Imagine being a Native American before the Europeans came.

[Floogeldy]

I mean, just imagine with me for a moment.

Days were spent working hard to take that from the Earth with which to survive. Hunting Buffalo (and following the herd) and other game for food, hides, and seeking out water, building shelter. It sounds stressful. But compared to today?

A lot of physical activity went into providing for the family. But such content and, I assume, clean living abounded.

Much different from today, with all of the conveniences and social pressures, i.e., the automobile as a status symbol, fashion, corporate raping of the common man. What a fucking joke.

They either had to kill it and skin it, or grow it. It was survival that required physical activity and acumen. Honestly, I think very few would have needed Prozac and its progeny back then.

I may be a romantic, but I can't help but think that most people were happy.

I'm still struggling with sending the elderly out to die, but survival of the rest may have depended upon the practice.

[XOKCowboy]

1. I think about it all the time

as I travel throughout the west. A large part of my ancestry is native to this country (and I disavow the rest :).

One thing though.. The elderly LEFT to help the tribe from what I read.

[Maddy McCall]

2. Read up on the Mississippian period. I just can't agree with you.

In the 500 years before Euro-contact (the Mississippian Period), American Indians emphatically undertook agriculture, and small groups were being consolidated often by force into larger groups.

Read about Cahokia. Or the Natchez. Or Moundsville.

American Indians overused resources, engaged in warfare (though nothing of the sort that entered the continent with the Euros); their leaders expected tribute, which they used to prop up themselves and their other elite friends; American Indian chiefs manipulated through fear and religion their subjects; Choctaw women were gang-raped by every man in their town if they were even suspected of cheating on their husbands. Oh and so much more.

What I am trying to say is this. It's condescending to perceive of American Indians as perfect people and to romanticize their lifestyles. They were PEOPLE, like you, like me.

[elshiva]

3. Amen. Yes, would have hated being a woman in most of the

tribes. Have babies and cook have babies and cook. It was the same for Europeans back then too, though.

[Maddy McCall]

8. Hard to believe, but there were actually women hunters.

And women were well-respected, often sitting on tribal councils, frequently serving as chiefs.

Indeed, in many Mississippian groups, the men would not go to war without the permission of the women, because they knew that the women would bear the greatest burden of the war.

American Indian history is sooo fascinating.

[elshiva]

9. Yes and no. I've heard some great things and some awful

things. As you said the gang rape stuff. And there was a fair share of the woman's place is at home or gathering in SOME tribes.

[Maddy McCall]

14. But perceptions were completely different.

See my post on the sexual division of labor below.

[cynatnite]

16. Some tribes were better than others....

They took great pains in caring for those in need, took in non-relatives and made them family, and in some tribes homosexuality was considered a great blessing.

But some were brutal. Apaches cut off the noses of their women for adultery, for example.

[Maddy McCall]

19. I agree that there were differences.

But I don't agree that, broadbrushedly, women had it bad. Women were esteemed among most of the southeastern tribes. Their reproductive powers were not only respective, but feared. Many sat on tribal council (Iroquois nations--especially) and women frequently were chiefs.

Sure, there were terrible aspects to being women, but there were good aspects, too.

[henslee]

25. The CA Indians had a unique systtem of loosely connected tribes

ranging from very sophisticated like the Chumash.... to nasty warlike tribes to the East. The Chumash were too difficult for the Spanish Missionaries to deal with. If you look at the location of Missions, they were skipped over.

And from what I understand, the Americas, especially CA was filled with livestock like sabre tooth tigers and variations of elk which were decimated by Indians.

