In this video I show how to make a simple distillation kit from a water bottle that can be used to make fresh water from ocean water. Any steel container could work for this project. I almost used a small stainless steel food container, but decided a water bottle was a more practical object to carry...
Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photos via Library of Congress & Wikimedia Commons.
Native American Slaves: Historians Uncover an Overlooked, Chilling Chapter in U.S. History
America’s Other Original Sin
Europeans didn’t just displace Native Americans—they enslaved them, and encouraged tribes to participate in the slave trade, on a scale historians are only beginning to fathom.
By Rebecca Onion
Here are three scenes from the history of slavery in North America. In 1637, a group of Pequot Indians, men and boys, having risen up against English colonists in Connecticut and been defeated, were sold to plantations in the West Indies in exchange for African slaves, allowing the colonists to remove a resistant element from their midst. (The tribe’s women were pressed into service in white homes in New England, where domestic workers were sorely lacking.) In 1741, an 800-foot-long coffle of recently enslaved Sioux Indians, procured by a group of Cree, Assiniboine, and Monsoni warriors, arrived in Montreal, ready for sale to French colonists hungry for domestic and agricultural labor. And in 1837, Cherokee Joseph Vann, expelled from his land in Georgia during the era of Indian removal, took at least 48 enslaved black people along with him to Indian Territory. By the 1840s, Vann was said to have owned hundreds of enslaved black laborers, as well as racehorses and a side-wheeler steamboat...
