My essay I wrote today, more like a rant, have a read: Significance in the California Missions Many would like to believe that the Native Americans of Californians were nomadic; their camps stood a 500 year time span. The California missionaries brought many things, metal, Latin and Spanish tongue and Catholicism. These people were forced to speak in a different language, called Indians (when these people for a fact never lived in India) and was even killed for not conforming. There is no significance or anything different about this event that took place, like everything else, when a much more advanced society meets another, it never turns out good, people die, and people cause war. These Natives used survival skills to conform to the beliefs of a monotheistic religion and they were not treated peacefully. This was a beginning of a genocide. These people were FORCED to speak in a different language, wear a different style of clothing, and their land was taken away so swiftly. In fact, this is considered to be the worst thing to ever happen to Native Americans in American history, and this was all over religion, and this happened because the Spanish wanted to kill off the resisting population. These Natives were enslaved as well, and under a white person. The abuse that happened by the missions were disgusting, and they were not killed off by just threats of disease, they were killed by hand as well. This is described as by Americans today as the Spanish coming here and giving people new ideas an minimalizing the conflict that really happened, and the Native story is neglected and told by the slave owners and the men who killed off these people and made it justifiable, so today, that’s counted as credible, as of someone who wrote it from the perspective of the minority and the victim then it is thrown out of the window. These Natives fell from over a million to twenty thousand less. These people were hunted down by soldiers, beaten, and starved to death, and many cases, killed. Sometimes if they tried to escape, they would be eaten by dogs. They were placed in crowded rooms with no sanitation and disease would spread from person to person. Families were separated and would never see each other again. This is the true significance of this event; these people are treated with lack of empathy and the empathy is expected to be switched over to the white race, the race that did this to these people. I think American schools should practice what they preach and not incite any empathy for murders and monsters. I am a Native, and reading this unit makes me utterly disgusted. I am surprised at the neglect of telling this side of this story; the true story. We cannot sit here and believe that nothing horrible happened here, and what I read in this unit, it was the equivalent to reading in the Nazi’s perspective of the holocaust. If someone incited the innocence of the Nazis and minimalized what Hitler has done, they are shunned. But someone can minimalize the slaughter of the Native Californians and call it “school”.
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 00:24:58 +0000