[cleofus1]

29. could you cite some sources?

here is an excerpt from an article challenging some of those notions regarding some issues

http://www.sacredland.org/resources/bibliography/Deloria_on_Krech.html

"Let us now turn to some specific topics that constitute contemporary accusations leveled against Indians, presumably from 12,000 BP to the present by the anti-Indian scholars. . Krech discusses Paul Martin's crazy notion that big game hunters killed off the mega fauna of North America. He cites with apparent approval one of the silly scenarios: ". . one hundred Paleoindians arrived on the Alberta prairies some 12, 000 years ago. Each year, they moved southward just twenty miles and killed only one dozen animals per person. They also reproduced, doubling their population every twenty years." This premise assumes a fantastic scenario since the postulated reproduction rate is unknown in human history. Krech has the same reservations: Except for the reproduction rate, the assumptions underlying these figures seem fairly modest." (p. 34) Neither Krech nor Martin seems familiar with studies on the in a relatively 'natural environment', that is, hunter-gatherers, have decided limited fertility, with late menarche (at age 16 or 17) followed by a number of years of adolescent sterility, late first birth, several years of lactation, and an interval of years or more between births, followed by early menopause." How then are these people going to double every twenty years when it may take a young woman 17 years simply to be capable of being a mother?

First, not all animals are good sources of food. Predators as well as prey became extinct in the Pleistocene loss and one can hardly blame Paleoindians for the nearly 5,000 sabre tooth and dire wolf skulls on the walls at La Brea Tar Pits. Second, a little band of one hundred could not completely clear even a hundred mile area of all big game. The grazers would simply move away from the hunters and go back to their original feeding grounds north of the band as soon as the next spring season came. The idea that there were no animals north of the band that has escaped the last season's hunt is absurd. Every fall massive numbers of hunters with guns, scopes, and other modern instruments of killing conduct a ruthless slaughter of game without seriously denting even the deer population. Were one hundred Indians with spears so much better hunters than whites with guns?

Krech laments: "If only there were numerous archaeological sites with associated extinct megafauna to test Martin's thesis of overkill. But there are only fifty or so sites - a mere handful." (p. 36) This dire is the traditional war cry of the big game hunter theorists. But if you can't test the thesis because there is no evidence, why does it still qualify as a thesis? Why would Krech even pretend that this nonsense should be taken seriously? Here, I suspect, Krech is simply paying his dues to establishment scholars who hold this view. How I would like to get Krech on a witness stand and have him defend his belief.

[Kali]

32. "anti-Indian", "crazy notion", "silly scenarios"?

Deloria was an activist, not a scientist.

[Odin2005]

48. So now it's un-PC for saing paleo-indians drove the megafauna...

...to extinction? The people who think it was all climate forget that those animals survived previous glacial-interglacial cycles. I think the extictions were the result of overhunting at the same time the ecosystems were under stress by the warming climate.

[sundog]

49. Vine Deloria, Jr is a great writer

:thumbsup:

[Radical Activist]

36. Thank you.

There were certainly positive aspects of of many native american tribes before Europeans came that we would do well to emulate today, but that doesn't mean we should romanticize them as some sort of utopian society.

[pitohui]

4. supposedly the men worked 20 hrs a week

i'm of cherokee heritage and that's what i heard, won't vouch for the accuracy, but if so, come on, this boils down the women were screwed and had to do all the work and they just did a little huntin and fishin when they felt so moved

you can have it

[Maddy McCall]

7. That's not so.

Lots of time when you read that men in any tribe were lazy, etc. because they "rarely worked," you are reading books that rely on European sources. SAdly, many American Indians adopted European notions of what constituted work, and their oral traditions were affected by these Euro-tinged values.

Now, I assume you are talking about the Mississippian Period, because, prior to that, men and women shared duties on farmsteads and, prior to that, in hunting and gathering groups. American Indian men in the Mississippian period had duties. They swiddened fields, gathered corn for holy purposes, usually raised their nephews and nieces as their own children, had to endure horrific rites of passage, and, yes, they fished and hunted, but their fishing and hunting was not so leisurely, and it had religions and spiritual connotations. They built homes, city centers, made tools, and performed a ton of other duties...but much of what they had to do that was visible was seasonal.

