorates Cleveland uniforms, offends many Native Americans today however. And
Native American newspapers continue to react angrily to the "Washington Redskins." How long would
Americans tolerate the "Atlanta Niggers," they ask? Or the "New York Kikes?" Even positive terms like
"braves" trivialize Native Americans as mascots, some Indians assert.

At least two tribes in Arizona are called by their own names. "Havasupai" means "people of the blue-green
waters," referring to their homeland's beautiful waterfalls in a side gorge of the Grand Canyon, and "Hopi"
means "peaceful ones." Some other Arizona Indians have given in to the renaming. Apaches now acquiesce to
being called "Apaches." Many Navajos accept "Navajo" rather than insisting on "Dine." Many Pimas now call
themselves Pimas. Papagos, however, are making a concerted effort to be known as Tohono O'otam. In
Minnesota some Ojibwes now ask others to call them Anishinabes. Throughout the world, naming has been a
prerogative of power. With colonialism on the wane, calling natives by the name they use for themselves is
gradually becoming accepted practice. Thus when leaders in Upper Volta changed its name to Burkino Faso,
mapmakers had to make the adjustment. 5 Native Americans who care may win similar respect in coming years. 6

FOOTNOTES:
1. Pueblo means "town" in Spanish and is itself a misnomer as a proper noun; Pueblo Indians call themselves
Zunis, Acomas, etc.

2. There is more than one English spelling for many native names, since they are attempted phonetic renditions
of non-English words.

3. Some linguists would insist it means "we the proper people." "Lenape" was somehow repeated as "Lenni
Lenape" by an early missionary. Native Hawaiians likewise call themselves "kanaka maoli" or "the real people."

4. Russell Means and some other Native Americans have claimed that "Indian" is a corruption of "in dios," "with
God," because Columbus originally thought the Caribbean natives he met were peaceful, had "very good
customs," and seemed religious. I have not found adequate confirmation for this. Columbus did speak positively
of Native Americans at first; soon enough, when justifying his wars and enslavement of them, he called the
Indians "cruel" and "stupid," "whose customs and religion are very different from ours."

5. Unlike Burkino Faso, Native American groups do not have the advantage of statehood. This may explain why
spell-check programs in computer word processors still have a long way to go: of the fourteen derogatory names
I checked for this essay, nine were in my spell-check program, but of the thirteen positive names, the program
recognized only one - Dakota - a state!

6. Bill Bryson, Made in America (NY: Morrow, 1994), 24; S. L. A. Marshall, Crimsoned Prairie (NY:
Scribner's, 1972), 8; Barbara A. Leitch, A Concise Dictionary of Indian Tribes of North America (Algonac, MI:
Reference Publications, 1979); Kristen Hartzell, "Anasazi, Other Words Dropped," Denver Post, 11/9/97,
"Tribal Names: Meanings & Alternative Names," http://members.tripod.com/~Philkon/names.html 11/29/98

SOURCE: Excerpted from "Lies Across America," #14, Calling Native Americans Bad Names. Pgs. 99-102
(New Press, 1999)

STEALING THE LAND

In Battery Park at the lower tip of Manhattan stands a monument to the legend we all learned in elementary
school - how the Dutch bought Manhattan for $24 worth of beads and trinkets. Incorporating a huge flagpole, on
its base is a bas relief depicting the transaction. It is captioned in stone, "… The purchase of the Island of
Manhattan was accomplished in 1626. Thus was laid the foundation of the City of New York."

It's time to rethink this little fable. First, consider the price. My father bought the home in which I grew up, in
1937, for $3,000. It sold in 1983 for 50 times that. My father learned the $24 story in school. So did I, and so did
my children. But if $24 was the price in 1937 dollars, it would have been maybe $1,200 in 1983 dollars. This
$24 for Manhattan is the only figure in the Western World that has never been touched by inflation!

So we have to rethink the purchase price. Maybe it was 100 or 200 times higher -- $4,800, perhaps. But even at
$4,800, the statue invites us to smile indulgently at the Indians. What a bargain! Today, $4,800 wouldn't buy a
site large enough to pitch a pup tent in Manhattan! What silly Indians, not to recognize the potential of the
Island! Rather than deriding the Natives as foolish, history textbooks today lament the cultural gap that caused a
basic misunderstanding. Native Americans held a pre-modern understanding of land ownership: buying and
selling land wasn't part of their culture. This is the social archetype of the haplessly pre-modern Indians. Natives
just could not understand that when they sold their land, they transferred not only the right to farm it but also the
rights to its game, fish and sheer enjoyment.

Although kinder than merely making American Indians foolish, that archetype is still wrong. Native Americans
and European American ideas about land ownership were not so far apart. Most land sales before the twentieth
century, including sales between whites, transferred primarily the right to farm, mine, and otherwise develop the
land. Access to undeveloped land was considered public, within limits of good conduct. Moreover, tribal
negotiators often made sure that deeds and treaties explicitly reserved hunting, fishing, gathering, and traveling
rights to Native Americans. Natives were correct when they believed they still had the right to hunt on the land
they had sold. Nevertheless Europeans often then accused them of trespassing and jailed and sometimes killed
them for the offense.

Even if they understood that they could continue to use Manhattan, it still seems surprising that American
Indians would trade away their very homeland - sell their villages and gardens, their fishing grounds and hunting
land - for $24 or even $4,800 worth of beads and trinkets. Peter Francis, Jr., "Director of the Center for Bead
Research in Lake Placid," points out that no documentary evidence even suggests that European trade beads
were used to buy Manhattan.

If by now the story seems hopelessly implausible, it should - because it didn't happen. It turns out that the Dutch
paid the wrong tribe for Manhattan - the Canarsies. Today visitors can take the subway from Battery Park to
Canarsie - the name lives on, in Brooklyn. 1 And indeed, the Canarsies lived in what is now Brooklyn. So why
wouldn't they sell Manhattan to the Dutch? Especially since the Dutch probably paid a substantial sum in the
form of blankets, kettles, steel axes, knives, and perhaps guns - goods American Indians valued highly and
would go to great lengths to obtain. No doubt the Canarsies were as pleased with the bargain as the New Yorker
who sold Brooklyn Bridge to some later Europeans - they got paid for something that wasn't theirs in the first
place.

The apocryphal Brooklyn Bridge sale invites us to laugh at the tourists - stupid bumpkins! Similarly the Dutch
were bumpkins in the "New World." (Hardly a "New World," since when first discovered by Europeans the
Americas were home to about 100 million people, according to historian William McNeill. Pg. 60, Lies Across
America) As Reginald P. Bolton, who wrote most widely on the sale of Manhattan, put it, "The colonists do not
appear to have made themselves acquainted with the native situation… [The Canarsies'] wily leaders conveyed
the impression of their ownership of the whole island, and thus secured for themselves and their own people all
the goods which the white men were offering." 2 But the conventional Manhattan sale tale invites us to laugh not
at the tourists, but at the Natives. It all depends on who has the power. The Dutch and their European American
successors won, so the story is told to make the Indians the bumpkins.

Actually, the Dutch were happy to have bought Manhattan from the wrong tribe because they weren't really
buying Manhattan but the right to Manhattan in the eyes of other Europeans. In short, they were buying
respectability - in their own eyes too. With this monument, inscribed "In testimony of ancient and unbroken
friendship, this flagpole is presented to the City of New York by the Dutch people, 1926," the Dutch were still in
a way buying world esteem three centuries later.

The purchase also made allies of the Canarsies, who otherwise might have joined with the Weckquaesgeeks, the
Indians who lived on Manhattan and owned most of it. 3 The Netherlanders didn't try to buy off the
Weckquaesgeeks, a more difficult task since they knew, loved, and made their homes on Manhattan. Instead,
they waited as a succession of inter-Indian wars, some instigated by the Dutch, and a series of epidemics
weakened the Weckquaesgeeks. Then in the 1640s, with the aid of the Canarsies and other Native Americans on
Long Island, the Dutch exterminated most of the Weckquaesgeeks.

Manhattan was only the beginning. Europeans were forever paying the wrong tribe for America, or paying a
small fraction within a much larger nation. Often, like the Dutch, they didn't care. They merely sought
justification for conquest. Fraudulent transactions might even work better than legitimate purchases, for they set
one tribe or faction against another while providing Europeans with the semblance of legality to stifle criticism.

The biggest single purchase from the wrong tribe took place in 1803. Louisiana was not France's to sell - it was
Indian land. The French never consulted with Native owners before selling it; most Native Americans living
there never even knew of the sale. Indeed, France did not sell Louisiana for $15,000,000. The French foreign
minister couldn't even tell the American negotiators its boundaries. France merely sold its claim to the land. In
short, like the Dutch with the Canarsies, the United States bought from the French the right to respectability in
the eyes of other Europeans. That's why the government continued to pay Native American nations for Louisiana
throughout the nineteenth century. We also fought them for it: the Army Almanac lists more than 50 Indian wars
in the Louisiana Purchase from 1819 to 1890. Similarly, as late as 1715, Europeans were still paying the
Reckgawawancs, tributaries of the Weckquaesgeeks who somehow escaped their extermination and still claimed
upper Manhattan. Despite the $24 story then, Europeans were still paying for Manhattan almost a century after
Peter Minuit.

Treating Native Americans as ignorant, as this monument in Battery Park does, is part of the fantastic history
European Americans constructed to convince themselves they did not simply take the land. The statue and the
story also help to convince whites that Native Americans aren't very bright, at least in compared to European
Americans. It was one of the latter however, who put a Plains Indian, complete with incongruous headdress, on a
Manhattan monument. 4

FOOTNOTES:

1. It's the final stop on the "L" train.

2. Bolton makes the best of what turns out to be scant evidence that this "sale" ever took place at all. "No deed
has survived," Peter Francis notes, "although the West Indies Company specifically instructed that a deed be
secured."
3. Although many writers call the Indians who lived on Manhattan Weckquaesgeeks, like most Indians in the
East before the Europeans arrived, they lived in small kinship groups only loosely organized into tribes. Some
were probably members of smaller groups such as the Reckgawawancs and were tributaries of the
Weckquaesgeeks, who also lived in the Bronx and Westchester County. No Indians may have been living on the
southern tip of the island, for the Dutch moved in with no difficulty and lived there for a year with no treaty.

4. So far as I know, the only evidence for the purchase of Manhattan written at the time is one sentence in a letter
by Peter Schagen, 11/5/1626: "They have purchased the Island Manhattes from the Indians for the value of 60
guilders." I rely on these secondary sources: Irving Wallace, David Wallechinsky, and Amy Wallace, Significa
(NY: Dutton, 1983), 326; Robert S. Grumet, "American Indians," in Kenneth T. Jackson, Encyclopedia of NY
City (New Haven: Yale UP, 1995), 25-28; Reginald Pelham Bolton, NY City in Indian Possession (NY: Heye
Foundation, 1920), 240-45; Bolton, Indian Life of Long Ago in the City of New York (NY: Joseph Graham,
1934), 127; Peter Francis Jr., "The Beads That Did Not Buy Manhattan Island," NY History 67 no. 1 (1/86): 5-
20; Robert S. Grumet, Historic Contact (Norman: U. of OK Press, 1995), 219; James Finch, "Aboriginal
Remains on Manhattan Island" (NY: American Museum of Natural History, 1909 Anthropological Papers, vol.
3), 72; and E. M. Rutenber, History of Indian Tribes of Hudson's River (Saugerties: Hope Farm Press, 1992
[1872]), 71-78.

SOURCE: Excerpted from "Lies Across America," #81, Making Native Americans Look Stupid. Pgs. 385-389
(New Press, 1999)

EXPLOITATION VS. EXTERMINATION

At 27th and "I" Streets in Sacramento stands "Sutter's Fort," one of the oldest buildings in California, preserved
and reconstructed. It comes with a state historic marker:

Sutter's Fort
John Augustus Sutter, born of Swiss parents in Germany, arrived in New York in July 1834 and in California in
July 1839. He founded the fort in 1839 to protect "New Helvetica," his 76-square mile Mexican Land Grant. Of
the original fort, the two-story central building, made of adobe and oak remains; the fort's outer walls and
rooms, which had disappeared by the 1860s, were reconstructed after the state acquired the property in 1890.

While the marker is not wrong, it does not tell the most important facts about the fort, including who built it and
how Sutter's enterprise worked. John Augustus Sutter talked the Mexican governor of California into granting
him 76 square miles of the Sacramento valley. Of course, it was already occupied: about 200 Miwok Indians
were living about twelve miles south of what became Sutter's Fort, Kadema Village was five miles west, and five
miles north was the territory of the Maidus. Following a pattern used across the continent, Sutter negotiated with
chiefs or men he considered chiefs. He honored these men with the title of "capitanos" and gave them blankets,
sugar, alcohol, and other goods after they supplied him with workers.

Although unmentioned on the marker, Sutter's Fort was first and foremost a Native American site. "Except for a
few overseers, Indians did all the work on Sutter's rancho," historian Albert Hurtado points out. "His" Miwoks
and Maidus built the fort, plowed the fields, planted wheat and other crops, tended his livestock, wove cloth, ran
a hat factory and blanket company, operated a distillery, worked his tannery, staffed something of a hotel for
immigrants to California from the East, and killed deer to get food for them all.

Equally missing from the marker is any mention of the amazingly interracial nature of Sutter's Fort. While
predominantly American Indian, Sutter's "New Helvetia" also had Mexicans, Swiss, Hawaiians, Russians,
Germans, and Americans. Sutter even brought eight or ten Polynesian workers with him to California from
Hawaii in 1839 - one as his common law wife. 1 Two years later he bought Fort Ross and all its stores, the only
Russian settlement in California, on credit. He then organized a 200-man Indian army - clothed in Tsarist
uniforms and commanded in German! - and used this militia to seize children from distant and hostile tribes to
maintain his labor supply.

