Re: off topic: different cultures, same ideas

["mike shupp" mikeshupp@xxxxxxxx]

I dunno that this is exactly apologetics, but...

It's nonsensical to generalize what happened over a 30 million square
mile region over a stretch of say 15 thousand years.  That said, we
know of some extremely pugnacious Indian cultures in the Americas --
the Navaho and Apache in the American SW for example, the Iroquois
league in the NorthEast, and the Aztecs come to a nonspecialist's
mind. Endemic warfare also seems to have accompanied the decline
and disappearance of the Mt Alban culture in southern Mexico, the
Mayas and Olmecs and other Mesoamerican groups, the Chaco Canyon people,
possibly the Hopewellians in the middle west, the Cape Dorset eskimos, and
dozens of South American "nations".


And yet... until comparatively recently, or roughly about the time
of the white man's appearance on the stage, Indian conflict seems
to have hinged on competition for resources, usually in a period of
climatic stress. I.e., closely related tribes spread over broad river
valleys in temperate periods, mixing hunting and farming, and

gradually increasing in population, with little sign of violence.
Then two centuries of drought would set in, and within a generation
we find evidence of widespread warfare, cannibalism, fortress-like
architecture, etc.

There's not a lot of evidence that Indians went to war in ordinary
circumstances for the sort of ideological/religious/loot-and-glory things
that inspired OUR ancestors. They didn't build world empires, and they
didn't build socialism, and they didn't build Dauchau and Auschwitz. They
weren't perfect, but harping on their "savage

brutality" is rhetorical overkill.




----Original Message Follows----
From: "Charles Knouse" 
Reply-To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
To: 
Subject: Re: off topic: different cultures, same ideas
Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2002 12:47:44 -0400

This discussion has brought up a point that I've long thought but am usually
fearful of expressing - which is that, with perhaps a few exceptions here
and there - the history of all mankind, all nations and tribes, is a history
of savage brutality, and the American Indians are no exception. Our culture
has tended to idiolize them in many ways, their connection to nature, etc.,
but the fact, I think, is that they were no better (and no worse) than the
colonists - the tribes fought each other with savage brutality long before
the colonists, and various tribes eagerly jumped at the chance for scalps
and rapine in the French and British conflicts, and certainly many tribes
engaged in tortures that would make a Catholic Inquisitor blush. The fact is
that if the American Indians had been a united nation with justice and
reverence for life the colonists could never have taken this land from them.
So, the myth of the American Indians being somehow superior morally to the
whites is just that - a myth. In the same way that indigenous peoples are
somehow inherently better conservationists than we are is also a myth.

Boy, do I hope there isn't an American Indian apologist on this list,
because I'm going to get a real tongue-lashing now...

Charles

----- Original Message -----
From: "David B. Kronenfeld" 
To: 
Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2002 10:53 PM
Subject: Re: off topic: different cultures, same ideas


> My understanding is that the trees were there when they arrived. But
that

> they eventually, under population pressure, cut them down for
> firewood--leaving them without the means of building boats, and thus of
> important ways of fishing (as well as traveling). And, I gather, that as
> the wood gave out they turned to burning the books in what had been at
> least somewhat extensive libraries. The story sort of looks a little
like

> those cartoons where, for example, Wiley Coyote, runs off a cliff and
keeps
> going horizontally until finally he notices that he is over a great
> drop--and too far from the cliff to grab it or go back. Only it's the
> population that crashes here. We seem to be trying to replicate the
effect
> with our own environmental policies.
>                 Cheers
>
> At 08:47 PM 9/3/2002 -0400, you wrote:
> >Seems far more likely that the Easter Islanders are of Polynesian
> >ancestry -- they wound up on an island with not enough trees for them to
go
> >into shipbuilding again, and so were trapped there.
> >
> >George Scithers of owlswickpress@xxxxxxxx
> >----- Original Message -----
> >From: "Charles Knouse" 
> >To: 
> >Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2002 7:11 PM
> >Subject: Re: off topic: different cultures, same ideas
> >
> >
> > > Fascinating. Have the monoliths on Easter Island been dated? If
Heyerdahl
> >is
> > > right, and I'm sure he is, the original settlers of Easter Island
were

> >from
> > > the western coast of South America, at a time when civilization there
was
> > > well established and probably threatened by invaders.
> > >
> > > Charles
> > >
> > > ----- Original Message -----
> > > From: 
> > > To: 
> > > Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2002 6:10 PM
> > > Subject: Re: off topic: different cultures, same ideas
> > >
> > >
> > > > I once labored at a 11,500-year-old mammoth boneyard in Idaho,
where

> > > scholars
> > > > looked for signs of contact between man and an array of extinct
> >mammals.
> > > > Phil Adamsak
> > >
>
> David B. Kronenfeld       Phone  Office 909/787-4340
> Department of Anthropology       Message 909/787-5524
> University of California            Fax   909/787-5409
> Riverside, CA 92521           email  kfeld@xxxxxxxx
>
> Department: http://Anthropology.ucr.edu/
> Personal: http://pweb.netcom.com/~fanti/david.html




_________________________________________________________________
Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com