Friday, July 26, 2019

Shockwave: From 1649 to 2019, 370 Years of Migration in America - By Josh First


Until 1649, the Huron Nation were a mighty Indian tribe, unafraid to use overwhelming violent force to take or raid the better hunting and trapping grounds of nearby Indian tribes who were not strong enough to withstand them.
For hundreds of years, from their vastness in Canada, the mighty Huron tribe had ranged deeply into rich hunting grounds that would become Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio.  But a now familiar combination of factors resulted in their loss of power, a retreat back into Canada, and a resulting cascade of westward Indian migration that did not end until 250 years later, when the very last battles of the Indian Wars played out on the Great Plains in what is today Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and the Dakotas.
Beaten by imported cholera; smallpox; and an ad hoc alliance of lesser tribes, themselves the products of desperate starvation, loss of homeland, and mechanical pressure emanating outward from growing European settlement on the east coast, the year 1649 marked the defeated Huron Nation's inability to project violent force beyond their original tribal base around the eastern Great Lakes in what is today southeastern Canada.  It marked the beginning of their tactical retreat.
So in 1649, as the surviving Hurons retracted northward and westward, eventually southward, the demographic dominos really began to fall, as they already had along the east coast for the previous fifty years, but now en masse.  One by one, two by two, smaller or lesser known Indian tribes in the Great Lakes region began to migrate westward and southward, pushed by those coming up from behind.  One tribe displaced another along its southwestern migration path, with new tribes emerging and some old tribes merging.  Some tribes were stamped out in genocidal raids.  Historically, Indians colonized and occupied each other, and they always migrated because of "economic" circumstances.
The Oglala Sioux and the poverty-stricken, fish-eating Cheyenne (Tsi-Tsi-Tas in their own language) had emerged onto the Great Plains from the Minnesota lake district with a finely honed hunger for survival and unoccupied open spaces.  We know them today as the most dominant and warlike of all the western Indians, but the truth is that they were simply of the few Indian tribes most determined to survive and prosper out of the 250-year stream of refugees fleeing ahead of the shockwave.  When we see magnificent and inspirational pictures of brave Plains Indians mounted on their war ponies, totally free on the prairies, we are not looking at thousands of years of cultural evolution.  Rather, the horseback Indian is a modern creation of America and Europe.
On the southern plains, migrating Indians on foot had encountered the remainders of once domesticated Spanish conquistador horses, subsequently gone wild and feral since the 1600s.  By the 1750s, herds of wild mustangs were being captured, broken, and ridden by Indians.  Comanches, Sioux, Cheyenne, Pawnee, and many others used these new horses to keep pace with bison herds, to fight each other, and eventually to face off with mounted U.S. cavalry.
So in 1649 there was a demographic shock, a vacuum, and then an explosion that marked the fragmentation and full-throated shift of Indian tribal power in the east, until the surviving results of their waves of westward migration then turned and fought the Bluecoats at the Washita and Little Big Horn in the 1880s.
The history lesson here is that already by 1630, European migratory settlement on the east coast had started a cascading migratory effect that ended only when the Oglala Sioux, Cheyenne, Crow, and Arapahoe were herded onto "reservations" and spirit-starved of any remaining patriotic vigor and will to fight in the 1890s.
This leads us to the practical lesson here: the uncontrolled mass migration invasion into America that we are witnessing right now is really nothing new.  Mass migration has been constant in America, started by the American Indians themselves, with subsequent migrants coming from all around the globe.  The recent hostile migration is illegal according to a "peace treaty" of sorts that the two major political tribes negotiated years ago, but that "treaty" has now been openly violated and broken.  Today's mass migration into America is being orchestrated primarily by one political "tribe" in order to gain political power over the other political "tribe," and over everyone else living in America, too.  And once that power is gained, the illegal invader political tribe will use the coercive force of official government to wrest whatever control over the citizens they desire, to compel us to live as they believe we should. Needless to say, that particular tribe does not believe in any of the founding agreements that created America, like the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.
You don't like this?  Don't feel like being a demographic refugee in your own land?  Then act like an Indian: project your force, and protect your land.  Because in fact, your back is already up against the wall.  Many of us just don't know it yet, don't know how dire things are.  Many of us are a bit too materially comfortable and complacent to recognize our actual situation.
Then again, maybe we do just want to live on political reservations, to go where we are told to go, think what we are told to think, do as we are told to do.  It seems easier than messy freedom and personal liberty, doesn't it?