ANGEL RONAN SLRP with the Toshokan ™ Law Centre: Litigation, Consulting and Management.

 

  # Page 36 **An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States** Actions and local occurrences said to indicate witchcraft included nonpayment of rent, demand for public assistance, giving the “evil eye,” local die-offs of horses or other stock, and mysterious deaths of children. Also among the telltale actions were practices related to midwifery and any kind of contraception. The service that women provided among the poor as healers was one of a number of vestiges from pre-Christian, matrilineal institutions that once predominated in Europe. It is no surprise that those who had held on to and perpetuated these communal practices were those most resistant to the enclosure of the commons, the economic base of the peasantry, as well as women’s autonomy.^6 The traumatized souls thrown off the land, as well as their descendants, became the land-hungry settlers enticed to cross a vast ocean with the promise of land and attaining the status of gentry. English settlers brought witch hu...

  Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's *An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States*, organized in chronological page order. ### Page 46 46 *An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States* In the founding myth of the United States, the colonists acquired a vast expanse of land from a scattering of benighted peoples who were hardly using it—an unforgivable offense to the Puritan work ethic. The historical record is clear, however, that European colonists shoved aside a large network of small and large nations whose governments, commerce, arts and sciences, agriculture, technologies, theologies, philosophies, and institutions were intricately developed, nations that maintained sophisticated relations with one another and with the environments that supported them. By the early seventeenth century, when British colonists from Europe began to settle in North America, a large Indigenous population had long before created “a humanized landscape almost everywhere,” as William Denevan pu...

  *An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States* by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, organized by page number. ### Page 49 **Cult of the Covenant** were taken as evidence of damnation. “The attractiveness of such a doctrine to a group of invading colonists... is obvious,” Akenson observes, “for one could easily define the natives as immutably profane, and damned, and oneself as predestined to virtue.”¹¹ Since another sign of justification was a person’s ability to abide by the laws of a well-ordered society, Calvin preached the obligation of citizens to obey lawful authority. In fact, they should do so even when that authority was lodged in poor leaders (one of the seeds for “my country right or wrong”). Calvin led his Huguenot followers across the border into Geneva, took political control of the city-state, and established it as a republic in 1541. The Calvinist state enacted detailed statutes governing every aspect of life and appointed functionaries to enforce them. The laws reflec...

  ### Page 66 **An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States** occupied Florida called Guale. From the time the first settlers squatted on Indigenous land in Georgia, rangers were in the forefront of ethnic cleansing, clearing the region for British settlement. Brigadier General James Oglethorpe, commander in chief of the Georgia colony, tried but failed to turn his own small regular army into rangers, so he commissioned Hugh Mackay Jr. to organize the regulars into a Highland ranger force. A settler agent for the Georgia colony, Mackay was a former British army officer and a Scots Highlander. The Highlanders were reputed to be tough, fearless fighters—in other words, brutal killers. It was unusual at the time to put a local militia officer in command of army regulars.^{28} The Indigenous population of Georgia consisted primarily of the Cherokee Nation. The colonizers realized it would be impossible to persuade the Cherokees to accept or defend Georgia settlers if war broke ...