This should have you trembling in your buckle shoes, oh my Puritan Brotha...

The Celts had the same argument with the Romans, and lost.

I agree with Means, and Kurt Vonnegut before him but they haven't a Chinaman's chance in hell.

ah297900 wrote:

Yeah, but what's his stance on litter?

You want us to go back to the native american clan system? So, uh, how'd that pan out?

I think it worked pretty well for 14K years until the neighborhood went to hell.

Russell Means is from my neck of the woods and is a certifiable wackjob....  Every couple of weeks he writes the local newspaper with some convoluted pseudo racist rant....  He's big into the Libertarian party which lets me give him a little credit, but I can't overlook his past with the American Indian Movement....  Everyone is afraid to badmouth AIM because it has to do with the natives and they've done an amazing job of creating a legitimate cover for themselves...  They're nothing but a bunch of hate filled thugs though...

Wha...You're already willing to shove Obama out the door?

George Orr wrote:

AladdinSane wrote:

Wha...You're already willing to shove Obama out the door?

I like the cut of his jib, but I'm down to the stems and seeds of "Hope" at the moment.  The man's got a bitch of a job in front of him.

Frankly, I'm already suffering from Obama-fatigue.

Last edited by AladdinSane (2008-11-01 01:00:44)

Dmtdust wrote:

Look, you keep thinking that I'm a Democrat.

Whatever would have given us that idea?  One year out of four you're a rabid badger, but let's face it, the rest of the time you're a democrat.

He was great in Last of the Mohicans.

Wasn't he also involved in some armed native American uprising in the 70's?

He's bad-ass with an ax that looks like a scimitar, let me tell you. He's (at the very least) "as qualified" as Palin. This, of course, means he is "more qualified" than Obama, however "less qualified" than either Biden or McCain.

What the hell, Means + Woody Harrelson 2008!!! That would be an AWESOME ticket, dude! The "Natural Born Killers" ticket! They could say, "Only love can kill the demon" and proclaim their love for Obama on the commercials!!!! kickass!

I have a few acquaintances/friends from early AIM.  all solid people.

I have read the first 2.  I never said anything about 'more noble'.  Extrapolate/Masturbate to your hearts content.

whiskytangofoxtrot wrote:

Dmtdust wrote:

I think it worked pretty well for 14K years until the neighborhood went to hell.

Cracka, please.  Native Americans were people on a typically 200-700 year cycle of development, prosperity, then decline and either extinction or displacement by the new group in the neighborhood.  Until the Neolithic revolutions in metallurgy and written language, allowing for better accounting of really large numbers for labor and agricultural and trade surpluses, this was the norm the world over.  Even given the advantages of gunpowder and metal armor, the Europeans would have been hard-pressed to move them aside if it weren't for the earlier softening-up action of pandemic diseases introduced by the vikings and fishers of ca. CE 1000 prior to contact.

For further reading, consider:

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
and for an interesting alternate take, written before he became so head-spinningly bad, jingoistic, and a favorite of Dick Cheney and his ilk:
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power by Victor Davis Hanson

It will never cease to amaze me how many people assume that "native" societies were more noble than those which replaced them.  HGs the world over are necessarily on more intimate terms with their environments than the "more developed" societies which surround them.  They also are necessarily smaller and more mobile and require a hell of a lot of land area for a small number of people.  Most NA cultures were HGs, with a smattering of horticulturalists and pastoralists (but following wild herds, typically, not their own domesticated ones), with only a few true agricultural civilizations.  Each of the agricultural civilizations quickly reached the limits of their land's holding capacity and had either faded away or were in decline or very nearly so at the time of European contact.

Bottom line:  Native Americans are people, no more and no less noble as a group than any other.  They should be goddamned happy they weren't the Canaanite relatives of the Hebrews moving back to the neighborhood at the time of the post-Exodus Conquest.  God struck down any Hebrew who didn't utterly destroy every living thing and item of value in the conquered areas...

For about 80 years before the first Europeans decided to build a settlement in our country, the NE natives had been interacting with fisherman off the coast. Whole pockets of  Atlantic coast indians were wiped out by disease in the years just before colonization began. The puritans met no strong resistance until King Phillips war because the residents had abandoned the land the year before. After a 1618 epidemic killed off what is estimated as up to 90% of the Massachusetts Bay population.

But it wasn't just white man's disease that had left the New England and mid Atlantic natives pacified before the colonists arrived. A generation or so before settlement, regional wars had gotten so out of hand that whole tribes were vanquished and displaced.  While the resolution of this conflict and the coalescing of power into the Iroquois Confederacy in 1570 is interesting social structure studies, these "noble" savages had just enacted, on a huge scale for their society's history, some of the most base human predations upon each other in protracted blood feuds.

It was so bad that large parts of eastern PA and NJ were in disarray and some once thriving agrarian villages were abandoned. Before Penn arrived in 1681, the once powerful Delawares  were a broken and conquered people. Similar situations applied to other areas of the NE in the interior close to the coast. Like the decimated Mahicans who retreated to Connecticut. Only the Iroquois 6 nations came out of this upheaval as a dominant power. Which they managed to hold onto the core part of for about 200 years till just after the American revolution. The rest of the tribes were in a self inflicted decline before the Europeans showed up.

The Eastern Indians were not really what you could call hunter gatherers, I forget the proper term but they were  agrarians and many practiced herd management. The "Noble" Delawares (Lenni Lenape), who had once some of the most successful and sophisticated slash and burn agriculture and forest management of their herds of game, managed to denude the tristate area of all beaver in just 25 years after their first contact in the early 1600s with Dutch traders on the Hudson.

Last edited by Johnny_Rotten (2008-11-02 02:17:13)

Yes that must be the term. Typically in the NE they were very rooted to their territories and had been cultivating the land as discrete tribal groups. Sometimes for succesive generations going back a few hundred years. They might seasonally rotate settlements, particularly near the coast where they would pull back from the shore and inlets in the winter taking their harvest with them, but they relied heavilly on growing plots that supported and fixed villages.  Though in times of scacity and social disruption groups might be forced to move on.