Dave Smith > wrote in
:

>> This wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that white people
>> came in and destroyed the native peoples' ecology and economy and
>> culture (when they weren't killing them off outright).
>
> Ahh.... the old myth about the natives all being natural born
> ecologists who had such respect for the land, only killed what they
> needed and used every scrap of their prey. They had stone age weapons
> and couldn't kill much and they would hunt and fish an area until they
> ran out of game and then moved on to another place where they killed
> everything they could before having to move on again. Their big
> downfall was firearms, which allowed them to kill even more. The
> natives in the far north wiped out the caribou herds long before there
> was any significant white presence, other than the odd trading post.

You missed the opportunity to mention ritual cannibalism and the failure to
meet the basic standards of a capitalist society through ownership of land.
:-)

> We tried to educate them to help them adapt to life in the 20th
> century but that turned out to be a major problem.

Oh, cheez...white man's burden crap again. Hey, "you" tried to educate MY
people to stop being French and Catholic (fat lot of good it did "you").
"You" tried to educate Indians (in India) to chew tallow-soaked paper to
prime their bullets and look where that led. When someone thinks they can
impose their views on someone just because of who they are, I smell the
rank body odour of Imperialism.