Posted on 03/08/2005 3:53:07 PM PST by Stoat
It certainly wouldn't be the best thing that ever happened if you were one of the 70 percent that got wiped out. It might very well be a beneficial happening from the perspective of those who survive. A good analogy is the slave trade. A black slave from Africa, taken into captivity and killed horribly on the unthinkably cruel and brutal voyage to the Americas certainly wouldn't have thought the slave trade a good thing. His American ancestors, on the other hand, might perceive things differently. While they still couldn't call the slave trade "good," they could at least acknowledge that its existence benefited them.
FReeper Review
Architectural triumph..... Presentations are obscure. Exhibits contained far too much information, especially written information often written so that glare on glass made it unreadable.
The museum is a failure.
Good heavens! Hillary as President? Surely that would doom us to a new stone age and lives, like those of the Indians, that are nasty, brutish and short!
ahmmmm.. Sequoyah. He is mentioned in the museum
Interesting analogy. Gosh, I wonder how many Blacks in the USA thank their lucky stars every day that their great grandfathers were slaves. My guess would be, not many.
Probably only some of those who have traveled to Africa and seen what their free brethren have been able to accomplish....
The man behind the project was Douglas Cardinal, a renowned native Indian architect from Canada. He worked with designers from the Cherokee, Hopi, Navajo and Oneida tribes nations, but his name was taken off the project because of a contractual dispute.
Full story here: http://encore.dailyheraldtribune.com/Z01_subtext0810.html
I do sometimes chuckle a bit about some 'Afro Centrics' who envision life in Africa as being one of a free and happy go lucky existence or who view Africa as the land of their dreams.
Here's an interesting book that deals with this very subject:
Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa
by Keith B. Richburg
You outa see the scam the so called "Indians" in Connecticut have managed to pull off on the entire state. A group of totally related by blood, mostly Black individuals, with no proven Indian Blood have managed to put together a tribe out of whole cloth and open up the biggest money making casinos in the western world! Finally the state wised up and stopped giving these scammers state recognition as "INDIAN" tribes and they are now trying to get the B.I.A. to reverse it's recognition of these Indian wannabes. Which they recognized only because the state set the precedent. UNBELIEVABLE!
After defeating George Foreman for the heavyweight title in Zaire, Muhammad Ali returned to the United States where he was asked by a reporter, “Champ, what did you think of Africa?” Ali replied, “Thank God my grand-daddy got on that boat!” Ali’s point was that although the institution of slavery was oppressive for the slaves, paradoxically it benefited their descendants.
When I visited the National Museum of the American Indian, it struck me as the most obvious example of the post-modern influence on American culture that I have yet seen. The whole thing is a rejection of what a museum has traditionally been. I understand the urge to approach the project in such a manner: American Indians have not exactly been treated well by western museums in the past. I will say, however, that I left with very mixed feelings about the whole enterprise, and without feeling like I had really learned much of anything.
Yours appears to be a similar impression as what was taken by the author. I haven't been to the musuem, and so it's quite interesting to read the firsthand accounts here. Hopefully the museum will morph into something more relevant and accurate than what it now apparently projects.
I remain unconvinced. Had not Euros arrived, the Americas would be mostly in the stone age today. Again, I already gave credit to the few bits of civilization in Meso America. And I also noted that as of the arrival of the Euros, they were essentially failed states.
The Spanish were burning people alive for witchcraft.
Some civilization..
Bac dangit Bac.
You're missing the forest for the trees.
A lot of bad stuff happened. A lot of good stuff happened. Some good stuff came out of bad stuff happening. Some bad stuff came out of good stuff happening. Learn from history so we don’t repeat the bad stuff as much as possible. Those who win write the history books. History books written by the losers are not history books; they are trying to rewrite history. Reparation for anything done by anyone to anyone or anything generations ago is just plain silly. Any book ever written is just an opinion. Move to the future; don’t dwell in the past. Learn from history, but get over it.
I'd like to see this museum someday.
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