The arrival of the colonizers thus triggered a real demographic slaughter because of the epidemics it aroused. Where things went differently, as in the Antilles with the Caribs or in Louisiana with the Natchez, scruples were abandoned, and massacres took place. It is true that the only attempted massacre perpetrated against the Galibi dates back to 1657… One must not lose sight of the fact that if neither systematic manhunts nor methodical destruction of villages were organized as elsewhere in Latin America, it is less because of kindness of soul than because Guiana never reached the stage of a true colony and that the extraction of forest products could never be satisfactorily established. Retreat, scattering in the forest and passive resistance became their main weapons… Then historical amnesia: (we did not massacre the Indians to take their land). It was only their brutal demographic collapse due to the often-imported epidemics that imposed a change of strategy on them. Nothing is less sure… Understanding very quickly that the real intentions of the newcomers differed from their own, the Amerindians, for example the Galibi, fought fiercely. “First myth: (contacts between whites and Indians have always been peaceful). However, this violence of conquest was not comparable with what happened in the rest of Latin America for reasons that the ethnologists Pierre Grenand, Françoise Grenand and Patrick Mengt summarize as follows by deconstructing the colonial myths produced to justify the French presence This is evidenced by the massacre that took place in 1857 during the conquest of Cayenne. “The French upon their arrival slaughtered all the Indians or attempted to reduce them to slavery” says the philosopher Neuville Doriac. The arrival of the first French settlers quickly translated into an attempt to enslave the natives and, faced with resistance, by their massacre. The installation of the Guiana Space Centre in 1964 further strengthened this colonial structure. If the reasons for the French presence changed during the three centuries of French occupation, the social system remains until today characterized by a colonial relationship. They were replaced by slaves as shown by the characterisation “slave colony” appearing in the various colonization projects that succeeded each other from 1626, the year in which Cardinal Richelieu installed the first French settlements in this country. The result was a quasi-genocide of the six indigenous nations of the territory. The Spanish colonizers gave it the name of Eldorado because of the legend of the “Golden King” describing a king paying homage to the gods by being coated with gold from head to toe.
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