The American Holocaust- Shows the huge down fall of the Native American People
This text really showed the huge downfall of the Native American people. I had no idea that there were so many Native American Indians before the Europeans came. All texts I read seemed to downplay or not list the number of them here. It says in the text, North and South America contained between 90,000,000 and more than 112,000,000 people before the coming of the Spanish. That was compared to only 60 million to 70 million in Europe. The diseases really wiped out what seemed to be great civilizations of people. It also surprises me that people tried to justify invading and capturing these people even very recently, within the lifetime of my parents. It is sad hearing how much people hated races that they knew very little about but also encouraging that people have changed over recent years to be more understanding of them.
The authors term of moral epistemology of imperialism is the original thinking that justified colonizing the Americas originally. The major historians of the time and for a great amount of time after were European. This made it easy to write books and shape history to make it look like they were doing the right thing. They were colonizing knowledge but putting their spin on it, people would only learn what the white scholars of the time wanted people to learn. Epistemic violence was forcing the European epistemology on the rest of the world, in this case the Native Americans.
The Spanish used a combination of military force along with disease and the cruelest forms of death to completely cripple the Native American empires. After some time, the Natives just stopped fighting back because they were mentally broken (as well as physically). The author says, When there were among prisoners some women who had recently given birth, if the newborn babes happen to cry, they seized them by the legs and hurled them against the rocks or flung them into the jungle so they would be certain to die there and also says, In the face of utter hopelessness, the
The authors term of moral epistemology of imperialism is the original thinking that justified colonizing the Americas originally. The major historians of the time and for a great amount of time after were European. This made it easy to write books and shape history to make it look like they were doing the right thing. They were colonizing knowledge but putting their spin on it, people would only learn what the white scholars of the time wanted people to learn. Epistemic violence was forcing the European epistemology on the rest of the world, in this case the Native Americans.
The Spanish used a combination of military force along with disease and the cruelest forms of death to completely cripple the Native American empires. After some time, the Natives just stopped fighting back because they were mentally broken (as well as physically). The author says, When there were among prisoners some women who had recently given birth, if the newborn babes happen to cry, they seized them by the legs and hurled them against the rocks or flung them into the jungle so they would be certain to die there and also says, In the face of utter hopelessness, the