When European men saw American Indian men sitting on the ground, flint knapping, they perceived it as "not work." What they perceived as "real work" was the tending of the fields, which they saw the women doing, and, therefore, they saw American Indian men as lazy, and American Indian women as industrious. They had no idea that most of the duties of American Indians were based in tradition and religion, and that tending the fields (especially among the Cherokee, whose chief goddess is Selu, the corn mother) was nearly sacred to American Indian women. Indeed, when Euro-americans attempted to force American Indians to adopt "civilization" (European-based notions of what is proper), the first thing they set out to change was women working in the fields. From hence on, men took up the plow and women were to tend to domestic chores.

Sadly, this affected the status of women in many groups. Prior to being removed from the field, they provided the bulk of the diet, which gave them good status in their towns and even in tribal councils. After American Indians adopted European modes of "civilization," women's status plunged in relation to the degree of "civilization" (including perceptions of women) that American Indian men adopted.

By the way, gay men and women had it pretty good in most Southeast Indian groups--they even married and performed "other-gender" chores. A straight man had surely better not carry water, but a gay man (berdaches--they even cross-dressed) took on ALL the traditional roles of the woman--he performed those duties while the man of the house did male chores.

Alright--I'm going to bed. But I want to say to you...never be ashamed of your male forefathers, because they indeed DID work and perform important functions in their groups.

[Radical Activist]

37. Interesting.

I never knew about that. I guess I never thought much about how keeping men as the bread-winners is another way to keep women in dependent subjugation, even in agricultural societies, not just modern times.

[pitohui]

45. hell i got no idea what period i'm talking abt

the cherokee blood is pretty thin in this family, i suspect a lot of stories were just made up on the spot rather than based on any accuracy

i always heard my dad's cherokee grandmother was a princess, but as my dad eventually explained it, "to the cherokee, every daughter is a princess"

ho-kay

so nothing real fact-based there

[William Bloode]

46. Yes and no.

In my tribe(i'm 1/2 eastern Cherokee) men were responsible for hunting/fishing and tool manufacture mostly. And yes women had a few more responsibilities. But the women owned everything, men owned squat. And no it just was not men who moved. If a woman disliked her husband or they had a falling out she could make him leave any time she chose. Men also took a large role in the raising of children. The exception was though a man did not raise his own kids, he raised his sisters kids, due to it being very a matriarchal society.

You have a twisted view of our fore fathers and mothers place. Women had as much or more power than men in Tsalngi(Cherokee) tribal life. They had much more power and control than women in the modern U.S.. A man was viewed primarily as a means to reproduce, kinda like women are viewed by some today.

[Heidi]

5. It was hardly a bucolic existence, and the outcome

(extermination over the long-term as an official policy of the US government) certainly isn't anything to write home about, either. :(

[henslee]

6. There is a great book called "Digger" about plight of CA indians.

http://www.humboldt.edu/~crc/books/digger.htm

[cynatnite]

10. Just as with most whites back then...

life was just as fragile and work much harder...

The women did majority of the work while the men hunted and played games. Most wounds were life-threatening and a woman being pregnant could easily die along with her unborn baby. The young and the old were the most vulnerable.

That's not counting religious and sociological restraints placed on people as well. They warred, conquered and pillaged just as many a white man did.

Quit watching movies with Indians and read a few books. The romanticism will just slip away.

[Kali]

11. Slavery, war, violence and even cannabalism, overuse of natural

resources. Extinctions. Status, competition, drug use - check - all there. The fantasy of happy, basket-weaving, nature nymphs is just that - a fantasy.

Not to say the coming of Europeans was a great experience, but what you describe is just a dream.

[Floogeldy]

12. I'm calling bullshit.

"Overuse of natural resources. Extinctions." Didn't happen.

By the time the railroad made it to the Midwest, trains had to sometimes wait a day and a half for Buffalo herds to cross the tracks before they could continue.

[Maddy McCall]

18. Re: resources. It's true.

Especially with wood. Read up on the huge mound centers that devolved a century before contact. Lack of wood and forest devastation were at least partially to blame, if not primarily to blame.

