Conquest

Quotes and commentary about the European and (later) Euro-American conquest of indigenous peoples and their homelands.

by Thomas Ivan Dahlheimer



Bible scripture verses advocate conquest, imperialism, genocide and ethocide of heathen natives. "The Lord said...I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel." - Psalm 2 KJ

"You must drive all the natives of the land before you. If you do not drive the natives of the country before you then those who remain will become disgusting to your eyes and a thorn in your side. They will harass you in the land where you live, and I will deal with you as I meant to deal with them." - Num. 33:5

"The history of Minnesota's Indians is but a page in the world-wide story of the conquest of simple peoples and their homelands by the civilization, arms, and diseases of a more dominant race. The local story differs but little from that of most other States; the outcome has been, however, quite different. For while many States have banished practically their entire Indian population and others have segregated their native tribes on reservations in Minnesota the prehistoric Siouan tribes have been displaced almost entirely by Indians of Algonquian stock." ref.

"Historically the Algonquian peoples were prominent along the Atlantic Coast and into the interior along the St. Lawrence River and around the Great Lakes." The Ojibwa are of Algonquian stock. ref.

"Earliest explorers reported the Chippewa, or Ojibwa, at Sault Ste. Marie and frequently referred to them as Saulteurs. Tradition indicates that long before they had been pushed westward, they ranged the St. Lawrence Basin." ref.

"The Beaver Wars began in the east but soon spread to the Great Lakes. The fur trade turned the Great Lakes into a war zone."

For many tribes, lack of beaver furs meant suffering due to unsatisfied alcohol addiction cravings. Tribes would leave their own land when most of the beaver had been killed and their skins sold. They would then, armed with guns and ammunition, invaded other tribes' lands to get furs for alcohol. Alcohol addition was causing the tribes to do evil things that they would not have thought of doing prior to their adiction to alcohol. ref.

"Encouraged and armed by their Dutch and English trading partners, the Iroquois sought to expand their territory and monopolize the fur trade and the trade between European markets and the tribes of the western Great Lakes region. The conflict pitted the nations of the Iroquois Confederation, led by the dominant Mohawk, against the French-backed and largely Algonquian-speaking tribes of the Great Lake region." ref.

"Moving gradually westward along the southern shores of Lake Superior came the Chippewa, indirectly reflecting the pressure of white settlement along the Atlantic coast and unable to maintain themselves against the firearms of the eastern tribes. The Chippewa, almost marooned for a time on Madeline Island in Lake Superior, eventually secured firearms also and turned them against their powerful neighbors, the Sioux, to the west." ref.

As the white settlers in the east continued to push further west this applied pressure to the tribes of the east and they in turn started to pressure the Dakota. Most notable of these tribes was the Chippewa/Ojibwe. With the assistance of the French and utilizing weapons brought by white settlers, the Ojibwe were able to push the Dakota from places that had been their ancestral homes. ref.

"When the Ojibwe first moved into Chequamegon Bay, Lake Superior and established a village at Lapointe (Wisconsin) they were considered intruders by the Sauk, Fox and the Mdewakanton Sioux in particular." ref.

"In the last half of the seventeenth century, the Dakota were living in most of what would become the northern two-thirds of the state of Minnesota. They were centered around Mille Lacs Lake, where they probably had been living for at least three hundred years. Over the next 150 years the Dakota were both pushed and drawn to the south and west. They were pushed out by the Ojibwa, who were receiving fire-arms from the French. In the Battle of Kathio, about 1744-45, the Dakota were driven from the Mille Lacs area. A counter-offensive in 1768 failed, and the historic territory of the Dakota was lost. The Isanti first acquired firearms about 1772, and their retreat came to an end. The Isanti then occupied the southern third of Minnesota, which placed them closer to European traders on the Mississippi." ref.

"The French had things pretty much their own way in the upper Great Lakes, especially after the Ojibwe victory over the Dakota, and were making their initial forays onto the plains." ref.

