AN ARCHEOLOGY OF MEMORY: First Peoples of the Americas: ONLINE

An ONLINE presentation: an overview of the history:

An estimated 10 million indigenous peoples inhabited in what is now the US when Columbus reached (he believed) the Indies in 1492. By 1900, there were fewer than 300,000 Native Americans -- perhaps better identified as Indigenous or First Peoples.

For centuries European colonists massacred native people, forcibly removed tribes from their lands in deadly marches, and spread infectious diseases that the native peoples had never faced; occupation and disease devastated the lands.

Native Americans belonged to social groups known as nations, or tribes, that spanned from present-day Canada to Central America. There were over 200 nations that spoke more than 200 different languages and had their own unique cultures.

This presentation explores the broad contours of this forgotten history, beginning in the earliest days of the landing of the Puritans in Massachusetts, where it was the colonist's practice to enslave indigenous people for their labor and their lands.

Massachusetts Bay Colony – under Gov. John Winthrop, himself a slaver — was the first of the colonies to pass a law approving slavery. The 1641 law – 10 years after the Puritans arrived and established the colony – was designed to sanction in retrospect the enslavement of the Pequot peoples taken by the victorian colonists in the 1636 conflicts with the native tribes.

The precedents set here would spread through the other colonies and eventually find themselves embodied in the 1789 Constitution by which enslavement became the law of a nation founded, ironically, ‘to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

One historian writes "Between 1492 and 1880, between 2 and 5.5 million Native Americans were enslaved in the Americas -- in addition to 12.5 million African slaves.” Nor did enslavement end here. These numbers do not reflect post-colonial policies instituted under General George Washington, and Federal policies of land theft and genocide through the Western lands.

ZOOM LINK FOR TODAY'S PRESENTATION:

Ed Ingebretsen is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: First Peoples of the Americas
Time: Oct 7, 2023 03:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83671938560?pwd=HBLXcGialTEFoExIdvKvkudaIyJA28.1