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Entry: "Yesterday's Americans" Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/yesterdays_americans#27303 Post contents: re R. Johnson, Contrary to your assertion, "The Europeans" did not "settle" a mostly "un-populated wilderness". Regardless of anyone's position on immigration, this idea that North America was an un-touched Eden with little or no human residents is a patent lie and the kind of self-satisfied thinking that continues to plunge the species into hells of their own making. It is now known and accepted that the Pilgrims of the Massachusetts Bay Colony encountered a land that had been impacted by European disease first brought to the native population by Portuguese and English fisherman. The Pilgrims were used by local tribes in their own intertribal conflicts that had been inflamed by european disease. William Johnson, the early Anglo-Irish Intermediary with the Iroquois Confederacy left records of nighttime boat trips up the Hudson Valley , remarking in wonder how vast swaths of the landscape on both sides of the river between New York and Albany were aflame from Indian-managed landscape maintenance. The explorer Block, and others, traversing Long Island Sound took note of what they called large "prairies" along the Connecticut and Rhode Island Shorelines , dotted with the fires of many villages. The Spanish explorer DeSoto, cruising the Mississippi River country of Arkansas and Missisippi took note of large urban and agricultural complexes of Mound Building Peoples who were essentially gone several decades later, when La Salle descended the river from the north, leaving only their mounds as a record of their existence. Some assert that the huge herd of pigs DeSoto brought with him may have been an effective vector of European disease. The Navajo, originally a northern Plains indian migrated to the southwest from Canada, supplanting the "vanished" Anazasi and impinging upon the Hopi. The Americas were not a sparkling new Caddie picked up at a New Car Dealer of Fresh Continents by settlers from Europe. Regardless how one feels about immigration, this is a myth. In fact, the myth undermines and diminishes the position of many ethno-separatists who maintain that it is their right and obligation to protect the institutions built here by European culture. Though perhaps not as crowded as today nor as peopled as was 16th century Europe, North American was a settled place with diverse cultures. This notion that it was empty is as faulty as was the Zionist Notion that Palestine was something like an empty land for a persecuted people. Turkish and Egyptian landlords were as put out by this cant as were the Palestinian inhabitants. This fact, as with our own circumstances in no way diminishes the logic and sentiment of any people who have built something they wish to preserve. However, it does impinge upon the righteousness of those who claim to have been "native" or , who were graced by a benevolent God with a choice piece of real-estate with which to work their magic. Then again, history supposedly ended. The neo-cons who yearn to write it now can publish all the fiction they like because this history-averse culture seems to lap it up. Sent at: 2008 09 06