"Needless to say the initial Sioux reception of the French was somewhat frigid. Some limited trade developed, but the French preferred to work with people who were more receptive (the Ojibwa) who were enemies of the Sioux and made sure that the French did not supply too many weapons to them." ref.

A statement on the Minnesota DNR website reads: Early White/Indian intervention played an important role in the settlement of the area by white men. The French, instigated fights between the Ojibwe and Dakota so as to ally themselves with the Ojibwe. ref.

Not only did the French instigate fights between the Ojibwe and Dakota they armed the Ojibwe with guns, bullets and gun powder. And the French would not arm the Dakota so that they could defend themselves and protect their Minnesota homeland from being stolen by the Ojibwe. Because of these heinous actions by colonizing Europeans the Dakota lost their ancestral homelands at Mille Lacs Lake and other places in central and northern Minnesota.

"The first actual contact with the Sioux was made in 1658 by Radisson along the shores of Lake Superior. The Sioux before this time had also become well aware of the French because Wisconsin had been overrun after 1640 with refugees from the east (Ojibwa, Fox, Sauk, Ottawa, Wyandot, Potawatomi, etc.) who were fleeing an Iroquois offensive of annihilation during the Beaver Wars. To aid these allies against the Iroquois, the French had been trading guns to these peoples, and they had been using them not only against the Iroquois, but also to fight and seize territory from the resident Sioux." ref.

"When Du Luth, in 1679, came to Mille Lacs and at the flourishing Sioux village at Izatys (corrupted to Kathio) planted the French flag, the Ojibwa were claiming, by right of conquest, the hunting grounds to the north and east of the Mississippi headwaters." ref.

"The people speaking languages of the Siouan linguistic stock, lived in the Ohio River Valley. Forced out by the Iroquois, they split into smaller branches, with the branch which was to become the Sioux or Dakota drifting west. By the seventeenth century, when the first contacts with French explorers occurred, they were established around Mille Lacs Lake, north of what is now Minneapolis, where they had been for a long time." ref.

"The continuing wars between the eastern tribes over the fur trade had driven the Chippewa westward to this area. They were well-armed by the French, and gradually forced the Oceti Sakowin westward, out of their forest-and-lake range, and onto the Great Plains west of the Mississippi." ref.

"Before 1670, the Ottawa had gotten much of their fur from the Cree, but the British established their first posts on Hudson Bay that year. Able for the first time to trade directly without a middleman, the Cree began taking their fur to the British, and the Ottawa had lost their main supplier. The Ojibwe stepped in to fill the void and, with French encouragement, began expanding west along both shores of Lake Superior. The movement along the northern shore blocked British access to other Great Lakes tribes and brought skirmishes with the Assiniboine and Cree alliance which traded with the British. However, it was the expansion along the south shore which produced the most trouble. It not only started a war between the Ojibwe and Dakota, but fighting with the Fox who were also competing for hunting territory in the area." ref.

Commentary: Encouraged and armed by their Dutch and English trading partners, the Iroquois moved west from the Atlantic coast to expand their territory and monopolize the fur trade. In the process they forced the Ojibwe from their Atlantic coast homeland. Indirectly pressured by the Dutch and English the Ojibwe moved west and then, encouraged by the French, eventually entered the Dakota's homeland territory in Minnesota, which caused a war to break out between the Ojibwe and Dakota. The war continued, but with temporary times of peace. The French kept the Dakota from acquiring guns, bullets and gun powder, and they instigated fights between the Ojibwe and Dakota. Eventually the Ojibwe, who were assisted by the French (i.e. the Ojibwe and French together), force the Dakota from their centeral and northern Minnesota homeland. The Europeans (Dutch, English and French) along with the Iroquois and Ojibwe, are therefore responsible for unjustifiably forcing the Dakota from their Minnesota ancestral homelands, especially including their sacred spiritual center at Mille Lacs Lake.

