[Public_Domain]

[Jabberwalker]

The Iroquois also built permanent settlements with long houses and wooden palisades

Those were wattle-and-daub Mesolithic structures like the ones that Northwestern Europeans were living in 7,000 years ago.

http://www.conservationhalton.ca/fallin ... awfordlake

http://exarc.net/issue-2015-4/at/experi ... schen-2014

[raydan]

If you look at what we've built, we haven't made this world a better place. If anything, we've screwed it up pretty bad.

[Strutz]

raydan raydan:

If you look at what we've built, we haven't made this world a better place. If anything, we've screwed it up pretty bad.

[Jabberwalker]

raydan raydan:

If you look at what we've built, we haven't made this world a better place. If anything, we've screwed it up pretty bad.

I don't know. Are you sure that someone else would have done a better job?

How do you even measure "what ifs"? What you don't do is assume that some unknown, unproven reality is better than this one. You have absolutely no way of knowing that it's true.


Your own bias and prejudice is simply not enough.

[Coach85]

raydan raydan:

If you look at what we've built, we haven't made this world a better place. If anything, we've screwed it up pretty bad.

Complete nonsense.

We have no idea how good we have it today. You take it for granted, the technology, the food, the everyday basics that we couldn't imagine living without.

[raydan]

Jabberwalker Jabberwalker:

raydan raydan:

If you look at what we've built, we haven't made this world a better place. If anything, we've screwed it up pretty bad.

I don't know. Are you sure that someone else would have done a better job?

How do you even measure "what ifs"? What you don't do is assume that some unknown, unproven reality is better than this one. You have absolutely no way of knowing that it's true.


Your own bias and prejudice is dimply not enough.

Dimply?

What I meant by "we", is man in general... no bias and prejudice there.

The very nature of man pretty much guarantees that everybody would eventually screw it up.

[Coach85]

Tricks Tricks:

Because natives stretched the entirety of two continents. It doesn't matter though, because he's wrong regardless. The monuments the natives built were underground. They were/are called mounds (sometimes earthworks). Several thousand square feet and quite high, I think I saw the highest being 70+. Massive underground mausoleums. The ones in the U.S. were monstrous.

Monuments?

So what.

With all due respect to the Natives before us, I don't care about stuff built underground, monuments or mausoleums.

When we talk about the important things being built to evolve our Nation, it wasn't done or initiated by the Natives. The railroads, industry, roads, businesses, technology.

The REAL things that got this Country going can largely be attributed to the non-Natives who came to Canada. And saying that isn't racist.

[Thanos]

raydan raydan:

If you look at what we've built, we haven't made this world a better place. If anything, we've screwed it up pretty bad.

Yup. It's a collective guilt that everyone who's ever lived has been part of. Humans by nature are destructive, and that applies as much to the old hunter/gatherers, or the early agricultural communities, all the way through to the industrial age, and then on to the reverse-mercantilism that sees the old jobs in the western countries get outsourced to the developing world. Everywhere on this planet nature is in full retreat, sadly too often past the point of extinction. There is no such thing as "low-impact" when it comes to human activity.

And people are what they are. There's no way in hell that anyone will ever convince me that anyone on this planet, and that includes the North American Natives or black Africans, wouldn't have behaved exactly the same way European or Chinese culture did when if they'd had the same civilized tools and ideas in their possession. All this "we worship Mother Earth while you guys only want to destroy it" is just plain crap that isn't worth a second of thought being put towards it.

[Strutz]

I get what raydan was saying.

It reminded me of a part of a Robin Williams stand up performance (many years ago) where he talks about pollution and the effect on the environment and he says (something to the effect of) "It makes you wonder if God is looking down and saying 'I gave you a nice planet and you fucked it up'"

[Tricks]

Coach85 Coach85:

Monuments?

So what.

With all due respect to the Natives before us, I don't care about stuff built underground, monuments or mausoleums.

That's great for you, but that's not what he said.

Vbeacher Vbeacher:

Well that's a problem since the natives didn't build one damned thing.

