Well That's Just Mean

Zinn's history of America was certainly not what I expected to find in such a book.  While I was aware of many atrocities committed against the natives by European settlers, I was not expecting the massacre to be so expansive or so purposeful.  The passage from Powhatan (Zinn 13) struck me the most out of the book.  The chief completely resigns from the fighting and the conflict.  He doesn't seem to harbor any hidden grudges; he wants to stop the death of his people.  The fact that he failed to bring about any sort of meaningful peace suggests that some of the violence resulted from a real hatred between the two peoples, a hatred that is often covered up as a necessary sacrifice for the sake of human progress in the textbooks.  I have never really thought that much about how European settlement affected the natives, but after reading the first chapter of Zinn, I really feel like we've lost a culture that could have taught us a lot about how to live.
While the Cullen reading didn't have quite as profound of an effect on me, it was interesting to see how some Puritan values still persist today.