• applebusch@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    16
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    13 hours ago

    Thr USA killed way way way more than 10 million native americans. We will never know the true scale of the genecide because the majority of it was done through disease. Early settlers would deliberately trade goods contaminated with several european diseases that the natives had little or no resistance to, including small pox and several others I can’t remember off the top of my head. Explorers moving west described “virgin” country untouched by man, beautiful and bountiful, but they were wrong. What they saw was an environment shaped over thousands of years by humans for humans that once supported hundreds of millions of native americans, who were mostly dead by the time european explorers got there. The genecide everyone knows about was really just the end, picking off the stragglers. That was bad enough that it’s whitewashed in public schooling, but they don’t even teach the history of the biological warfare that did the vast majority of the work. In many ways the americas still bear the gaping wounds of european contact today. This place is built on a foundation genocide.