They had no one to tell their story of a plague that was on par or worse than the fourteenth century European Black Death. We do not know the stories of the native people because in part they had no writing. But Squanto from another light is a race-traitor, allowing the white people to come in and take over the villages that had been abandoned because a plague wiped out all the native people.
In one narrative, Squanto, who is famous for helping the Pilgrims is someone to be celebrated. In America, we tell the stories of the Jamestown settlers or the Pilgrims outside of Boston and how they interacted with the natives. What is striking about reading Galeano is that despite reading alternative texts like Zinn’s People’s History or Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me is that the narrative I grew up with was based on North America, but it was more than that, it was a triumphal history of conquest. The other thing was just how small the initial crews were who were so accomplished in being able to lay waste to the indigenous populations because of their more advanced weaponry, horses, and germs they carried with them, on purpose or not: “Cortez landed at Veracruz with nor more than 100 sailors and 508 soldiers he had 16 horses 32 crossbows, 10 bronze cannon, a few harquebuses, muskets, and pistols” (16). The first being that often the colonization was often not a state endeavor, but one in which adventurers set out to make their names and their riches, but they need capital for boats and men to cross over with (14). In reading, I learned several things that I did not know. In the chapter “Lust for Gold, Lust for Silver,” Galeano highlights the purely extractive nature of this colonization. In The Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano details the centuries of extraction that that colonizing European powers exercised over the land and the peoples of Latin America.
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