Within a generation, all that remained of the grandiose civilizations of Central and South America were ruins and a wretched collection of plantation slaves, while to the north the impetus of conquest and extermination was only delayed. All the European newcomers were destroyers. The French demolished the nations of the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. In Canada the British invented germ warfare by distributing blankets from a smallpox hospital among the tribes (a method favoured in Brazil to this day), while the freed American colonists pushed westwards behind a shield of treachery and massacre. The appalling fact is that most of the aboriginal inhabitants have been cleared from what amounts to one third of the world’s surface, and it is perhaps even more depressing that the remnants should have been reduced, by and large, to destitution and cultural nothingness. These processes of annihilation have been so thorough that it comes as a surprise to learn that in this continent, north of the Amazon, a major aboriginal group—the Huichols of western Mexico—can have survived with their tribal structure, religion, traditions and art intact.
