You know nothing: Indians.
Fucking hippies. So, there is no archelogical evidence to support the idea that Native Americans were more in tune with their enviroment than any other culture at their level of advancment and population size. What's that you say? What about Chief Seattle's great speech to a govenor trying to buy his lands?
How can you buy or sell the sky?
The land? The idea is strange to us.... Every part of this earth is sacred to my people.
Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and experience of my people.... Will you teach your
children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of earth. This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.
Nice speech, right? Oh yeah, it's fucking made up. Written for a TV show called Home by a WHITE MAN. White people are always at the core of all bullshit.
Oh yeah, and this guy HE WAS FUCKING ITALIAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
9 comments:
i'm with Elk and Geronimo, 'in touch w surroundings' is culturally relative . plus that is one false speech, of about a thousand or so other real speeches that were recorded (but mostly forgotten) by history ,and ended with indians getting torn apart by cannonballs and shit.
Eh, I'd again say that considering population size, and technological advancement they were no different than any other culture of human beings at similar levels. By the time Europeans made their way to North America they were far more wasteful and vile creatures, but if you wanted to compare the natives to Bronze Age European tribes they are right on par.
pretty bold and blanket statement sir. given that technology does not correlate with your awareness or 'in touch'ness to the world around you.
many would argue the exact opposite. and given that settlers had trouble settling the land itself i would call your statement the opinion of one man based on assumptions in the past and not scientific fact (i know, you hate that dont you).
they were no doubt on a completely different path, but dont forget that there are many different paths in the universe and the one that lead to guns, metal, roads, biological warfare (although primitive) may not prove inclusively that they were more advanced or in touch with shit. it only gave them the ability to easily conquer and prey on the trust of people they considered primitive.
anyway, lets not forget that 'native american' in my mind includes at least central and also south america
The inevitable point that I was trying to make was that we have romanticized these people to a certain extent, and that when comparing their actual level "awareness" with the environment we see commonalities between them and other cultures. The Indian tribes used slash and burn agriculture, and hunted local wildlife to extinction on occasion. The Mayans had dumps and burned their trash. They also recycled, which again I think shows the more real nature of their practices. Make no mistake I am not saying that somehow "the white man" knew more or anything like that. Just a providing little light on a subject that, for me at least, was previously dark.
indeed, i think that while in my mind i believe we owe these dudes a lot, i do think that the idea of what an indian or native american is certainly represents our false ideas of the perfect little pilgrim landing where we all smoked peace pipes together and ate turkey. not true in the least.
however, we did kill them off via one of the largest genocides in history if you include all of europes expansion into the 'new world'. and if we include the advanced farming techniques, societal structuring, and even the myans calendar that is still up to date (although thats a broad spectrum) we can see that the natives, in their own ways, were more advanced in certain areas. i mean im not calling the motherfuckers geniuses but they did teach us a thing or two and we might be saying something different if we all cohabited nicely instead of just killing 95% of them.
anyway i can agree with you in a lot of ways. i cringe anytime i see someone with tassels on.
oh yes also i love these comment wars. keep em comin.
Yeah, I had just always thought that the Indian Tribes left almost a zero footprint. Which really is a ridiculous premise looking at it now. Especially to hear they used slash and burn, which after a little reading, they must have picked up right before they made their migration over the Bering Strait because it was only dated to about 11,000 years ago.
As far as genocides go. I don't understand how humanity can be SO FUCKING STUPID that it still, to this day, cant figure out that it is a bad idea to not try and learn from other cultures. Something in our brains just goes, "IT'S DIFFERENT, KILL IT KILL IT!" We are xenophobic fucks.
oh yes and i forgot to mention that the whole 'slash n burn' thing is a bit of an exaggeration.
'slash and burn' by todays standards is wrecking a whole forest and burning that shit down to make cow pastures.
slash and burn on a native american scale at that time is cutting down a small swath of land (presumably one that may already have crops on it or did at one time many cycles ago) and burning the remainder of the plant life to fertilize the tilled soil.
slash and burn on that scale can actually be good for the soil underneath it. c'mon richard you know they werent wrecking whole forests with bulldozers.
ex: preserving a forests undergrowth for too long (unnaturally) can cause a buildup of underbrush that actually makes them more prone to forest fires. one of the reasons you see so many in the west in modern times is because in a natural situation the forest will burn off selections of itself due to lightning strike/whatever and leave the floor with less brush to burn. since we dont let the forest do that and havent for hundreds of years its like 100000sq/mi of kindling. a slightly off topic example but you get the point. fire on a small and naturally occuring scale can be good for the earth, were just too scared of it/dont know how to control it as well as she does.
read this particularly the 'role of fire by natives' section.
My point isn't that they were able to achieve the scale of deforestation that Europeans of the time, or people today are able to do. They taught Europeans a whole lot about agriculture, but it wasn't with this perfect mythical type of oneness with the Earth. Here is a good book that is on google:
The Ecological Indian by Shepard Krech
"According to archaeologists, American Indians often so pressured or depleted basic resources like land and trees that they had to swtich from one type of food to another or move the locations of their villages."
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