- Could a society that was based and started in that way, ever be called democratic or free or fair?
All
these societies in Americas, with very few exceptions, were built on
genocide. A lot of the indigenous people were wiped out. Some people
with the estimate for the Caribbean Taíno people, for instance, as being
somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-10 million when Columbus landed.
Within 50 years they were practically extinct. When you look at the
overall total, it is almost unbelievable, and they talk about barbarism
and people don’t discuss it too often but the Spaniards used human flesh
to feed dogs. And scalp proclamations were one of the favorite things
of the English here in the Americas, putting a price on the heads of
men, women and children. And then the spreading the smallpox was another
thing they used quite liberally in trying to eliminate populations. And
then simple starvation, after they destroyed most of the food sources
of the indigenous people and trading patterns, the people lived in a
state of malnutrition and many were starving to death, and when you get
to that state, even a common cold can be fatal to you. So, our
population in the Americas was reduced, I would say, almost by 90% by
time it was all over. And even in this day and age the Nigma, for
instance, in Nova Scotia were down to 1,400 in 1850 and that stayed
around the same until the 1940s, and then the Canadian government began
to get a little bit of a conscience, or what have you, and started
improving health services and food rations and so forth and so on. And
today our population is up to about 25,000 now. We’re slowly mature in
making the comeback.
- How are the other tribes ferrying in Canada and up to the United States?
The
United States has owned up to the atrocities that went on there,
there’s an apology I believe, that was issued by the Congress in 2010
but as what I call a silent apology. It was never broadcast around the
world or anything like that and it was part of a defense Procurement
Bill that went through the Congress. But when you are looking at the
overall thing, that is not what we need to be done in these countries.
What we have to see is they change curriculums and began to place in
those school curriculums, the real history of the peoples that were here
before the Europeans invaded. And I don’t call it discovery, I call it
invasion. It was an invasion by people that were superiorly armed and
they brought their wars to the Americas. The French and British were
fighting almost constantly on this side of the water, at the same time
fighting constantly on the European soil. So, they didn’t bring peace
and prosperity to the indigenous people in the Americas - we already had
that. And we all had good standards of living and some people like to
believe that all our ancestors were standing along the shores of the
Americas, cheering on the Europeans for coming over and saving them and
civilizing them and so forth and so on, which is a pile of bull.
- You mentioned the Taíno people, I’m part Taíno Indian myself, why are groups such as Taíno listed as being extinct when actually some peoples exist?
What’s
happened here is, there are probably even some people with Sundiata
blood in them. But when you can’t find a member of a tribe that is
full-blooded, that is the point where you would call that tribe extinct
in the sense that they are no longer with us in that sense, the Biatok’s
were wiped out. I believe there may be a few people around with some
Biatok blood in them but they didn’t live in the traditional way or what
have you.
- Can you describe a little bit the present state of the tribes in Canada and the United States?
We
live under the state of systemic racism. In the United States and
Canada you can’t have open discrimination against us anymore such as
they had 30-40 years ago but we are still not viewed as equals in these
societies and we are not treated as equals, and we are still seen by the
vast majority of the people here, because of lack the lack of
education, as people that came from barbarous tribes, savage tribes and
not as people who came from civilized a community. So, until we can
overcome that kind of perception and like I said before change
curriculums in schools and begin to teach the truth, we still got a long
way to go before we are treated as people who have come from
civilization that had every right to continue to exist and prosper in
this world, and stop demeaning our people in the sense that we were
never a civilized people, where in fact, we were. And how to get that
information out? It is slowly happening, it is going to take a long time
and at the rate we’re going, I think we’ll be at it for a couple of
centuries before we really make that final step. And one of the biggest
steps has to be acceptance by Europeans that the genocide of the
American Indians, the indigenous people of the Americas was probably one
of the worst mass ethnic cleansings that this world has ever known and
begin to make that part of history lessons, so forth and so on. There
were great civilizations on this side of the water, there were rural
civilizations, hunter-gather civilizations, there were city dwellers and
what have you, and all these. And how many people in Americas or around
the world know that fact? Very few. And the reason that they don’t know
is because it’s not taught.
- By the ancestors of the people who committed genocide on them.
25/12/12
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