How the West Was Lost by Native Americans

Frontiers of Anthropology ^ | 11-20-2012 | Dale Drinnon

[wizr]

Well, I hope you are enjoying the current wave of events.

Instead of “Manifest Destiny”, we are looking at a “jihad” in this country. You had better get ready to bow to allah.

But, if you are a Christian, as I am, and stand for what you believe in, you may have your head handed to you, or worse.

[WhiskeyX]

The definition given for “nomad” by the Ameerican Heritage Dictionary is: “A member of a group of people who have no fixed home and move according to the seasons from place to place in search of food, water, and grazing land.” These Amerindian tribes did in fact have “no fixed home” and did “move according to the seasons from place to place in search of food, water, and” land for gathering herbs.

They are pretty much a textbook example of a nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyle, missing only the grazing livestock and reoccupation of townsites for longer periods of time than plains nomads in the Old World and New World.

[WhiskeyX]

You did not answer the questions. The Amerindian cultures failed to retain control of the land they had conquered and their complete cultural independence for a variety of reasons. Blaming Washington and the Christian religion are only a smaller yet significant part of those reasons. Blaming the European colonists for the fate of the Amerindian cultures may be politically correct yet blindly mistaken for their many half-truths and disregard for much larger truths. The fact is that the Amerindian cultures did an extensive job of destroying Amerindian cultures long before Europeans arrived on the scene to contribute their own efforts to the decline of the Amerindian cultur4es that remained. The failure to recognize these Amerindian contributions to their decline hides some very important truths.

One of those truths with respect to your comment about Islam is how other cultures do not possess or practice the moral imperative to protect and preserve from extinction the other cultures they dominate willfully and/or out of necessity and self-defense. Instead, these other cultures such as Islam are dedicated to exterminating their enemies and not preserving them from extinction.

[Vigilanteman]

OO (and I) are simply pointing out that certain Indian tribes did have fixed locations and were even less "nomadic" than their white counterparts.

Examples:

1. The Pueblo lived in their cliff settlements (NE Arizona and NW New Mexico) for thousands of years.
   
2. The Mandan lived in the Knife River settlement in the Upper Missouri for at least 400 years.
   
3. The Powhattan whom John Smith and the Jamestown settlement encountered had been in the James River Valley for at least two centuries by 1607.

[WhiskeyX]

Osage Orange wrote: “Pretty sure the Chippewa’s, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi’s were pretty well known to live in the Great Lakes region for hundreds of years.....
I wouldn’t have called them nomadic.”

In my response I was very specific in referencing exactly the samee tribes Osage Orange used as his examples when I wrote: “The Chippewa’s, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi’s were nomadic....”

I and other posters had already noted there were less nomadic Amerindian cultures and civilized (meaning city dwelling) Amerindian cultures. Osange Orange and I commented specifically about the “Chippewa’s, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi’s.” So, I don’t see what the Mandan and Powhattan have to do with the “Chippewa’s, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi’s” whose nomadic habits we were discussing.