Native American Tragedy

Imagine if this had never happened in the first place what America could have become. I am not saying that the alternative would be better or worse, but the actions of European settlers was ungodly, evil, and genocidal. Even if the Europeans had advanced technology, the Natives had number son their side. Places like Peru had a population of nine million in 1530, but due to disease and warfare, the population was reduced to just 500,000 just a century later. Millions of Natives were killed off by these aggressive diseases and the conquest of America was made easy mainly because of the unintentional spreading of disease from Europeans to Natives. I think it is a sad tragedy of what the Native American people went through and I can not even imagine

being placed in their situation. They were a proud and prosperous people capable of so many things within their tribal networks that we as Europeans were too ignorant to understand. Just because we didn’t understand or choose to understand their traditions, cultures, and ways of life, we came, we saw, and we conquered their people in the name of colonization. Flourishing Native American and Mesoamerican populations had millions more than European countries, so their numbers alone should have been enough to counter the oppressive forces of Europeans. They were mostly wiped out by the silent killer of various diseases that caused huge epidemics, changing the way of life in the Western Hemisphere and for the entire world in the years to follow. Because they died and could not resist western expansion, Native Americans ended up ceding millions of acres of land to the government. Acts such as the Dawes Act enabled the government to basically determine if the men living on the land were competent enough to take care of the land. Without their wanting, the Natives ceded millions of acres of land, as stated by Dr. Erich Longie: “Between 1778 and 1871, when the last treaty was signed, Indian tribes ceded almost a billion acres to the United States” (Longie). Who knows what could have happened if the Natives were immune to these diseases and were able to successfully fight off the invaders. For the better or worse, America as we know it would have developed one thousand percent differently and could have turned out to be an exact opposite of what we experience today.