What if other islands had suffered the same fate as Tasmania?

Next year I have an amazing opportunity to spend a year of my education at the University of Guam. Guam is a tiny, but beautiful pacific island in Micronesia, with some of the kindest people I have ever met. The native Chamorros make it their business to make me and anyone else feel welcome. For instance, knowing that the family I stayed with over winter break had only been in Guam a few months, a coworker invited us over to their home for Christmas dinner. I can’t wait to meet more people and learn about Guam’s culture and history. For this reason Sven Lindqvist’s brutal description of the extermination in Tasmania affected me the most. The same fate could have easily been bestowed on Guam’s native people under different circumstances. This realization made the destructive history of my European ancestors even more horrifying to me.

My ancestors believed that people unlike themselves were inferior and in the 19th century they found false justification in Darwin’s theories of evolution and Spencer’s notion of “survival of the fittest” to wipe out these “inferior” people. They believed it natural for the “superior” races to live on, while the “inferior” would slowly die out. This belief led to the killing of many innocent people, which Europeans passed off as a good deed as they were preventing the “inferior’ from suffering a slow painful death. It was with this mindset that the whole population of native Tasmanians were tortured and slaughtered in less than eighty years, “A man called Carrots became renowned for having murdered a Tasmanian; he then forced the man’s wife to carry her dead husband’s head hanging round her neck,” (Lindqvist, 118). Similar horrors were forced on indigenous people around the world.

The Spanish colonized Guam in the early 17th century. This was around the same time the colonization of the Americas was happening. They suffered much of the same treatment as Native Americans had. Amazingly they were able to come out of it alive and free, with their culture intact.

It is upsetting to me that I did not know anything about the horrors committed under my European ancestors colonization. Even though I am deeply ashamed by how they treated innocent people and it is easy to ignore what happened, I think we owe it to the living decedents of the indigenous peoples to remember. I think it is okay to appreciate our ancestors for the great things they have done, but it is not okay to ignore their faults.