[cleofus1]

30. more from the above article

"We come, then, to Krech's treatment of ancient settlements that might show Indians demonstrating an appalling lack of conservation concerns, remembering that there was no such thing as either ecology or conservation at the time when there were large settlements in North America. Krech takes on the mystery of Chaco Canyon:

In the arid Southwest, where trees take many human generations to grow, an expanding Anasazi population could easily have stripped their trees for house and kiva construction and for fuel, and to produce arable fields, bringing about a deforestation with various adverse repercussions on all aspects of their lives, just prior to debilitating drought. In Chaco Canyon alone they used over 200,000 (' Wesson, Robert, Beyond Natural Selection, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1993, p. 99) trees in multistory buildings and denuded the land, inviting erosion and destruction of arable lands. (p. 77) (Emphasis added.)

I have emphasized "could have" in this description because it eliminates the requirement to present evidence and relies on pure speculation. It is an accusation without a basis. The question is not whether the Indians could have done something but rather did they in fact do something. The number of 200,000 trees sounded outrageously high to me so I got on the phone and began calling "experts" on Chaco to see 1) if there were that many trees and 2) where they were obtained. The results were predictable, hilarious, and demonstrated that we know virtually nothing about these people. Most of the scholars I called had no idea there were that many trees nor did they know where the trees came from. One very prominent scholar lyrically told me that the trees were harvested in the San Francisco mountains, some two hundred miles west of Chaco, and asked me to imagine little gangs of Indians hauling telephone-pole-sized logs across northern Arizona to Chaco Canyon. No one was able to explain where the wood came from, how it was brought to Chaco, or how the people were organized to accomplish this feat. All of them agreed that the Anasazi had to go some very long distances to get their wood however.

Krech makes it seem like the Anasazi harvested their wood adjacent to the building site, denuding the landscape and turning the area into a desert. There is no evidence for this proposition at all. Visitors to Chaco, if they have read The Ecological Indian, may well stand in that desolate location and curse the Indians for cutting all the trees. They will be wrong! No one knows where the trees came from and no one has pointed out any denuded region nearby caused by tree cutting. "

[Kali]

34. Your source is a book review of a book written by an

anthropologist, a group Deloria wasn't exactly objective about, nor does he have a scientific background in any case. There are some that disagree with Martin, but to use a polemicist like Deloria to refute scientific work is sort of like buying intelligent design or creationism. (apologies if that is offensive, I just happen to lean to scientific works when having these kinds of discussions)

[tigereye]

38. I find mound culture really interesting

could you provide some links and/or resources?

Fascinating information, thanks. I have a lot of friends who are anthropologists, so I am always very careful when I make comments about culture around them!

[Kali]

21. I admit the topic is controversial, but local guy Paul Martin

has done the work check out his book "Twilight of the Mammoths"

[cleofus1]

27. the late vine deloria and others have challenged

martins thesis

http://www.sacredland.org/resources/bibliography/Deloria_on_Krech.html

in my opinion martin is full of shit

[Kali]

33. anybody can have an opinion, science goes on

Deloria was no scientist. He brought many things to the table, but he was really not qualified to review work in the fields of physical anthropology or other hard sciences.

[Wetzelbill]

40. I'd have to agree

he's way off base.

[Kali]

47. and both from the U of A! heh heh

You are in History dept. right? Why do you think Dr. Martin off base? (Or did you mean Deloria?)

[cleofus1]

31. on the "myth of cannibalism"

"Q: Were Native Americans cannibals?
A: Not for the most part, no, but there were some groups who were. The Aztecs were notorious for ritual cannibalism (warriors would eat a strip of flesh from enemies they had slain in combat). Some people dispute this, but the Aztecs' own written and oral histories seem to support it as the truth. There were a few Amazonian tribes who practiced funerary cannibalism (family and friends would eat part of a dead tribal member's body as a religious ceremony at the funeral). Finally, the Carib people of South America were said to kill and eat prisoners of war, though it's been pointed out that the Spaniards who made this claim were lining their own pockets by doing so (Queen Isabella had forbidden her subjects from selling Africans, or Indians, as slaves unless they were cannibals).