Interpretation within Sutter's Fort does tell that Native Americans built the place, which marks an improvement
over how history is presented at California's many missions. At least twenty state historical markers treat
missions without mentioning Native Americans - although mission communities were Indian communities
typically comprising 200 to 2,000 natives, a handful of Spanish or Mexican soldiers and their family members,
and two priests. Half a dozen other markers mention Indians only as recipients of Spanish services - the most
insulting is at San Juan Capistrano, which the marker describes as "seventh in the chain of 21 missions
established in Alta California to christianize and civilize the Indians."

In San Luis Obispo County, a marker tells that Mission San Luis Obispo was "built by the Chumash Indians
living in the area"; another marker for its outpost, Santa Margarita Asistencia, states "Here the mission padres
and the Indians carried on extensive grain cultivation." No marker in any other county lets on that Indians made
and laid virtually every brick in every mission in California. Instead, like the slave plantations, the head man did
all the work himself, as in this marker in Santa Clara County:

OLD ADOBE WOMAN'S CLUB

This adobe, among the oldest in Santa Clara Valley, was one of several continuous rows of homes built in 1792-
1800 as dwellings for the Indian families of Mission Santa Clara. It links the Franciscan padres' labors with
California today.

When interpretation does mention Indians at missions maintained as museums - particularly at those still owned
by the Catholic Church (Mission San Juan Capistrano was personally deeded back to the Catholic Church by
President Abraham Lincoln) - it presents the missions as harbors of shelter and well-being built by the Spanish
for the Natives, echoing the state markers. Guides and labels do not tell how overseers forced Indians to farm,
build, and even worship under threat of lash and chain.

At Sutter's Fort, labels and guides similarly imply that the Indians were there voluntarily and were treated well.
Sutter did feed and pay "his" Indians, but the system amounted to serfdom and verged on slavery. "I had to lock
the Indian men and women together in a large room to prevent them from returning to their homes in the
mountains at night," wrote Heinrich Lienhard, Sutter's manager. "Large numbers deserted during the daytime."
(It has also been documented that the padres who ran the Mission system, also locked the Indians who worked
the Missions, in at night, to prevent them from escaping.)

Sutter armed men from "his" nearby villages to steal children from more distant villages and sold the captives in
San Francisco to pay his debts. Sexual pleasure may also have played a role; writer William Holden suggests
Sutter "was fond of the young Indian women." In 1844 Pierson Reading, Sutter's manager, extolled the easy life
he led: "The Indians of California make as obedient and humble slaves as the Negro in the south. For a mere
trifle you can secure their services for life." One California Indian recalled a life not so easy: "My grandfather
was enslaved by Sutter to help in building the Fort. While he was kept there, Sutter worked him hard and then
fed him in troughs. As soon as he could, he escaped and with his family hid in the mountains."

Before condemning Sutter too roundly however, we need to compare Native life under the Spanish and
Mexicans (including Sutter) to what happened under the Anglos who followed him. Spanish and Mexican rule
was brutal. Indians had revolted against the missions in 1771, 1775, 1810, 1812, 1824, and 1831 according to
California historian David Wyatt. Nevertheless, Sutter's enterprises did connect the Indians to the world
economy. The alternative, not to be so connected, meant extermination. Anthropologists are fond of saying that
the French penetrated Native American societies, the Spanish acculturated them, and the British expelled them.
Or, equally accurate, the French exploited the Indians, the Spanish enslaved them, and the Anglos killed them.
And of course disease played a major role, regardless of the colonizers' nationality.

Sutter volunteered his Indian garrison to U.S. Army Lieutenant John C. Fremont in Fremont's 1846 campaign
against the "Californios," the Mexican Californians on the coast, during the Mexican-American War. (After
invading California, Fremont persuaded a group of miners to kidnap the Mexican governor of California, to
force him to surrender. After getting drunk on the Mexican governor's liquor, his kidnappers proceeded to
establish California as an independent state called the Bear Republic, which became the genesis of the modern
State of California. WFI) Fremont's victory helped secure California for the United States, but the new territorial
government had no further use for Native Americans. A newspaper account related the 1849 massacre of a Pomo
Indian village at Clear Lake, north of San Francisco: "The troops arrived in the vicinity of the lake and came
unexpectedly upon a body of Indians numbering between two and three hundred… They immediately
surrounded them and as the Indians raised a shout of defiance and attempted to escape, poured in a destructive
fire indiscriminately upon men, women, and children. They fell, says our informant, as grass before the sweep of
the scythe." Sutter would surely have had his Indian army conquer and enslave the Pomos rather than massacre
them, but Sutter was not long to be a factor in California. That same year James Marshall discovered gold some
fifty miles east of Sutter's Fort. Sutter tried to keep it secret, but soon thousands of Americans, hundreds of
Chinese, and other immigrants from Europe and Latin America (as well as African American fugitives from
slavery) surged to California to seek their fortune. Sutter's rule was not strong enough to withstand this rush. His
Indians fled, leaving no one to harvest his wheat. Miners plundered his livestock and even stole his millstones. In
the ensuing anarchy, even his legal claim to the land was challenged (though eventually upheld) and Sutter went
bankrupt.

The Natives likewise had to deal with this anarchic white frontier. For a moment, it seemed they might benefit
from the discovery of gold. In 1848, of 4000 gold miners in the central mining district, more than half were
American Indians. One white might hire fifty Indians, who received about forty dollars a month, four times what
Sutter had paid two years earlier, yet whites made huge profits from their labor. Some Native Americans were
able to mine on their own using willow baskets, and some became temporarily middle-class from their earnings.
Almost immediately however, whites began driving Native workers out of the labor force. Indian men were
confined to panning gold at the edges of white society; many Indian women became prostitutes.

Even these alternatives did not last long. White Americans thought of California Indians as depraved because
most wore little or no clothing, "Digger Indians" because they used "primitive" gathering technology and ate
"disgusting" food, "horrendously ugly and dirty," and heathen even if Catholic. As a result, in the words of
historian Tomas Almaquer, "the California state government launched a systematic policy of sanctioned
decimation." In January 1851, Gov. Peter H. Burnett's message to the California legislature read, "A war of
extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct."
(California had a bounty on Indians that lasted until the last decades of the 19 th century. In one year alone the
State of California paid out $1 million to people who had killed Native Californian Indians. WFI) A startling
drop in native population ensued. In 1848 perhaps 150,000 Indians lived in California, compared to about 15,000
non-Indians, mostly Mexican Californians. Ten years later just 16,000 Indians were left.

In 1910 "Sutter Indians" had been ravaged. The Maidus, who had numbered at least 9,000, were reduced to
1,000 people, and the Miwoks, starting with like numbers, to 670. They did not disappear though, and even
rebounded somewhat by 1990 - the Maidus to 2,334 - and are contesting nearby Davis's renaming a street for
Sutter, whom they call "an enslaver." They have disappeared from the historical marker for Sutter's Fort
however, even though they built it. 2

1. He also had a legal wife in Switzerland.

2. Santa Barbara Indian Center and Dwight Dutschke, "A History of American Indians in California," in CA
Dept. of Parks and Recreation, Office of Historic Preservation, ed., Five Views (Sacramento: Office of Historic
Preservation, 1988), 42, 70; Albert Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven: Yale UP,
1988), 47-49, 75 88-89, 104-7; Hurtado, "John A. Sutter and the Indian Business," in Kenneth N. Owens, ed.,
John Sutter and a Wider West (Lincoln: U. of NE Press, '94); Jack D. Forbes, "What Do We Honor When We
Honor Sutter?" email, 1/19/99; Heinrich Lienhard, A Pioneer at Sutter's Fort, 1846-1850 (Los Angeles: Calafia
Society, 1941), 67-68; David Wyatt, Five Fires (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997), 39; William Holden, "
'Captain' John Sutter," American History 2/98: 34, 66; Joe Pitti conversation, 1/14/99; Philip Burnham, How the
Other Half Lived (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995), 101-8; Tomas Almaquer, Racial Fault Lines (Berkeley: U. of
CA Press, 1994), 5, 8, 26, 120-30; Francis L. and Roberta B. Fugate, Roadside History of NM (Missoula:
Mountain Press, 1989), 14; Melanie Turner, "Yes, Street Will Remain Sutter Place," Davis Enterprise, 1/10/99.

SOURCE: Excerpted from "Lies Across America," #4, Exploiting vs. Exterminating the Natives. Pgs. 62-67
(New Press, 1999)

Do the White, Christian, European "Discoverers" and

"Settlers" of the Americas Owe the prior owners
ANYTHING ?
INTRODUCTION :

Have you ever wondered why, when Attila the Hun and then later Ghenghis
Khan "discovered" Europe, their conquests were called "invasions", but when
Christopher Columbus led Europeans into an
invasion of the Americas, that was called a
"discovery"? In an ideal world, history would be
written by scholars distinguished by their
knowledge of the facts and their unquestioned
impartiality in reporting them. But in our unreal
world, the history that the masses are taught is
what history's victors and their descendants have
wanted written. And contrary to what Darwin
may have said about the "survival of the fittest",
we don't need to be professional scientists to know
that, where human beings are concerned, those
who survive and prosper, and who get to write
history, are not the "fittest", in any truly human
sense of the word, but more often than not, the
best armed and most vicious, i.e. the most "unfit",
morally speaking.
Ever since the invasion and the conquest of the Americas, each subsequent
generation of white European Christian children who have inherited the lands which
their ancestors stole from their rightful Native American owners have been taught
that:

 the "discovery" of the Americas by Christopher Columbus on behalf of

Spain and the Roman Catholic Church was a triumphal moment in the
history of mankind, with a whole day given over to its celebration as a
national holiday every year.
 the American continents were vast wildernesses, a vacuum which nature
abhored, just waiting for somebody like the Europeans to discover and fill.
 the rare occupants of these continents were nothing but stone-age
uncivilized pagan savages. What they had built up was worthless
compared to what Europeans had built back in the "Old World".
 these lands were free for the taking by whichever ship captain happened to
be the first to "discover" them and plant a cross on them to claim them on
behalf of their Christian European monarch, because such were the rules of
international law laid down by Europe's "Supreme Pontiff", the Christian
pope. The fact that the occupants of these lands and their ancestors had
lived on and developed those lands for thousands of years gave the native
inhabitants no claim to them whatsoever, and if they didn't hand them over
to their rightful owners, they were criminals and savages that needed to be
dealt with accordingly. They themselves were worthless except as slaves to
work their own lands and mines for the benefit of their higher class
Christian European masters.
 What Europeans would bring these benighted pagans was infinitely better
than what they had, the blessings of Christian salvation and higher
civilization.
 Given that the Christian Conquerers were blessed with the one true faith, it
was their duty to do whatever it took to "save" these pagan savages, even if
they had to torture and/or kill many of them to get them or their survivors
 at least to see the light.
As best described by its most famous proponent, the eminent Spanish
scholar Juan Gines de Sepulveda, the New World's Indians were 'creatures
of a subhuman nature who were intended by God to be placed under the
authority of civilized and virtuous princes or nations, so that they may
learn, from the might, wisdom, and law of their conquerors, to practice
better morals, worthier customs and a more civilized way of life.' {p.64}

To see how terribly wrong these views actually are, we urge you to read the
masterful book, American Holocaust, by David E. Stannard (or others like
it), excerpts from which are offered on this web site, to give you a
taste of what you can learn from reading the entire book. Is it too
much to ask the millions of people who, like myself, are part of the
white, Christian, European majority in America today, to admit that
we are "in possession of stollen goods"? And that to steal those goods
the former owners were killed?

Almost Complete Genocide of the "Pagan Savages" who REALLY discovered America :

Table of Contents :

Section 0 = This Introductory page

Section 1 = The world that Columbus "discovered".

Section 2 = The "Blessings" the "Old World" brought to the "New World".

Section 3 = How the American "Savages" treated the European "Civilizers".

Section 4 = How the European "Civilizers" treated the American "Savages".

Section 5 = The price America's Natives paid for "civilization" and "salvation".
 Section 6 = The role played by the Church and its "missionaries".

Section 7 = The Psychology? / Theology?" that drove the American Holocaust.

Section 8 = What about the Violence of America's Natives?.

Notes :
1. The first celebration of a "Columbus Day" took place in 1792, but there
were no annual celebrations until 1920. "Columbus Day" only became a
national holiday when Richard Nixon made it such in 1971.
2. This entire website was inspired by the extremely important and interesting
book by the accomplished writer, David E. Stannard, called "American
Holocaust", and published by Oxford University Press, and timed if I am
not mistaken to coincide with the commemoration of the 500th anniversary
of Columbus. These web pages are meant to make its readers aware of how
they have been misinformed by their teachers on this subject and why they
need to get and read this momentous book in its entirety.
3. Chapters 2 and 3 of another book, "Lies My Teacher Told Me" , by James
W. Loewen do an excellent job of covering the same ground as Stannard's
book.
4. It should be obvious to everyone that giving Christopher Columbus the
entire credit for discovering America is an overstatement, as he could not
have achieved what he did without a great deal of help from a great many
other people. But everybody talks about Columbus because of his unique
role in the "discovery", as its leader. He serves as the "poster boy", the
"celebrity" for that dramatic development in the history of the world. By
that very token, when we use his name on this site in connection with the
holocaust of millions of Native Americans, it is not to suggest that
Columbus was personally responsible for the death of every last victim of
that holocaust. He is only given the "blame" in the same way that he is
given so much of the "credit" for everything that accompanied his discovery
and conquest of the New World.
5. You can read what 30+ ordinary readers like yourself thought of Stannard's
book at : ReviewsofAmericanHolocaust.notlong.com

6. Another great source is Native American History, by Judith Nies

This was the supposedly "pagan", "savage" world, that was supposedly tamed and converted
by the supposedly civilized "missionaries" and "discoverers" who represented "Christendom":

"It's gone now, drained and desicated in the aftermath of the Spanish conquest, but once there was an
interconnected complex of lakes high up in the Valley of Mexico that was as long and as wide as the city of
London is today. Surrounding these waters, known collectively as 'the Lake of the Moon', were scores of towns
and cities whose population, combined with that of the outlying communities of central Mexico, totaled about
25,000,000 men, women, and children. On any given day as many as 200,000 small boats moved back and forth
on the Lake of the Moon, pursuing the interests of commerce, political intrigue, and simple pleasure.

