Comments by "Ficus-lovin\x27 Capybara N\x27 pals • 🌟 • 25 yrs ago" (@YourCapybaraAmigo_17yrsago) on ""Killing for Saving"? How U.S. Destroyed Native Americans Settlements, Culture and Lives -Facts Tell" video.

  1. I live in the US. I'm not an expert on our history but I know enough to have a good general lay knowledge. Everything said in this sad video is true. I have much more to say about it which I will later. I would say most US citizens don't give much thought to what happened to the indigenous people that lived here first. Some of us however, are unwilling to let the present state be the end of the story for America's indigenous people. We don't know exactly how but we resolved to be organized with them and do what we can to demand reparations and land return for every current surviving tribal Nation, federally recognized or not, within the lower 48 states and Alaska. Most people in the federal government have chosen to genocide and forcefully assimilate those indigenous to this continent in all the ways described in this video and more. It's very tragic. It never should have happened, there were always alternatives. Treaties could have been respected, and buffalo herds could have been protected and harvested sustainably instead of intentionally driven to almost extinction. It's probably going to take at least another 100 years but some of these crimes can be undone. Land can be returned, sovereignty finally granted (it still isn't) and for Great Plains-origin tribal Nations who wished they can raise bison again on their lands. The only thing that's stopping all of that from going forward right now are POS State authorities in some cases and federal authorities. Oh, and just to show you the idiocy and the egos of those in power here, I live in California and every year we have worse catastrophic wildfires then the last. To my knowledge, the California fire authorities have not yet started to employ the most simple of measures to minimize this huge risk, called control burning. Any native community in a fire prone area knows all about controlled burns. Now maybe I'm wrong as I'm not up on the latest details of CalFire, but I think I would have heard about it if they started using controlled burns. To this day they don't use them, that I'm aware of. And guess what? Every YEAR our fire damage gets worse and worse. It's at apocalyptic levels now every summer. Billions of dollars property lost, 100s of lives lost. Now controlled burning wouldn't prevent all of that, but it has the potential to minimize a lot of it. But I guess the CalFire bosses right now think they know better than anyone else, and that's why keeps getting worse every year. So I'm sure whatever they're doing they should just keep doing it since clearly it's been so effective. Or, just maybe, if they had any shred of sense in their head or humility or desire to truly limit the impact of our fire season, maybe they would consult with some of the Native communities we have up and down the state of California, see what they can recommend about control burning and what kinds of ancestral knowledge they can pass along. It certainly wouldn't hurt. The worst it can do is nothing and I have a feeling that knowledge would be very helpful. Anyways yeah we'll see if they ever do that. Far as I'm aware, it hasn't happened yet. And so the rest of us pay a price for their arrogance.
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  2.  @georgeinjapan6583  perhaps, but I'm not sure about that.
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  3. You're right. Starting from first contact when European settlers first came to North America, it wasn't always physical attacks or forced to displacement that were responsible for taking the lives of the majority of Native people, it was the unintentional transference of disease, as I'm sure you know, which the Native people had no immunity to. Statistics say up to 90% of Eastern tribes within the first 150 years died as a result of contact with European diseases. I'm sure in some cases it was less but those are the figures that I always remember reading. Similar thing happened in South america. There was certainly violence on both sides, but I believe it was disease far more than any other that was responsible for decimating the South American indigenous populations. If it wasn't for that, I doubt the Spanish conquistadors would have prevailed anywhere. They were so grossly outnumbered, eventually they all would have been killed, even with some disaffected indigenous populations choosing to side with the Spanish. Eventually a few hundred or a few thousand Spanish troops would have been driven off or killed by the coordinated attacks of the Native South Americans, were it not for the invisible microbes that did their deadly work with unprecedented efficiency. The Black Plague in the 1300s apparently made surviving Europeans quite resistant to infectious disease. Sadly 200 to 400 years later, the Indigenous in the new world would have no such resistance.
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