Ole Bull (are you a fiddler?) writes:
>And who sings for the thousands of colonists who were tortured alive, butchered or taken into the wilderness by the native >americans who were not troubled by the concepts of racial genocide; the farmers and particuarly the wives and babies who >suffered so. This is a part of our history which we convieniently forget, ignore or pretend that did not exist.

When I was in school 25 years ago, this was far from forgotten--indeed it was emphasised much more than the number of Indians killed. I don't know how things have changed.

Certainly all those killings should not be forgotten. But it's also worth remembering that contact with the Europeans and European-Americans slowly reduced the indigenous population of the Americas by 90%, through outright massacre, war, starvation, disease (which toward the end of the process some whites spread deliberately), and despair caused by bereavement and cultural destruction. The death toll during the past 500 years has been over 100 million. (This information is from an article in Science magazine a few years ago; it called the deaths of the indigenous Americans due to European settlement the greatest disaster in history.)

Of course this doesn't make the deaths of Ole Bull's ancestors any less sad or painful. Here a Navajo friend of mine might say that you can't rank suffering, that you can't say a million deaths outweigh a thousand. (Folk music provides good examples--a song protesting a fare increase on the Boston subway may be more popular than one about the Battle of the Somme.)

As for whether whites understood the plight of the slaves--I think it's obvious that initially most didn't, or why would Uncle Tom's Cabin and abolitionist speakers like Frederick Douglass have had any effect at all? What they did was open people's eyes. There was a gradual increase of awareness from the seventeenth century when slavery was widely accepted through 1865 when it was outlawed--and the attitudes that made slavery possible are still found, though rarely. However, I believe it's now possible to sing "Old Black Joe" looking at those attitudes critically rather than adopting them.