In the middle of this fresh-water part of the lake there were two reed-covered mud banks that the residents
of the area over time had built up and developed into a single huge island as large as Manhattan, and upon that
island the people built a metropolis that became one of the largest cities in the world. With a conventionally
estimated population of about 350,000 residents by the end of the fifteenth century, this teeming Aztec capital
already had at least five times the population of either London or Seville and was vastly larger than any other
European city. Moreover, according to Hernando Cortés, one of the first Europeans to set eyes upon it, it was far
and away the most beautiful city on earth.

The name of this magnificent metropolis was Tenochtitlán. It stood, majestic and radiant, in the crisp, clean
air, 7200 feet above sea level, connected to the surrounding mainland by three wide causeways that had been
built across miles of open water. To view Tenochtitlán from a distance, all who had the opportunity to do so
agreed, was breathtaking. Before arriving at the great central city, travelers from afar had to pass through the
densely populated, seemingly infinite, surrounding lands -- and already, invariably, they were overwhelmed.
Wrote Cortés's famous companion and chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo of their visit to one of the provincial
cities at the confluence of Lake Chalco and Lake Xochimilco:

When we entered the city of Iztapalapa, the appearance of the palaces in which they housed us! How
spacious and well built they were, of beautiful stone work and cedar wood, and the wood of other sweet scented
trees, with great rooms and courts, wonderful to behold, covered with awnings of cotton cloth. When we had
looked well at all of this, we went to the orchard and garden, which was such a wonderful thing to see and walk
in, that I was never tired of looking at the diversity of the trees, and noting the scent which each one had, and the
paths full of roses and flowers, and the native fruit trees and native roses, and the pond of fresh water. There was
another thing to observe, that great canoes were able to pass into the garden from the lake through an opening
that had been made so that there was no need for their occupants to land. And all was cemented and very
splendid with many kinds of stone [monuments] with pictures on them, which gave much to think about. Then
the birds of many kinds and breeds which came into the pond. I say again that I stood looking at it and thought
that never in the world would there be discovered lands such as these.

Bernal Díaz wrote: 'When we saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great towns built
on dry land and that straight and level causeway going towards [Tenochtitlán], we were amazed and said that it
was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadis, on account of the great towers and [temples] and
buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the
things that we saw were not a dream.' . . .
About 60,000 pale stucco houses filled the island metropolis, some of them single-story structures, some of
them multi-storied, and 'all these houses,' wrote Cortés, 'have very large and very good rooms and also very
pleasant gardens of various sorts of flowers both on the upper and lower floors.' The many streets and
boulevards of the city were so neat and well-swept, despite its multitude of inhabitants, that the first Europeans
to visit never tired of remarking on the city's cleanliness and order: 'There were even officials in charge of
sweeping,' recalled one awed observer. In fact, at least 1000 public workers were employed to maintain the
city's streets and keep them clean and watered.'
Criss-crossed with a complex network of canals, Tenochtitlán in this respect reminded the Spanish of an
enormous Venice; but it also had remarkable floating gardens that reminded them of nowhere else on earth. And
while European cities then, and for centuries thereafter, took their drinking water from the fetid and polluted
rivers nearby, Tenochtitlán's drinking water came from springs deep within the mainland and was piped into the
city by a huge aqueduct system that amazed Cortés and his men -- just as they were astonished also by the
personal cleanliness and hygiene of the colorfully dressed populace, and by their extravagant (to the Spanish) use
of soaps, deodorants, and breath sweeteners.
In the distance, across the expanse of shimmering blue water that extended out in every direction, and
beyond the pastel-colored suburban towns and cities, both within the lake and encircling its periphery, the
horizon was ringed with forest-covered hills, except to the southeast where there dramatically rose up the slopes
of two enormous snow-peaked and smoldering volcanoes, the largest of them, Popocatepetl, reaching 16,000 feet
into the sky. At the center of the city, facing the volcanoes, stood two huge and exquisitely ornate ceremonial
pyramids, man-made mountains of uniquely Aztec construction and design. But what seems to have impressed
the Spanish visitors most about the view of Tenochtitlán from within its precincts were not the temples or the
other magnificent public buildings, but rather the marketplaces that dotted the residential neighborhoods and the
enormous so-called Great Market that sprawled across the city's northern end. This area, 'with arcades all
around,' according to Cortés, was the central gathering place where 'more than sixty thousand people come each
day to buy and sell, and where every kind of merchandise produced in these lands is found; provisions, as well as
ornaments of gold and silver, lead, brass, copper, tin, stones, shells, bones, and feathers.' Cortés also describes
special merchant areas where timber and tiles and other building supplies were bought and sold, along with
'much firewood and charcoal, earthenware braziers and mats of various kinds like mattresses for beds, and other,
finer ones, for seats and for covering rooms and hallways."

" 'Each kind of merchandise is sold in its own street without any mixture whatever,' Cortés wrote, 'they are
very particular in this.' (Even entertainers had a residential district of their own, says Bernal Díaz, a place where
there lived a great many 'people who had no other occupation' than to be 'dancers . . . and others who used stilts
on their feet, and others who flew when they danced up in the air, and others like MerryAndrews [clowns].')
There were streets where herbalists plied their trade, areas for apothecary shops, and 'shops like barbers' where
they have their hair washed and shaved, and shops where they sell food and drink,' wrote Cortés, as well as green
grocer streets where one could buy 'every sort of vegetable, especially onions, leeks, garlic, common cress and
watercress, borage, sorrel, teasels and artichokes; and there are many sorts of fruit, among which are cherries and
plums like those in Spain.' There were stores in streets that specialized in 'game and birds of every species found
in this land: chickens, partridges and quails, wild ducks, fly-catchers, widgeons, turtledoves, pigeons, cane birds,
parrots, eagles and eagle owls, falcons, sparrow hawks and kestrels [as well as] rabbits and hares, and stags and
small gelded dogs which they breed for eating.'
There was so much more in this mercantile center, overseen by officials who enforced laws of fairness
regarding weights and measures and the quality of goods purveyed, that Bernal Díaz said 'we were astounded at
the number of people and the quantity of merchandise that it contained, and at the good order and control that it
contained, for we had never seen such a thing before.' There were honeys 'and honey paste, and other dainties
like nut paste,' waxes, syrups, chocolate, sugar, wine. In addition, said Cortés:
There are many sorts of spun cotton, in hanks of every color, and it seems like the silk market at Granada,
except here there is much greater quantity. They sell as many colors for painters as may be found in Spain and
all of excellent hues. They sell deerskins, with and without the hair, and some are dyed white or in various
colors. They sell much earthenware, which for the most part is very good; there are both large and small
pitchers, jugs, pots, tiles and many other sorts of vessel, all of good clay and most of them glazed and painted.
They sell maize both as grain and as bread and it is better both in appearance and in taste than any found in the
islands or on the mainland. They sell chicken and fish pies, and much fresh and salted fish, as well as raw and
cooked fish. They sell hen and goose eggs, and eggs of all the other birds I have mentioned, in great number,
and they sell tortillas made from eggs.
At last Cortés surrendered the task of trying to describe it all: 'Beside those things which I have already
mentioned, they sell in the market everything else to be found in this land, but they are so many and so varied
that because of their great number and because I cannot remember many of them, nor do I know what they are
called, I shall not mention them.' Added Bernal Díaz: 'But why do I waste so many words in recounting what
they sell in that great market?' For I shall never finish if I tell it in detail. . . . Some of the soldiers among us
who had been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople, and all over Italy, and in Rome, said that so large a
marketplace and so full of people, and so well regulated and arranged, they had never beheld before.
And this was only the market. The rest of Tenochtitlán overflows with gorgeous gardens, arboretums, and
aviaries. Artwork was everywhere, artwork so dazzling in conception and execution that when the German
master Albrecht Dürer saw some pieces that Cortés brought back to Europe he exclaimed that he had 'never seen
in all my days what so rejoiced my heart, as these things. For I saw among them amazing artististic objects, and
I marveled over the subtle ingenuity of the men in these distant lands. Indeed, I cannot say enough about the
things that were brought before me."

" If architectural splendor and floral redolence were among the sights and smells that most commonly
greeted a stroller in the city, the most ever-present sounds (apart from "the murmur and hum of voices" from the
mercantile district, which Bernal Díaz said "could be heard more than a league off") were the songs of the many
multi-colored birds -- parrots, hummingbirds, falcons, jays, herons, owls, condors, and dozens and dozens of
other exotic species -- who lived in public aviaries that the government maintained. As Cortés wrote to his king:
Most Powerful Lord, in order to give an account to Your Royal Excellency of the magnificence, the strange
and marvelous things of this great city and of the dominion and wealth of this Mutezuma, its ruler, and of the
rites and customs of the people, and of the order there is in the government of the capital as well as in the other
cities of Montezuma's dominions, I would need much time and many expert narrators. I cannot describe one
hundredth part of all the things which could be mentioned, but, as best I can I will describe some of those I have
seen which, although badly described, will I well know, be so remarkable as not to be believed, for 'we who saw
them with our own eyes could not grasp them with our understanding. In attempting to recount for his king the
sights of the country surrounding Tenochtitlán, the "many provinces and lands containing very many and very
great cities, towns and fortresses," including the vast agricultural lands that Cortés soon would raze and the
incredibly rich gold mines that he soon would plunder, the conquistador again was rendered nearly speechless:
"They are so many and so wonderful," he simply said, "that they seem almost unbelievable." Prior to Cortés's
entry into this part of the world no one who lived in Europe, Asia, Africa, or anywhere else beyond the Indies
and the North and South American continents, had ever heard of this exotic place of such dazzling
magnificence. Who were these people? Where had they come from? When had they come? How did they get
where they were? Were there others like them elsewhere in this recently stumbled-upon New World? These
questions sprang to mind immediately, and many of the puzzlements of the conquistadors are with us still today,
more than four and a half centuries later. But while scholarly debates on these questions continue, clear answers
regarding some of them at last are finally coming into view. And these answers are essential to an understanding
of the magnitude of the holocaust that was visited upon the Western Hemisphere-beginning at Hispaniola,
spreading to Tenochtitlán, and then radiating out over millions of square miles in every direction-in the wake of
1492. " { Pp. 1-8 }

The magnificence of what Columbus found: "As Juana, so all the other [islands] are very fertile to an
excessive degree, this one especially. In it there are many harbors on the sea coast, beyond comparison with
others which I know in Christendom, and numerous rivers, good and large, which is marvelous. Its lands are
lofty and in it there are many sierras and very high mountains, to which the island Tenerife is not comparable.
All are most beautiful, of a thousand shapes, and all accessible, and filled with trees of a thousand kinds and tall,
and they seem to touch the sky; and I am told that they never lose their foliage, which I can believe, I saw them
as green and beautiful as they are in Spain in May, and some of them were flowering, some with fruit . . . And
there were singing the nightingale and other little birds of a thousand kinds in the month of November, there
where I went. There are palm trees of six or eight kinds, which are a wonder to behold because of their beautiful
variety, and so are the other trees and fruits and plants; therein are marvelous pine groves, and extensive meadow
country; and there is honey, and there are many kinds of birds and a great variety of fruits. Upcountry there are
many mines of metals and the population is innumerable. La Spanola is marvelous, the sierras and the
mountains and the plains and the meadows and the lands are so beautiful and rich for planting and sowing, and
for livestock of every sort, and for building towns and villages. The harbors of the sea here are such as you
could not believe it without seeing them; and so the rivers, many and great, and good streams, the most of which
bear gold." If it sounded like Paradise, that was no accident. Paradise filled with gold. { p.63}

This is what "Old World" had to offer to the supposedly benighted "savages" and "infidels" of the "New World":

" The Spain that (the former trafficker in African slaves) Christopher Columbus and his crews left behind
just before dawn on August 3, 1492, as they sailed forth from Palos and out into the Atlantic, was for most of its
people a land of violence, squalor, treachery, and intolerance. In this respect Spain was no different from the rest
of Europe.

Epidemic outbreaks of plague and smallpox, along with routine attacks of measles, influenza, diphtheria,
typhus, typhoid fever, and more, frequently swept European cities and towns clean of 10 to 20 percent of their
populations at a single stroke. As late as the mid-seventeenth century more than 80,000 Londoners -- one out of
every six residents in the city -- died from plague in a matter of months. And again and again, as with its
companion diseases, the pestilence they called the Black Death returned. Like most of the other urban centers in
Europe, says one historian who has specialized in the subject, 'every twenty-five or thirty years -- sometimes
more frequently -- the city was convulsed by a great epidemic.' Indeed, for centuries an individual's life chances
in Europe's pesthouse cities were so poor that the natural populations of the towns were in perpetual decline that
was offset only by immigration from the countryside-in -- migration, says one historian, that was 'vital if [the
cities] were to be preserved from extinction.'

