[P2P-F] Fw: Fw: Info

Tue Oct 25 01:53:28 CEST 2011

From: Chris Nelson 
Sent: Monday, October 24, 2011 9:13 AM
To: Natalie Golovin 
Subject: Re: Fw: [P2P-F] Fw: Info

This is one of the dumbest things I've ever read. Is this person representative of the people you chat with? It is meaningless, and even demeaning, to speak of American Indians, in toto, as a "they," as if all Indians were the same. Some tribes offered their hands in friendship, others offered the tip of an arrow or point of a spear. Indian tribes varied widely in militancy, technological development (though they were all technologically backward compared to Europeans), and political and cultural sophistication. They were as bigoted as any Europeans toward tribes they considered inferior (consider the universally despised "Diggers"), which explains why they never, except in rare instances (e.g.,Tecumseh), made common cause. Many warrior tribes practiced slavery and torture, and some even human sacrifice and cannibalism. There were isolated attempts at "forced acculturation" (long after "first contact"; the Pilgrims, trying to claw a foothold in North America, were hardly in a position to force anything) but they were given up when the Indians exhibited either unwillingness or inability to assimilate. There are still something like 300 Indian languages in North America ('notable for its linguistic diversity," says Wikipedia); sure, many are dying out, but you don't hear Basque or Gaelic much anymore either. There are an equal number of Indian reservations comprising nearly 60 million acres in the US, which is hardly evidence of "genocide." The implementation of the reservation system, the only realistic solution to the inevitable clash of Stone Age pagans and the authors of the Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, and Industrial Age, was initially a disaster, but through incompetence and corruption, not design. 

From:        "Natalie Golovin" <10natalie at cox.net> 
To:        "Chris Nelson" <cnelson at computer.org> 
Date:        10/23/2011 06:06 PM 
Subject:        Fw: [P2P-F] Fw: Info 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

HELP!!

-----Original Message----- 
From: Mark Janssen
Sent: Sunday, October 23, 2011 4:39 PM
To: P2P Foundation mailing list
Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Fw: Info

On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 10:32 AM, Natalie Golovin <10natalie at cox.net> wrote:
> The European Tribes treated the Natives no worse than they treated each
> other.

Whoa.  You should really stop talking.  You have NO idea what you're
talking about.  How about forced acculturation, not allowing them to
speak their own language (which hold the record of their own history),
confined them under threat of violent force into reservations, among
other things.  But, really, that's probably not even the worst of it
-- the worst of it is that for reasons they couldn't ever understand
is why you were doing all of these cruel things when they were willing
to share it it all with you.  Why, when they handed out their hand to
be friends, you chopped it off.  Remember, they're the ones who gave
us Thanksgiving which is still "celebrated" in this nation today.
Read the reports made of making first contact with the Native peoples
here.

You really should read up before propagating the attitudes of
conquest.  Sorry....

marcos

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