None of the other 1200 Native American cultures engaged in culturally sanctioned cannibalism at the time of European contact. That doesn't mean cannibalism never happened--there were certainly stories in the American Indian oral history about cannibalistic incidents (a hunting party trapped in a snowstorm who fell to eating each other, a war chief who taunted captives by striking them in the face with their leader's heart and then taking a bite out of it.) Such incidents also occurred in American and European history under similar starving-in-the-wilderness and war-atrocity circumstances (a company of Crusaders, for example, bragged of having grilled and eaten a Saracen; a Jamestown settler was executed for cannibalizing his wife during a famine). Cannibalism should not be considered part of American Indian culture on this account any more than it would be considered part of European or American culture--it was culturally unacceptable behavior. The Sioux considered cannibalism a sin, the Cree considered it a mental illness, the Algonquin and Ojibwe considered it a sign of possession by an evil spirit. In almost all cases, American Indian cannibals--just like European or American cannibals--were put to death as soon as they were discovered.

Q: But weren't they cannibals before that--in ancient times, before European contact?
A: Most of them definitely were not. It's been suggested that the pre-Iroquois Mohawk and the ancient Anasazi may have practiced group cannibalism. This is possible, though it has not been proven. The Mohawk were called "man-eaters" by their Algonquian enemies on account of this belief about their lurid past. Some Mohawks think it was probably true, others that you shouldn't give too much credence to slurs people's enemies cast at their ancestors. The claim about the ancient Anasazi came more recently, when anthropologists found a burial site with skeletons whose flesh had apparently been hacked off the bones after their death. Personally, I'm not too impressed by that evidence. Even if those bodies were cut up for cannibalistic purposes, we're talking about one anomalous site with only seven bodies in it. Of the hundreds of ancient Indian burial sites exhumed by archaeologists--including dozens of Anasazi ones--this was the only one with this strange appearance. For all we know it was the work of some Anasazi psychopath. We can't assume ancient Anasazi culture included cannibalism from this one unusual case any more than we could say American culture includes cannibalism because of Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer."

http://www.native-languages.org/iaq13.htm

[Kali]

35. Read "Man Corn" by Turner

It is a very thorough SCIENTIFIC work on the subject in the "Anasazi" area. See how evidence is looked at, criteria developed, analyisis done. Read the discussion on science and taboo topics.

It has been pretty well proven. Human coprolite deposited on a hearth, human protien.

[Swamp Rat]

58. This is turning into a debate not unlike Marvin Harris and William Arens.

:D

Let's not forget Europeans were (are) cannibals too. Dried human flesh was regularly sold as medicine and folks drank the blood fresh after executions, especially if s/he was a redhead (see Lyon, 16th C). ;)

(Michel de Montaigne, "Des Cannibals." Jean de Léry also defers “to the histories” and chastises so-called Christians for “chewing and devouring human flesh,” as well as the fat of human bodies consumed during the massacre at Lyon in 1572.

[AngryAmish]

13. Nasty, brutish and short

Just like me.

[LisaL]

15. Yea, they were having fun. Then white men showed up,

and the rest is history.

[Floogeldy]

17. White women showed up, too.

[NMMNG]

20. Sending the elderly out to die

The Inuits sometimes practiced a form of this by placing the aged person on an ice floe and sending them out to sea. While this seems cruel to us, is it any more so than our practice of sending our elderly to warehouses (e.g. nursing homes) where they may live out the end of their lives completely in the care of strangers, subject to possible abuse and neglect?

[Maddy McCall]

22. One of my MA advisors did his anthropological work in ...

Kenya. The people he worked with could not believe that we have such a thing as nursing homes. They just couldn't comprehend it. They told him that they would never put their old people out of their homes. The elderly, among the people he studied, stayed with the little children while the parents worked. They just thought it was horribly barbaric that we have places we send our elderly.

[NMMNG]

23. Precisely.

So while we are clucking our tongues and calling the practices of other cultures barbaric, they are doing the same to us. Some things are indeed relative.

[cleofus1]

26. i believe that's not true...entirely

i think a lot of this "native american history" is colored by agenda and misunderstanding...