Famine, too, was common. What J. H. Elliott has said of sixteenth century Spain had held true throughout
the Continent for generations beyond memory: 'The rich ate, and ate to excess, watched by a thousand hungry
eyes as they consumed their gargantuan meals. [This would include the upper-class clergy, i.e. the Supreme
Pontiff and 'princes of the Church'.] The rest of the population starved. This was in normal times. { p.58} The
slightest fluctuation in food prices could cause the sudden deaths of additional tens of thousands who lived on
the margins of perpetual hunger. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries prices fluctuated constantly. . . The
result of this, as one French historian has observed, was that 'the epidemic that raged in Paris in 1482 fits the
classic pattern: famine in the countryside, flight of the poor to the city in search of help, then outbreak of disease
in the city following upon the malnutrition.' And in Spain the threat of famine in the countryside was especially
omnipresent. Areas such as Castile and Andalusia were wracked with harvest failures that brought on mass
death repeatedly during the fifteenth century.' But since both causes of death, disease and famine, were so
common throughout Europe, the recorders of many surviving records did not bother (or were unable) to make
distinctions between them. Consequently, even today historians find it difficult or impossible to distinguish
between those of the citizenry who died of disease and those who merely starved to death.' Roadside ditches,
filled with stagnant water, served as public latrines in the cities of the fifteenth century, and they would continue
to do so for centuries to follow. So too would other noxious habits and public health hazards of the time persist
on into the future -- from the practice of leaving the decomposing offal of butchered animals to fester in the
streets, to London's 'special problem,' as historian Lawrence Stone puts it, of 'poor's holes.' These were 'large,
deep, open pits in which were laid the bodies of the poor, side by side, row upon row. Only when the pit was
filled with bodies was it finally covered over with earth.' As one contemporary, quoted by Stone, delicately
observed: 'How noisome the stench is that arises from these holes so stowed with dead bodies, especially in
sultry seasons and after rain.' Along with the stench and repulsive appearance of the openly displayed dead,
human and animal alike, a modern visitor to a European city in this era would be repelled by the appearance and
the vile aromas given off by the living as well. Most people never bathed, not once in an entire lifetime. Almost
everyone had his or her brush with smallpox and other deforming diseases that left survivors partially blinded,
pock-marked, or crippled, while it was the norm for men and women to have 'bad breath from the rotting teeth
and constant stomach disorders which can be documented from many sources, while suppurating ulcers, eczema,
scabs, running sores and other nauseating skin diseases were extremely common and often lasted for years."
{p.59}

Street crime in most cities lurked around every corner. One especially popular technique for robbing
someone was to drop a heavy rock or chunk of masonry on his head from an upper-story window and then to
rifle the body for jewelry and money. This was a time when,. . . as Johan Huizinga once put it, 'the continuous
disruption of town and country by every kind of dangerous rabble [and] the permanent threat of harsh and
unreliable law enforcement . . . nourished a feeling of universal uncertainty.' With neither culturally developed
systems of social obligation and restraint in place, nor effective police forces in their stead, the cities of Europe
during the fifteen and sixteenth centuries were little more than chaotic population agglomerates with entire
sections serving as the residential turf of thieves and brigands, and where the wealthy were forced to hire torch-
bearing body guards to accompany them out at night. In times of famine, cities and towns became the setting for
food riots. And the largest riot of all of course -- though the word hardly does it justice -- was the Peasants' War
which broke out in 1524 following a series of local revolts that had been occurring repeatedly since the previous
century. The Peasants' War killed over 100,000 people.

What Lawrence Stone has said about the typical English village also was likely true throughout Europe at
this time -- that is, that because of the dismal social conditions and prevailing social values, it 'was a place filled
with malice and hatred, its only unifying bond being the occasional episode of mass hysteria, which temporarily
bound together the majority in order to harry and persecute the local witch.' Indeed, as in England, there were
towns on the Continent where as many as a third of the population were accused of witchcraft and where ten out
of every hundred people were executed for it in a single year. { p.60}

In Genoa, writes historian Fernand Braudel, 'the homeless poor sold themselves as galley slaves every
winter.' They were fortunate to have that option. In more northern climes, during winter months, the indigent
simply froze to death. The summer, on the other hand, was when the plague made its cyclical visitations. That
is why, in summer months, the wealthy left the cities to the poor: as Braudel points out elsewhere, Rome along
with other towns 'was a graveyard of fever' during times of warmer weather.

Throughout Europe, about half the children born during this time died before reaching the age of ten.
Among the poorer classes -- and in Spain particularly, which had an infant mortality rate almost 40 percent
higher even than England's -- things were much worse. In addition to exposure, disease, and malnutrition, one of
the causes for such a high infant mortality rate (close to three out of ten babies in Spain did not live to see their
first birthdays) was abandonment. Thousands upon thousands of children who could not be cared for were
simply left to die on dungheaps or in roadside ditches. Others were sold into slavery." {pp. 57-61}
 At least some of the "holier than thou" clergy, however, who supposedly joined monastic orders in order to
"do penance" and pray for the salvation of the souls of those who contributed money to their monasteries fared
much better, as their bones now testify.

In Columbus' own words, THIS is way the "pagan savages" of the New World greeted the Christian
"missionaries" and civilizing "discoverers" :

"There are palm trees of six or eight kinds, which a wonder to behold because of their beautiful
variety, and so are the other trees and fruits and plants; therein are marvelous pine groves, and extensive
meadow country; and there is honey, and there are many kinds of birds and a great variety of fruits.
Upcountry there are many mines of metals the population is innumerable. La Spanola is marvelous, the
sierras and the mountains and the plains and the meadows and the lands are so beautiful and rich for
planting and sowing, and for livestock of every sort, I for building towns and villages. The harbors of
the sea here are such as you could not believe it without seeing them; and so the rivers, many and at,
and good streams, the most of which bear gold. If it sounded like Paradise, that was no accident.
Paradise filled with gold. And when he came to describe the people he had met, Columbus's Edenic
imagery never faltered:

'The people of this island and of all the other islands which I have found and seen, or have not
seen, all go naked, men and women, as their mothers bore them, except that some women cover one
place only with the leaf of a plant with a net of cotton which they make for that purpose. They have no
iron or steel or weapons, nor are they capable of using them, because -- although they are well-built
people of handsome stature -- they are wondrous timid. . . [T]hey are so artless and free with all they
possess, that no one would believe it without having seen it. Of anything they have, if you ask them for
it they never say no; rather they invite the person to share it, and show as much love as if they were
giving their hearts; and whether the thing be of value or of small price, at once they are content with
whatever little thing of whatever kind may be given to them." { p.63}

A century later, this is what greeted the Spaniards on the coast of what would become California:

" In 1602 and 1603 Sebastian Vizcaino led an expedition of three ships up and down the California coast,
with frequent stops on shore where his men spent time with various Indian peoples. There was sickness on
Vizcaino's ships from the moment they set sail, and before the voyage was complete it combined with scurvy to
literally shut the voyage down. Scores of men were incapacitated. . . Fray Antonio de la Ascension, one of three
clergymen who made the voyage with Vizcaino, feared the whole crew was close to death. But fortunately for
the Spanish -- and unfortunately for the natives -- the Indians helped the crippled sailors, offering them 'fish,
game, hazel nuts, chestnuts, acorns, and other things. . . . for though but six of our men remained in the said
frigate, the rest having died of cold and sickness, the Indians were so friendly and so desirous of our friendship . .
. that they not only did them no harm, but showed them all the kindness possible.'' There can be no doubt that
for their kindness the Indians were repaid by plagues the likes of which nothing in their history had prepared
them.

The earliest European mariners and explorers in California, as noted in a previous chapter's discussion of
Cabrillo, repeatedly referred to the great numbers of Indians living there. In places where Vizcaino's ships could
approach the coast or his men could go ashore, the Captain recorded, again and again, that the land was thickly
filled with people. And where he couldn't approach or go ashore 'because the coast was wild,' the Indians
signaled greetings by building fires -- fires that 'made so many columns of smoke on the mainland that at night it
looked like a procession and in the daytime the sky was overcast.' In sum, as Father Ascension put it, 'this realm
of California is very large and embraces much territory, nearly all inhabited by numberless people." {p. 135}

"From island to island, small and large, throughout the Caribbean,

wherever he went, Columbus reported that he planted a cross,
"making the required declarations, " and claiming ownership of the
land for his royal patrons back in Spain. Despite the fact that
Columbus noted in his own journal of the voyage that "the people of
these lands do not understand me nor I them," it seems to have been
of particular satisfaction to him that never once did any of the
onlooking Arawak-speaking islanders object to his repeated
proclamations in Spanish that he was taking control of their lands
away from them. Ludicrous though this scene may appear to us in
retrospect, at the time it was a deadly serious ritual similar in ways
equally ludicrous and deadly to the other famous ritual the Spanish
bestowed upon the non-Spanish-speaking people of the Americas,
the requerimiento ( a sort of "Miranda Rights Statement" in reverse,
made by the criminal to their victims).

Following Columbus, each time the Spanish encountered a

native individual or group in the course of their travels, it was a
"requirement" that they read to the Indians a statement informing
them of the truth of Christianity and the necessity to swear
immediate allegiance to the Pope and to the Spanish crown. After
this, if the Indians refused or even delayed in their acceptance (or,
more likely, their understanding) of the requerimiento, the statement
continued: )

The Requerimiento,

"We certify to you that, with the help of God,

we shall powerfully enter into your country and shall
make war against you in all ways and manners that
we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and
obedience of the Church and of Their Highnesses.
We shall take you and your wives and your children,
and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell
and dispose of them as Their Highnesses may
command. And we shall take your goods, and shall do
you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to
vassals who do not obey and refuse to receive their
lord and resist and contradict him."

[ another version read: "If you do not do this,

however, or resort maliciously to delay, we warn you
that, with the aid of God, we will enter your land
against you with force and will make war in every
place and by every means we can and are able, and
we will then subject you to the yoke and authority of
the Church and Their Highnesses. We will take you
and your wives and children and make them slaves,
and as such we will sell them, and will dispose of you
and them as Their Highnesses order. And we will
take your property and will do to you all the harm
and evil we can, as is done to vassals who will not
 obey their lord or who do not wish to accept him, or
who resist and defy him. We avow that the deaths and
harm which you will receive thereby will be your own
blame, and not that of Their Highnesses, nor ours,
nor of the gentlemen who come with us . . ."]

In practice, the Spanish usually did not wait for the

Indians to reply to their demands. First the Indians were
manacled; then, as it were, they were read their rights. As
one Spanish conquistador and historian described the
routine: "After they had been put in chains, someone read
requerimiento without knowing their language and
without any interpreters, and without either the
reader or the Indians understanding the language
they had no opportunity to reply, being
immediately carried away prisoners, the Spanish
not failing to use the stick on those who did not
go fast enough."

The price paid for not embracing "the One True Faith" :

"They built a long gibbet, low enough for the toes to touch the ground and prevent strangling,
and hanged thirteen [natives] at a time in honor of Christ Our Saviour and the twelve Apostles
When the Indians were thus still alive and hanging, the Spaniards tested their strength and their
blades against them, ripping chests open with one blow and exposing entrails, and there were those
who did worse. Then, straw was wrapped around their torn bodies and they were burned alive."

In this perverse way, the invasion and destruction of

what many, including Columbus, had thought was a heaven
on earth began. Not that a reading of the requerimiento
was necessary to the inhuman violence the Spanish were to
perpetrate against the native peoples they confronted.
Rather, the proclamation was merely a legalistic rationale
for a fanatically religious and fanatically juridical and
fanatically brutal people to justify a holocaust. After all,
Columbus had seized and kidnapped Indian men, women,
and children throughout his first voyage, long before the
requerimiento was in use, five at one stop, six at another,
more at others, filling his ships with varied samples of
Indians to display like exotic beasts in Seville and
Barcelona upon his return." { p.67 }

"On at least one occasion Columbus sent a raiding

party ashore to capture some women with their children to
keep his growing excess of captured native males company,
'because,' he wrote in his journal, his past experience in
abducting African slaves had taught him that 'the [Indian]
men would behave better in Spain with women of their
country than without them.' On this date he also records the
vignette of 'the husband of one of these women and father
of three children, a boy and two girls,' who followed his
captured family onto Columbus's ship and said that if they
had to go 'he wished to come with them, and begged me
hard, and they all now remain consoled with him.' But not
for long. As a harbinger of things to come, only a half-
dozen or so of those many captured native slaves survived
the journey to Spain, and of them only two were alive six
months later." {p. 66}

" When our caravels in which I wished to go home had

to leave for Spain, we gathered together in our settlement
1600 people male and female of those Indians, of whom,
among the best males and females, we embarked on our
caravels on 17 February 1495, 550 souls. Of the rest who
were left the announcement went around that whoever
wanted them could take as many as he pleased; and this was
done. And when everybody had been supplied there were
some 400 of them left to whom permission was granted to
go wherever they wanted. Among them were many women
who had infants at the breast. They, in order the better to
escape us, since they were afraid we would turn to catch
them again, left their infants anywhere on the ground and
started to flee like desperate people." { p.67 }
The Invasion begins in earnest:

Columbus's second voyage was the true beginning of

the invasion of the Americas. The royal instructions
authorizing the expedition had directed that the finest ships
in Andalusia be outfitted for the trip and that they be
commanded by the most expert pilots and navigators in the
realm. Seventeen ships made the voyage and aboard those
ships were more than 1200 soldiers, sailors, and colonists --
including a cavalry troop of lancers and half a dozen
priests." {p. 70}

. . . "The massacres continued. Columbus remained

ill for months while his soldiers wandered freely. More
than 50,000 natives were reported dead from these
encounters by the time the Admiral had recovered from his
sickness.' And when at last his health and strength had
been restored, Columbus's response to his men's
unorganized depredations was to organize them. In March
of 1495 he massed together several hundred armored
troops, cavalry, and a score or more of trained attack dogs.
They set forth across the countryside, tearing into
assembled masses of sick and unarmed native people,
slaughtering them by the thousands. The pattern set by
these raids would be the model the Spanish would follow
for the next decade and beyond."

