
We have a duty to retrieve our past
Wednesday, September 16, 2020
Native Sun News Today Columnist
It is clear now that the newcomer literally destroyed the balance of the North American continent as well as the lives of the people who lived there for millennia. Believing in their ill-famed Manifest Destiny, their intent was to remove indigenous people completely off the surface of the earth. To be honest, indigenous cultures, languages, and histories were also shattered.
Natives today are still reeling from the devastation of that 19th century doctrine in which the expansion of the United States throughout the land was deemed inevitable and excusable. Accordingly, their God gave his blessing for the U. S. to expand its dominion and spread their monotheistic religion and capitalism across the entire North and South American continents.
With no natural resistance to European diseases, epidemics of smallpox, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, influenza and measles, indigenous people were nearly exterminated. Scholarly studies place the deaths of native people from 70% to 90% from the 15th century. Then violence was committed on the survivors and the Europeans claimed the land for themselves, oftentimes stealing it.
Modern scholars argue with other about how many native died from disease and violence and their numbers range from 55 to 100 million. This destruction continued by further assimilating the survivors, especially the children, into Euro-American society by forcibly obliterating native languages, cultures, and history.

Ivan F. Star Comes Out can be reached at P.O. Box 147, Oglala, South Dakota, 57764; via phone at 605-867-2448 or via email at mato_nasula2@outlook.com.
Copyright permission Native Sun News Today
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