I'm thinking we should serve enslaved Indian tribes for dinner tonight...

:sarcasm: How's that wet your appetite? I may be a full blooded Italian, but I'd to have some good ole American hash on the side mixed with manifest destiny, middle Eastern style...

Why the hell do we even celebrate this myth every year, anyway? And now, from one of my favorite books, which I"m still reading-

... Howard Zinn's chapter on, Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress, 'A People's History of the United States, 1492 - Present'...

"When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to vacant land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indians, The governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, created the excuse to take Indian land by declaring the area legally a 'vacuum.' The Indians, he said, had not 'subdued' the land, and therefore had only a 'natural' right to it, but not a 'civil right'. A 'natural right' did not have legal standing.'..."

Ya see where we get this stuff? Enough, already. Let's face this farce on the day lots of working people take off in "honor" of our past "deed"...

So, quit bitchin' and get on with reality.

... and you think I SHOULD get on with reality?

:P ... Oh, my.... God

Why is their tradition and culture built around silver and weaving wool? What is their relationship with the Pueblo Indians? Did the Plains Indians wage war against each other?

I think you're right, I will continue to get on with reality. Care to join me?

:hi:

... and you're right, it IS reality.

So, we ARE getting on with it. The only difference is that tribal wars can be fought on a more equal scale.

It might be better for you to "imagine, if you will" another species with far advanced technology, then using it to gain inhabitance. I think we'd be more traumatized by those odds.

As Zinn says, ""in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia" is something for which we are already late. But, the "easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)- that is still with us."

Evolution starts with admitting that we all have to acknowledge reality, KC. I've already joined you.

That's always the comeback to the whole "evil white man" argument - that the Indians fought each other also, so what's the big deal. Maybe so, but the Indians didn't engage in wholesale genocide against each other. They didn't systematically slaughter each other for no good reason like the Europeans did. Look at the way that the Europeans treated the Native Americans - you cannot in good faith tell me that they were treating each other with such disdain. The Native Americans fought each other as equals - the Europeans considered the Native Americans as sub-human, as savages. I don't recall ever reading about Native American tribes deliberately infecting other tribes with diseases like smallpox.

there are no Rousseauean noble savages and it's a little condescending to hint that there ever were. All humans behave in exactly the same shitty ways to one another. Arguing degrees of evil or access to more profound evil is pointless.

And the behavior of everyone you describe as "evil" in another person's point of view is "regressed".

Of course, I tend to see behavior as learned, which explains me wanting to expose and challenge previously learned myths, like Columbus Day.

The ate each other.

http://www.canyonsworldwide.com/chacoCanyon/p25.htm

... eat each other.

Whoever finished first must have won! :P

what would you say about Roger Williams then? Not everyone was a bastard.

Yet, we celebrate what is clearly a myth, neh?

1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.

Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions


It might have been true for people of Vonnegut's generation--and I'm not even entirely convinced of that--but not so much today. I think that you'd be hard pressed to find anyone under 50 in the US who honestly thought that colonization was an unproblematic event. Instead, you're merely seeing people who either a) really don't give a shit about 600 year old dead indians, or b) realize that the world is a complex place.

Eh?
;-)

We're really no different now than we were 500 years ago.
500 years is not much time at all on the evolutionary scale.
We'd like to think we've grown and learned in that time, but we haven't really.
We're an adolescent species, and we're going through a painful growth spurt right now.
Hopefully it won't kill us...

... and that is the intent is of my OP. I can see some people are "too uncomfortable with it". Interesting....

It's uncomfortable to admit that as a species, we still should fess up to our infantile patterns and response to the lowest of our "chakras"

But, that's exactly what it is.

Everybody overlooks my Viking heritage in favor of some upstart Italian dude. I feel oppressed. Norwegian-Americans unite!

Let's try to replace something really controversial with something even more controversial.

The Clovis people, also known as Paleo-Indians, are generally regarded as the the first human inhabitants of the New World, and ancestors of all the indigenous cultures of North and South America. However, this view has been recently contested by various archaeological finds which are claimed to be much older.

This should piss off the Christian Conservatives, too!

As an Italian American, I'll support to replace Columbus Day with it-

http://www.clubworkout.com/bonvoyage/animation/erikthered/

:hi: