I found a link from World Net Daily in a Google search result list,  talking about Zinn’s book as “revisionist history”,  and also linking it to Hollywood (as if Zinn is “in with Hollywood”,  a laughable idea).  But then, this is World Net Daily.

If you are looking for a history book to read about America, may we suggest Paul Johnson’s “A History of the American People.” You won’t end up with such a bitter taste in your mouth after reading it.

WorldNetDaily: Hollywood’s revisionist history

So good history is that which makes you feel good.  Makes you “proud to be an American”.  Having just finished reading “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee”, I am a bit of a distance away from that sentiment.  This stuff took place on THIS soil.  On THIS continent.  By the contemporaries of the “founding fathers”,  and probably even under the watchful eye of just those same “fathers”,  and on through the 1800’s under such heroes as Tennessee’s own Andrew “Stonewall”  Jackson. 

       In the Revolutionary War, almost every important Indian nation fought on the side of the British. The British signed for peace and went home; the Indians were already home, and so they continued fighting the Americans on the frontier, in a set of desperate holding operations. Washington’s war- enfeebled militia could not drive them back. After scouting forces were demolished one after the other, he tried to follow a policy of conciliation. His Secretary of War, Henry Knox, said: “The Indians being the prior occupants, possess the right of the soil.” His Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, said in 1791 that where Indians lived within state boundaries they should not be interfered with, and that the government should remove white settlers who tried to encroach on them.
       But as whites continued to move westward, the pressure on the national government increased. By the time Jefferson became President, in 1800, there were 700,000 white settlers west of the mountains. They moved into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, in the North; into Alabama and Mississippi in the South. These whites outnumbered the Indians about eight to one. Jefferson now committed the federal government to promote future removal of the Creek and the Cherokee from Georgia. Aggressive activity against the Indians mounted in the Indiana territory under Governor William Henry Harrison.
       When Jefferson doubled the size of the nation by purchasing the Louisiana territory from France in 1803-thus extending the western frontier from the Appalachians across the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains-he thought the Indians could move there.

He proposed to Congress that Indians should be encouraged to settle down on smaller tracts and do farming; also, they should be encouraged to trade with whites, to incur debts, and then to pay off these debts with tracts of land. “.. . Two measures are deemed expedient. First to encourage them to abandon hunting… – Secondly, To Multiply trading houses among them … leading them thus to agriculture, to manufactures, and civilization….”
       Jefferson’s talk of “agriculture . . . manufactures . . . civilization” is crucial. Indian removal was necessary for the opening of the vast American lands to agriculture, to commerce, to markets, to money, to the development of the modern capitalist economy. Land was indispensable for all this, and after the Revolution, huge sections of land were bought up by rich speculators, including George Washington and Patrick Henry. In North Carolina, rich tracts of land belonging to the Chickasaw Indians were put on sale, although the Chickasaws were among the few Indian tribes fighting on the side of the Revolution, and a treaty had been signed with them guaranteeing their land. John Donelson, a state surveyor, ended up with 20,000 acres of land near what is now Chattanooga. His son-in-law made twenty-two trips out of Nashville in 1795 for land deals. This was Andrew Jackson.
       Jackson was a land speculator, merchant, slave trader, and the most aggressive enemy of the Indians in early American history. He became a hero of the War of 1812, which was not (as usually depicted in American textbooks) just a war against England for survival, but a war for the expansion of the new nation, into Florida, into Canada, into Indian territory.

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinnasl7.html  (from Chapter 7 of A People’s History of the United States,  pp. 125-126)

Treaty after treaty was tossed aside in the wake of the ever-increasing drive to expand and plunder the continent for all of its treasures.  Each time the Natives were asked to “move over” and go “over there” where they will never again be bothered,  only to see this set aside as soon as more settlers and prospectors eyed the wealth and decided that the land was “too valuable” to be “left to the Indians” who obviously didn’t know how to parlay things into wealth and do “civilization”,  so they needed to be shown how,  or be sent away where they won’t be in the way, or live too close to “our” settlements. 

When there was literally no more “out of the way” places to which they could be exiled,  they were compressed still further into reservations with no amenities for their way of life, and so they were then forced to become farmers, become Christians, accept European style education.  Resistance ended up bringing the wrath of the military.

I find it hard to articulate how I feel about all this.  I was aware of the basic story of “annihilation”, then “removal” and then the “herding” of the survivors into scarcely livable reservations (aka “concentration/refugee camps”) with,  surprise, surprise,  a “shortage” of promised supplies and rations to”replace” their being forbidden to hunt, or have sufficient lands to keep their people healthy, not to mention happy.

I’m here now,  a benefactor of the “western civilization” whose forbears basically wiped out an entire civilization, largely with the justification (when asked for one) that there was no prior civilization.  Columbus’ contemporaries observed  that the natives were remarkable for their hospitality and sharing,  but Columbus himself was impressed most with how easily they could be enslaved and thus “used”.   And this is the sort of person who our histories teach us are “bold explorers” whose ambitions betrayed their lack of real humanity or love of God.

And it didn’t stop with these “heroes” of times ancient in American narratives (way back in 1492),  but picked right up in with the colonialists who were wont to wipe out entire villages to avenge a stolen horse.  And then,  after the founding of The United States,  the government finagled the tribes into moving elsewhere and “giving them” land that was already theirs with the pledge that “as long as the grass grows or water runs” ,  it was theirs and only theirs.  Those would last only as long as the pressure to expand or go in to those treatied lands and extract the gold,  but wait,  the settlers moving into extract the gold aren’t “comfortable” with all you people hanging around,  so ya’ll go on now and move over there,  where we won’t bump into you so much,  and we can all live in peace……but no wait,  sorry ,  ……..and on and on all the way to the other coast, extinguishing from history tribe after tribe.

What do we do with all this “history” that was “achieved” by wiping out what amounts to millions?

World Net Daily has no clue who our “forefathers” were,  or that a civilization just as proud and more rightfully so (since they were the ACTUAL inhabitants) was “eliminated” to make way for OUR “civilization” in the name of “progress”.

I’d like to find some laments and reflections that properly consider the gravity of what was done to “achieve” what we’ve wrought these 500 years.

Maybe reading 1491 will help me do this,  but I doubt it.  But I want to know more about what was here before,  and what was wiped away and conquered and exterminated to make way.