"The Inuit practiced geronticide. The past tense is important here. The ease and speed with which they abandonned it attests to how much it was a matter of necessity when they did practice it, not deeply ingrained cultural values. It was also not a universal practice - there were groups that found the notion profoundly immoral well before the missionaries showed up. Necessity was a key factor wherever it took place. Even among the Inuit who did use this practice, killing an elderly family member without the justification of severe necessity - not merely the existence of a burden - constituted murder. This point needs to be emphasized.
They cared about their old people too, but they didn't always have the means to support community members who would never be able to contribute to the real economy. The practice ended more or less with the arrival of the missionaries and, not too much later, the government. Even before that, it was something practiced largely under conditions of severe resource shortages - usually bad hunting years - and more often than not with the consent of the elderly victims. Those who knew they were a severe burden on their families often chose suicide in some form rather than remaining a burden. Infanticide was also practiced under severe conditions, as it has been in every human society. Infanticide was also more commonplace than geronticide - which has also generally been true of all human societes.
In general, the Inuit had respected elders as de facto commmunity leaders. Theirs was not a Logan's Run sort of society.
I have no objection to saying something like this in the article, but don't do the "they abandonned their elderly on ice floes" thing. That's a myth. The practice was a lot less cruel than that as I understand it. Most of the time, it was a form of assisted suicide rather than an imposed death sentence. Abandonment was far more often used for infanticide than geronticide. And, geronticide was far from expected. People did not go through their lives knowing that they would end up abandoned on the ice."

[Whoa_Nelly]

24. I was born and raised in Oklahoma

Am third generation Oklahoman. Native American history, stories were part of what we were, and are yet, as Oklahomans. Life must have been intense day to day, to survive and carry the tribe. Families were the core of the larger family, the tribe. When it came to the time of The Trail of Tears, and the forced exodus to Oklahoma....well,that part of history has always made me sad. It really wasn't all that long ago. It happened in 1828.

My grandfather was friends with Will Rogers, also known as the Cherokee Cowboy. They met on the Bliss 101 Ranch outside of Claremore, OK. Will was a mustanger at the time. My grandfather was also the appointed guardian of Jackson Barnett, a Creek Indian known as the richest Indian in the world due to the oil pool found on the land the government had allotted to Barnett.


Anyway...
Romantic post, dear Floog. Definitely something to ponder and wonder...

[SoCalDem]

28. It was probably a hard and short life..dental disease got a lot of them

as they lost teeth, their ability to eat the foods they had available to them cause a lot of them to die..

infant mortality was probably horrendous too.

I'm sure they did not sit around weaving and singing...

Indigenous people all live hand to mouth and suffer from diseases and weather related issues.

the fact that they survived shows how tough humans can be when they have no other choice:)

[WeRQ4U]

39. I have diabetes and therefore, I'd be fucking dead.

It's not so glamorous to me.

[SoCalDem]

41. the glass half full..You might not have gotten diabetes

with their lifestyle and foods:)

[zanne]

42. But you may have gotten Pernicious Anemia.

One day, you'd notice you felt weak. A few years later, you'd be blind, paralyzed and probably insane. All because you couldn't have a B12 injection once a month.

[WeRQ4U]

44. Pretty sure I would have.

I'm type I. I work out regularly, eat well, and am as skinny as a rail. My surroundings didn't cause it, my crummy genes did. They would have found my lathargic attitude a little crazy. I would have died within a year of developing the disease.

;)

[Beaverhausen]

43. Go see "The New World" at a theatre near you

excellent film.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

50. You can't generalize about Native Americans

They're hundreds of tribes, each as distinct as the peoples of Europe, speaking languages that were grouped into 150 different families as distinct as English and Arabic and Chinese. What's true of a Mohawk or Ojibwe may not be true of a Commanche or Navaho or Choctaw.

I remember once reading about worldwide health standards, and it said that the unhealthiest people in the world were urban slumdwellers in the Third World, due to all the infectious diseases. However, pre-agricultural people were some of the healthiest--if they could survive infancy, childbirth, and injuries. They usually ate a healthy, land-based diet, got plenty of exercise, and were isolated from sources of infectious diseases. A hunter-gatherer who survived infancy was more likely to live into old age than a slumdweller in Brazil or India.