They did build things. They build some pretty significant things.

$1:

When we talk about the important things being built to evolve our Nation, it wasn't done or initiated by the Natives. The railroads, industry, roads, businesses, technology.

You're asking something of a people that didn't need to do such things. Places that developed these things largely did it because of population density. There is no reason to build a road, or railroads, or businesses when your small group of 50 people is the only one around for 20 miles and you can get everything you want or need from the land. Developments often come from necessity, and it's a necessity the natives didn't (and in some parts of the world still don't) have. Why should we judge them for not constructing things they didn't need? I'd also like to point out that depending on your definition of technology, that's also wrong. The picture I posted before includes far more than just burial sites. The octagon shape maps the moon's natural cycle that repeats every 19 years or so. Stonehenge does the same thing. Poverty Point has been posited as a trading outpost pre-columbian. Mayans had built paved roads.

$1:

The REAL things that got this Country going can largely be attributed to the non-Natives who came to Canada. And saying that isn't racist.

I don't disagree with that. I take issue with shitting on natives because they weren't "as advanced" as europeans at the time. The majority of the population of the americas pre-columbian was in south america, that's why we see things like the Mayan and Aztec Empires and their considerable level of development. In Canada the population is estimated by scholars at around 300 thousand. Even if you up that by a factor of 5, 1.5 million people across all of Canada is nothing. That's 1 person per 6 km. Whereas Europe is estimated at 90 million people. And with that level of density and population comes technological development out of necessity, and development out of war. To compare the two is intellectually dishonest.

I don't agree with the taking down of the Statue, I think that's ridiculous, but to attack natives as savages when they hadn't had the catalysts that fostered development that europeans had is fucking stupid.

[Zipperfish]

Freakinoldguy Freakinoldguy:

$1:

Native Americans: Stone Age People

Native Americans, even the great civilizations of Meso-America and the Andes, were stone age people. This is not to denigrate these people and their achievements, it is simply a statement of fact. This made their phenomenal achievements even more remrarkable. The stone age is usually defined as the era of human developent in which stone tools and weapons were used. Many advances could be made during the stone age, including achievements in fields often associated with more technologically advanced eras. The key technological development leasing to more advanced periods is metalurgy. And here the technological advance was the ability to generate high temperatures. The first step ws the Bronze Age nd finally the Iron age. Native american peoples had begun to nake some achievenents in metlurgy, but primarily work in precious metals like gold nd silver, metals with low melting points. They were on the cusp of the Bronze Age, but never made this vital transition. This is astonishing because the agricultural societies of the Old World had all energed from the Stone age by 2000 BC
.
Stress on Achievements
Academicians tend to stress the achievements of Native Americans, especially because its fits the modern ideological docrtines of cultural relativity and resistance to recognizing the achievements of the West. As a result, we find people taking offense atwhen we point out that that Native Americans were stone age people, even the most advanced Native americans had a stone age cilture. Here is a good example, "That's ignorant, and based on information about 50 years out of date. No respectable historians or most other scholars would make the "Stone Age" claim. Especially since the Aztecs, Incans, and Mayans had superior astronomy and mathematics to Europeans. Especially since they were more advances in medicine. Especially since Natives as a whole over both continents were far superior in their agriculture to Europeans. That's why 60% of the world's food supply was hybridized or domesticated by Native cultures. And finally, Natives were superior in their political theory and social organization in mostly being radically democratic at the time Europe was still in the dark ages politically by relying on absolute monarchy. The only two areas Europeans had superior technology in was shipbuilding and weapons." [Carrol] Our respnse was, "Very rude and poorly informed response. I must complement you, however, with how perfectly you have expressed PC thought. Now I suggest you actually read a little. The Native Americans were stone-age people as any scholar or historian would tell you if you bothered to read a little history. rather than spout off PC cultural relativity ideology. Do you even know what the Stone Age was? Wiki tells us, 'The Stone Age is a broad prehistoric period during which stone was widely used to make implements with a sharp edge, a point, or a percussion surface. The period lasted roughly 3.4 million years, and ended between 6000 BCE and 2000 BCE [meaning the Old World] with the advent of metalworking.' More than 3 millennia after the Old World entered the Bronze Age and Iron Age, Native Americans, including the most advanced civilizations, were still using stone tools Native Americans never entered the Bronze Age, although when the Spanish arrived, thy were on the cusp of it. This failure is one of the reasons a handful of Spanish defeated massive Native American armies. Even the advanced Native American people used stone tools. The magnificent Inca and Meso-American structures (many of which I have visited probably before you were born and before it was easy to get many sites) including the monumental buildings were done with stone tools. They also used stone and wood for their military Campinas--with the addition of obsidian tipped weapons. Native Americans had begun to work with metals, but mostly in precious metals for decorative / religious purposes. The accomplishments you mentioned were true, although I would take issue with the claim that agriculture was more advanced than in the Old World. They did develop the potato and corn which are central to modern agriculture. Now I never said that Native Americans were not very impressive people with enormous accomplishments . And I accept the examples you give. But that does not mean that they were not a stone-age people. And with all their accomplishment they had not even invented the wheel--something you fail to mention--did you even know it. Nor do you note along with impressive mathematical achievement, unlike the Europeans they did very little with it except for religious ceremonies and agricultural planning. And by the way for your PC proclivities it is you who has shown shocking disrespect for other people by assuming that Stone Age means primitive people without any real accomplishment. Tsk. Tsk." And I might add, I spent 2 years in the Peace Corps teaching children in Ecuador, most with Native American origins.

