[ppsreejith]

Wealth was definitely created in the colonies but the native inhabitants were almost always adversely affected. In the current wealthiest country in the world, it was the European migrants that benefited while the natives were mostly killed or eliminated.

[ldhough]

How is this being downvoted enough to be greyed out?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_Indi...

[barbazoo]

Is that a controversial thing to talk about in the US?

[ldhough]

People might debate how much of the killing was intentional but I wouldn't have thought it controversial to say that American natives, by and large, did not reap the benefits of colonization and actually incurred major losses.

[brightlancer]

> In the current wealthiest country in the world, it was the European migrants that benefited while the natives were mostly killed or eliminated.

The aboriginal peoples of the Americas mostly died from diseases which they hadn't been exposed to. It was tragic but not unique and rarely deliberate.

But what about the smallpox blankets? Well, smallpox isn't spread through bedding, and that single story happened in the late 1800s after centuries of the aboriginal peoples dying of disease.

Sure, they were monsters for _trying_ to kill those people with smallpox, but it didn't work.

There was plenty of war, also, and later displacement and Indian Schools and other atrocities, but we shouldn't promote a "noble savage" myth or misrepresent what killed the aboriginal peoples: it was disease as a natural consequence of contact with foreign peoples.

[fnimick]

Not just native inhabitants, people like to forget the whole "slavery" thing.