{ see "Padre de Las Casas, Defender of the Indians" }

As Bartolomé de Las Casas, the most famous of the
accompanying Spanish missionaries from that trip recalled:

"Once the
Indians
were in
the
woods,
the next
step was
to form
squadrons
and
pursue
them, and
whenever
the
Spaniards
found
them, they
pitilessly

slaughtered everyone like sheep in a corral. It was

a general rule among Spaniards to be cruel; not
 just cruel, but extraordinarily cruel so that harsh
and bitter treatment would prevent Indians from
daring to think of themselves as human beings or
having a minute to think at all. So they would cut
an Indian's hands and leave them dangling by a
shred of skin and they would send him on saying
'Go now, spread the news to your chiefs.' They
would test their swords and their manly strength
on captured Indians and place bets on the slicing
off of heads or the cutting of bodies in half with
one blow. They burned or hanged captured
chiefs."

. . . "With the same determination Columbus had

shown in organizing his troops' previously disorganized and
indiscriminate killings, the Admiral then set about the task
of systematizing their haphazard enslavement of the
natives. Gold was all that they were seeking, so every
Indian on the island who was not a child was ordered to
deliver to the Spanish a certain amount of the precious ore
every three months. When the gold was delivered the
individual was presented with a token to wear around his
neck as proof that the tribute had been paid. Anyone found
without the appropriate number of tokens had his hands cut
off.

Since Hispaniola's gold supply was far less than what

the Spaniards' fantasies suggested, Indians who wished to
survive were driven to seek out their quotas of the ore at the
expense of other endeavors, including food production.
The famines that had begun earlier, when the Indians
tempted to hide from the Spanish murderers, now grew
much worse, new diseases that the Spanish carried with
them preyed ever more intensely on the malnourished and
weakened bodies of the natives. And the soldiers never
ceased to take delight in killing just for fun.

Spanish reports of their own murderous sadism during

this time are legion. For a lark they 'tore babes from their
mother's breast by their feet, and dashed their heads against
the rocks.' The bodies of other infants 'they spitted . . .
together with their mothers and all who were before them,
on their swords.' On one famous occasion in Cuba, a troop
of a hundred or more Spaniards stopped by the banks of a
dry river and sharpened their swords on the whetstones in
its bed. Eager to compare the sharpness of their blades,
reported an eyewitness to the events, they drew their
weapons and 'began to rip open the bellies, to cut and kill
those lambs -- men, women children, and old folk, all of
whom were seated, off guard and frightened, watching the
mares and the Spaniards. And within two credos (i.e. the
time it takes to recite the 'Creed'), not a man of all of them
there remained alive. The Spaniards enter the large house
nearby, for this was happening at its door, and in the same
 way, with cuts and stabs, begin to kill as many as they
found there, so that a stream of blood was running, as if a
great number of cows had perished.. . . To see the wounds
which covered the bodies of the dead and dying was a
spectacle of horror and dread . This particular slaughter
began at the village of Zucayo, where the townsfolk earlier
had provided for the conquistadors a feast of cassava fruit
and fish. From there it spread. No one knows just how
many Indians the Spanish killed in this sadistic spree, but
Las Casas put the number a over 20,000 before the soldiers'
thirst for horror had been slaked. {pp. 70--71} . . .
'When there were among the prisoners some women
who had recently given birth, if the new-born babes
happened to cry, they seized them by the legs and hurled
them against the rocks, or flung them into the jungle so that
they would be certain to die there.'

Or, Las Casas again, in another incident he witnessed:

'The Spaniards found pleasure in inventing all kinds of
odd cruelties, the more cruel the better, with which to spill
human blood.' {p. 72}

"The Dominican monk Bartolomé de Las Casas reached

America in 1502, and was the leading figure in the ecclesiastical
opposition to colonial oppression. In his will he wrote 'I believe that
due to these godless, evil and ignoble acts perpetrated in such an
unjust, barbarous, and tyrannical manner, God will direct his ire
and fury upon all Spain, as all Spain has taken its part, large or
small, of the bloodly wealth usurped at the price of much ruin and
many massacres."

[from The explorers, by Paoalo Novaresio]

 "And then the Spanish turned their attention to the mainland of
Mexico and Central America. The slaughter had barely begun. The
exquisite city of Tenochtitlán was next.{p. 75 } . . .

. . . Rather than meeting resistance when he approached the

great city, Cortés was greeted in friendship and was welcomed by
Montezuma. In retrospect this behavior of the Aztec leader has
usually seemed foolish or cowardly or naive to Western historians.
But Meso-American political traditions had always dictated that war
was to be announced before it was launched, and the reasons for war
were always made clear well beforehand. War was a sacred
endeavor, and it was sacrilegious to engage in it with treachery or
fraud. In fact, as Inga Clendinnen recently has noted: 'So important
was this notion of fair testing that food and weapons were sent to the
selected target city as part of the challenge, there being no virtue in
defeating a weakened enemy.' In this case, therefore, not only was
there no reason for Montezuma to suppose Cortés intended to
haunch an invasion (the Tlaxcaltec troops who accompanied him
could have been part of an effort to seek political alliance), but
Cortés had plainly announced in advance that his purposes were not
warlike, that he came as an ambassador of peace.
Once the Spanish were inside the city's gates, however, it soon
became apparent that this was a far from conciliatory mission. {p. 76
} . . .
Once the disease dissipated -- having devastated the city's
residents and killed off most of the Aztec leaders -- Cortés prepared
to attack again. First, he had ships constructed that were used to
intercept and cut off food supplies to the island capital. Then he
destroyed the great aqueduct that brought fresh water to the city.
Finally, the Spanish and their Indian allies laid siege to the once
brilliant white metropolis and its dwindling population of diseased
and starving people. 'Siege,' as Inga Clendinnen has observed, was
for the Aztecs 'the antithesis of war.' Viewing it as cowardly and
dishonorable, 'the deliberate and systematic weakening of opposition
before engagement, and the deliberate implication of noncombatants
in the contest, had no part in their experience.' But it had been the
European mode of battle for many centuries, deriving its inspiration
from the Greek invention of ferocious and massively destructive
infantry warfare. To the Spanish, as to all Europeans when
committed to battle, victory -- by whatever means -- was all that
mattered. On the other side, for reasons equally steeped in ancient
tradition, the people of Tenochtitlán had no other option than to
resist dishonor and defeat until the very end. The ensuing battle was
furious and horrifying, and continued on for months. Tenochtitlán's
warriors, though immensely weakened by the deadly bacteria that
had been loosed in their midst, and at least initially hobbled by what
Clendinnen calls their 'inhibition against battleground killing,' were
still too formidable an army for direct military confrontation. So
Cortés extended his martial strategy by destroying not only the
Aztecs' food and water supplies, but their very city itself. His
soldiers burned magnificent public buildings and marketplaces, and
the aviaries with their thousands of wondrous birds; they gutted and
laid waste parks and gardens and handsome boulevards. The
metropolis that the Spanish had just months earlier described as the
most beautiful city on earth, so dazzling and beguiling in its exotic
and brilliant variety, became a monotonous pile of rubble, a place of
dust and flame and death." { p.78--9}

Recalled Cortés :

. . .'We now learnt from two wretched creatures who had

escaped from the city and come to our camp by night that they were
dying of hunger. . . we resolved to enter the next morning shortly
before dawn and do all the harm we could. . . and we fell upon a
huge number of people. As these were some of the most wretched
people and had come in search of food, they were nearly all
unarmed, and women and children in the main. We did them so
much harm through all the streets in the city that we could reach,
that the dead and the prisoners numbered more than eight hundred.', .
. .' They moved their forces to another section of the city where they
slaughtered and captured more than twelve thousand people. Within
a day or two they had another multitude of helpless citizens penned
in: 'They no longer had nor could find any arrows, javelins or stones
with which to attack us.' More than forty thousand were killed in
that single day, and 'so loud was the wailing of the women and
children that there was not one man amongst us whose heart did not
bleed at the sound.' Indeed, because 'we could no longer endure the
stench of the dead bodies that had lain in those streets for many
days, which was the most loathsome thing in all the world,' recalled
Cortés, 'we returned to our camps.' But not for long. The next
morning the Spanish were in the streets again, mopping up the
starving, dehydrated, and disease--wracked Indians who remained. 'I
intended to attack and slay them all,' said Cortés, as he observed
that: The people of the city had to walk upon their dead while others
swam or drowned in the waters of that wide lake where they had
their canoes; indeed, so great was their suffering that it was beyond
our understanding how they could endure it. Countless numbers of
men, women and children came out toward us, and in their eagerness
to escape many were pushed into the water where they drowned
amid that multitude of
corpses; and it seemed
that more than fifty
thousand had perished
from the salt water they
had drunk, their hunger
and the vile stench.. . .
And so in those streets
where they were we came
across such piles of the
dead that we were forced
to walk upon them."
{p.80}

'Gold is most
 excellent; gold constitutes treasure; and he who has it does all he
wants in the world, and can even lift souls up to Paradise.' --
Christopher Columbus, 1503 letter to the king and queen of Spain.
Columbus wrote to the Spanish monarchs in 1493: 'It is
possible, with the name of the Holy Trinity, to sell all the slaves
which it is possible to sell…Here there are so many of these
slaves . . . that although they are living things, they are as good as
gold…'

Columbus and his men also used the Taino as sex slaves: it was
a common reward for Columbus' men for him to present them with
local women to rape. As he began exporting Taino as slaves to other
parts of the world, the sex-slave trade became an important part of
the business, as Columbus wrote to a friend in 1500: "A hundred
castellanoes (a Spanish coin) are as easily obtained for a woman as
for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who
go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten (years old) are
now in demand."

[ precise source unknown ]

Here's the thinking of the prophet of Conservative Libertarian

Republicans:

"They [Indians] didn't have any rights to the land, and there was no
reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived
and were not using... What was it that they were fighting for, when
they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue
a primitive existence, their 'right' to keep part of the earth untouched,
unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that
you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any
white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to
take over this continent."

(Ayn Rand, 03/06/1974, talk at USMA, West Point, NY)

It appears from DNA evidence that quite a few Latinos in

America's southwest have some connection to Jews, perhaps through
the "Maranos", Jews who had been forced during the Spanish
Inquisition to chose between death as Jews and life as Catholics [ see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-Judaism ]

Countless MILLIONS exterminated by the "Christian" invaders, their property stolen by their European
"discovers", and handed down to the descendants of these mass-murdering thieves:

"Just twenty-one years after Columbus's first landing in the Caribbean, the vastly populous island that the
explorer had re-named 'Hispaniola' (now divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic) was effectively
desolate; nearly 8,000,000 people -- those Columbus chose to call Indians -- had been killed by violence, disease,
and despair.' It took a little longer, about the span of a single human generation, but what happened on
Hispaniola was the equivalent of more than fifty Hiroshimas. And Hispaniola was only the beginning.
 . . . The island of
Hispaniola's population of about
eight million people at the time of
Columbus's arrival in 1492 already
had declined by a third to a half
before the year 1496 was out. And
after 1496 the death rate, if
anything, accelerated. In plotting
on a graph the decline of
Hispaniola's native population,
there appears a curious bulge,
around the year 1510, when the
diminishing numbers seemed to
stabilize and even grow a bit.
Then the inexorable downward
spiral toward extinction continues.
What that little blip on the
demographic record indicates is
not, however, a moment of respite
for the island's people, nor a
contradiction to the overall pattern
of Hispaniola's population free-fall following Columbus's arrival. Rather, it is a shadowy and passing footnote to
the holocaust the Spanish at the same time were bringing to the rest of the Caribbean, for that fleeting instant of
population stabilization was caused by the importation of tens of thousands of slaves from surrounding islands in
a fruitless attempt by the Spanish to replace the dying natives of Hispaniola. But death seized these imported
slaves as quickly as it had Hispaniola's natives. And thus, the islands of the Bahamas were rapidly stripped of
perhaps half a million people, in large part for use as short-lived replacements by the Spanish for Hispaniola's
nearly eradicated indigenous inhabitants. Then Cuba, with its enormous population, suffered the same fate.
With the Caribbean's millions of native people thereby effectively liquidated in barely a quarter of a century,
forced through the murderous vortex of Spanish savagery and greed, the slavers turned next to the smaller
islands off the mainland coast. The first raid took place in 1515 when natives from Guanaja in the Bay Islands
off Honduras were captured and taken to forced labor camps in depopulated Cuba. Other slave expeditions
followed, and by 1525, when Cortés arrived in the region, all the Bay Islands themselves had been entirely shorn
of their inhabitants.' In order to exploit most fully the land and its populace, and to satisfy the increasingly
dangerous and rebellion-organizing ambitions of his well armed Spanish troops, Columbus instituted a program
called the repartimento or Indian grants -- later referred to, in a revised version, as the system of encomiendas.
This was a dividing-up, not of the land, but of entire peoples and communities, and the bestowal of them upon a
would--be Spanish master. The master was free to do what he wished with 'his people' -- have them plant, have
them work in the mines, have them do anything, as Carl Sauer puts it,'without limit or benefit of tenure.' The
result was an even greater increase in cruelty and a magnification of the firestorm of human devastation. Caring
only for short-term material wealth that could be wrenched up from the earth, the Spanish overlord on
Hispaniola removed their slaves to unfamiliar locales . . . deprived them of food and forced them to work until
they dropped. At the mines and fields in which they labored, the Indians were herded together under the
supervision of Spanish overseers, known as mineros in the mines and estancieros on the plantations, who treated
the Indians with such rigor and inhumanity that they seemed the very ministers of Hell, driving them day and
night with beatings, kicks, lashes and blows and calling them no sweeter name than dogs.'{p. 73 }

"As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to
nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7,000 babies died in three months. Some mothers even
drowned their babies from sheer desperation, while others caused themselves to abort with certain herbs that
produced stillborn children. In this way husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from
lack of milk, while others had not time or energy for procreation, and in a short time this land which was so
great, so powerful and fertile, though so unfortunate, was depopulated.

