I’ve discovered that a lot of the history of North America since 1492, the day that Columbus, the infamous day that Columbus, had landed on the Hague in the Caribbean, that our cultures had been destroyed. Whereas before 1492, the cultures were radically different from what we thought we knew. For instance, the population of the western hemisphere including the North America, Central America, and South America was in excess of 145,000,000 people, and I had no idea this was how large the population was. The population of North America, north of Mexico alone, which is what is now Canada and the United States was a minimum of 18,000,000. As thought, it was just a few thousand, this is the way we were told.
The cultures were so totally different before Columbus arrived. When the diseases that Columbus brought with him from Europe, ravaged the western hemisphere wave after wave, in wave after wave of epidemics, it wrecked the cultures of the people. Whenever a disease would hit like typhoid or small pox, the people who would die first logically are the very old and the very young. When the very old people died through these diseases, what went with them was, each type of person, an old person died, people say that a whole encyclopedia has gone away, and there are so many, so many epidemics that happened to our people. It has been proven that small pox alone since 1492 hit the communities 42 different times, like once every ten, ten-fifteen years. So and every time a small pox epidemic hit, large numbers of people died. Twenty to thirty percent of the people would die, maybe even more.
So people after Columbus arrived, even before the White man arrived, the diseases spread north and south from Central America. We never learned how wonderful our cultures were, and this is where we have to start rewriting the history books. They talk about the wonders of the old world, sometimes wonders like the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids; these are all puny compared to what our ancestors were able to accomplish before Columbus. They are really, really puny. It’s interesting that the young people want to start researching and educating themselves to some of the things that our ancestors did.
One of the things that really astounds me is that more than half of the worlds food originated from foods produced by our ancestors. For instance, the world might have worked. The worlds most widely eaten food is the potato, very humble potato, but it feeds the world all away around the globe today. That was originated by our ancestors. Corn is another, but there is a list that would be pages and pages full if I was to describe it.
Another thing that happened too is that they gave, believe it or not, the world democracy. Democracy first started as a governing system amongst our people, but it was more like consensus government, rather than the now kind of government. But it was taken for the first time by White people back around 1763 to 67 when America became independent from British rule and the constitutionalist form from our ancestral peoples form of governance. In this particular incident, it was taken from the Iroquois Confederacy. This is the first time the world has ever known the true and actual practice of democracy. Democracy is now practiced all over the world including democratic governance of the United Nations today. So we have contributed a lot to the world, and I never knew that our ancestors did some wonderful things culturally. I never knew that. Since I knew that, my self-esteem went up. My racial shame, shame in my race, went out the window. Now I know that God loves me, because he made me an Indian!