Overlooking Weaknesses
And thus the failures of Nativive Amrican civilization such the continued use of crude stone tools, limited metalurgical technology, failure to develop the wheel, lack of a fully developed written language, and absence of any movement toward scientific discipline. This is important, especially when viewed with their mny accomplishments. Academicians, especially ideologicaly oriented authors, commonly overlook or down play these weaknesses.

Important Question
Rather than trying to make the cultural relativity case, the question that should be asked and the really interesting question was why Native Americans were so far behind the Old world (both the West and China). We suspect that the reason so many scholars fail to ask this question is that it leads to answers that do not ideological conform to the desire to undermine the great achievements of the West. And part of this answer is isolation.

http://histclo.com/chron/na/stone/na-stone.html


We've done some pretty horrible things to the natives over the centuries but that doesn't mean we should be changing history to suit a political agenda. It's time to stop portraying their culture as anything more than what it really was. Stone Age because it doesn't benefit anyone and only creates more animosity.

OK, first off your entire argument rests on discounting the technological achievements of South American indigenous peoples. "They were the exception" is a cop-out.

Secondly, much of the technology you ascribe to European culture, never came from European culture, such as writing, metallurgy, agriculture--all of which date back to the middle east.

Thirdly, I think European culture produced wonderful things. Wonderful philosophers, and scientists and artists. But it seems to piss you folks off that the natives of the Americas refuse to recognize your "natural superiority." In fact, that makes sense, since much of the European incursion into the Americas tried to eradicate indigenous peoples or their cultures.

[Zipperfish]

Vbeacher Vbeacher:

I haven't made any racist comments, you brainless, hand-wringing simpleton.

Ad hominems aside, I'm pretty sure expressing the desire to go punch a random Indian in the face is racist though.

[Zipperfish]

Tricks Tricks:

I don't agree with the taking down of the Statue, I think that's ridiculous, but to attack natives as savages when they hadn't had the catalysts that fostered development that europeans had is fucking stupid.

this!

[Thanos]

Their largest missing catalyst was that the Mayans, Aztecs, and other Central American civilizations didn't spread their technology and other ideas far and wide enough into North and South America in the same way that the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans did through Europe. Without the uber-culture there to provide the impetus, through trade or conquest or what have you, the bordering tribal cultures would not be "converted" over to the more technical way of life. When the civilizations fell there was no repository of their knowledge waiting to be found among the neighbouring tribes in the same way the knowledge was preserved in the monasteries and churches of Dark Ages Europe.