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Wednesday, March 28, 2018
Ishi, The Last North American Indian To Leave The Wild, Died 102 Years Ago
The man in the middle is Theodor Kroeber, father of Ursula LeGuin (Notice that Ishi is wearing a "white man's suit" but is barefoot.)
Alan: Last month, while living in my son's Colorado College dorm room, Danny and I discovered a memorial to 4 white people whom Native Americans had killed nearby.
After reading the plaque, I said to Caribou: "You might want to investigate my hypothesis, but I think that thousands of Indians were murdered by white people for every white person murdered by native Americans."
Shortly thereafter, I learned from "An Indigenous Peoples' History Of The United States" that - all across America - civil "authorities" paid cash bounties for Indian scalps (after it became too problematic to deal with all the severed heads that were being delivered by "the good Christians."
In the following article bout Ishi, we learn -- in microcosm -- the whole squalid story of "white privilege" and genocide under aegis of "Manifest Destiny."
"He was born about 1862, a time of vigilante attacks and other pressure on the Indians of northern California. The influx of non-Indians that began with the gold rush of 1849 was over, but the flood of immigrants to the state never stopped. Mining and other activities wreaked ecological havoc everywhere they turned, killing off food sources for the Indians and driving down their population by squeezing their habitat and by one of America’s least known happenings—the California genocide.Ishi was a survivor of that 25-year-long slaughter.
The first governor of California, Peter H. Burnett, didn't start that genocide, but he added to it. In January 1851, he said: "That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races, until the Indian race becomes extinct, must be expected. While we cannot anticipate this result but with painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert."
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That "painful regret" didn't stop future governors from supporting volunteer militias to hunt and kill Indians. Between 1851 and 1859, the state spent more than $1.3 million for this purpose. The federal government reimbursed California for some of this spending. The state offered scalp bounties of 25 cents each in 1856, raised to $5 in 1860. Some townsalso offered their own bounties.
Groups like Humboldt Home Guard, the Eel River Minutemen, and the Placer Blades terrorized and murdered local Indians. The 19th century historian Hubert Howe Bancroft wrote: "The California valley cannot grace her annals with a single Indian war bordering on respectability. It can, however, boast a hundred or two of as brutal butchering, on the part of our honest miners and brave pioneers, as any area of equal extent in our republic.""
In the main, Americans do not know the rudimentary truth of their forebears' brutality because the facts are so diabolically horrifying they cannot own up to them.
Ishi, The Last North American Indian To Leave The Wild, Died 102 Years Ago
Alan: In the historical drama "Mission" (starring Robert DeNiro and Jeremy Irons with Daniel Berrigan performing a cameo as a 16th century Jesuit), we learn that the genocide of American Indians perped by European whites was justified by the (convenient) "conviction" that "the savages" were not human beings at all, and therefore could be slaughtered like pigs or any other "animal" that was considered "fair game."
"Why I Consider Friend Fred's View Of Native Americans Wrong"
Notably, Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortez categorized Tenochtitlan (the Aztec capital and current site of Mexico City) as "the most beautiful city in the world.
Furthermore, the population of 16th century Tenochtitlan was between 200,000 and 350,000 at a time when the population of London was no more than 50,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenochtitlan
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