Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Family ties




The basques.

Many people dont really know what a basque is, and because of this, i would like to introduce you to these interesting people. Nowadays the only thing that people even know about the modern basque region is that the sepratist group ETA is from there. Now, dont get me wrong, these motherfuckers are some assholes and train bombers and i would like to distance myself from them and their ideologies during this post and emphasize the fact that just as every middle eastern may not be up to no good, the same goes for my people in the Pyrenees. Why are they so mad? well, despite the fact that they have their own language, flag, economy, and society, spain refuses to give up their tiny tract of land and let them be their own country.

The basque people have a strange and mysterious history. They live in the pyrenees between spain and france in a tiny little principality that has been ass raped historically by everyone surrounding it, thus their anger toward spain and france. My family came to america from there in the late 30's-early 40's to become loggers in the northwest, specifically central oregon. central oregon (i guess) has similar terrain to the pyrenees and therefore it had a huge appeal to my kinfolk, who travelled way over there to cut down oregon's gigantic trees


(not a real photo of my ancestors, duh)

Ever seen picasso's guernica?



Guernica is a painting about a basque village. During the spanish civil war the spanish government basically sold a basque village to the germans for target practice. they strafed the village with bombers and gunned down people in the street ruthlessly. sweet of them right? see, basques were famous and you didnt even know it.

Another strange thing about these dudes is that they have a language that was mysteriously developed with no basis on any language anywhere near it. from wikipedia:

The impossibility of linking Basque with its Indo-European neighbours in Europe has inspired many scholars to search for its possible relatives elsewhere. Besides many pseudoscientific comparisons, the appearance of long-range linguistics gave rise to several attempts to connect Basque with geographically very distant language families.

anyway, these dudes are ill, and i encourage you to check out their history, because its my history too. Wikipedia's always a good starting point. heres some links.



basque people
basque language

Basque people in the colombia river basin

2 comments:

jay atkins said...

super tight man. i met some basques in mexico and they were really cool. its too bad ETA is the loudest voice for the basque people, and that thats all a lot of folks know about them.

euskal presoak, euskal herrira. word.

King of Daves said...

Tight. I was telling one of my students about the Basque people the other day. And how you especially are super gay. (jk) Also, their language is what's called a 'language isolate'.