"Around 1750 - 1775, the Lakota split off from the main Dakota homeland in Minnesota, and moved west. During the late 1700s to early 1800s, the Lakota established dominance versus other tribes in their new home and hunting grounds in the Black Hills and on the northern plains, in areas that would become western South Dakota, eastern Montana, northern Wyoming and northern Nebraska." ref.

On the Santee Sioux Tribe website where is the following statement: "The Santee's defeat by the Chippewas at the Battle of Kathio in the late 1700s forced them to move to the southern half of the state which would bring them into close contact and eventually conflict with the white settlers. From that point on, survival for the Santee Tribe would become a daily struggle." ref.

"The two centuries that followed were unhappy ones for the Sioux. The French came and were followed by the British; the Revolution of the eastern colonists was fought and settled. But to the Sioux the white man's struggle meant chiefly that the furs, whose values he had learned to appreciate, were increasingly difficult to get. In 1805 Lieutenant Pike bought for liquor and a handful of pin money the huge tracts near the present Twin Cities, and boasted their value at $200,000, but the Sioux evidenced no realization that the white man's regard for the land was in any wise different from his own--a place to hunt and camp. He was far more concerned with the steady encroachment of the Chippewa armed with the white man's guns." ref.

"In the meantime the settlers, constantly annoyed as they were by the natives, could scarcely be expected to see the Indian brave as the romantic and symbolic figure Rousseau had pictured, nor his squaw as the tragic lady that Schiller immortalized in his Nadowessian Lament. It was all very well for Longfellow to grow enthusiastic over Mrs. Eastman's descriptions of Indian legends, or to seize upon Schoolcraft's tales for his Hiawatha saga, but settlers saw little poetry in the red man. Far more heartily they agreed with Cotton Mather when he called the Indians "the devil driven race." During the same years in which poets sang of the natural man, settlers struggled to eliminate him, pushing the Chippewa back from their newly won hunting grounds into undisturbed lands of the north, thrusting the Sioux westward into the Great Plains." ref.

"Equally interesting is its preface in which the editor made a strong plea for a consistent American policy toward Indian problems. Let the Indians alone, he urged, or at least let the white man cease to treat them as if they had deliberately disobeyed the white man's laws of which actually they had no knowledge. Such pleas were of small avail; little by little the Indians' lands were reduced, their activities restricted." ref.

"Two treaties in 1837, one with the Sioux and another with the Chippewa, opened the triangle between the Mississippi and the St. Croix. The payment to the Sioux was $500,000, of which $200,000 went to the traders and half-breeds, the usual reward for influence." ref.

"By such methods in a series of treaties before 1863, the Sioux parted with their entire holdings with the single exception of a narrow strip along the Minnesota River; the Chippewa ceded almost the entire upper half of the State. One farsighted chief complained at the low price saying: "You forget that the land will be yours as long as the world lasts." But land acquisition by a method best described as one of food, flattery, and fraud was the order of the day; cynically, the historians of that time called the Minnesota treaties "as honest as any." ref.

"Persons who had bought the scrip in "good faith" should be allowed to make good their claims and purchase lands at not less than $1.25 per acre. In a short time "the innocent parties," whom Congress termed victims of a fraudulent system, had acquired for about $2.00 per acre almost 20,000 acres of Minnesota's richest timber, worth at that time about $150,000." ref.

The Natives did not sale any of their land. They could only sale their occupancy rights to the land they once consider theirs. The Natives were out numbered and out gunned and they believed that if they did not sale their occupancy rights to the white people's acclaimed land they would probably take their occupancy rights away from them by conquest, so they sold most of their occupancy rights to the white people. ref.

For an explanation of where and how Christian European colonial/conquest assumptions of domination-subordination [of indigenous peoples] originated click here

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The following quotes are from an article located here

"All this new armament arrived just as beaver were becoming scarce in southern Ontario from supplying the French. Huron, Ottawa, Neutral, and Tionontati hunters solved this by moving into lower Michigan and using their new weapons to take territory from the Assistaeronon, or Fire Nation (an alliance of Fox, Sauk, Mascouten, and Potawatomi). Although the French were aware of what was happening, they made no attempt to stop it."

