Colonization and Christianity: A popular history of the treatment of the natives by the; Europeans in all their coloniesHowitt, William
History
Colonization and Christianity: A popular history of the treatment of the natives by the; Europeans in all their colonies
Howitt, William
Indians, Treatment of; Indigenous peoples
This enterprise came to nothing; but for the successful one of 1759 the
same stimulants were applied, and the natives, to the very Twightwees
and Chickasaws, brought into the league, either to march against
the French, or to secure quiet in the states during the time of the
invasion of Canada. And what was their reward? Scarcely was Canada
reduced, and the services of the Indians no longer needed, when they
found themselves as much encroached upon and insulted as ever. Some of
the bloodiest and most desolating wars which they ever waged against
the English settlements, took place between our conquest of Canada
and our war against the American colonies themselves. It was the
long course of injuries and insults which the Indians had suffered
from the settlers that made them so ready to take up the tomahawk
and scalping-knife at the call, and induced by the blood-money, of
the mother-country against her American children. The employment and
instigation of the Indians to tomahawk the settlers brings down British
treatment of the Indians to the very last moment of our power in that
country. What were our notions of such enormities may be inferred
from their being called in the British Parliament “_means which God
and nature have put into our hands_,”—and from Lord Cornwallis, our
general then employed against the Americans, expressing, in 1780, his
“_satisfaction_ that the Indians had pursued and _scalped_ many of the
enemy!”
This was our conduct towards the Indians to the last hour of our
dominion in their country. We drove them out of their lands, or cheated
them out of them by making them drunk. We robbed them of their furs
in the same manner; and on all occasions we inflamed their passions
against their own enemies and ours. We made them ten times more
cruel, perfidious, and depravedly savage than we found them, and then
upbraided them as irreclaimable and merciless, and thereon founded
our convenient plea that they must be destroyed, or driven onward as
perishing shadows before the sun of civilization.
Before quitting the English in America, we need only, to complete our
view of their treatment of the natives, to include in it a glance at
that treatment in those colonies which we yet retain there; and that is
furnished by the following Parliamentary Report, (1837.)
NEWFOUNDLAND.
To take a review of our colonies, beginning with Newfoundland. There,
as in other parts of North America, it seems to have been, for a
length of time, accounted a “meritorious act” to kill an Indian.[47]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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