Land Grab from the Indians

Native American Series

Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen, 1995, Excerpts

The never-ending source of dispute was land. To explain this constant conflict, half of the textbooks examined rely on the cliché that Native Americans held some pre-modern understanding of land ownership. Not one pointed out that the Dutch paid the wrong tribe for Manhattan. Europeans were forever paying the wrong tribe or paying a small faction within a much larger nation. Often they didn’t really care; they merely sought justification for theft. Such fraudulent transactions might even have worked in their favor, for they frequently set one tribe or faction against another.

The biggest single purchase from the wrong tribe took place in 1803. All the textbooks tell how Jefferson doubled the size of the United States by buying Louisiana from France. Not one textbook points out that it was not France’s land to sell – it was Indian land. The French never consulted with the Native owners before selling; most Native Americans never even knew of the sale. Indeed, France did not really sell Louisiana for $15,000,000. France merely sold its claim to the territory. To treat France as the seller, as all our textbooks do, is Eurocentric.

Banksy

Indian Religion vs. Christian Religion: An Anthropological Description

Native American Series

Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen, 1995, Excerpts

Native Americans: Believed that nature was filled with spirits. Each form of life, such as plants and animals, had a spirit. Earth and air held spirits too. People were never alone. They shared their lives with the spirits of nature.

Christians: Believed that one great male god ruled the world. Sometimes they divided him into three parts, which they called father, son, and Holy Ghost. They ate crackers and wine or grape juice, believing that they were eating the son’s body and drinking his blood. If they believed strongly enough, they would live on forever after they die.

A Taste of the Savage Life

Native American Series

Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen, 1995, Excerpts

Just as Native American societies changed when they encountered whites, so European societies changed when they encountered natives. Indians gave the new settlers directions, showed them water holes, sold them food and horses, bought cloth and guns, and served as guides and interpreters. These activities are rarely depicted in movies, novels, or our textbook. Inhaling the misinformation of the popular culture, students have no idea that Natives considered European warfare far more savage than their own. A number of settlers fled to Indian villages rather than endure the rigors of life among the autocratic English.

As Benjamin Franklin put it, “No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies. All their government is by Counsel of the Sages. There is no Force; there are no Prisons, no officers to compel Obedience, or inflict Punishment.” Probably foremost, the lack of hierarchy in the Native societies in the eastern United States attracted the admiration of European observers. Frontiersmen were taken with the extent to which Native Americans enjoyed freedom as individuals. Women were also accorded more status and power in most Native societies than in white societies of the time, which white women noted with envy in captivity narratives. Most Indian societies north of Mexico were much more democratic than Spain, France, or even England in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Hernando De Soto had to post guards to keep his men and women from defecting to Native societies. The Pilgrims so feared Indianization that they made it a crime for men to wear long hair. People who did run away to the Indians might expect very extreme punishments, including the death penalty, if caught by whites. Nonetheless, right up to the end of independent Indian nationhood in 1890, whites continued to defect, and whites who lived an Indian lifestyle, such as Daniel Boone, became cultural heroes in white society. African Americans frequently fled to Indian societies to escape bondage. 

Whores of the Devil

The Malleus Maleficarum Series

Whores of the Devil by Erik Durschmied, 2005, Excerpts

Witchcraft trials destroyed the principles of honor and justice: common report or gossip was sufficient ground to bring an accusation of sorcery. Apprehended by a bishop’s minions, the victim was tortured until he confessed his guilt. Accusation was equal to condemnation, since no man or woman could possibly beat the terrible pains inflicted upon his or her body by the hooded men with glowing pincers. Ecclesiastical and secular inquisitors threw open the gates into a sulphurous Hall of Shame. For three centuries, Western civilization suffered the foulest crimes and base indignity, the blackout of everything that reasoning man has ever been called on to defend. The church became corrupt to its lower clergy. Clerical misbehavior and outright perverted acts were widespread and detrimental to the Church’s moral image.

The witch mania spread rapidly across Europe. At the start of the delusion, the Catholic clergy vented their fury on those who strayed from the faith, those that pope, bishop or priest designated as heretics. Now it was to be those accused of heresy, Lutherans and Calvinists, that turned into the greatest witch-burners, more than Catholics had ever been. Their witch-burnings took on truly epidemic proportions. And the more they burned, the more they found to burn.

‘Witches are the whores of the devil.’ Martin Luther, 1519