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StahlBro
Trad climber
San Diego, CA
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Geez,
Everyone knows that the indigenous people were just screwing the pooch until whitey showed up and showed them the light.
Nothing ethnocentric about that.
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John M
climber
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Everyone knows that the indigenous people were just screwing the pooch until whitey showed up and showed them the light.
I don't think anyone meant that. I certainly didn't. Its just this glorification of indigenous people that bothers me. They had good things, they had bad things. Just like the Europeans. If we could take the good from both societies, and leave off the bad, then we might have something worth having.
One problem of course would be getting large groups of people to agree on what is good and what is bad.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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adjective
originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native.
"the indigenous peoples of Siberia"
synonyms: native, original, aboriginal, autochthonous; More
I don't like getting long-winded but this a subject important to me.
By the precise definition of "indigenous" so-called Native Americans did not originate in North America. In fact, the only place that any given human can be accurately said to originate from is Africa.
All other places on the globe were migrated to.
When human groups migrated to new areas if there were prior human groups residing there these prior arrivals were usually either absorbed and/or destroyed by the subsequent ones.
This happened in the Western Hemisphere on numerous occasions --- long before Europeans arrived.
The tendency in recent years for certain groups of Americans to suggest that the history of European arrival in the New World is unprecedented in cruelty and heinousness ---is not validated when looking into what is known of the migratory history of the human race. In fact, it was quite normal and status quo, outside of occurring in relatively recent history.
Stronger human groups always supplant weaker ones when choice real estate is involved. Like it or not this is the way that nature functions. Humans and other hominid species have operated like this for millions of years.
Only in relatively recent times have new and radically different political dimensions been injected into this formula so that various moral, legal,and philosophical aspects seem to have been brought into play.
Now we have politically motivated groups that subsist on portraying history and contemporary times as solely consisting of perpetrators and victims.
The perpetrators are conditioned from childhood to feel miserably guilty ---and the victims to feel and act like victims deeply wronged beyond redress.
A particular and specific psychology is thereby actually cultivated to produce a political and social result that can be exploited.
This perp/victim conditioning is not healthy for any society in the long run. Once again, in the service of transitory political ends we have been set at one another's throats --- this time over a history that is misunderstood and taken out of context , and cannot be changed--- despite all the endless hand-wringing and transforming of language and holidays.
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sandstone conglomerate
climber
sharon conglomerate central
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Mario conquered Donkey Kong. I believe he was Italian. For such short legs, he sure could jump over fast rolling barrels.
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clinker
Trad climber
Santa Cruz, California
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No caffeine intake, good taste in music, not indigenous to Seattle.
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StahlBro
Trad climber
San Diego, CA
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I they wanted to do it right Bill Gates should hold a Potlatch and give all his sh*t away.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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A really funny thread.
What do you want, or what would you have wanted? What will make you ok today?
Chief:
I doubt that you are particularly concerned with barbarism, but for the rest, "barbarism" is just a point of view. I understand that it can be er, "challenging" when directly confronted with barbarism, but it's just a place where people were at the time. (It's like there is no room at all for a personal and genetic sense of evolution.) When looked at from a couple of hundred (or thousand) years from now, I'll bet it will look like I'm stupid every minute of the day.
Personally, I'm happy that I've moved to Seattle. It's a nice place to be, if anywhere is conducive to "be."
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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"Only in relatively recent times have new and radically different political dimensions been injected into this formula so that various moral, legal,and philosophical aspects seem to have been brought into play.
Now we have politically motivated groups that subsist on portraying history and contemporary times as solely consisting of perpetrators and victims.
The perpetrators are conditioned from childhood to feel miserably guilty ---and the victims to feel and act like victims deeply wronged beyond redress.
A particular and specific psychology is thereby actually cultivated to produce a political and social result that can be exploited."
Now we have Television, an instant way to learn about others and enjoy them as part of our world.
Now there is an internet, which should be able to show us that others are as creative and intelligent and worthy as we and ours.
Now we have mind-altering substances (but only if ya want to) to mitigate our tribal fear of the others.
AND NONE OF IT SEEMS TO WORK, boo-hoo, boo-hoo.
Do your part and hope the rest do theirs is about all you can expect.
I'd be down with a Bill Gates Sky River Potlatch and Land Grab, StahlBro, my bro.
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dirt claud
Social climber
san diego,ca
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"Cortez and his cohorts would have been skinned and stretched on willow hoops for the amusement of the Aztecs."
