How much of this is actually true? I’m not a scholar of Native American history but the Native war stories and heroes I’ve heard from fighting against Europeans. There was a massive European propaganda campaign here and the “motherland” to characterize natives as savages to justify genocide to clear them out for colonization.
I'm no expert either, but there seems to be a lot of Native American revisionist history that goes on. From Roanoke to King Philip's War to French/Indian War to the Revolutionary War, the colonist relationship with Indians was complicated and doesn't fit into a neat narrative. Sometimes peaceful, sometimes warlike, but always dangerous because not all tribes were on the same page, or even people within tribes, and the hell if the average settler was going to know who was what. There are many contemporary accounts of Indian attacks and atrocities from the earliest days, and those are not part of some European propaganda plan or even American propaganda plan. The idea that you could have all these newspaper folks and settlers spread out, with no way to connect each other except by horse ride for days, all acting on the same page to make Indians look bad is just absurd. There were obviously atrocities on the part of the white man too, the worst of which probably being the Trail Of Tears (which, in spite of the belief of some, was taught to people my age, to people my father's age, and even people my great grandfather's age, who would've been a schoolboy from about 1900-1910). If you get down to a "who started the fight?" debate, it's pointless. Maybe the whites started it by simply landing on the shore, or maybe the Indians did by killing everybody who did. Regardless, that shit happened in fits and starts on both sides for 300-400 years not because one side was morally superior/inferior to the other or because somebody "started it", but because war was a part of life back then in a way that people can't fathom today.
The whole "America is a racist, genocidal country" narrative has been around since the old Soviet Union days and that's really where it comes from. Stratton's attack was out of line since it is a bit silly to compare the experience of pasty white Swedes with black folks, but the larger point of every country/civilization having similar issues is absolutely true. The Euros still too this day will look down on other Euros, Mexicans look down on other Mexicans, and Asians are remarkably racist about everybody, especially other Asians. I don't think I need to get into Africa, Rwanda being a recent, obvious example. And every one of those areas have had far more recent experiences with things much more terrible than anything America has touched. I take the rather unpopular view that because of America's diversity and tackling of its past, that we are remarkably lacking in racism compared to most if not all other countries of consequence. America was never great because of its racism or because it made Indians march hundreds of miles and die along the way. It never claimed to be. It was great because of the influence it had on the world, on spreading democracy, religious freedom, and inspiring others. The focus on its faults is counterproductive, and at some point the motive should be questioned.
