Take him out Alice!
Posted on 03/17/2005 4:52:00 PM PST by hleewilder
"Two Dogs Kissing, the White Eyes are descending on our encampment...Let's gather our young Braves together and drive them from our sacred hunting grounds! What say you?"
"Well, Crazy Cat, ordinarily, I'd say 'go for it', but looking up into the sky, I couldn't help notice that the Spring equinox isn't for another two weeks..."
Shucks, and here I thought it was because:
1. They didn't have easy access to mineral wealth.
2. Hadn't evolved, for the most part, past the hunter/gatherer stage, due in large part to the lack of decent domesticated animals. At least prior to the Spanish Conquest, anyway.
3. A state of constant warfare between many tribes, due to constant encroachment on each other's territory.
As for the last, there was a push there for ahwile to point out the difference between how the Amerindians and the European settlers viewed the concept of property. The argument went something like this:
Problems arose when Europeans decided to fence in and claim plots of land as their own individual territory, while to the aborigines, the 'Land' belonged to everybody. You know, another one of those New Age romantic fairy tales.
Sure, the 'Land' belonged to everybody, that is, as long as you belonged to the tribe whose territory that 'Land' was.
Daniel Boone found this out the hard way when, he pushed West into Ohio and the Ameindians there told him that he was trespassing on their hunting grounds, that he should immmediately leave and that he would be killed if they found him there again.
When Boone went back the following season, a couple of people got killed, including one of his brothers.
The book's not bad, but it is typical of the Evil-(White)-Europeans versus the holistic, pre-vegan (Bison meat is natural, right?) aboriginal peoples of the world, who worshipped Gentle Mother Nature and not some frowning, severe patriarchial GOD. Oh yeah, they never developed a written language or the freaking Wheel, for that matter, because they weren't as 'obsessed' with such things as were the Europeans.
Bottom-line: When Sixteenth Century European Civilization met Stone-Aged nomadic tribes on the North American continent, the disparity between their technological development made the conquest of America a forgone conclusion.
Also known as the "manana time" syndrome.
"Aboriginal people were 'focussed'."
Too bad they weren't 'focused' or perhaps they'd be ruling the world.
Europeans were obsessed and focused.
Yeah, the Dodo bird must have been too "focussed" on living also.
I'm a different person depending upon the speed of my internet connection. I spend a couple months a year away from clocks, watches and time keeping and it makes for a markedly different, not better, way of life.
Take him out Alice!
They had the continent for 20,000 years and had worked it all the way up to the stone age. Europeans and others came here and in fewer than 500 years had left footprints on the moon.
Yup, Boone was an interesting character. He wanted to live like the amerindians by hunting and living off the land, but at the time that was considered "speculation". So he couldn't even keep the land that he acquired due to the fact that he had not farmed it nor "improved" it.
His family was the first to settle the valley and by the time he moved away (I think to Missouri), there were over 100k settlers living in the area. He had no idea what kind of floodgates he was pushing open and was surprised at the result.
He reminds me of Gary Kildall, the author of C/PM operating system, who didn't know how to handle the business end of what he had generated. When Kildall stubbed his toe with IBM, Bill Gates swooped in with a cloned version of QDOS and completely bypassed him.
Thanks for that insight. Upon reading your post, it reminded me of how the Romans had developed a professional standing army beating, among others, the Gauls rather easily.
My understanding was that this was, for the most part, due mostly to the penchant of Gallic warriors to pick out individual Roman soldiers oppostite their line and challenge them to individual combat for individual glory and fame.
The Romans ignored this sort of chaotic approach, stuck to their formations and tactics and simply mowed the hillbillies and tribespeople down as the military arm of the first Western society to develop, use and improve bureacratic organization.
You could make the argument, without too much of a stretch, then, that the conquest of the Americas was an ongoing extension of the Roman/Western European tradition of expansion.
Individual bravery, while a noble and worthwhile accomplishment, still loses hands down to superior equipment, tactics, training and organization, all else being equal.
So they came for the dog racing?
Here in North America, Europeans were outnumbered by the Indians. It's also easily arguable that the average Indian warrior was superior to his European opponent. The difference was the fact that the Europeans stuck together in a line and fought as a group. An individual Indian, no matter how brave, could not stand up against a whole company of Whites formed in a line like a bunch of Greek Hoplites.
There were horses here 14,000 years ago, but the eco-friendly Indians ate them into extinction.
Thanks for recommending the book. I'm a big VDH fan.
"harmonizing their lives with the cycles of the seasons"
DUDE. Cycles and seasons IS time!!
So is birthing cycles. Is this guy claiming that the Indians didn’t notice that the sun went down about the same "time" every day? And if the Aztecs and Mayans were not so interested in time why did they create all those calendars!!??
Nutty, nutty, nutty.
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