"The French allies and trading partners started the process of forcing the original tribes from lower Michigan, but they never got to complete it. Facing a similar shortage of beaver in their homeland from trading with the Dutch, the Iroquois during the 1630s needed to find new hunting territory but were hemmed in by powerful enemies."

"The Mississauga killed almost half of them during their retreat to New York marking the beginning of Ojibwe involvement in the Beaver Wars. Iroquois raids continued, but unlike their other enemies, the Ojibwe did not fold and run. Instead, they gave ground slowly and began to concentrate near Sault Ste. Marie. To defend themselves, the Ojibwe began to organize and merge, and although they probably did not realize it at the time, the Iroquois had created a dangerous enemy."

"Daniel DeLhut (Duluth) arrived at Sault Ste. Marie in 1678 and two years later negotiated a truce between the Saulteur and Sioux. He also was able to arrange a peace between the Dakota and Assiniboine. This second one did not last, but the Saulteur and Dakota agreement endured for some time, and fur flowed east to Montreal in unprecedented amounts. Despite a second smallpox epidemic at Sault Ste. Marie in 1681, the Ojibwe and Ottawa by 1685 were supplying over 2/3 of the French fur trade. Unfortunately, the 1680 treaties did include all of the Ojibwe. The Saulteur signed, but the Keweenaw Ojibwe remained at war and joined forces with the Fox to defeat a large Dakota war party. The Saulteur, of course did nothing against their Keweenaw relatives, but they formed an alliance with the Dakota against the Fox. Neither the Keweenaw nor the Fox wanted the French to trade with the Dakota, and to prevent this, Menominee and Ojibwe warriors of chief Achiganaga murdered two French traders in upper Michigan in 1682."

"The French then proceeded to throw away their victory. For many years, Jesuit missionaries had complained about the corruption which the fur trade was creating among Native Americans. These protests fell upon deaf ears, especially after Louis XIV's dispute with Rome began in 1673. However, when the price of fur dropped and profits plunged, the French monarchy suddenly got "religion" and in 1696 issued a decree suspending the fur trade in the western Great Lakes. What appeared to the government in Paris as a practical decision, was disaster to the French in North America. As posts closed and official trade ended, Coureurs de Bois (illegal and unlicensed traders) attempted to take up the slack. Many were honest, but most were not, and their abuse and dishonesty added to the tension. The French in 1701 negotiated another truce between the Saulteur and Dakota ending fighting which had occurred since the 1690s, but the Algonquin in Wisconsin still opposed French sales of firearms to the Dakota. French traders enroute to Dakota villages were robbed and murdered, and even the highly respected Nicholas Perot found himself tied to a Mascouten torture stake ready to be burned alive. Saved by the Kickapoo, Perot went back to Quebec and never returned to the Great Lakes."

"The first suggestion of genocide was made in 1727, but this was not official policy until approved by the king 1732. The French first took the precaution to isolate the Fox from their Dakota and Winnebago allies and by 1728 were ready to strike. The Fox added to this by killing some of the Kickapoo and Mascouten after an argument, and the Kickapoo and Mascouten went over to the French."

The near annihilation of the Fox during the Fox Wars removed them from the picture leaving the Ojibwe and Dakota to face just each other. French traders had begun regular trade with the Dakota at Fond du Lac (Duluth) as early as 1712 and, for the most part, were bringing the Ojibwe with them.

"By this time, the Ojibwe had ended their hostilities with the Cree and Assiniboine, but the Dakota had not. With the Ojibwe neutral in these conflicts, their friendship was of less use to the Dakota. In addition, Ojibwe had used up most of the beaver on their own lands supplying the French. This forced them to rely more on hunting territory shared peacefully with the Dakota and to look with a jealous eye on the fur and rice lakes the Dakota had in Minnesota. The Dakota became increasingly disturbed by the heavy Ojibwe hunting, but the explosion came in 1736 when Vérendrye attempted to lure the Cree and Assiniboine away from the British by selling them firearms. The Dakota would not tolerate the French arming their enemies and attacked Fort St. Charles killing 21 Frenchmen (including Vérendrye's son). Perhaps more for their own reasons than to avenge the French, the Ojibwe swore revenge, formed an alliance with the Cree and Assiniboine, and attacked the Dakota villages on Lake Pepin on the Mississippi."

