--"We" did not grab Indian lands. I certainly didn't. Did you?
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no one really owns the land; it 'goes to' whomever 'says' they control it. but in the end it's all bogus.
no one owns the land.
i'm a native american - i was born here. to a european - i wonder if they know just what this land of american can do to someone who is born here.
the western europeans have a series of small countries, none of them larger in land mass than say - washington and half of oregon combined.
a european doesn't understand what it's like to be born here, and walk these lands all of one's life.
that much i share with the aboriginal americans - the ones the europeans (and to some extent the asians) practically pushed off of the continent.
there was a friar in central american during the spanish conquests. i think his name was 'le landa' or 'de landa.'
he destroyed scads of records of the indigenous people, saying that it was all, 'the work of the devil.' when the higher-ups back in spain hauled him back there for questioning on the matter, he said, 'oh no worries; i have it all in my head' and he wrote a book. his book is much of what we know of much of those central-american cultures, because he destroyed the libraries.
the book is, "Yucatan: Before and After the Conquest" by friar diego de Landa.
From the forward, "It is perhaps not too strong a statement to make, that ninety-nine percent of what we know today of the Mayas, we know as the result of either of what Landa has told us in the pages that follow, or have learned in the use and study of what he told."
..."He knew of their (Mayans) greater "count of ages," but only that such a count existed. He did not understand it, but left a one-line formula which, used as a mathematical and chronological key, opened to us their greatness in that science, and their almost perfect astronomy."
if you're interested in the history of the yucatan, this is a must-have.
but the land, yes the land; the sense of wide-openness and large areas of extremely low population - those are the things which make america different than western europe.
the land is so vast it could almost swallow a civilization...
andy |
