Bw
Who was treated worse
Indians or blacks?
The Federal gov't invaded, waged total war against, and subjugated them, too... "for the children". Therefore, under Birdwatcher "logic", it was completely permissible and in fact the "morally right thing to do".
The sooner we dive into Mexico to straighten them out, the better.
I'll answer all three at once.
RWE, Mexico is not the United States. The United States is my country, Mexico is not.
Now for the American Indian versus slave question...
Who was better off?
There are numerous cases of slaves running off to join the Indians, not many of Indians running off to join the slaves (a few IIRC in the Eighteenth Century, back East, but only in the last stages of desperation).
Worth noting is the role of Black Seminoles in the Seminole War. In that conflict at least a few hundred former slaves or descendants of the same actually bore arms against the forces of the United States. Even more remarkable yet, they were allowed to remove to the Indian Territory WHILE STILL BEARING ARMS. The closest thing to a successful slave insurrection in our history.
As to the treatment of "the Indians".... "the Indians" themselves did not see themselves as such, rather on the whole they were members of their own tribe, who's members were not necessarily all "Indians".
If being killed is the ultimate denial of one's rights, the sad truth is that up until the very end of our Frontier period more Indians died at the hands of other Indians then were ever killed by Whites (and disease and starvation offed far more than both those).
As for treaties, the Frontier Period encompasses a very long time, and many disparate locations. A typical pattern was a treaty being initially made in good faith, but rapid demographic changes in the form of an exploding White population changing everything.
Many treaties were made cynically, using a few compliant drunks as signers, but one of the biggest frauds was perpetrated by the Iroquois who, in order to divert White settlement from their own lands, in the Mid-Eighteen Century, sold West Virginia and Kentucky out from under the feet of the tribes who actually lived there.
So, while their ain't much to be proud of in our treatment of the Indians, I'm not recalling they were enslaved en masse on a scale remotely like that of our African slavery.
In fact, lots of Indians even owned slaves, tho not often under the absolute terms of American chattel slavery....
Birdwatcher