"Starting from Chequamegon (La Pointe), the Pillager Band began an invasion of the Dakota homeland. The initial movement was inland towards Lac Courte Oreilles and Lac Flambeau to take northern Wisconsin. From there they spread west into Minnesota to attack the center of the Dakota world, Mille Lacs. Allied with the Cree and Assiniboine, the Ojibwe at the same time advanced west from Thunder Bay up the Rainey River portage dislodging the Dakota from what is now the border of Minnesota and Ontario. Following the three-day battle at Kathio in 1750, the Dakota abandoned most of their villages in northern Minnesota (Mille Lacs, Sandy Lake, Red Lake, Leech Lake, Cass Lake, and Lake Winnebegosh) and retreated south. By 1780 there was not a single Dakota village north of the Minnesota River."

"Since it occurred far from any white settlements, this epic struggle went largely unnoticed by Europeans. Their attention was focused on the confrontation between Britain and France for North America. The French had things pretty much their own way in the upper Great Lakes, especially after the Ojibwe victory over the Dakota, and were making their initial forays onto the plains."

Commentary: The reason why the missionaries' requests to the Christian European authorities (European monarchs and the Pope) to end the fur trade went unanswered for a long time is because the execution of their plan of conquest, ethnic cleansing, theft and occupation of Native lands, subjugation of Natives and the genocide of these indigenous tribal peoples was working just the way they wanted it to work. more...(1.)... more...(2.)

More commentary: The intertribal wars caused the depletion of the Native population, which made it easier for the Europeans to steal the Native's lands. It also made it easier for them to subjugate and manage/manipulate the remaining Natives. The pagan religions of the tribes who were living in their traditional homelands were interwoven with their lands and sacred sites. Therefore, then the Europeans used tribes to force other tribes from their sacred traditional homelands this made in easier for them to Christianize and "civilize" the pagan "savages" who had been violently forced from their sacred homelands.

The same notion of creating space for the "master race" is as germane to the ideological framework of Hitler's Lebensraumpolitik as it is to the U.S. government's doctrine of Manifest Destiny: In each instance, the extermination of "inferior races" is justified in the interest of making way for a "superior race" of peoples. According to Hitler biographer John Toland, the Führer is known to have "expressed admiration for the 'efficiency' of the American genocide campaign against the Indians, viewing it as a forerunner for his own plans and programs." The "depopulation of the New World" was a "salient precursor" to the Nazi Holocaust. The Christian instigated and promoted American Indian Holocaust is the prototype for the extermination of the Jews in Europe.

Valerie Larson, the Urban American Indian Health Coordinator for the Office of Minority and Multicultural Health, says: "The Dakota people, due to the brutality of their historic treatment, are afflicted with a sort of collective post-traumatic stress disorder." The only solution, she says, "is a return to traditional ways of being, which can only occur by reclaiming the land upon which the people once thrived."

"In The Circle article 'Dakota Rising' its author Jon Lurie describes how Wyatt Thomas (Dakota) traveled to Mille Lacs County from Nebraska where he lives on a reservation as a member of the Santee Dakota Tribe. Thomas said that Minnesota, and Ogechie lake in particular, was, to him, "home". Thomas was on a mission to scout his tribe's Minnesota ancestral lands. An important first step in reintroducing the Santee Dakota to their original homeland."... "Thomas is one voice in a growing chorus of indigenous cultural leaders who agree that the reclamation of traditional lands is crucial to solving the Dakota mental health crisis due to the brutality of their historic treatment." ref.