Mr. Baum reads like a proponent of eracism. He articulates the math of primal mass murder as a reasonable response to the natives who had the bad luck of surviving for as long as they had. Nothing like a clean slate to write one’s history upon, what, old fellow!

Truly, you hate baby Jesus and the troops if you mention such things…

++++

that has been spread in regard to Native Americans.

I got my BA in History with a focus on US/Latin American History. That area of study included Native Americans.

First of all, there was not one single pre-Columbian NA culture. There were many. The various NA people were diverse and represented thousands of years of migration both from Asia and within the American continents. Their customs, languages and lifestyles varied tremendously.

With the exception of the Inca, Maya and Aztec peoples, they were basically stone age/Early bronze age people. Those cultures would not have survived unchanged after coming into contact with more advanced technologies, even if the Europeans had merely came to trade and not invade.

In the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies, the natives (those who survived the European diseases)were stripped of their culture, language and religions and virtually enslaved by the European colonists, but genetically they survived, albiet at the lowest level of society.

Here in the North they were kinda-sorta allowed to keep their culture (for a while) but were killed and/or driven off the land until the survivors were isolated on “reservations.” The interest in preserving the NA culture didn’t start until they were virtually extinct.

Once the NA’s were placed on reservations, naturalists like John Muir gushed over the “pristine” wilderness that had actually been the home of millions of NA people for thousands of years.

NA peoples were just as smart as the Europeans, they just didn’t have the same level of technology. Much of their culture was simply destroyed as “pagan” or “heathen” and untold riches of their gold and silver artwork was melted down and shipped to Spain.

The NA studied and manipulated their environment just like humans the world over. They just weren’t as technologically advanced as the other contempory civilizations and cultures of Europe and Asia.

My favorite example of historical myth is the bison/buffalo. We hear nonsense like “the Indians used all of the buffalo and wasted nothing.”

Ya think? Imagine living on the Great Plains without horses and armed only with a bow and arrow or stone-tipped spear (forget about where the wood came from on the plains) How are you going to hunt and kill a 2000 lb animal on foot?

Poke it with your spear and you’ll just piss it off, along with its thousands of friends. Them critters weren’t tame, and they can run faster than humans.

If you managed to kill one and survive, you damn sure wouldn’t waste any of it.

But why IS it better to embrace technology? Does it REALLY forward the human species? Or is oil, cars, sacrifice of the environment better for the Humans?

Just asking.

Do you live in a cave or teepee/hogan/wigwam?

Actually, the latter three are technology. So are fire, stone tools, the thigh bone of an antelope, etc.

Use that logic on why the NA should have been wiped out. After all my postman said they were so stupid because they didn’t even use ’the wheel’ and ’cause of that they deserved to die.

I said their cultures would not have survived unchanged.

NA tribes were eager to trade for technologies like metal knives and tools, firearms, metal pots, traps and other manufatured goods.

They also wanted horses.

No cultures would turn down an advancement, proven through-out history.

I’m just annoyed that present day people think the NA’s deserved their fate because they lacked the European’s technology.

They DID NOT deserve what happened to them.

They were nearly destroyed by disease before European technology delivered the coup de grace.

Unfortunately, as Clint Eastwood says in Unforgiven, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”

Please forgive my attitude. I’ve read up some on the conquer of this continent and was pissed that many current American’s, including myself, didn’t know that even the European’s of the time would have preferred living with the “heathens”.

LOL

In the beginning they were called simply Americans…so colonists would have called them “those dirty Americans”.
There is so much about the AmIndians.
Firstly, our country was founded on principles that the AmInd had.
Secondly, they had a system that worked.
Thirdly, they kept the land, if industrialization had not occurred, it is likely that the land would have been kept much longer than now.
Fourthly, this is one reason why Rev Wrights sermon doesn’t hold jack. If he believed in what he was saying he would be preaching for the removal of every race in the US except the American Indian.
Fifthly, AMInd were slaves. I have ARGUMENTS about this all the time it just pisses me off.
Sixthly, AMInd were more despised than the Negro (using this term to fit the times) their documents were destroyed, their land removed from them. they were not allowed to own property, if they became successful if it was discovered their business was burned and they were tossed from the land. This happened to my great great great grandfather.
I really REALLY get sick of hearing the black plight, when you talk to the kids, there is no personal histories, it is what they read in the black history books, what is taught them by their ministers and parents, what is spread to them in schools. The white females taught are homogenized into stereotypes, the Indians are homogenized into stereotypes, and so I am a wee bit tired of this one sided view of history they have. I can agree with a lot, but eventually it’s the white woman over 40 who is expected to lay down and pay for their sins. Count me out. I can’t remember which black author who said that the white woman doesn’t know what it was like to be …. etc. and I just wanted to call her up and rail at her smug, condescending, entitled attitude. Screw that. This whole race has been about putting white women over 40 in their place and it sickens me.

