User blog:CmdrTako/In order to subjugate someone you must instill in them artifical wants

The miners say, "Before the miners arrived here, the Indians lived their normal life. They lived in the jungle but now they have more comfort, they have more food, and the gold miners bring them progress. They bring them food, clothes, all the things that they need. And the Indians adore the miners.

The impression that people have on the outside is that the miners fight with the Indians. This is not true. The Indians love the miners, and the miners like the Indians."

But the miners do this not out of love, to satisfy their wants, but to instill artificial wants in them; so they become dependent on miners for food and other goods.

At first they give away tools, machetes, cooking pots, and begin providing the Yanomamo with food, things like rice and sugar. And eventually, particularly the younger men, who don't like to make gardens to begin with, become very highly dependent on mining camps that are located near their villages. So they stop planting. When the miners stop giving them food and other goodies after enough miners get there and they can resist Yanomamo demands, then that puts the Yanomamo into a very unfavorable kind of relationship with the miners. They no longer are given the handouts that they originally got when the Yanomamo outnumbered the miners, and they have failed to plant their crops, so they become destitute.

"Many people ask for the White man's things. I say to them, 'Don't ask for those things. The miners are only going to lie to you. They've already killed some of our people. They're very fierce. When there are enough of them, they are going to kill us.' That is what I say, but no one hears me."- a Yanomama