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It actually did make my brain ache, because ArizBear didn't answer my question. She gave me other unjustifyable actions in history, but she had no justification for forceful European removal of Indians on their own land all across the United States.
Kele,
All I said was ArizonaBear had no justification of forceful European removal of Indians on their own land, because she didn't answer the question. You helped confirmed my point with relationship to a lack of justification of many events over history and its relationship to the removal of Native American Indians off their land. You helped me prove my point!
All I said was ArizonaBear had no justification of forceful European removal of Indians on their own land, because she didn't answer the question. You helped confirmed my point with relationship to a lack of justification of many events over history and its relationship to the removal of Native American Indians off their land. You helped me prove my point!
My intent was not to help you prove anything. My intent was to say to you that throughout history, man's inhumanity to man has been a repetitive pattern since the beginning of time.
Every white person in the United States of America has been sufficiently beaten over the head with the sins of their forefathers; sins, which I might add, they had nothing to do with.
Enough already!
BTW "she" is a he--a very good looking one too if he can actually be compared to a Nordic god!
My intent was not to help you prove anything. My intent was to say to you that throughout history, man's inhumanity to man has been a repetitive pattern since the beginning of time.
Every white person in the United States of America has been sufficiently beaten over the head with the sins of their forefathers; sins, which I might add, they had nothing to do with.
Enough already!
Thank you for the good words; besides, many of us so-called 'White' people actually have American Indian ancestry as you have pointed out
Quote:
BTW "she" is a he--a very good looking one too if he can actually be compared to a Nordic god!
Not that good looking, just tall but thanks for the compliment
There is no justification just as there is no justification for Darfur, for what the Aztecs did to neighboring Indian tribes, for what the Nazis did to most of Europe, for what Cromwell did to the Irish, or for what Native American Indian tribes did to each other for that matter.
History is not created in a vacuum. Shortly after our ancestors first stepped off of the continent of Africa all those millions of years ago, conflict began. And it's been going on ever since.
Can conquering of a people ever be justified? Certainly not if you are among the conquered. However, it is a fact that the human race is most certainly a fallible one. Homo sapien sapien alone has the capacity to do terrible things to those of his own race in search for power, glory, riches, and lands. If you are a person with a moral center, than you will always be able to see the evil behind certain actions throughout time immeasurable. Does that change things? Most certainly not.
But you cannot continue to blame the descendents of those who committed atrocities against their fellow man for the sins of their fathers. In that way, nobody alive today with any sort of conscience would ever condone the genocide of the Native American Indian any more than they would condone slavery or the slaughter of six million Jewish people. What's done is done and if we ever hope to evolve beyond the mentalities which bring about these sort of atrocities, then we have to stop living in the past and start working toward touching the lives of those within our realm and trying to make the world a better place--one person at a time.
I am of mixed Caucasian and Native American ancestry. There is not one person living today that I blame for what happened to my people on either side of my ancestry. Blame, along with living in the past, are both fruitless endeavors and I for one, choose to work toward change rather than dwell on things that I cannot change.
Very well said...none of us should feel any more guilt for what our ancestors did wrong, than we should take credit for what our ancestors did right. We are not our ancestors. Some of our ancestors may have been slaveowners-others may have been primitive cannibals, pirates, mafiosi, or other miscreants--or just plain stupid, ---or backward,----or illiterate. That has NOTHING to do with "us" today....those ancestors are now dead and gone. We are answerable for our own actions, not the actions of dead people.
There is no justification just as there is no justification for Darfur, for what the Aztecs did to neighboring Indian tribes, for what the Nazis did to most of Europe, for what Cromwell did to the Irish, or for what Native American Indian tribes did to each other for that matter.
History is not created in a vacuum. Shortly after our ancestors first stepped off of the continent of Africa all those millions of years ago, conflict began. And it's been going on ever since.
Can conquering of a people ever be justified? Certainly not if you are among the conquered. However, it is a fact that the human race is most certainly a fallible one. Homo sapien sapien alone has the capacity to do terrible things to those of his own race in search for power, glory, riches, and lands. If you are a person with a moral center, than you will always be able to see the evil behind certain actions throughout time immeasurable. Does that change things? Most certainly not.
But you cannot continue to blame the descendents of those who committed atrocities against their fellow man for the sins of their fathers. In that way, nobody alive today with any sort of conscience would ever condone the genocide of the Native American Indian any more than they would condone slavery or the slaughter of six million Jewish people. What's done is done and if we ever hope to evolve beyond the mentalities which bring about these sort of atrocities, then we have to stop living in the past and start working toward touching the lives of those within our realm and trying to make the world a better place--one person at a time.
I am of mixed Caucasian and Native American ancestry. There is not one person living today that I blame for what happened to my people on either side of my ancestry. Blame, along with living in the past, are both fruitless endeavors and I for one, choose to work toward change rather than dwell on things that I cannot change.
