European Conquest of Indigenous Peoples Brought Them a Higher Standard of Living

It might ease your conscience a little to know that before Columbus appeared on the scene, the indigenous peoples were extremely barbaric among themselves - They practiced unspeakable violence and oppression. There were massacres of entire villages. Victims were "not just killed, but mutilated. Hands and feet were cut off, each body’s head was scalped, the remains were left scattered around the village, which was burned."

“Most Native American tribal groups practiced some form of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery into North America.”

“Enslaved warriors sometimes endured mutilation or torture that could end in death as part of a grief ritual for relatives slain in battle. Some Indians cut off one foot of their captives to keep them from running away.”

At the re-consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs performed a mass human sacrifice of an estimated 80,000 enslaved captives in four days.

Captives of the Iroquois in 1642 had their fingers cut off, were forced to set each other on fire, had their skinned stripped off and, in one captured warrior’s case, “the torture continued throughout the night, building to a fervor, finally ending at sunrise by cutting his scalp open, forcing sand into the wound, and dragging his mutilated body around the camp. When they had finished, the Iroquois carved up and ate parts of his body.”

With this perspective, indigenous peoples' lives have significantly improved since Columbus came.

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This information is from an article based on several sources including:

George Franklin Feldman's “Cannibalism, Headhunting and Human Sacrifice in North America: A History Forgotten”

Tony Seybert's “Slavery and Native Americans in British North America and the United States: 1600 to 1865”

Kim MacQuarrie's “The Last Days of the Incas.”

Rev. Father Barthelemy Vimont’s “The Jesuit Relations”

Marvin Harris' “Cannibals and Kings”