Perhaps I’m reading you incorrectly and you are not calling bullshit on what I wrote. In fact, why on earth would you think that I would have gone to the trouble to add the issue of change and the perfect past if I don’t agree with what you are saying. It seems that most of the commentators agree.

I even explicitly mentioned that the societies of Native Americans found by the Europeans upon their arrival were multi-cultural and multi-lingual.

It would seem that your point is also Mary-Beth’s point.

To say that Native Americans had a rich past and no present is to obliterate them once again, and in the nineteenth century, was a prelude for calling for their final extermination. Focusing one’s attention on racism and the many questions surrounding how we look at American Indians, past and present, brings an interesting and critical perspective to the often by rote discussions of so-called identity politics.

Perhaps you were calling bullshit on Buruna and Baum, but it might be nice to be a big clearer in your response.

It was Mary-Beth, after all, who went to the trouble of reading and commenting on Buruna, and doing a second post that made the point even stronger. What little coverage of Native American news and views one find in the liberal blogisphere takes place at Wampum. But that doesn’t define the blog, either.

I took the time to call attention to her work, and attempted to ask our readers to think about her comments in light of the current multiple comment threads which raise “race” issues from various angles, some of them silly, although both sides of the conflict, each aligned with a different Democratic candidate for the presidential nomination, is always calling bullshit on the other.

That should have been worth some recognition, shouldn’t it have?

As far as I’m concerned, one of the biggest problems with the blogisphere is not its snark, nor its willingness to employ obscenity, it’s the too easy assumption - reinforced by the fact that we carry on conversations with one another without really knowing much about who it is we’re talking to - that someone who speaks of a given subject in a short post can’t possible be either as smart or as well-informed as we are.

Updated Coomment:

What follows is an edited addition that wasn’t in my original comment:

BTW, I mentioned the horse cultures of the plains precisely because there is an example of a huge cultural change based on the reintroduction of the horse into North American by the Spanish in the 17th century. And yes, before the plains Indians got their hands on horses, they used to stampede buffalo herds over high cliffs, and then cull their kill. Naturally, many more buffalo died in the process than could be used or carried or stored by a nomadic peoples, so it was rather a wasteful process. American Indians saw the value of guns immediately and the technology of the use of guns, (it made more sense to trade for them than to become makers of them), became part of Indian cultures.

It is certainly true that it is possible to romanticize the Native American past, which is, of course, many pasts, but it is also true that many Native American cultures, whether the farming communities of the Pueblo tribes, or the hunter gatherers, or an interestingly mixed culture like that of the Navajos, had a fundamentally different conception of both time and their relationship to the natural world which made them less effective at destroying the environment than much of European-American culture turned out to be.

I was semi-incoherently agreeing with you. Sorry.

It’s irritating to me that the general public is so ignorant of the true history of Native Americans. Most of what people think they know they learned from movies that either demonize or mythologize the NA’s. They were people just like us, with all the same qualities and failings.

BTW - The stampeding buffalo trick doesn’t work where there are no high cliffs. And even where there are such cliffs, if the herd changes direction you’re gonna be a grease spot.

Regarding the issue of technology raised by Nervine5, I want to add that it’s one thing to voluntarily forego the benefits of technology, especially for a brief vacation “roughing it,” and it’s another thing entirely when your survival (and your family’s) is at stake.

And yes, you are right you need a cliff for the example I gave. I just hope it was clear that the example was meant to buttress your point about both change and technology. What I agree most fully with you about is the notion that native American societies were fated to wither because of the overwhelming superiority of Euro-American culture, or that they had no way to adapt to it. American Indians were ever bit as adaptive as any other set of human beings

Assume that the Europeans never invaded, but just began trading with the NA people. Assume no diseases either.

NA culture would have inevitably changed dramatically.

European culture was not superior - European technology was superior.

Regarding Tibet - it was doomed to change too.

We don’t live the same way our ancestors did either. The real issue is who controls that change, the indigenous people or the outsiders?

The Inca, Maya and Aztec were stone and bronze age along with the Mississippi and Muskogee civilizations and were more advanced than the Europeans. With the exception of steel and gunpowder, the Europeans were rather primitive. They lacked the mathematics, astronomy, medicine, ecology, urban planning, horticulture, agriculture and husbandry (what would become know as the plains tribes were first agriculturalist and horticulturalist and were situated closer to riverine and sylvan terrain – yes the buffalo hunt was a special occasion until they were driven onto the plains), if not for guns germs and steel … Europeans would have never survived in the Americas. They were routed at every initial landing Roanoke, Mobile, Vera Cruz, Tabasco, Florida, Hispaniola, etc. It wasn’t until the population had been decimated that European settlement became an option. Remember this has been going on since 1492. The reason horses were re-introduced was because Spanish dragoons were repulsed in the south. We won’t even begin to talk about the slaveholding (Native and African) “civilized tribes” they have reaped their due.