By 1496, we already have noted, the population of Hispaniola had fallen from eight million to between four
and five million. By 1508 it was down to less than a hundred thousand. By 1518 it numbered less that twenty
thousand. And by 1535, say the leading scholars on this grim topic for all practical purposes, the native
population was extinct. In less than the normal lifetime of a single human being, an entire culture of millions of
people, thousands of years resident in their home land, had been exterminated. The same fate befell the native
peoples of the surrounding islands in the Caribbean as well." {p. 75 }

"Meanwhile, Tenochtitlán effectively was no more. About a third of a million people dead, in a single city
in a single lake in the center of Mexico. And still this was just the beginning.
No one knows how many they killed, or how many died of disease before the conquistadors got there, but
Las Casas wrote that Alvarado and his troops by themselves 'advanced, killing, ravaging, burning, robbing and
destroying all the country wherever he came.' In all, he said:
'By other massacres and murders besides the above, they have destroyed and devastated a kingdom more
than a hundred leagues square, one of the happiest in the way of fertility and population in the world. This same
tyrant wrote that it was more populous than the kingdom of Mexico; and he told the truth. He and his brothers,
together with the others, have killed more than four or five million people in fifteen or sixteen years, from the
year 1525 until 1540, and they continue to kill and destroy those who are still left; and so they will kill the
remainder.'

Alvarado, of course, was but one among many engaged in this genocidal enterprise. Nuño Beltrán de
Guzman was one of those who led armies to the north, torturing and burning at the stake native headers, such as
the Tarascan king, while seizing or destroying enormous native stores of food. Guzman later was followed by
Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, by Francisco de Ibarra, and countless other
conquerors and marauders. As elsewhere, disease, depredation, enslavement, and outright massacres combined
to extinguish entire Indian cultures in Mexico's northwest. Among the region's Serrano culture groups, in barely
more than a century the Tepehuan people were reduced in number by 90 percent; the Irritilla people by 93
percent; the Acaxee people by 95%. It took a little longer for the various Yaqui peoples to reach this level of
devastation, but they too saw nearly 90% of their numbers perish, while for the various Mayo peoples the
collapse was 94%. Scores of other examples from this enormous area followed the same deadly pattern."
{ p. 81--82 }

"Within no more than a handful of generations following their first encounters with Europeans, the vast
majority of the Western Hemisphere's native peoples had been exterminated. The pace and magnitude of their
obliteration varied from place to place and from time to time, but for years now historical demographers have
been uncovering, in region upon region, post-Columbian depopulation rates of between 90 and 98 percent with
such regularity that an overall decline of 95 percent has become a working rule of thumb. What this means is
that, on average, for every twenty natives alive at the moment of European contact-when the lands of the
Americas teemed with numerous tens of millions of people-only one stood in their place when the bloodbath was
over.

To put this in a contemporary context, the ratio of native survivorship in the Americas following European
contact was less than half of what the human survivorship ratio would be in the United States today if every
single white person and every single black person died. The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far
and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. That is why, as one historian aptly has
said, far from the heroic and romantic heraldry that customarily is used to symbolize the European settlement of
the Americas, the emblem most congruent with reality would be a pyramid of skulls." {p. x of Introduction }

"Very early on, as they were tying an Indian chief named 'Hatuey' to
the stake, a Franciscan friar urged him to take Jesus to his heart so
that his soul might go to heaven, rather than descend into hell.
Hatuey replied that if heaven was where the Christians went, he
would rather go to hell.' [ Would it have taken a genius to figure out
that the ones with the express tickets to hell were the Catholic
monsters, rather than the innocent pagans?]

'Much later, and thousands of miles to the west,' as Father

Ascension put it, 'this realm of California is very large and embraces
much territory, nearly all inhabited by numberless people.'
 But not for very long. Throughout the late sixteenth and the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Spanish disease and Spanish
cruelty took a large but mostly uncalculated toll. Few detailed
records of what happened during that time exist, but a wealth of
research in other locales has shown the early decades following
Western contact to be almost invariably the worst for native people,
because that is when the fires of epidemic disease burn most freely.
Whatever the population of California was before the Spanish came,
however, and whatever happened during the first few centuries
following Spanish entry into the region, by 1845 the Indian
population of California had been slashed to 150,000 (down from
many times that number prior to European contact) by swarming
epidemics of influenza, diphtheria, measles, pneumonia, whooping
cough, smallpox, malaria, typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, dysentery,
syphilis, and gonorrhea -- along with everyday settler and explorer
violence."' {p. 135--6}

Using armed Spanish troops to capture Indians and herd them

into the mission stockades, the Spanish padres did their best to
convert the natives before they killed them. And kill they did. First
there were the Jesuit missions, founded early in the eighteenth
century, and from which few vital statistics are available. Then the
Franciscans took the Jesuits' place. . . . [ Most people just assume
that the 'missions' were about 'doing the Lord's work' for the benefit
of God and the Indians. The recorded history of this time and place,
however, do not bear this out.]

And what was done was that they brought more natives in,
under military force of arms. Although the number of Indians within
the Franciscan missions increased steadily from the close of those
first three disastrous years [ when the number of deaths caused the
Indian population living in the missions to decline] until the opening
decade of the nineteenth century, this increase was entirely
attributable to the masses of native people who were being captured
and force-marched into the mission compounds. Once thus
confined, the Indians' annual death rate regularly exceeded the birth
rate by more than two to one. This is an overall death-to-birth ratio
that, in less than half a century, would completely exterminate a
population of any size that was not being replenished by new
conscripts. The death rate for children in the missions was even
worse. Commonly, the child death rate in these institutions of
mandatory conversion ranged from . . . one of every six to every
three. . .

In short, the missions were furnaces of death that sustained the

Indian population levels for as long as they did only by driving more
and more natives into their confines to compensate for the huge
number were being killed once they got there. This was a pattern
that held throughout California and on out across the southwest.
Thus, for example, one survey of life and death in an early Arizona
mission has turned up statistics showing that at one time an
astonishing 93% of children born within its walls died before
reaching the age of ten. {p.136--7}

There were various ways in which the mission Indians died.

The common causes were the European-introduced diseases -- which
spread like wildfire in such cramped quarters -- and malnutrition.
The personal space for Indians in the missions averaged about seven
feet by two feet per person for unmarried captives, who were locked
at night into sex--segregated common rooms that contained a single
open pit for a toilet. It was perhaps a bit more space than was
allotted a captive African in the hold of a slave ship sailing the
Middle Passage. Married Indians and their children, on the other
hand, were permitted to sleep together -- in what Russian visitor
V.M. Golovnin described in 1818 as 'specially constructed 'cattle--
pens.' ' He explained: I cannot think of a better term for these
dwellings that consist of a long row of structures not more than 7
feet high and 10 to 14 feet wide, without floor or ceiling, each
divided into sections by partitions, also not longer than 14 feet, with
a correspondingly small door and a tiny window in each -- can one
possibly call it anything but a barnyard for domestic cattle and
fowl? Each of these small sections is occupied by an entire family;
cleanliness and tidiness are out of the question: a thrifty peasant
usually has a better--kept cattle--pen.'' Under such conditions
Spanish--introduced diseases ran wild: measles, smallpox, typhoid,
and influenza epidemics occurred and re--occurred, while syphilis
and tuberculosis became, as Sherburne F. Cook once said,
'totalitarian' diseases: virtually all the Indians were afflicted by
them. As for malnutrition, despite agricultural crop yields on the
Indian--tended mission plantations that Golovnin termed
'extraordinary' and 'unheard of in Europe,' along with large herds of
cattle and the easily accessible bounty of sea food, the food given the
Indians, according to him, was 'a kind of gruel made from barley
meal, boiled in water with maize, beans, and peas; occasionally they
are given some beef, while some of the more diligent [Indians] catch
fish for themselves.' On average, according to Cook's analyses of
the data, the caloric intake of a field--laboring mission Indian was
about 1400 calories per day, falling as low as 715 or 865 calories per
day in such missions as San Antonio and San Miguel. To put this in
context, the best estimate of the caloric intake of nineteenth-century
African American slaves is in excess of 4000 calories per day, and
almost 5400 calories per day for adult male field hands. This seems
high by modern Western standards, but is not excessive in terms of
the caloric expenditure required of agricultural laborers. As the
author of the estimate puts it: 'a diet with 4206 calories per slave per
day, while an upper limit [is] neither excessive nor generous, but
merely adequate to provide sufficient energy to enable one to work
like a slave.' Of course, the mission Indians also worked like slaves
in the padres' agricultural fields, but they did so with far less than
half the caloric intake, on average, commonly provided a black slave
in Mississippi, Alabama, or Georgia. Even the military commanders
at the missions acknowledged that the food provided the Indians was
grossly insufficient, especially, said on given 'the arduous strain of
the labors in which they are employed'; labors, said another, which
last 'from morning to night'; and labors, note a third, which are added
to the other 'hardships to which they are subjected.' . . . The
resulting severe malnutrition, of course, made the natives all the
more susceptible to the bacterial and viral infections that festered in
the filthy and cramped living conditions they were force to endure --
just as it made them more likely to behave lethargically, something
that would bring more corporal punishment down upon them. . .

When not working directly under the mission fathers' charge,

the captive natives were subject to forced labor through hiring-out
arrangements the missions had with Spanish military encampments.
The only compensation the natives received for this, as for all their
heavy daily labors, was the usual inadequate allotment of food. As
one French visitor commented in the early nineteenth century, after
inspecting life in the missions, the relationship between the priest
and his flock 'would . . . be different only in name, if a slaveholder
kept them for labor and rented them out at will; he too would feed
them.' But, we now know, he would have fed them better.

In short, the Franciscans simultaneously starved and worked

their would be converts to death, while the diseases they and others
had imported killed off thousands more. The similarity of this
outcome to what had obtained in the slave labor camps of Central
and South America should not I surprising, since California's
Spanish missions, established by Father Junípero Sera aptly dubbed
'the last conquistador' by one admiring biographer, and currently a
candidate for Catholic sainthood), were direct modeled on the
genocidal encomienda system that had driven many millions of
native peoples in Central and South America to early and agonizing
deaths. Others died even more quickly, not only from disease, but
from grotesque forms of punishment. To be certain that the Indians
were spiritually prepared to die, when their appointed and rapidly
approaching time came they were required to attend mass in chapels
where, according to one mission visitor, they were guarded by men
'with whips and goads to enforce order and silence' and were
surrounded by 'soldiers with fixed bayonets' who were on hand in
case any unruliness broke out. These were the same soldiers,
complained the officially celibate priests, who routinely raped young
Indian women. If any neophytes (as the Spanish called Indians who
had been baptized) were late for mass, they would have 'a large
leathern thong, at the end of a heavy whip-staff, applied to their
naked backs.'' More such infractions brought more serious torture.

And if ever some natives dared attempt an escape from the

padres' -- as to lead them to salvation -- as, according to the
Franciscans' own accounts, the Indians constantly did -- there would
be little mercy shown. From the time of the missions' founding
days, Junípero Serra traveled from it to pulpit preaching fire and
brimstone, scourging himself before his incarcerated flock, pounding
his chest with heavy rocks until it was feared he would fall down
dead, burning his breast with candles and live coals in imitation of
San Juan Capistrano. After this sort of self-flagellating exertion,
Father Serra had no patience for Indians who still preferred not to it
his holy demands of them. Thus, on at least one occasion when of
his Indian captives not only escaped, but stole some mission supplies
to support them on their journey home, 'his Lordship was so ant,'
recalled Father Paulo, 'that it was necessary for the fathers who there
to restrain him in order to prevent him from hanging some of . He
shouted that such a race of people deserved to be put to knife."
{ p.138--40 }

America's first occupants to the north didn't fare much better at

the hands of the English- speaking Protestant invaders:

Commenting on the scene of a totally unprovoked massacre of

unsuspecting Pequot men, women and children, in my own state of
Connecticut, a witness observed:

"It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the

fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and
horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory
seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof
to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to
enclose their enemies in their hands and give them so
speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.

Added the Puritan divine Cotton Mather, as he

celebrated the event many years later in his Magnalia
Christi Americana (i.e. 'Great Christian Events in
America'} : "In a little more than one hour, five or six
hundred of these barbarians were dismissed from a world
that was burdened with them." Mason himself counted the
Pequot dead at six or seven hundred, with only seven taken
captive and seven escaped. It was, he said joyfully,'the just
judgment of God.' . . .

