The best explanation for the observed holocaust is slaving literally grabbing a whole community and then transporting them to the coast for shipment into the Caribbean. This way we do not have surviving populations struggling to join nearby communities and retaining a cultural memory.
We had a native holocaust on the West Coast which eliminated most of approximately 100,000 individuals through three separate waves of infection. Yet a remarkable amount of cultural information was retained by this form of assembly of survivors.
Disease was still a factor, but we are talking long after the primary waves following the Spanish during the sixteenth century. We really do not know just how much effect those waves had on the populations in North America.
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Brief Update: Cultural memory of the American holocaust
Analysis of the Creek Migration Legends Series
http://peopleofonefire.com/brief-update-cultural-memory-of-the-american-holocaust.html
During the past month I have been studying every line of the “lost”
colonial documents that were discovered in April 2015. I also have
obtained other little known records of the contacts between British
traders and Southeastern tribes in the early 1700s.
Nowhere is there a mention of a great “die-off” of the ancestors of
the Muskogean tribes. We know it happened from the sudden abandonment
of towns, cessation of construction . . . even the maps that suddenly
show many towns no longer existing. For example, the town of Apalache,
located around the Kenimer Mound in Georgia’s Nacoochee Valley, is
displayed prominently on a 1693 English map, but is never mentioned
again on future maps.
There was a horrific small pox plague in 1696 that decimated the
Creeks and Uchees in western South Carolina and eastern Georgia. There
is no mention of this demographic disaster in the statements of Creek
leaders. That plague would have occurred only 39 years before the
creation of the “Migration Legend of the Creek People.”
*By the way, both Creek and colonial officials used the word
Uchee, not Yuchi. We can assume that it was the preferred
pronunciation.
I have also noticed that even in 1735, the intelligentsia of the
Creek Confederacy seemed not to know the meanings of their proper
nouns. Many of these same words were translated by the High King of
Apalache (quite accurately) to Richard Briggstock in 1653. Eighty
years later, they were essentially “Latin” to the leaders of the Creek
Confederacy, yet the Creeks still called themselves either Apalache or
Palache, not Muskogee. Were the new members of the Creek elite,
actually the descendants of commoners?
My only explanation for the lack of cultural memory for the American
holocaust is that it killed so many members of the Apalache elite, (who
knew how to write) in a short period that the cultural memory was
erased. There are two ways that an almost instantaneous elite
extinction could have occurred.
- It is known that a hemorrhagic fever wiped out over 85% of the indigenous population of many parts of the Mexican Highlands in a few weeks during the late 1500s. Victims would often be healthy at breakfast and dead by supper time. That horrific disease could have spread to the Southern Highlands of North America.
- Slave raids sponsored by the Rickohocken allies of the English or the Native allies of the French could have instantly exterminated entire towns during the late 1600s. Just because they are not now part of our sanitized American History books does not mean that they did not occur.
I can’t emphasize enough that Muskogee IS NOT a traditional name for
the Creek Indians, The word did no appear as an ethnic label until
just before the American Revolution.
As our research goes forward, we will continue to look for answers to
these riddles, but for now, they are just that – unanswered questions.
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