W
e ended up sitting down in a faux-50s-style burger joint next to the Walmart today, and I got to talking with Louis. Louis is a 74-year-old full-blooded Blackfeet Nation Indian, and very chatty. He is a Vietnam vet, is missing one eye, speaks three languages, has worked in several casinos, survived lung cancer, has three children and is a widower. He is constantly cracking jokes and telling about the ways of his people. He's pretty pissed the White Man ever showed up in the Americas. I was very glad to meet him; you don't find a character like him every day.
Being conquered definitely sucks. Because Americans are geographically isolated from the "Old World", I think it's easy for us to imagine the conquest of the New World by Europeans as a uniquely terrible event. While there are unique things about it (principally, the depth of the technological and germological imbalances at play), it's important to remember that all of human history has consisted of stronger forces taking advantage of the weaknesses of their neighbors. Europeans have been doing it to each other for ages (up to the present day); Japanese warlords did it; Hindu princes did it; Mongolian nomads did it; American Indians were doing it to one another for centuries before the Europeans ever showed up.
I'm not saying they didn't get a raw deal, or that Europeans didn't do anything wrong. Getting conquered sucks. But American Indians (especially in North America) fought long and hard against conquest, and were surprisingly tenacious and resourceful given how outnumbered and outgunned they were. They fought a war on the scale of centuries, and while they lost, I think it's a disservice to paint them as helpless victims of evil Europeans. There was a great and terrible clash of cultures that happened between 1492 and the end of the nineteenth century; for half a millennia, there was intermittent deadly conflict between those of European descent and the Indians who occupied the continent before them. One side won, and the other lost; but they were equals on the battlefield of history.