From then on the surviving Pequots were hunted into

near-extermination. The comparative handful of Pequots
who were left, once this series of massacres finally ended,
were parceled out to live in servitude. . . The last of them,
fifteen boys and two women, were shipped to the West
Indies for sale as slaves, the ship captain who carried them
there ( returning the next year with what he had received in
exchange: some cotton, some salt, some tobacco, 'and
Negroes, etc.' The word 'Pequot was then removed from
New England's maps: the river of that name was changed to
the 'Thames' and the town of that name became 'New
London'. Having virtually eradicated an entire people, it
now was necessary to expunge from historical memory any
recollection of their past existence. {p.114--5}
. . . The destruction of the Indians by these plagues
was considered an unambiguous sign of divine approval for
the colonial endeavor. As the first governor of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony wrote in 1634, the Puritan
settlers, numbering at the time 'in all about four thousand
souls and upward,' were in remarkably good health:
'through the Lord's special providence . . . there hath not
died above two or three grown persons and about so many
children all the last year, it being very rare to hear of any
sick of agues (sic) or other diseases.' But, he noted in
passing, as 'for the natives, they are near all dead of the
smallpox, so as the Lord hath cleared our title to what we
possess.'
God, however, was not enough. At some point the
settlers would have to take things into their own hands.
For, terribly destructive though the Old World diseases
were, some Indians remained alive. The danger posed by
these straggling few natives was greatly exaggerated by the
English (as it remains exaggerated in most history
textbooks today), not only because their numbers had been
so drastically reduced, but because their attitudes toward
the colonists and their very means of warfare were so
comparatively benign.
We have seen in an earlier chapter that the native
peoples of this region (as elsewhere) combined in their
everyday lives a sense of individual autonomy and
communal generosity that the earliest Europeans
commented on continuously. This was a great cultural
strength, so long as the people they were dealing with
shared those values and accepted the array of culturally
correct reciprocal responses to them. However, just as their
isolation from Old World diseases made the Indians an
exceptionally healthy people as long as they were not
contacted by disease-bearing outsiders, once Europeans
invaded their lands with nothing but disdain for the native
regime of mutual respect and reciprocity, the end result (of
their virtuous liberal culture) was doomed to spell disaster.
{p. 109}

"Of all the horrific genocides that have occurred in the

twentieth century against Armenians, Jews, Gypsies, Ibos,
Bengalis, Timorese, Kampucheans, Ugandans, and more,
none has come close to destroying this many -- or this great
a proportion -- of wholly innocent people. {p. 75 } . . .
In the forward to a book of oral history accounts
depicting life in Germany during the Jewish Holocaust, Elie
Wiesel says something that befits the present as well: 'The
danger lies in forgetting. Forgetting, however, will not
effect only the dead. Should it triumph, the ashes of
yesterday will cover our hopes for tomorrow.'
. . . Moreover, the important question for the future in
this case is not 'can it happen again?' Rather, it is 'can it be
stopped?' For the genocide in the Americas, and in other
places where the world's indigenous peoples has never
really ceased. As recently as 1986, the Commission on
Rights of the Organization of American States observed
that 40,000 and simply 'disappeared' in Guatemala during
the preceding fifteen years. Another 100,000 had been
openly murdered. That is the equivalent the United States,
 of more than 4,000,000 people slaughtered or removed
under official government decree -- a figure that is almost
six times number of American battle deaths in the Civil
War, World War One, War Two, the Korean War, and the
Vietnam War combined.
Almost all those dead and disappeared were Indians,
direct descendants. . . of the Mayas, of one of the most
splendid civilizations that this earth has ever seen. Today,
as five centuries ago, these people are being tortured and
slaughtered, their homes and villages bombed and razed --
while more than two-thirds of their rain forest homelands
have now been intentionally burned and scraped into ruin.
The murder and destruction continue, with the assistance of
the United States, even as these words are being written.
And many of the detailed accounts from contemporary
observers read much like those recorded by the
conquistadors' chroniclers 500 years earlier.
"Children, two years, four years old, they just grabbed
them and tore two,' reports one witness to military massacre
of Indians in Guatemala 1982. . . and 'children, of two
years, of nine months, of six months, they killed and burned
them all . . . and ' 'At about 1:00 p.m, the soldiers began to
fire at the women inside the small church. . . they returned
to kill the children, whom they had left crying and
screaming by themselves, without their mothers." { p. xiii-
xiv of Introduction }

"For years to come Columbus repeatedly would insist that his

expeditions and adventures in the New World had nothing to do with
'mere reason, mathematics, and maps,' as two scholars of the subject
put it, but that his 'execution of the affair of the Indies' was a
fulfillment of prophecies in Isaiah.' In addition to helping explain, if
taken seriously, why Columbus in many respects was a less
successful navigator and helms-man than is commonly supposed
(once into the Caribbean he rarely seemed to know where he was
and routinely lost ships that were under his command), this
rhetorical claim of biblical guidance is a clue to understanding the
European reaction to his reported find."
Columbus finished his letter, describing what he had seen on
his voyage, on March 4th of 1493. A printed version of it was
published in Barcelona. . . At least seventeen different translated
editions appeared throughout Europe within five years following
Columbus's return from that first voyage.
If not the biblical Eden, or the fabled Fortunate Isles of classical
myth, Columbus, it seemed, at least had found some sort of paradise
on earth. Such places had long filled the legends and dreams of all
the peoples of Europe, as they would on into the future: it is no
coincidence that during the next two centuries the invented utopias
of Bacon and More and Harrington and others invariably would be
located in distant oceanic lands to the west.
 But myths of paradise and utopia were complex -- and often
confused -- affairs. On the one hand, in some versions, they
represented a re-discovered time of innocent perfection dating from
before the biblical Fall from Grace; on the other hand, some dreams
of such perfection envisioned and were built upon the expectation of
a future time of anticipated peace and harmony. And bound up with
every myth, past, present, or future, was still another and
contradictory vision of the primordial world, a Satanic vision of
savagery and wildness and the dark.
Before long, reports were circulating that Satan himself resided
on one of those islands in the Caribbean Sea. Perhaps it was only
natural then, as Lewis Hanke has said, that 'the popular image, in the
first feverish months, of a terrestrial paradise was soon succeeded by
that of a hostile continent peopled with armed warriors rushing out
of the tropical forests or strange cities to resist the advance of the
Spanish soldiers and the missionary efforts of their companion
friars.'
It was only a matter of time before that stereotype of
barbarically hostile natives had metamorphosed once again. As best
described by its most famous proponent, the eminent Spanish
scholar Juan Gines de Sepulveda, the next representation of the New
World's Indians was as creatures of a subhuman, Caliban-like nature
who were intended by God 'to be placed under the authority of
civilized and virtuous princes or nations, so that they may learn,
from the might, wisdom, and law of their conquerors, to practice
better morals, worthier customs and a more civilized way of life.' " {
p. 65}

That the visions of the ferocious Indian assailant or the inferior

natural slave were fictions, as much as the image of a prelapsarian
American Eden had been, mattered not one bit to anyone. The
myths were simply formed and reformed, shaped and reshaped, and
made to do whatever work their propagators at any given moment
wanted done.
Numerous modern scholars have dissected and analyzed the
effects of both biblical and classical myth on the minds of Europeans
during this so--called Age of Discovery. But at least as strong as all
the mixed-up imaginings of terrestrial heavens and Elysian fields, of
lusty maidens and cannibalistic human beasts, was a fervent, and in
many cases a truly maniacal, European craving for raw power and
the wealth of gold and silver. Among the clergy, meanwhile, there
was the promise of God's favor should they successfully introduce
the New World's 'pagan innocents' to the glory of his grace. It is not
surprising, then, that in the very first sentence of his celebrated letter
to the Spanish Crown Columbus says of the lands that he has found,
'and of them all have I taken possession for Their Highnesses, by
proclamation and with the royal standard displayed, and nobody
objected.' Consider the picture: standing alone with a few of his
fellow officers in the white coral sand of a tiny island whose
identification remain disputed to this day, an island 'discovered' by
Columbus despite the fact that it was well populated and had in fact
been discovered by others thousands of years earlier, the admiral
'took possession' of it -- and of all the people it contained. And
'nobody objected .' Clearly, God was on the Spaniards' side.
Columbus was, in most respects, merely an especially active
and dramatic embodiment of the European -- and especially the
Mediterranean -- mind and soul of his time: a religious fanatic
obsessed with the conversion, conquest, or liquidation of all non-
Christians; a latter-day Crusader in search of personal wealth and
fame, who expected the enormous and mysterious world he had
found to be filled with monstrous races inhabiting wild forests, and
with golden people living in Eden. He was also a man with
sufficient intolerance and contempt for all who did not look or
behave or believe as he did, that he thought nothing of enslaving or
killing such people simply because they were not like him. He was,
to repeat, a secular personification of what more than a thousand
years of Christian culture had wrought. As such, the fact that he
launched a campaign of horrific violence against the natives of
Hispaniola is not something that should surprise anyone. Indeed, it
would be surprising if he had not inaugurated such carnage.
But why did the firestorm of violence turn openly genocidal,
and why did it continue for so long? Why did it take the grotesque
forms that it did? Why was it morally justified in the terms that it
was? And why, and in what ways, were the later British and
American genocide campaigns different from those of the Spanish --
if at least equally destructive in the long run? The answers to all
these questions must be sought in the constant interplay of Western
ideologies and material realities, beginning with the initial Spanish
quest for gold and for glory, proceeding from there to evolving
concepts of race along with traditional notions of divine providence
and sin, and then back again to the hunger and thirst for wealth and
for power, sought down different paths by different European
peoples on the different American continents of the north and of the
south. { p. 199--200}
The real reason for the attrocities perpetrated was not Religion,
merely an excuse, but greed on the part of all of those who stood to
gain from the exploitation and robbery of America's prior owners,
the distant rulers of Christendom, the Church, and their agents on the
ground :
There was little doubt in Columbus's mind that with
sufficient man--power, both military and ecclesiastical, he
would reap with ease a vast fortune in gold and souls. Both
of these godly gifts to the Admiral and to his Spanish
supporters were simply there for the taking. In a letter to
the king and queen dated April 9, 1493, Columbus outlined
his plans for the second voyage. Instead of the fewer than
100 men he had brought on the initial expedition, he
recommended that he be allowed to transport twenty times
that number 'so that the country may be made more secure
and so that it may be more expeditiously won and
managed.' " { p. 201--202}

Distribution of spoils of Conquest:

. . . So great was the supply of gold that awaited them,
and so effortless would be its collection, he believed, that
he urged the sovereigns to establish on the islands
magistrates and notaries to oversee what he repeatedly
referred to as the 'gathering' of this fabulous wealth, all of
which was to be 'immediately melted and marked . . . and
weighed and placed in carefully guarded chests.
 He also proposed that 'of all the gold which may be
found, one percent be reserved for the erection of churches
and their furniture and for the support of the priests or friars
attached to them.' One percent may not appear to be much,
but if the Admiral's estimate of how much gold awaited
them had been even close to the truth, one percent could
have paid for cathedrals. { p. 202}
This initial phase of the Spanish bloodbath in the
region finally over, Cortés now returned to camp where he
spent three or four days 'attending to many items of
business. . . concerning myself with the good order,
government and pacification of these parts.' What this
meant, first of all, as he says in his very next sentence, was
the collecting and dividing up of the gold ('and other things,
such as slaves') that were the spoils of the carnage.
Although much had been destroyed or lost in the fury of the
battle, these valuables included 'many gold bucklers,' which
he promptly melted down, 'plumes, feather headdresses and
things so remarkable that they cannot be described in
writing nor would they be understood unless they were
seen.'
Through prior arrangement with his king, Cortés's
share of the loot was one-fifth. In gold and jewelry and
artwork, that was a fortune, probably more than
$10,000,000 in 1990 American currency. In terms of
slaves, it meant at least 3000 human beings for his personal
and private use, not counting about 23,000 Indian 'vassals,'
even after the Crown reduced his holdings in 1529.
Immediately setting his slaves to labor in the placer mines,
he drove them until they dropped. Before long, almost all
of them had died from neglect and overwork. No matter
how quickly he moved to replenish his human capital (an
individual slave cost only six or seven pesos because they
were so plentiful), Cortés killed faster than he could
purchase or commandeer. By the time of his own death in
1547 his personal holdings in Indian slaves, despite
constant infusions of new bodies, was barely one--tenth of
what he started with. { p. 81--82 }

To understand the horrors that were inflicted by

Europeans and white Americans on the Indians of the
Americas it is necessary to begin with a look at the core of
European thought and culture-Christianity-and in particular
its ideas on sex and race and violence.
At its heart, Christianity expressed a horror at the
tainting of godliness with sexuality. Some early Christian
Fathers, such as Origen, had taken literally the prophet
Matthew's charge (19:11-12) that 'there be eunuchs which
have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven,'
and castrated themselves. Such self-mutilating behavior
finally was condemned by the Church in the fourth century
as being excessive and unnecessary. Thenceforward
 celibacy would be sufficient. But then this too was carried
to extremes. Saint Paul had written (Cor. 7:1,9) that 'it is
good for a man not to touch a woman. . . But if they
cannot contain, let them marry for it is better to marry than
to burn.' Even marital sex invariably was infected with lust,
however, so there developed in Christian culture the
anachronistic institution of sexless so-called chaste
marriage, and it endured with some popularity for nearly a
thousand years.
As Peter Brown has pointed out, however, perhaps the
most remarkable thing about what he calls this gran rifiuto,
or 'great renunciation', was the way it quickly became the
basis for male leadership in the Church. One key to
understanding this phenomenon is located in the contrast
between Judaism at the time and its radical offshoot of
Christianity. For as Brown notes: 'In the very centuries
when the rabbinate rose to prominence in Judaism by
accepting marriage as a near-compulsory criterion of the
wise, the leaders of the Christian communities moved in the
diametrically opposite direction: access to leadership
became identified with near compulsory celibacy.' The
Christian leader, then, stood apart from all others by
making a public statement that in fact focused enormous
attention on sexuality. Indeed, sexuality became a highly
charged symbolic marker exactly because its dramatic
removal as a central activity of life allowed the self-
proclaimed saintly individual to present himself as 'the ideal
of the single--hearted person' -- the person whose heart
belonged only to God. { p. 155 }

The Violence of the Civilized "Christians" :

