Posted on 08/31/2005 7:32:03 PM PDT by Mobile Vulgus
Next week my daughter will go back to elementary school, and I will be faced with a choice. At some point the curriculum will cover the environment, and she'll be taught that before Europeans settled the Americas the Indians lived so lightly on the land that for all practical purposes the hemisphere was a wilderness. The forests and plains, the teacher will explain, were crowded with bison, beaver, and deer; the rivers, with fish; flights of passenger pigeons darkened the skies. The continent's few inhabitants walked beneath an endless forest of tall trees that had never been disturbed.
But in recent decades most archaeologists, anthropologists, and geographers have come to believe that this Edenic image isn't true. When Columbus landed, the new research suggests, the Western Hemisphere wasn't filled with scattered bands of ecologically pure hunters and gatherers. Instead, it was a thriving, diverse place; a tumult of languages, trade, and culture; the home to tens of millions of people - more, some researchers believe, than Europe at that time.
Then, the majority of native Americans lived south of the Rio Grande. They were not wanderers with tepees; they built up and lived in some of the world's biggest, most opulent cities. Tenochtitlán, the greatest city in the aggressive military alliance best-known as the Aztec empire, may have had a quarter-million inhabitants - more than London or Paris. It glittered on scores of artificially constructed islands in the middle of a great lake in central Mexico. On first encountering this metropolis, the conquistadors gawped like yokels at the great temples and immense banners and colorful promenades. Hundreds of boats flitted like butterflies around the city's canals and the three grand causeways that linked it to the mainland. Long aqueducts conveyed water from the distant mountains to the city. Perhaps most astounding to the Spaniards, according to their memoirs, were the botanical gardens - at the time, none existed in Europe.
...Go read the rest this is a good one...
That's what poor people do in rural areas. The accumulate large amounts of large discards. While we city dwellers are left with limiting our own discards to an un-used hibachi on the fire escape and a dead potted plant.
Well, actually, as the article seems to concede, above the Rio Grande it was.
Except that they weren't "ecologically pure." Ask the American mammoth, the American sabertoothed cat, the American horse, etc., etc.
"But let us also recall that N America once had horses, camels, and elephants. The Indians never learned to make use of these animals, but instead simply ate them. Horses, camels and elephants became extinct in N America due to over-hunting by Indians. Entire elephant herds would be stampeded off a cliff so that Indians could have dinner. This is not good wildlife management.
I teach my children that Indians were primitive stone age people who mis-used their environment, engaged in constant warfare, and thought bloody tortures were good public amusement. It helps balance the Disney Pocahantas image the public schools like to promote."
I don't know if you're usually this elegant and concise, but this post certainly lives up to your name. ClearCase_guy indeed! Very well said, and there is no least trace of sarcasm in what I'm saying about it.
"And in that statement lies the solution"
Not for everyone, however. It may be the best solution, but not everyone can do it. Some because they are too busy scratching for a living, and some people are just lousy teachers, no matter how hard they try. There is an alternative, however. IF you are a good teacher, and have the patience to jump through the necessary hoops, become a public school teacher. You can impact hundreds or even thousands of lives that way. If enough of us do it, (I'm practicing what I preach, having finished my bachelor's last fall, done my student teaching internship this spring, and I'm working on a masters in Special Education while I wait for my certification papers to be completed) we can have an enormous impact, and seriously counter the liberal agenda most of us are at least irritated by.
Earlier still, Indian Reservation
( Paul Revere and the Raiders )
They took the whole Cherokee Nation
And put us on this reservation
Took away our ways of life
The tomahawk and the bow and knife (I always heard this as "bowie knife")
They took away our native tongue
And taught their English to our young
And all the beads we made by hand
Are nowadays made in Japan
Cherokee people, Cherokee tribe
So proud to live, so proud to die
They took the whole Indian Nation
And locked us on this reservation
And though I wear a shirt and tie
I’m still a red man deep inside
Cherokee people, Cherokee tribe
So proud to live, so proud to die
But maybe someday when they learn
Cherokee Nation will return
Will return
Will return
Will return
Will return
IIRC, the tomahawk was introduced by the British traders, and Indian bows were slack-stringed sticks, not very effective. Nothing at all like the English longbow, and they had nothing at all like the composite bow.
"...and thought bloody tortures were good public amusement."
They're not?
Nowadays, being so much more "civilized", we have Congressional "Hearings".
Uh, no. I think they were probably gawking at the seemingly endless human sacrifices, blood soaked walls, violent torture, and general savagery displayed by those cretins.
