Some California Teachers Ditching Traditional Thanksgiving Lessons

Fox News - AP ^ | 11-22-06

[kalee]

And now 200+ years later, some people are screaming, "we was robbed!".

[randita]

I don't get this. He says he wants to portray a more "realistic" version of history. But he's really making his own value judgements about what that history should be.

Hypocrisy on parade yet once again. The same people who condemn those throughout history who have moved to a new land to make a better life for themselves and their families are the very ones who want us to extend open arms to anyone who crosses our borders or washes up on our shores.

[kenth]

Harrah's is a big one, which scoops up the majority of profits from the Indian casinos it runs. But we shouldn't let that get in the way of an ignorant rant.

[antiRepublicrat]

The whole North American Continent was awash in blood from their near-constant inter-indian warfare until they were finally civilized by the musket and the bible

Two words: Iroquois Confederacy.

[2banana]

The early American Indian culture cannot be compared to Western culture, it's like comparing apples and oranges.

Yet the pre-white Indian "culture" is constantly being rammed down our throats as superior...

[-=SoylentSquirrel=-]

The whole North American Continent was awash in blood from their near-constant inter-indian warfare until they were finally civilized by the musket and the bible.

Two words: Iroquois Confederacy.

Another word: Anomaly.

[antiRepublicrat]

Another word: Anomaly.

The point is they were already working towards a stable system of government to promote peace and common protection between tribes before we came long. The first cracks in the confederacy didn't show until nations in the confederacy took different sides during the American Revolution.

[ClaireSolt]

What's this "we"? Are you 500 years old?

[Toggameid]

ping to myself.
Thanks for the post.

[pabianice]

More California Values a la Nancy Pelosi.

[pabianice]

For this metaphore to be accurate, half the students would then have to murder and skin the other half. Might upset the parents, though...

[pabianice]

Almost forgot. The "Indians" also hunted to extinction every North American large animal except the bison, and they tried awfully hard to total those, too.

[khnyny]

You couldn't be more wrong. I know you've read some book (maybe two) about the Indian responsibility, but it's not accurate.

"Send them powder and lead, if you will; but for the sake of a lasting peace, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffalo's are exterminated." General P. Sheridan

"Kill every buffalo you can,...every buffalo dead is an Indian gone." Colonel R.I. Dodge

The American Indian would take leaf branches and drag them behind themselves to cover their tracks in the woods, as it was their intention to leave the land as they had found it, without even their footprints disturbing the landscape. Yes, they hunted, but they did not create the extinctions.

There's documentation to support the theory that the buffalo were actually intentionally eliminated by "the White Man" to aid settlements and to destroy Indian populations.

http://www.american.edu/TED/ice/buffalo.htm
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/tcrr/sfeature/sf_interview.html#c

How did white settlers view the buffalo?

It became obvious that Indians and whites viewed the buffalo from differing points of view. Plains Indians had learned to hunt the buffalo skillfully with a bow and arrow, while the white professional hunter hired to supply meat to railroad crews used a rifle of long distance accuracy. While the Indians became dependent upon the buffalo, Anglo-American culture stressed the cultivation of the land as agrarians with less importance placed on the numerous buffalo. As a result, the buffalo was hunted for sport by the white professional hunters and sportsmen. In contrast, the American Indian of the West had developed a cultural importance on the buffalo as the center of ceremonial and daily life.

What is the difference between a buffalo and a bison?

Most people think that there is no difference between a buffalo and bison, but actually there is one. A "buffalo" can also refer to a water buffalo, and it is a term that describes a larger category of wild oxen. Bison more appropriately describes the North American buffalo, which has short horns, a heavy forequarter, a large head with a heavy mane. When Europeans first saw the bison, it is logical that they called it a buffalo that was similar to what they knew about in other parts of the world.

Is it true that the buffalo nearly became extinct?

It has been estimated that the West held as many as fifteen million to sixty million buffalo at the arrival of the white man. Even with the lowest estimate, the number was severely depleted as a result of the introduction of the transcontinental railroad to the Western homeland of the Plains Indian tribes. By the end of the 1870s, the buffalo was on its way to extinction with an alarmingly low number of less than 1,000 in the West by the end of the nineteenth century. Rapid American expansion in the West in less than fifty years caused catastrophic results for the great animal called the American bison. We're talking about an animal that was almost literally erased from this earth.

[khnyny]

[Yet the pre-white Indian "culture" is constantly being rammed down our throats as superior...]

Well, first, let me say this moron of a teacher in SF went waaaay too far with what, 3rd or 4th graders? What he did was absurd and a little wacky, especially considering the age of the children.

Regarding your above statement, again, I think it's apples and oranges. I don't think that there in an overwhelming meme of American Indian superiority in U.S. culture. Maybe it's just me, but I don't see U.S. society talking about American Indians very much at all, in any way, let alone having positive messages rammed down our collective throats.

[khnyny]

BTW, I'm part American Indian, so perhaps I'm "biased", but I also think that gives me better firsthand info.:) My Dad and Grandad could do amazing things in the "woods", including, hunting with virtually any weapon, tracking and riding horses bareback, to name a few. Dad was in the US Army Aircorps, WWII, flew over Normandy. Happy Thanksgiving.

