Apparently, you haven’t heard how England, and by. The extension of Canada gave the greatest Indian tribe in North America…THE HAIDA NATION…BLANKETS,…. FULL OF SMALLPOX….. THE HAIDA NATION WENT FROM 15,000 INDIANS TO 2500 OVERNIGHT……… WE DIDN’T KILL THE INDIANS…. OH YES, WE DID…. BUT THE INDIANS ALSO KILLED US WHITE GUYS… did you ever hear of the Boston massacre….. And how the Indians got their first horse and gun…. Was by coming in the middle of the night, sneaking into the house, killing the people that lived there, THEN STEALING THE HORSE AND THE GUN….INDIANS…ARE THIEVES…big time
You’re not using it… Why shouldn’t I have it?
This comment mixes one painful truth with several racist lies.
Yes, the Haida Nation and many other Northwest Coast Peoples were devastated by smallpox. The 1862 smallpox epidemic was catastrophic. Historical accounts report that many coastal Nations lost staggering numbers of their people. The Haida, like many others, suffered immense loss, with whole villages emptied, families shattered, leaders gone, ceremonies interrupted, and entire lines of knowledge broken.
That was not a small event. It was one of the great horrors in the making of British Columbia.
But acknowledging that tragedy does not give anyone permission to turn around and call Indigenous Peoples “thieves.” That is not history. That is racism.
What happened in Victoria in 1862 must be faced honestly. Smallpox appeared in a colonial town where officials, settlers, doctors, missionaries, police, and military authorities already knew that smallpox was contagious and deadly. They understood enough to vaccinate many settlers. They understood enough to fear the disease. They understood enough to know that moving infected people would spread it.
Yet Indigenous camps around Victoria were driven out while the disease was already spreading. Indigenous people were forced away from the settlement, including by armed colonial pressure, and sent back along the very coastal routes that connected Nations from Vancouver Island to the North Coast and beyond. The result was devastating. Smallpox moved through the coastal and interior networks of Indigenous life, trade, kinship, and travel.
Historian Robert Boyd’s judgment is severe: “This epidemic might have been avoided, and the Whites knew it.” That sentence matters because it names the moral truth. This was not simply a natural disaster. It was a disaster shaped by colonial decision-making, racial hierarchy, and deadly indifference. Historical accounts estimate that more than 14,000 Indigenous people died in the 1862 epidemic across the Northwest Coast region.
So yes, speak about smallpox. Speak about the Haida. Speak about the loss. But speak truthfully. Do not use one tragedy as an excuse to smear all Indigenous Peoples.
The claim that “Indians got their first horse and gun by sneaking into houses, killing people, and stealing them” is childish fiction when used as a general explanation. Horses and guns spread through complex networks of trade, diplomacy, intertribal exchange, colonial markets, raiding, warfare, gifting, and adaptation over generations. The Smithsonian explains that in the 1700s, horses were moving north from Mexico while guns were moving west from New England through English, Dutch, and French traders. That is the historical record — not a cartoon story about all Indigenous people being thieves.
Indigenous Peoples did what every people on Earth has done: they adopted useful technologies and made them their own. Europeans adopted technologies from Arabs, Asians, Africans, and Indigenous Peoples. Nobody calls Europe “thieves” every time Europeans use algebra, paper, gunpowder, potatoes, corn, tomatoes, chocolate, rubber, quinine, or tobacco. Human history is full of exchange, adaptation, learning, and struggle.
And bringing up the Boston Massacre does not prove what this person thinks it proves. The Boston Massacre was British soldiers firing on colonists in Boston in 1770. The first victim was Crispus Attucks, an African-Indigenous sailor, remembered by the National Park Service as the first victim of the Boston Massacre. That event is not evidence that Indigenous Peoples were thieves. It is evidence that colonial violence was already shaping the birth of the United States.
The deeper truth is this: yes, Indigenous and settler peoples both experienced violence. No honest person denies that. Indigenous Nations had conflicts. Settler societies had conflicts. European Nations slaughtered each other for centuries. Russia, Britain, Spain, France, Portugal, the United States, and many other powers built empires through war, conquest, extraction, and domination. Violence was not unique to Indigenous Peoples.
But isolated acts of conflict do not justify the seizure of entire continents. They do not justify the spread of epidemics through forced removals. They do not justify residential schools. They do not justify child removals. They do not justify outlawing ceremonies. They do not justify breaking treaties. They do not justify taking land, forests, fisheries, minerals, rivers, and sacred places.
That is the dishonest trick in these comments: they take examples of Indigenous conflict or survival, exaggerate them into a racial smear, and then use that smear to excuse colonialism.
The phrase “you’re not using it, why shouldn’t I have it?” reveals the colonial mindset perfectly.