I guess you don't know that many other tribes that were non-Aztec helped the Spanish win because the Aztecs treated those other tribes like sh#t. Also, Monteczuma did not make good decisions during the whole affair. And if it wouldn't have been the Spanish it would have been the Brits or French or who knows who else. Are we supposed to believe the Europeans would have never discovered this land if it wasn't for Colombus? Bottom line, no matter how much it may irk you someone would have found it and still treated people like sh#t. It was a clash of civilizations. Perhaps some of you should read up on the evidence they have that the Ansazi tribes fought and used cannibalism to scare other tribes at one point.
"Human remains from other sites in the area were similarly treated, and three explanations have been proposed: hunger-induced cannibalism, ritual cannibalism adopted from Mesoamerica, or something else altogether. Patricia Lambert of Utah State University and Brian Billman and Banks Leonard of Soil Systems, the contract archaeology firm that excavated 5MT10010, propose that cannibalism was associated with violent conflict between Anasazi communities in the mid-1100s, contemporary with a period of drought and the collapse of the Chaco system. They note a sharp increase in evidence of cannibalism between 1130 and 1150, followed in each case by the abandonment of the site, then a decrease in the early 1200s as the climate improved.
A religious leader from a Ute tribe, on whose reservation the remains were found, supervised the archaeological work and will rebury the bones."
http://archive.archaeology.org/9709/newsbriefs/anasazi.html.
Why does whitey hate himself so much when it was his/her ancestors who did the terrible deeds. Any other race that still blames you is just ignorant and bitter. for gods sakes f*#kin get over it.
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MisterE
Gym climber
Bishop, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 7, 2014 - 04:14pm PT
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It has always felt to me like having a Columbus Day was kind of celebration of Imperialism and oppression. It's really not our (current generations) fault it happened, but to make it a holiday?
Aren't we past that?
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Spider Savage
Mountain climber
The shaggy fringe of Los Angeles
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I'm for changing it to NatAm day for sure. Way more fun.
However, some are giving Columbus a bad wrap. He was just the navigator.
It was the jerks who were running the Catholic Church at the time who made a mess of things.
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MisterE
Gym climber
Bishop, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 7, 2014 - 05:04pm PT
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Let's just agree to disagree, The Chief.
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crunch
Social climber
CO
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It was the jerks who were running the Catholic Church at the time who made a mess of things.
Yea, the Columbus' discovery has a complex legacy. Finding the New World had huge effects on Europe.
The Catholic Church was pretty much the seat of all European knowledge up until 1492 and fully sure of itself at the time. It seemed like everything was already known, already discovered.
What Columbus found, the New World, was to blow this complacency wide open. There were entire races of unknown, civilized and cultured peoples, vast new lands, previously never-seen plants and animals. None of this foretold or described in the Bible, nor by the ancient Greeks.
Columbus's discovery led to the edifice of the Cathoiic Church as the source of all knowledge and wisdom being doubted and questioned. Which the Church hated, but they had no response, no way to explain this new, parallel world. With doubt came fresh ideas and thoughts and over time came the Enlightenment and rise of modern scientific and secular thought.
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MisterE
Gym climber
Bishop, CA
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 7, 2014 - 05:21pm PT
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Excellent non-partisan historical post, crunch - thanks.
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blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
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Crunch (and "Mister E")--I don't know where you learned that but it's certainly not the version of history that I've ever heard (i.e., that somehow Europeans and the Catholic Church thought they knew everything before Columbus' discovery (well maybe you're right about the Catholic Church).
Check out the "Age of Discovery"--and remember what we learned in grade school about he Portuguese sailing down the west coast of Africa and then around the Cape and all that, which predated Columbus.
Obviously Columbus' discovery was huge, I don't mean to minimize it, but to see his voyage as something that came of the blue is not historically accurate--the Europeans were busy discovering stuff at the time of Columbus, and he was a part of that, maybe the most important part from our perspective, be he certainly didn't start it.
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looks easy from here
climber
Ben Lomond, CA
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Meh. Berkeley's been celebrating that for over 20 years, and Santa Cruz has for probably a decade.
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crunch
Social climber
CO
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Hey blah blah, yes your right about voyages of discovery around Africa. But African had ben known about for centuries, so intellectually posed no challenge to existing European knowledge. The African peoples were regarded as barely-human heathen savages, whereas in the Americas were found entire cultures and civilizations that had arisen without any knowledge of the Church or of a Christian God.
I don't really know that much detail. There's a cool book, Shores of Knowledge by Joyce Appleby, which delves into this in detail.
I'd be psyched to learn more.
What's "Age of Discovery" a book? movie? TV series?
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Didn't Northern Exposure have an episode to this effect years ago?
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sandstone conglomerate
climber
sharon conglomerate central
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Anyone ever read the Jesuit Relations? Very interesting observations on the eastern tribes by a group very much at the mercy of the huge confederations that existed at that time.
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cuvvy
Sport climber
arkansas
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Such a silly holiday. Makes no sense. Uneducated's folk hero
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