They weren't restrained by any silly notions like all cultures are equally good. So because they had experience with similar evil in their dealings with muslims they wrote off these people as trash to be disposed of. Right or wrong it's obviously understandable.
I thought that too and quit reading. It doesn't make any difference to me who's doing the "creative" history writing, if it's a lie for any agenda, it's wrong.
I thought white men taught Indians to scalp because they were paid to prove kills? Don't get me wrong, some of their cultures were brutal but I thought I read scalping was taught to them.
Those civilized and humane Indians: Huitcilopochtli demanded blood sacrifice up to 20,000 a year. Ritual chopping off of limbs and the more blood the higher the rank ad nauseum. Cannibalism common.
Those darn Euros. They wanted to rid them of that.
Yes, but there's no screaming, no pathetic victims writing in the flames: nothing to keep up the birth rates of the spectators (the ancient rituals were very good at that).
Congressional hearings are not nearly as much fun as a good impalement.
"Those civilized and humane Indians: Huitcilopochtli demanded blood sacrifice up to 20,000 a year. Ritual chopping off of limbs and the more blood the higher the rank ad nauseum. Cannibalism common.
Those darn Euros. They wanted to rid them of that."
O hogwash!
During the same centuries of the Spanish Conquistadores, 50,000 people, mostly women, were burnt to death in public (after having been tortured and raped for days in the privacy of dungeons) for witchcraft.
In Scotland, same era, 20,000. Always in public. Always a spectacle. Including boiling in lead, hacking off limbs and breasts, etc.
The Conquistadores were not connected with the Protestant religion, which was doing all the fun in Germany and Scotland. They were associated with the Catholics, who had all the fun of the Inquisition going on down in sunny Spain.
Blood drenched public torture?
The Europeans were pretty bad about this.
Yes, the Aztec rituals were disgusting.
And that is precisely why Cortes was able to win and, mercifully, bring an end to all of that. You don't really think that it was 300 Spaniards who managed to beat the Aztec Empire in their capital, do you? It was 300 Spaniards and between 20,000 and 40,000 Mexican Indians, of the subject tribes of the Aztecs, who had their own reasons (other than the lust for gold which moved Spanish hearts) to want to stop being farm animals for the sport of the Aztec nobility.
For bloody hideousness, you wouldn't have wanted to be on either side of the Atlantic in 1560. The Europeans were no better than the Indians in this regard.
Reviewing revisionist History 101 with me gets you a smirk around here. OK?
Your "fables" regarding torture in Europe in the 16th century is just that - exagerrated stories from the socialist multicultural history readers.
Your silly post is nothing but exagerrations and outright lies of what was happening at the time in reality in western Europe. I wonder why you neglect what the Mooslems were doing in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean around the same time and up into the 21st centry in fact....compared to that, the "inquisition" in Spain was child's play.
If I fault the western Euros with anything it's that they did not liberate their Christian brethren there before tackling the heathens in the Americas.
"Your "fables" regarding torture in Europe in the 16th century is just that - exagerrated stories from the socialist multicultural history readers.
Your silly post is nothing but exagerrations and outright lies of what was happening at the time in reality in western Europe. I wonder why you neglect what the Mooslems were doing in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean around the same time and up into the 21st centry in fact....compared to that, the "inquisition" in Spain was child's play.
If I fault the western Euros with anything it's that they did not liberate their Christian brethren there before tackling the heathens in the Americas."
You obviously haven't read any of the old history books, which say much the same thing as Vicomte13. The Spanish Inquisition killed its hundreds of thousands, if not millions, and the Spanish Reconquista drove the Moors out of Spain, over a period of a couple of hundred years or so, ending in 1492. They also drove out the Jews, and anyone who wasn't Roman Catholic, or forcibly converted or killed them. This is not revisionism, it is history. So are the French attacks on the Albigensians, and the Huguenots.
Much of what the Muslims did in Eastern Europe was every bit as bad as you claim, but the Serbs were doing the same sorts of things, in a tit-for-tat, and had been since 1389's lost battle at Kosovo Polje.
Liberate their Christian brethren? How about enslaving or killing them? The response to that by Protestants has been felt here in America as recently as John F. Kennedy's election. I expect quite a few FReepers remember the fear that a Catholic president would sell us out to the Vatican.
Not all Christians are like that, of course. Unfortunately, there are quite a few people who claim to be Christians who wouldn't hesitate to kill or enslave someone who doesn't believe the way they do. It don't take all kinds, we just got all kinds.
Fables?
Denial of history does not make the history false, grasshopper.
I seem to remember hearing that the Indian tribal name Algonquin means "Eaters of men".
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.