Indigenous People Settled The West With kinship systems Before Gays Arrive.

Indigenous People Settled The West With kinship systems  Before Gays Arrive.

In addition to the deadly impact of diseases, wars, and genocide, Thornton has emphasized that many Indigenous nations in what is today the United States were “removed, relocated, dispersed, concentrated, or forced to migrate at least once after contact with Europeans or Americans.”47 And he has observed that the forced removal of over 100,000 Indigenous people to areas west of the Mississippi River during the first half of the nineteenth century directly resulted in significant loss of life.48 Moreover, such removals and relocations destroyed Indigenous people’s ways of life, which resulted in substantial additional loss of life.49 Other devastating assaults on these ways of life included the Spanish missions in California, Florida, and Texas; the U.S. government’s attempts to make Plains Indians into cattle ranchers and southern Indians into American farmers…efforts by churches and governments to undermine Indian religious, governmental, and kinship systems… the often-deliberate destructions of flora and fauna that American Indians used for food and other purposes…the near extinction of the buffalo…50 Widespread starvation and malnutrition, the deleterious effects of forced labor, alcoholism, demoralization and despair, declining fertility, and other factors also contributed to the Indigenous Holocaust.51 As remarked earlier, the demographic collapse of the Indigenous population in the Western Hemisphere and in the United States ended at the beginning of the twentieth century, but the cumulative human costs of invasion, conquest, and colonialism by Europeans and their descendants have continued to grow. Governments in Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, Peru, and other Latin American countries have continued to murder Indigenous activists and other Indigenous people.