Heloin wrote:Infected Mushroom wrote:The British would have respected the native treaties. This is what they wanted in the OTL. It was the Americans that continued west of the 13 colonies for imperialistic gains.
This is the dumbest thing you can continue to say and believe. It’s not just wrong, it’s offensively wrong. The British Empire committed dozens of genocides, the British Empire invented concentration camps, the British Empire paid bounties to hunt native peoples for sport.
No, the British would have been better than the Americans in their treatment of natives. Here is a source.
https://www.vox.com/2015/7/2/8884885/am ... on-mistakeIndependence was bad for Native Americans
Starting with the Proclamation of 1763, the British colonial government placed firm limits on westward settlement in the United States. It wasn't motivated by an altruistic desire to keep American Indians from being subjugated or anything; it just wanted to avoid border conflicts.
But all the same, the policy enraged American settlers, who were appalled that the British would seem to side with Indians over white men. "The British government remained willing to conceive of Native Americans as subjects of the crown, similar to colonists," Ethan Schmidt writes in Native Americans in the American Revolution. "American colonists … refused to see Indians as fellow subjects. Instead, they viewed them as obstacles in the way of their dreams of land ownership and trading wealth." This view is reflected in the Declaration of Independence, which attacks King George III for backing "merciless Indian Savages."
American independence made the proclamation void here. It's not void in Canada — indeed, there the 1763 proclamation is viewed as a fundamental document providing rights to self-government to First Nations tribes. It's mentioned explicitly in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Canada's Bill of Rights), which protects "any rights or freedoms that have been recognized by the Royal Proclamation of October 7, 1763" for all aboriginal people. Historian Colin Calloway writes in The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America that the proclamation "still forms the basis for dealings between Canada's government and Canada's First Nations."
And, unsurprisingly, Canada didn't see Indian wars and removals as large and sweeping as occurred in the US. They still committed horrible, indefensible crimes. Canada, under British rule and after, brutally mistreated aboriginal people, not least through government-inflicted famines and the state's horrific seizure of children from their families so they could attend residential schools. But the country didn't experience a westward expansion as violent and deadly as that pursued by the US government and settlers. Absent the revolution, Britain probably would've moved into Indian lands. But fewer people would have died.
Read the whole thing and you'll see that my point is correct. I understand that you are from the USA but you can't let that bias your assessment. There's a whole order of magnitude of difference in terms of what the British did and what the Americans did in North America. This is emphasised in the last paragraph. In history I learned that the British enforcing this 1763 proclamation is one of the root causes of the American Revolution, the USA literally fought the war in part because they wanted to colonise the Indians and Britain said "hey wait a minute, that's too much." Citing Canada/British North America and saying, "that's the same as what the USA pulled in North America" shows a grave misunderstanding of Canadian history. In terms of the numbers and the lands stolen and the magnitude of the mistreatment, it's not even close.
Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2022 5:24 am