As far as the status of women in concerned, it was fairly high in the northeastern tribes, especially among the Iroquois. There are stories of European women who were captured by the Iroquois and refused to leave when they had the chance, because they felt that Iroquois men treated them better than European men did. (In those days, whether you were Iroquois or European living in the wilderness where the two cultures met, your life consisted of the equivalent of camping, so the workload for the women would be about the same in either case.)

[applegrove]

51. Some people had more free time than anyone else in the world.

There was that much bounty. If you could value richness by time to devote to art by a people as a whole - some were the richest societies the world has ever seen. Until now, perhaps.

[Iktomiwicasa]

52. I'd say....

that most of you don't have a fucking clue about indians or indian life. We are not people from the past. We are still here, and will be long after your culture is a memory.

[Heidi]

53. Welcome to DU.

You're absolutely right, and I've got your back on this one.

[JanMichael]

56. Agreed. It's always interesting to hear Whites and their backassward...

...ideas about Native cultures.

[Broken_Hero]

59. Once again...

You are straight forward and to the point...:)

[Deja Q]

54. REAL work versus "hard work". And then they say "work smarter, not harder"

Physical survival. Didn't need surgery to gut out dislodged spinal discs, amongst heart and diabetic medications for people younger and younger...

It'll be that way again, don't worry.

None of us will get to live it, howver.

And those who do may not be able to adjust.

[JanMichael]

55. I wish some of the ethnocentric Europeans on this thread would read 1491.

Ignorance of the history of the inhabitants of the Americas is astounding in this country. In addition the Americas is not just NORTH AMERICA!

Read 1491, please, open your eyes. Think harder, think harder, think less rascist and ignorant!

Here I'll even help: http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Chumash/Population.html

"Erickson and Balée belong to a cohort of scholars that has radically challenged conventional notions of what the Western Hemisphere was like before Columbus. When I went to high school, in the 1970s, I was taught that Indians came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about 12,000 years ago, that they lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation it remained mostly wilderness. My son picked up the same ideas at his schools. One way to summarize the views of people like Erickson and Balée would be to say that in their opinion this picture of Indian life is wrong in almost every aspect. Indians were here far longer than previously thought, these researchers believe, and in much greater numbers. And they were so successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughly dominated by humankind."

"Given the charged relations between white societies and native peoples, inquiry into Indian culture and history is inevitably contentious. But the recent scholarship is especially controversial. To begin with, some researchers—many but not all from an older generation—deride the new theories as fantasies arising from an almost willful misinterpretation of data and a perverse kind of political correctness. "I have seen no evidence that large numbers of people ever lived in the Beni," says Betty J. Meggers, of the Smithsonian Institution. "Claiming otherwise is just wishful thinking." Similar criticisms apply to many of the new scholarly claims about Indians, according to Dean R. Snow, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University. The problem is that "you can make the meager evidence from the ethnohistorical record tell you anything you want," he says. "It's really easy to kid yourself."

"The Beni is a case in point. In addition to building up the Beni mounds for houses and gardens, Erickson says, the Indians trapped fish in the seasonally flooded grassland. Indeed, he says, they fashioned dense zigzagging networks of earthen fish weirs between the causeways. To keep the habitat clear of unwanted trees and undergrowth, they regularly set huge areas on fire. Over the centuries the burning created an intricate ecosystem of fire-adapted plant species dependent on native pyrophilia. The current inhabitants of the Beni still burn, although now it is to maintain the savannah for cattle. When we flew over the area, the dry season had just begun, but mile-long lines of flame were already on the march. In the charred areas behind the fires were the blackened spikes of trees—many of them, one assumes, of the varieties that activists fight to save in other parts of Amazonia."

[BikeWriter]

57. Bartolome de Las Casas, (Here's an eyewitness account)

Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies. (1542)

http://www.lasculturas.com/lib/mktxlascasasindies.php