Are You Saxon?

I keep reading about the horrid Europeans who came to the New World and destroyed the entire place, ruining the land and killing off all the natives. Terrible, just terrible. But untrue.

Industrialization has made the globe a dirtier place. With all our science we have prolonged lives and thereby increased the population until it is nearly unsustainable. Certainly unsustainable without the technology we have produced. Who would feed the more than 8 million New Yorkers if the combine farms in the Midwest did not produce much more food than the hand tilled lands the natives used?

I’ve been reading stuff that intimates that Europeans are the first and only slave holders in the world. Stuff and nonsense, as an outraged 18th century lady might say. Enslaving others has been a worldwide endeavor ever since someone noticed that if he were more powerful and threatening, he could get someone else to do the work while he glowered. Slavery is now illegal worldwide, which doesn’t stop it from happening at all. Especially sex trade slavery, but that’s only women so …

Now for killing off all the natives. What? Are the reservations empty? Or are we decrying the reservations? What about all the absorbed natives? My husband, and therefore my children, are part Cherokee. Just like with my English heritage I am probably part Anglo or Saxon. Who ever hears of those nationalities today? They weren’t all killed, they were absorbed into the English landscape and now are called something else. And I’m Irish, where are the Celts?

How about Vikings? They went all over the western European coast pillaging and what-not. There aren’t any Vikings today, but I’m sure that they were not all destroyed, but rather absorbed into a newer, later culture. They are called Swedes or Danes now. They aren’t gone, only differently labeled. The Vandals were once a people, not kids spray painting graffiti. Anyone hear of any Prussians lately?

Buffy St. Marie sang “the tribes were wiped out and the history books censored.” That seems ludicrous since she is of the tribes and she seemed vibrantly alive while singing of her national pain.

The world is unstable and at war. It has always been so. To the victors go the spoils. That means they get to keep the land and change the names of things. Londinium was the Roman name for London. We can see the connection. In the English countryside is evidence that the Roman armies once occupied the place. But they don’t still speak Latin because following that invasion came the Angles, the Saxons, the Vikings, and myriad other people.

With all wars, people die. The same happened with the European influx to the New World. But not all the indigenous people were killed. The tribes were not wiped out. Many exist as tribes today. Many others were enslaved and lived on, possibly mingling the gene pool by force or by choice.

We are the world, there is no us and them. There is only us. Combined. Intermarrying. Interbreeding. Us. All of us. Together. For better or worse. We meld and merge and become a melting pot of humanity. Each of us individual. Each of us with a history of war and conquest behind us. Because … if our ancestors had not won some measure of safety, they would not have reproduced.