(Based on the theology laid out in the previous
section . . .] Once integrated into Christian thinking, the
monstrous races came to be associated with the lineage of
Cain; that is, they were actual creatures whose strangeness
was part of their deserved suffering because of their
progenitor's sin. Whether Greeks, Romans, or medieval
Christians, moreover, the Europeans of all eras considered
themselves to be 'chosen' people, the inhabitants of the
center and most civil domain of human life. The further
removed from that center anything in nature was, the
further it was removed from God, from virtue, and from the
highest essence of humanity. Thus, the fact that the
monstrous races were said to live on the distant extremes of
the earthly realm was one crucial element in their radical
otherness, and also in their being defined as fundamentally
unvirtuous and base. So great was their alienation from the
world of God's-or the gods'-most favored people, in fact,
that well into late antiquity they commonly were denied the
label of 'men.'
This eventually became a problem for Christianity,
eager as the faith was to convert all humanity to God's
revealed truth. The classic statement of the early church on
this matter was the work of Augustine who, in The City of
God, affirmed that 'whoever is born anywhere as a human
being, that is, as a rational mortal creature, however strange
he may appear to our senses in bodily form or colour or
motion or utterance, or in any faculty, part or quality of his
nature whatsoever, let no true believer have any doubt that
such an individual is descended from the one man who was
first created.' Though often regarded as a fairly
unambiguous statement of support for the humanity of
distant peoples, Augustine's linking of humanity to
'rationality' left open a large area for definitional
disagreement. Nor did his closing words on the subject
help: 'Let me then tentatively and guardedly state my
conclusion. Either the written accounts of certain races are
completely unfounded or, if such races do exist, they are
not human; or, if they are human, they are descended from
Adam.'
All that really can be concluded from this is that, for
Augustine, someone who worships within the fold of
Christianity certainly is rational and certainly is human,
though there clearly are races that in some respects might
seem to be human, but are not. . . {p. 167 }
The very earliest Christian leaders had been of
differing minds on the matter of warfare in general, having
themselves suffered from military oppression under Roman
rule. . .The New Testament contains passages that have
been interpreted as supporting any number of positions on
the matter, from pacifism to warlike zealotry. The Old
Testament, however, is unremitting: 'And when the Lord
thy God shall deliver [thy enemies] before thee,' says
Deuteronomy 7:2, 16, 'though shalt smite them, and utterly
destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor
shew mercy unto them. . . . Thou shalt consume all the
people which the Lord thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye
shall have no pity upon them.' And later, in Deuteronomy
20:16-17 (the passage noted earlier that was cited so
gleefully by Puritan John Mason as justification for the
extermination of Indians): 'Of the cities . . . which the
Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt
save alive nothing that breatheth.. . . . But thou shalt utterly
destroy them.' This was 'war commanded by God,' writes
James Turner Johnson, 'a form of holy war. In such war not
only was God conceived as commanding the conflict, but
he was understood to be directly involved in the fighting,
warring with the divinities of the enemy on the cosmic level
even as the soldiers of Israel dealt with their human
counterparts on the earthly level.'
When Augustine came to pronounce on these matters
he uttered some words warning of excess in the violence
which one was properly to bring to bear on one's enemies,
but his overall pronouncements were strongly in support of
divinely inspired wrack and ruin. As Frederick H. Russell
summarizes Augustine's views:
 Any violations of God's laws, and by easy extension,
any violation of Christian doctrine, could be seen as an
injustice warranting unlimited violent punishment. Further,
the . . . guilt of the enemy merited punishment of the
enemy population without regard to the distinction between
soldiers and civilians. Motivated by righteous wrath, the
just warriors could kill with impunity even those who were
morally innocent.
Following Augustine, the Church enthusiastically
came to accept the idea of 'just war,' and from that
developed the concept of 'mission war' or 'Holy War' -- an
idea similar in certain respects to the Islamic jihad."
{ p. 177}
Sometimes there were defeats. Never, however, were
defeats unexplainable: those crusaders who were beaten had
failed because they had sinned -- and the sins they had
committed invariably were sins of pride and especially sins
of carnality. God was on the Christians' side unless they
succumbed to temptation. Example after example, the
medieval chronicles claimed, showed this to be so. From
the Hungarian defeat of Peter the Hermit's disciple
Gottschalk to the failures of the Christians at Antioch, 'the
lesson was plain,' observes one historian: 'the crusaders
were assured of victory in this life and salvation in the next,
but only so long as they avoided carnal sins.' { p. 179}

The "savages" way of viewing and fighting War:

This probably is seen most dramatically in the comparative

Indian and European attitudes toward warfare. We already have
observed one consequence of the differing rituals that were
conventional to Europe and the Americas in Montezuma's
welcoming Cortés into Tenochtitlán in part because Cortés claimed
he was on a mission of peace; and one inviolable code of Meso--
American warfare was that it was announced, with its causes
enumerated, in advance. Cortés's declared intentions of peace,
therefore, were supposed by Montezuma to be his true intentions. A
similar attitude held among Indians in much of what is now the
United States. Thus, as a seventeenth-century Lenape Indian
explained in a discussion with a British colonist:

"We are minded to live at peace: If we intend at any

time to make war upon you, we will let you know of it, and
the reasons why we make war with you; and if you make us
satisfaction for the injury done us, for which the war is
intended, then we will not make war on you. And if you
intend at any time to make war on us, we would have you
let us know of it, and the reasons for which you make war
on us, and then if we do not make satisfaction for the injury
done unto you, then you may make war on us, otherwise
you ought not to do it." {p. 109}
 Meso-American political traditions had always
dictated that war was to be announced before it was
launched, and the reasons for war were always made clear
well beforehand. War was a sacred endeavor, and it was
sacrilegious to engage in it with treachery or fraud. In fact,
as Inga Clendinnen recently has noted: 'So important was
this notion of fair testing that food and weapons were sent
to the selected target city as part of the challenge, there
being no virtue in defeating a weakened enemy." { p.76}

The following are examples of what defenders of Columbus say

about Native Americans.
The web site below paints a glorious picture of Columbus, and
a gruesome picture of the Native population of America. His
sources, however, with one exception, are many decades old. And
his claim of unanimity for his views proves either ignorance or
dishonesty on his part.
CatholicEducation.org/articles/history/world/wh0024.html

The alleged "brutality" of the Aztecs : "Honoring

Christopher Columbus"
by Warren H. Carroll (who holds his Ph.D. in history
from Columbia University and is Chairman of the
History Department at Christendom College in Front
Royal, Virginia, which he founded in 1977, serving as
its President until 1985. Dr. Carroll is the author of
numerous historical works including Our Lady of
Guadalupe and the Conquest of Darkness, Isabel of
Spain: The Catholic Queen and The History of
Christendom.")
"Let us begin, therefore, by defining the word
"discovery" in the context of history. A discovery is
made when an individual or a nation finds something
or someone or some people or some places of special
importance, not previously known to them. When any
previously unknown people is first found by another
people, that people may be said to have been
discovered. People as well as places can be discovered.
The fact that people live in places unknown to another
people does not mean that they, and the places where
they live, cannot be discovered. No people from any
other part of the world ever discovered Europe; but
Europeans discovered all other parts of the world. In
all of history, only the Europeans and the Polynesians
of the south Pacific have been true discoverers, sailing
for the explicit purpose of finding new lands, trading
with their people, and colonizing them. And of all
discoverers Christopher Columbus was the greatest,
because he accomplished the most against the highest
odds.". . .
"He was convinced that God had chosen him to
reach that land, hidden from the Western world for
ages, which the Roman philosopher Seneca had once
prophesied would be revealed. His discovery would
bring the Catholic Faith, to which he was devoted, to
the people who lived in that land.". . .
" That the conversion of the people he found was
a central purpose of Christopher Columbus is made
unmistakably clear by an entry in his log book written
November 6, when he was exploring the coast of Cuba.
It is addressed directly to Isabel and Fernando: I have
to say, Most Serene Princes, that if devout religious
persons know the Indian language well, all these
people would soon become Christians. Thus I pray to
Our Lord that Your Highnesses will appoint persons of
great diligence in order to bring to the Church such
great numbers of peoples, and that they will convert
these peoples. . . . And after your days, for we are all
mortal, you will leave your realms in a very tranquil
state, free from heresy and wickedness, and you will be
well received before the Eternal Creator."
(ed. Robert H. Fuson , Camden, ME, 1987, p.105)
"From this record it should be clear that, despite
occasional lashing out at the Indians, Columbus was
never their systematic oppressor, but simply unable to
control the Spaniards on land who were supposed to be
under his command."
"Their empire, which we call Aztec, carried out
ritual human sacrifice on a scale far exceeding any
recorded of any other people in the history of the
world. The law of the Mexica empire required a
thousand human sacrifices to the god Huitzilopochtli in
every town with a temple, every year; there were 371
subject towns in the empire, and the majority had full-
scale temples. There were many other sacrifices as
well. The total number was at least 50,000 a year,
probably much more. The early Mexican historian
Txtlilxochitl estimated that one out of every five
children in Mexico was sacrificed. When in the year
1487 the immense new temple of Huitzilopochtli was
dedicated in Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City), more
than 80,000 men were sacrificed, at fifteen seconds per
man, for four days and four nights of almost
unimaginable horror. It must be emphasized that there
is no serious dispute about these facts and figures. All
reputable and informed historians of pre-Columbian
Mexico accept their essential accuracy, though some
prefer not to talk about them. These facts of history
 totally dispose of the romantic fantasy of a hemisphere
full of peaceful, nature-loving Indians who threatened
no one until the cruel white man came. "

"In all their writings on the Aztecs, the Inquisition-loving

Spanish -- like most Western writers who have followed them --
expressed indignant horror at their enemies' religious rituals
involving human sacrifice. And indeed, the Aztec toll in that regard
was great. Perhaps as many as 20,000 enemy warriors, captured in
battle, were sacrificed each year during the peak of the Aztecs' brief
reign as the lords of central Mexico. (Yet, what one conquistador
said of the reports of Inca human sacrifice may hold true here as
well: 'These and other things are the testimony we Spaniards raise
against these Indians,' wrote Pedro de Cieza de Leon in 1553,
'endeavoring by these things we tell of them to hide our own
shortcomings and justify the ill treatment they have suffered at our
hands. . . } I am not saying that they did not make sacrifices . . . but
it was not as it was told.' " Las Casas claimed the same was true of
the reports from Mexico -- 'the estimate of brigands,' he claimed,
'who wish to find an apology for their own atrocities,' -- and modern
scholars have begun to support the view that the magnitude of
sacrifice was indeed greatly exaggerated by the New World's
conquerors, just as it was, for the same reasons, by Western
conquerors in other lands.' Even if the annual figure of 20,000 were
correct, however, in the siege of Tenochtitlán the invading Spaniards
killed twice that many people in a single day -- including (unlike
Aztec sacrifice) enormous numbers of innocent women, children,
and the aged. And they did it day after day after day, capping off the
enterprise, once Tenochtitlán had been razed, by strip-searching their
victims, before killing them, for any treasure they may have
concealed. . . Lastly, they burned the precious books salvaged by
surviving Aztec priests, and then fed the priests to Spanish dogs of
war. { p. 79--80 }

Even if it were true that Native Americans killed many fellow

Native Americans, that didn't prevent the population from growing
to huge numbers, almost all of whom died following the "discovery"
of the Americas by the benevolent Christians who came that the
Native Americans might be "saved".

Another good web site on Columbus :

home1.gte.net/res0k62m/columbus.htm

Other Books on this subject :

 Open Veins of Latin America : Five Centuries of the Pillage of a

Continent
by Eduardo H. Galeano
 Native American History, by Judith Nies
 A People's History of the United States , by Howard Zinn
 American Indian Holocaust and Survival : A Population History
Since 1492
(Civilization of the American Indian, Vol 186), by Russell Thornton
 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee :
An Indian History of the American West, by Dee Alexander Brown
 the attempt by church and state in Canada to exterminate the
native Amerian population, by Rev. Kevin D. Annett, M.A., M.Div.
 The Trail of Tears, by Gloria Jahoda
 "Exterminate Them": Written Accounts of the Murder, Rape, and
Slavery of Native Americans during the California Gold Rush, 1848-
1868 by Clifford E. Trafzer (Editor), Joel R. Hyer (Editor)
 A Little Matter of Genocide : Holocaust and Denial in the
Americas, 1492 to the Present, by Ward Churchill

In a lengthy article at http://hnn.us/articles/7302.html, "Were

American Indians the Victims of Genocide?" Guenter Lewy
questions the numbers of Native American lives that were taken, and
tries to downplay the use of the terms holocaust and genocide, on the
grounds of the intentions of those responsible for those deaths,
arguing one might say for a verdict of "manslaughter" over "first
degree murder".
I have not read the paperback by John Eidsmoe, Columbus &
Cortez: Conquerors for Christ and judging by the review below, by
one of the most prolific of Amazon Customer reviewers, I don't
shouldn't.
"Worse than I could have imagined, December 4, 2005
Reviewer: Steven Mason (California) -
"This book argues that just because the European conquerors
did 'bad' things, that doesn't mean they weren't good Christians. The
author never gets specific about the atrocities committed by the
conquering Christians (enslavement, rape, torture, murder); he only
vaguely, infrequently, and euphemistically refers to them as 'sins'
and 'errors,' and he rationalizes that Columbus and other conquerors
were simply normal for the time period in which they lived. Here is
a short summary from the first section of the author's perspective on
Columbus: 1) Columbus was not obsessed with gold; he just had a
natural and healthy desire for wealth. Besides, Columbus needed
capital to finance his voyages, so his need for gold can be compared
to a modern academic needing a research grant. 2) Columbus didn't
steal land from Native Americans because they didn't have any real
(i.e. European) concept of ownership. 3) Columbus made slaves of
free people, but that was okay because slavery was widespread in the
world, and besides, Christians could enslave other people as long as
they weren't Christians. 4) It is true that Columbus forced
Christianity and western culture on Native Americans, but as a
result, millions of people are in heaven. Need I say more?"

Ray Dubuque takes on Columbus "hero worship" in one of the

most Italian American communities in the country, his very own
East Haven, Conn. See New Haven Register article on Columbus
Day celebrations. He wants to replace them with "Native American
Appreciation Day".
Here is a link to a newspaper article about Ray Dubuque's
efforts to correct the teaching of one school district (his own) about
Columbus: New Haven Register article.