President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance have proposed that the U.S. should take control of Greenland. A reason for colonization is great mineral wealth that has not been “developed.”

Historically, the wealth of the colonizers goes to those who have the power and wealth to exploit the “natives.” Rarely, some natives exploited their fellows.

The colonized people lost their land, political organizations, languages, legal systems, religious freedoms and economies. Justifications included that Indigenous peoples were primitive, wasting land and natural resources, and needed to be “civilized.”

About 1520 A.D., an estimated 25 million native people lived in central Mexico, where the Aztec's biggest city, Tenochtitlan, had over 200,000 residents. Aztecs were slain by disease and war, and many were sold as slaves by the Spanish.

Around 1708 in the Carolinas, English traders enslaved Spanish mission Indians and sold many New England tribes into slavery. Indians were forced off their lands over European wars.

Throughout the 1700s, land speculators and settlers pushed Indians off their homelands with broken treaties.

By 1879 at the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania, to eradicate “Indianness” students had to have their hair cut, and dress “white,” and native languages and religions were banned. Such programs have been carried out well into the 20th century.

Similar fates occurred to Aboriginal Australians, Chinese peoples, Africans, Asian Indians (by the English), Southeast Asians (by the French), Belgians in the Congo, and so on.

No native peoples have ever gained from being colonized.

Dr. Frederick C. Miller, Butler County