Author
SY, M. M.
Abstract
This paper tries to reexamine the narrative of Native American history and experience with the American colonists from Europe on the western frontier. It analyzes real historical facts on the frontier line separating “civilization” from “wilderness” and symbolizing the absolutely hostile contact between white Americans and Indian tribes that led to bloodiest confrontations over land control. The study is motivated by a need to contribute in clearing up the confusion and controversies on the cause of Indian population decline from nearly 8 million on the colonists’ arrival in the New World to about 200000 in the turn of the 19th century. Thus, it has eventually come to the conclusion that this was mostly due to Europeans’ colonialism through wars as well as systematic Indian extermination in the Whites deliberate enterprise of the Indians removal policy, leading thus to most horrific genocidal catastrophes in human history, even though we cannot lose sight of the role of epidemics.
Keywords
Civilization, Epidemics, Expansion, Experience, Genocide, Narrative, Native Americans, reexamine, Western Frontier, Wilderness
Introduction
The narrative regarding the history of American-Indian’s experience in the New World has been controversial among historians. Some historians, like Ernest Codman (1913), Alfred Crosby (1976), Andrew David et al (2000), Suzanne Austin Alchon (2003) and James Daschuk (2013) firmly deny the idea that there was an Indian extermination or genocide and defend the theory of Virgin Soil Epidemics as the main cause of Native American population decline due to Indian populations being immunologically unprepared for Old World diseases. Other historians and scholars such as Dee Brown (1970), Alexie Sherman (2005; 2013) and David Treuer (2014) have criticized what they conceive as deliberate misinterpretation of Native American history and historiography by some historians in their narrative of Native American experiences with European settlers and colonists in the New World. This debate has greatly contributed to the shed light on aspects of this outstanding part of American history.
Content
Early European explorers who set foot on the New World declared that it was an uninhabited land, a virgin and no man’s land that they also called terra nullius, meaning an unoccupied land. Indeed, they believed that the indigenous Indians that they found there were savages just like the wild beasts they met in the Now World. Yet, Historians estimate at about 8 million the number of Indians who lived in the New World with their secular civilization and culture when the first settlers founded the first colonies in North America (Smith, 2017: 8). At that time, indigenous people (Indians) had settled across North America in hundreds of different tribes. This study is guided by the following questions: how was it that the Indians who were estimated about 8 million on the European colonist’s arrival in the New World, eventually counted just about thousands in the turn of nineteenth century America? What had happened to the 567 Indian nations by the end of the 1890s? The paper aims to reexamine the whole process of the conflicts and wars that took place between the Indians and the European settlers to highlight what had really happened to Native Americans. To do so, we will try to revisit the context of the colonists’ westward expansion into the Indian lands. Then we will analyze the role played by the 1812 American British war over western lands occupation and finally see how the hundreds Indian tribes along with their civilizations disappeared from their ancestral lands of New World
Conclusion
The history of Native Americans experiences with American colonists was about cruelty and power associated with ethnocentricity and racism. Indeed, when the first Europeans arrived in the New World, Indian tribes such as the Wampanoag, the Shawnees, the Iroquois, the Mohawks, the Kaskaskias, the Creeks, the Choctaws, the Cherokees, the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pokanoket, the Algonquians, the Susquehannock, the Lenape, the Powhatans, the Nansemond were living on their secular ancestral lands of the Americas proud of their civilization and culture that the “new comer” Europeans regarded as wild and barbarous. To the question whether or not Native Americans were really victims of genocide during the conquest and colonization by European colonists or white Americans of the entire4800 km from the Eastern Cost to the West of America, academics have long debated without ultimately agreeing on a single answer to the issue. While some scholars continue to defend the idea that Native Americans’ catastrophic demographic decline from a pre-contact population of about 8 million to some 240,000 individuals by 1900 was mainly due to the Old-World epidemic diseases that ravaged them, other academics and historians argue in their works that the Indians were rather exterminated in what can be referred to as a genocide.
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