draft
Tom
Sito on Facebook posted the following on the history of the
Pocohontas story (which became of course a very nice Disney movie).
I
made the following reply, which I sincerely believe:
If
the Native Americans had killed every European as soon as they came
off the boat (from a distance, preferably) and burned the bodies but
studied the weapons and other technology, then maybe, just maybe,
they would not have been the victims of the genocide that they were.
Maybe not, also. Hard to say. But it couldn't have been worse, it
seems to me.
Well,
live and learn.
from 1492 til 1615, for some reason, Europeans could not get settlements started along the East Coast. The reason turns out that once Hispaniola started raiding Indian villages for slaves in 1498, they were met by arrows everywhere they tried to land. It was only after the 1619 epidemic of smallpox, that many villages were wiped out, the tribal coalitions fell apart, and some needed new partners... thus Jamestown and the Bay Colony (and Manhattan a little later).
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