On Vancouver Island there is a place called Departure Bay, one of the ferry landings is located there now .... it was given its name because when colonists arrived they found the frames of longhouses, stripped of sheeting and roofs, along with many signs of recent habitation, but no people, none ... so obviously the indians had 'departed' ... well yes, but the thing is, the indians departed that bay every year in springtime, because it was their winter town, they went elsewhere during summer, following food sources ..... and they took with them each time of moving the cedar planks with which they roofed and sheeted the longhouses, partly because it was a lot of work to make these planks without steel, and also because they used them as rafts to float things on, for the move, pulled them with their excellent big cedar canoes ...... but the indians didn't come back the next fall, felt the neighbourhood had deteriorated, so it remains Departure Bay
I've had a fair bit to do with 'backward' people in Chiapas ... they live the way they want to live, they're more aware of choices available to them than many think .... and given that no one threatens their 'little land to fill the bellies of the children' as el Subcomandante puts it, they have got an excellent lifestyle in many respects .... the whole clash between mexicano and indio in Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, et cetera, is about culture, not race, because the mexicano is quite mestizo overall, and there's more europea blood among the indio than you might expect ... language is in some places a distinction still, but less and less, and it matters less all the time in the politics of culture ...... the two clash most, of course, at the point of deciding style of land tenure
... which makes them Perfectly Normal Human Beings, i guess eh -g- |
