Indigginest peoples day

 

Happy Indigeonous Peoples Day a day late and Colombus day a day eartly.  We hat a Ponca Indian mentor son who was 15.  One day he heard that I had been hand-digging a trench for a water line, and my back was killing me. “I’ll help!”  and he did handsomely, helping me finish a forty foot trench 2 feet deep.  Where did he learn to dig?  Well, before his mom got on drugs and his dad died, his grandfather used to get him to help digging and said, “Hayna, we are the indigginest people.”  Ahem.  Indian joke.

            Colombus was a great navigator and adventurer, but a horrible governor.  His colony of Hispanola didn’t grow or produce much for 40 years after his discovery.  It wasn’t entirely his fault.  Europeans carried Euro-Asian diseases that the native Americans hadn’t seen.  One of the reasons we know the Vikings had little luck establishing a post in N. America is that the Indians didn’t get sick.  Little contact.  Secondly, Colombus left governors over the colony who lorded it over the natives, making them slaves.  But their constant dying from diseases made the Spanish think them weaklings and Africans were imported.  The Spanish were a proud people who had just defeated the Muslims in Spain and didn’t want to get their hands dirty.  That was for the servants to do.  Thirdly, the central planning of the Spanish government dictated how many ships brought supplies and took back trading goods each year.  Thus there was no room for the beef cattle that flourished in Mexico, only hides. This led to a surplus of cattle that were just left to wander off and populate Tejas. 

            But the natives routinely enslaved others and had since time memorial.  Sometimes authors say that they treated slaves better, like family, but that seems to be only true of very nomadic tribes like those of the plains.  The Aztecs warred constantly in order to have human sacrifices.  One such “fest” had 20,000 killed in one day.  The Spanish didn’t respect the natives, but what else is new?  This history of the world if full of slavery and disrespect and conquest.  African Bantus genocided most of Africa 2000 years ago.  They had agriculture and the hunter-gatherers couldn’t compete.  Yet remants of these people live in small enclaves in Africa today—pygmys, Nilo-Saharans, bushmen, Madagascarans, Watusis, etc.  Thus modern anthropologists list 6 to 16 separate races in Africa who differ from Bantus more than Caucasians and Mongoloids do. And Bantus loved slavery, as did Chinese, S. Asians, Polynesians and native Americans.  

            The Spanish system of plantations (Haciendas) and absentee landlords, was also nothing new, but it was so inefficient that free and individual farmers and traders of British extraction beat the competition.  Christianity transformed displaced people, gave them hope and education, spawned science and engineering, and instilled a sense of fairness everywhere it went.  Sometimes it was a slow transition, but it has been the driving force of change throughout history.  Those of us who once dug ditches have come a long ways. "Don't call me no victim," Hayna used to laugh.  Now if you can say that given his tragic childhood, you are making it.