You forgot the most important one! There is no justification for what the settlers did what they did to the native indians
You forgot the most important one! There is no justification for what the settlers did what they did to the native indians
There is no justification just as there is no justification for Darfur, for what the Aztecs did to neighboring Indian tribes, for what the Nazis did to most of Europe, for what Cromwell did to the Irish, or for what Native American Indian tribes did to each other for that matter.
The first part of this sentence addresses that very subject. If you had read the post by JesusisLord, which this post answered, you would have realized that.
The Mexican government didn't know what to do about the Indians in Texas, that's one reason it was not settled by them and they let the Americans come in with Stephen F. Austin.
There is no justification just as there is no justification for Darfur, for what the Aztecs did to neighboring Indian tribes, for what the Nazis did to most of Europe, for what Cromwell did to the Irish, or for what Native American Indian tribes did to each other for that matter.
The first part of this sentence addresses that very subject. If you had read the post by JesusisLord, which this post answered, you would have realized that.
Kele,
You've posted some amazingly intelligent, thoughtful, and educated material on this forum. I look forward to reading more of your writings.
Sure they are--in the same way that the Britains, the French, the Danish, the Irish, the Scots, the Greeks, the Portuguese, the Czechs, the Slavic people, the Austrians, the Germans, the Swiss, the Spanish, and the Portuguese are all Romans.
They are related in the same way that we are all related to Homo erectus or Homo habilus. We all essentially came from the same place, yet even though we continue to share approximately 99% of our DNA, we have evolved our own little physical traits, shared languages, cultures, and religious ideologies which set us apart from our fellow man.
There are a couple of little inconsistencies which throw the monkey wrench into your oft repeated yet erroneous statement. Meso American Indians and North American Native Americans actually have very little in common in the way of culture, art, religious ideology and shared language. Although the languages within the Uto-Aztecan language family share some cognates, those cognates are fewer than English shares with Persian. North American Native Americans do not speak with the lateral affricative as do many Mesoamerican tribes. Nauhuatl is to the Hopi language as English is to Italian.
Then there is also the notion that all of the native peoples must have traveled from somewhere in modern day Siberia across the Bering Strait land bridge, down through Alaska and Canada until they reached the modern day U.S. and beyond. Until quite recently there seemed almost an air of “political correctness" to the notion that the earliest migrants into the New World were pedestrians, that is, that the most ancestral Native Americans came walking from Asia across the Bering Land Bridge and then, after spending some time locked by ice and snow from moving out of Alaska, that they finally moved down into North America via the newly-opened ice free corridor. This has always seemed a bit strange to those of us who study this subject, especially considering evidence that quite early on people were taking advantage of the ecological richness provided by the coastal northern Pacific Rim. Archaeologists also know that early East and Southeast Asians were successfully traveling across open water to places like Australia, Okinawa and parts of the Philippines; that they most probably were doing this as cultures already familiar with coastal travel in some kind of crafts. Even if such early peoples had lacked water craft, it is hard to conceive of them having avoided travel along the Pleistocene coasts, gathering shellfish, fishing, maybe occasionally hunting sea mammals – and perhaps doing so just a bit farther along the coasts than had their parents. Even accepting that parts of the Pleistocene coastline may have offered little land before one encountered massive mountain glaciers on their way to the sea, still, people could have slowly worked their way north, east, and then south to what is now British Columbia and then further south.
The implication here being that it is not necessarily true that the Mesoamerican Indians even passed through the modern day U.S. on their way to Mexico. In fact to insist that it must be so shortchanges the culture that became Mesoamerica, perhaps those indigenous peoples who built the magnificient pyramids of Teotihuacán. (No, it was not the Aztecs. The pyramids were there when they stumbled upon the site of Teotihuacán.)
So you see, in the world of Archaeology, theories change all the time. Because those pre-hisoric peoples left so little evidence of the civilizations behind, and indeed, no written language, we are left to interpret artifacts, the formations in which they are found, and the few undisturbed sites we are sometimes lucky enough to stumble upon, the best we can with continually evolving (for the better) dating techniques and middle range theory.
To blatantly state as fact that Mesoamerican Indians and North American Native Americans are one and the same shows very little understanding of genetics, migration patterns, and paleo-indian cultures as a whole. Sorry.
What are you sources for the theories you present? I have a degree in Anthropology and am in process of getting a degree in History. I am also of Mexica & Mayan Descent. You raise some good arguements but I would disagree with your statement of Native Americans from Meso-America having no relation to each other. The Mexica are not indigenous to area now known as Mexico City formerly Tenochtitlan. They are migrants from the North. I would suggest that you read the work Inga Clendinnen who has done extensive research on the civilzations and tribes of Meso-America. All Native Americans are broken down to into Language Families. Language shows connections. That is one way to distinguish a group of people from another. Uto-Aztecan does connect the Hopi,Shoshone,and Nauhua (Mexica)peoples together. Language roots is one way anthropologists have traced the Navajo back to their Athabaskan roots from further North. I would also contact Professor Richard Payne at the University of Utah who is also a Meso-American expert, richard.paine@anthro.utah.edu . If you wouldn't mind sharing your resource I would be interested in reading them.
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