[He Rides A White Horse]

Chuck Narcho, a member of the Maricopa and Tohono O'odham tribes who works as a substitute teacher in Los Angeles, said younger children should not be burdened with all the gory details of American history.

....or details regarding homosexuality, or details designed to politicize them, so on and so forth.

"Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone!"

[He Rides A White Horse]

Liberals always treat Indians like they are some kind of peace-loving, tree-worshipping, combine-dwelling hippies.

Ahh yes, the "noble savage" clique; like those noble Aztecs who would cut the hearts out of people, living in this utopia until white man came along.

[pabianice]

You couldn't be more wrong. I know you've read some book (maybe two) about the Indian responsibility, but it's not accurate.

I am not attempting to be insulting. The archaeological record of America's first immigrants (now reaching back as far as 20,000 years) is stark. For the most part, they were small groups of neolithic savages long after Europeans and Asians had created civilizations. As each successive wave of early immigrants arrived, they did their best to wipe-out everyone who had arrived earlier. Survivors were enslaved. Almost without exception, those in North America remained hunters and gatherers and left nothing behind. Even the Central and South Americans who built cities traditionally built their religions upon human sacrifice and destroyed all peoples they conquered. This is not a judgment, just a recitation of archaeological knowledge.

[khnyny]

[I am not attempting to be insulting.]

Yes, you are, but that's ok.

[For the most part, they were small groups of neolithic savages long after Europeans and Asians had created civilizations.]

That sentence alone is dripping with condescension and I daresay a certain kind of self-satisfied, fat white man in stained T-shirt, sitting in front of computer type of insecurity. I'm picturing "Newman" from Seinfeld, lol. (Not that you are a fat white man who happens to be insecure, of course. The T-shirt is actually more probable.)

It seems the immigrants to the new world brought their own brand of "condescension" and slavery with them, transforming the way that human beings were perceived in the New World. This new brand of slavery and commerce almost seems to mimic the philosophic underpinnings of 20th Century Nazism, but with a different ethnic group, of course.

http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_es_indians_slavery.htm


Once Europeans arrived as colonialists in North America, the nature of Indian slavery changed abruptly and dramatically. Indians found that British settlers, especially those in the southern colonies, eagerly purchased or captured Indians to use as forced labor in cultivating tobacco, rice, and indigo. More and more, Indians began selling war captives to whites rather than integrating them into their own societies. And as the demand for labor in the West Indies became insatiable, whites began to actively enslave Indians for export to the so-called "sugar islands."

The resulting Indian slave trade devastated the southeastern Indian populations and transformed Native American tribal relations throughout the region. The English at Charles Town, the Spanish in Florida, and the French in Louisiana sought trading partners and allies among the Indians, offering trading goods such as metal knives and axes, firearms and ammunition, intoxicants and beads, and cloth and hats in exchange for furs (deerskins) and Indian slaves captured from other tribes. Unscrupulous traders, frontier settlers, and government officials encouraged Indians to make war on other tribes to reap the profits from the slaves captured in such raids or to weaken the warring tribes.

It is not known how many Indians were enslaved by the Europeans, but they certainly numbered in the tens of thousands. It is estimated that Carolina merchants operating out of Charles Town shipped an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 Indian captives between 1670 and 1715 in a profitable slave trade with the Caribbean, Spanish Hispaniola, and northern colonies. Because of the higher transportation costs of bringing blacks from Africa, whites in the northern colonies sometimes preferred Indian slaves, especially Indian women and children, to blacks. Carolina actually exported as many or even more Indian slaves than it imported enslaved Africans prior to 1720. The usual exchange rate of captive Indians for enslaved Africans was two or three Indians to one African.

Until late in the 18th century, Indian slaves worked on English plantations along side African slaves and even, occasionally, white indentured servants. Women and children frequently were used as menial laborers or domestic servants. By 1720, most whites in the southeastern British colonies preferred enslaved Africans to Indians for obvious reasons. Indians could, for one thing, more easily run away into the wilderness. Also, Europeans always feared the possibility of a coalition of enslaved Africans and enslaved Indians, aided by free Indians on the frontier. What’s more, English settlers played the Indians off against one another in the various Indian wars or wars of empire fought between European colonial powers, using them as allies or as paid mercenaries. Additionally, Europeans commonly believed that Native American men, culturally conditioned to be hunters, considered fieldwork to be women’s work, and that Indian warriors would not adapt easily to agricultural labor in comparison to enslaved Africans. Most importantly, the demand for enslaved labor in the tobacco and rice plantations came to far exceed the potential supply of Indian captives, especially once European diseases began to decimate Indian populations and once the Indians began to more effectively resist European powers.

More:

The Indian wars of the early 18th century combined with the growing availability of African slaves essentially ended the Indian slave trade by 1750. Numerous colonial slave traders had been killed in the fighting, and the remaining Indian groups banned together more determined than ever to face the Europeans from a position of strength rather than be enslaved. Many of those Indians who remained joined confederacies like the Choctaw, the Creek, and the Catawba for protection, making them less easy victims of European slavers.