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New age nonsense
mike salovesh (T20MXS1@MVS.CSO.NIU.EDU)
Mon, 27 Feb 1995 01:24:00 CST
On Mon, 27 Feb 1995 at 01:40, Chuck Ertel said:
----------------- Original message ------------------------------
I hope that the Native American Culture just dosen't go by the way side. In
my opinion Native Americans (before the white man landed) was one with
nature. Like Ted Nugent said they only took what they needed. They had a
respect for the land that is missing at this time. Greed is what finally
killed off the Native Americans and forced them to live like 'savages'. I'd
take to skelping too if someone killed off my family!
Chuck Ertel
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Sorry, Chuck, that's New Age crap, not reality. Take, e.g., the
great Maya city of Copan (Honduras). The Copan valley was a good
place for a small town, but it grew. As more and more of the valley
got taken up by city, farming moved higher and higher on the slopes
above the valley. Eventually, they created their own ecological
disaster: erosion through rapid rain runoff just about killed the
usefulness of those upper slopes, people had made city all over the
valley, and the place was abandoned. (Yes, I know they were beaten
in war--but it probably was for the same reason, a ruined subsis-
tence base and overpopulation.) My authority for this very brief
summary is Bill Fash, who knows Copan archaeologically better than
anybody except maybe his wife Barbara.
"Taking only what they needed", I guess, is what killed off the
terminal pleistocene megafauna throughout the Americas.
Take off the romantic glasses. Native Americans are, and were,
humans like everybody else. They are, and were, just as capable of
screwing up, of getting overgreedy, of killing their fellows for
sport, of falling into cycles of folly, as any of the rest of Homo
sapiens. And yes, of course, they are, and were, just as capable of
greatness as the rest of us. No more, no less. That's a gloriously
optimistic expression of my faith in all humans. Including Native
Americans, or First Americans, and all the rest of us Americans, too.
-- mike salovesh <salovesh@niu.edu>
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