reading about the 1790s in ohio and georgia, specifically the Shawnee, Cherokee, and Muskogee resistance to direct theft of their lands by white settlers. some of this i’ve read about before, in Smithers’ Native Southerners, but RDB is really hammering home just how brutal these land thefts were. this was a genocide from the jump, and the colonial (and later federal and state) government was wholly complicit—they signed treaties with Indigenous tribes and nations with their right hand and pushed muskets into the hands of the squatters with the left.

the other thing that’s striking me right now is how terribly, horrifically effective the spiritual brutalization of the settlers was. this colonialism started in england, with the landed gentry oppressing first their own serfs, then the nations of Scotland, Wales, and especially Ireland. i said this already in this thread, but the “scots-irish” were scottish lowlanders whom the english imported to Ireland to brutalize the native population, to displace them, and to make a profit for the english.

this “test run” conditioned all those involved to be bloodthirsty murderers, and these same families would go on to do exactly the same to the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. same tactics, same utterly brutal methods—but on a much wider scale, and with the entire continent to take for their own enrichment.

if there’s anything resembling a hell, i hope those who sacrificed empathy on the altar of enrichment suffer there forever. there can be no accounting of the blood shed as a result.