Status Updates From Not Stolen: The Truth About...

People lament the fact that the Indian population dipped below a few hundred thousand by 1900, but it might easily have dipped far lower, had the federal government not intervened to provide medicine, food, and other material support to the remaining Indians. It is indisputable that the US government’s vaccination policy saved far more Indians than were massacred during the entire nineteenth century

this early pattern of marrying Indian “nobles” we may detect an assumption on the part of Europeans that Indian society would be long-lasting and permanent—just like Islamic society had proven to be. There would be no point in marrying into the nobility of a society that one expected to disappear over the course of a few generations

The Apache are thought by archaeologists to have originated in Alaska and then rampaged southwards. Conquering and intimidating as they went, like a group of New World Huns or Vandals, the Apache finally reached the region of Texas by the time the first Spanish arrived in the early sixteenth century.

The idea that European land ownership was tied to “patriarchy” has impelled some feminist scholars to assert that Indian property holding systems were “matriarchal” while European property systems were “patriarchal.” According to Suzanne M. Spencer-Wood: “Post-colonial feminist theories and research have shown how the social institution of patriarchy, including sexual relationships, was fundamental to European

Having kindled a fire, they selected a victim, and proceeded to excoriate his back with red-hot burning brands, and to apply live coals to the ends of his fingers, where they would give the most exquisite pain. They tore out his finger-nails, and, with sharp slivers of wood, pierced his wrists and rudely forced out the quivering sinews. They flayed off the skin from the top of his head, and poured upon the bleeding

the adoption of African slavery by the Five Civilized Tribes was merely an adaptation of preexisting practice. During the Trail of Tears marches of the 1830s, thousands of African slaves were moved westward, along with their Indian masters. In the lead-up to the Civil War, some tribes were split into pro- and anti-slavery factions

Slavery was widespread not only in Mesoamerica but also throughout the Indian tribes of the New World. Even far to the north, in present-day Canada, Native Americans routinely enslaved one another. The French were able to take advantage of this preexisting practice, buying slaves from the Indians and sometimes selling them in Caribbean markets

The Aztecs were notoriously short of large domesticable animals to use for food, so this steady ritual of human sacrifice met a social need for protein. The town where this occurred was previously named Zultapec—but after this windfall of sacrificial victims, its name was changed to “Tecoaque,” which meant “the place where they ate them.”

Left-leaning academics attempted to deny the mounting evidence that Indians of the southwestern United States—including the oft-fetishized Hopi—were, in fact, cannibals. In recent decades, however, our ability to forensically analyze human feces at the molecular level has provided the smoking gun

The archaeology of the period before Hiawatha has revealed many warrior skeletons riddled with arrows and/or hacked into pieces, indicating that violent warfare was normative in these regions before contact with Europeans

Allan R. Holmberg, who visited remote parts of the Andes in the 1940s in order to collect data on the Indians living there. Holmberg described them as “among the most culturally backward people in the world.” They lived in constant want and hunger; they had no clothes, no domestic animals, no musical instruments, no art or design, and almost no religion. They could not count above three, and they could not make fire

Over the eight hundred years between the year 1000 and 1800—both before and after colonization—Europe’s GDP experienced a remarkably consistent growth rate of about 10 to 15 percent per century. European per capita GDP went from $800 in 1500 to $900 in 1600 to $1,000 in 1700 to $1,200 in 1820.
This suggests that the European economy was already set on its growth trajectory prior to its colonial adventure

The Arabian Nights, one of the most widely copied manuscripts in the late medieval Islamic world, begins with a notorious description of a black slave as a “big slobbering Negro with rolling eyes…a truly hideous sight”

Ibn Khaldun, who would opine in the fourteenth century, “The only people who accept slavery are the Negroes, owing to their low degree of humanity and their proximity to the animal stage.”

The Arab world was importing slaves from Africa long before the Europeans, and we know that medieval Arab merchants charged far less for African than Caucasian slaves because they valued them less

medieval and early modern Arabs were more racist toward Africans than Europeans were and from a much earlier date. William Chester Jordan provides the following examples:
Consider the Muslim case. Avicenna (Ibn Sina) at the turn of the millennium wrote, “Those who are far removed from acquiring virtues are slaves by nature like the Turks and [N]egroes and in general people living in an unfavorable climate.”

In light of these cold, hard population figures, with tens of millions of mestizos and Amerindians living precisely where their ancestors lived five hundred years ago, where then is the “holocaust” of one hundred million dead claimed by Stannard and others?

The Indigenous population of Mexico in 1600 was probably about 1.5 to 3 million people. If the population in 1517 had been twenty-five million people, then this makes it look as though the Spanish conquest had killed off 90 percent of the people in Mexico—some twenty-two million victims. If the population of Mexico in 1517 had only been 7.5 million, then, the Indigenous population probably plummeted by some 66 percen

the urban situation in the New World was analogous to parts of the Old World circa 3000 BC. And only in a very few regions of the rather small Aztec empire and environs were truly intensive farming methods in use