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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Doren who wrote (1423125)

10/26/2023 10:32:19 AM

From: Maple MAGA

1 Recommendation

Recommended By
Mick Mørmøny

Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1572776

The Myth of Indigenous Utopia

Aboriginal Futures, Commentary, Culture Wars, Hymie Rubenstein

Genocide. Ethnic cleansing. Forced assimilation. Slavery. Racism.

As much as mainstream history and traditional anthropology have shown these five phenomena to be near universal features of the human condition, they are mostly portrayed these days in the ivory tower, government and media as late 15th century European colonizer inventions to subjugate, exploit, or exterminate the indigenous people of the world.

In Canada, this skewed portrait of the five sins of Westernization portrays the pre-contact New World as a veritable Garden of Eden inhabited by a myriad of aboriginal groups mostly living peacefully with each other and in harmony with nature. The indigenous “fall from grace,” if any, was precipitated entirely by the arrival of Europeans.

The de facto Book of Genesis for Canada’s indigenized creation story is the 4,000-page 1996 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RRCAP). The Report does not suggest the country was created in six days, it is silent on serpents and sex, and the Flood only appears as a metaphor for immigration. But – and I mean no disrespect to the authors and believers of the biblical Genesis story – the RRCAP creation story is just as hard to accept.

Among its many evidentiary shortcomings, it privileges unverifiable oral history over well-documented written accounts; makes no mention of periodic pre-contact hunger, starvation, or famine; only fleetingly refers to “violent death and cannibalism” and occasional warfare among the militaristic Iroquois; briefly comments on lethal conflict among the famously warlike Blackfoot; and buries pervasive West coast pre-contact slavery in a one-sentence footnote.

Conversely, the Report deals extensively with similar activities, some now viewed as crimes against humanity, when they were perpetrated by European societies, regardless of their relevance to Canada. This partial and selective story is well on its way to becoming our country’s “official history”. It is increasingly taught in our schools and is constantly regurgitated by prominent members of the Canadian intelligentsia. One of the latest to do so is Niigaan Sinclair, Associate Professor of native studies at the University of Manitoba and son of Senator Murray Sinclair, former chair of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Although Professor Sinclair is a beneficiary of the modern nation-state, industrialism and the capitalist system, he strongly rejects all three in an essaypublished by the Globe and Mail earlier this year as part of a multi-part series titled “Walls, Bridges, Homes … a series of essays written in response to the emerging global appetite for a progressive narrative around inclusion and immigration.” The essence of his argument is that the economic, social and political structures of pre-contact aboriginal cultures were not only fundamentally different from but actually superior to those of the European invaders. So superior, in fact, that Sinclair contends they must replace western civilization in order to “save the world”.

Leaving aside the claim of cultural superiority, for the moment, let’s examine the claim of indigenous exceptionalism.

There is no evidence that the aboriginal settlers of the Americas, as full and equal members of the human race, were any different from their pre-modern counterparts all across the globe, including Western Europe, in coping with the severe survival challenges they faced. Although the political evolution of individual groups of humans was highly idiosyncratic, the overall path of humanity starting about 100,000 years ago traversed from loosely structured, scattered, highly mobile family groups to somewhat larger, more organized foraging bands, to larger, more tightly integrated semi-sedentary tribes to moderately centralized chiefdoms and, finally, some 5,000 years ago, to the world’s first six pristine, hierarchical states. The long-term global process (which in no way implies the notion of “progress”) called “ general evolution” mainly took place on the back of some combination of slaughter, subjugation, tribute extortion, assimilation, and expulsion meted out against foes.

Not in his ancestral back yard, says Sinclair. In the Globe article, he sarcastically dismisses this cumulative story of thousands of years of human accommodation, adaptation, and change as a Eurocentric fiction based on an “an evolutionary model of human community [that] was invented, starting with the ‘tribe’ or some other savagery and ending with the great [19th century] Westphalian nation-state and notions of sovereignty.”

In every other culture but Sinclair’s, apparently, infanticide was used to control population growth beyond the environmental carrying capacity of stone-age hunters and gatherers; ethnic cleansing was undertaken against alien neighbours when local groups exceeded the demographic sustainability of their territories under simple forms of farming; cannibalism was practiced as a response to hunger or to capture the spiritual power of competitors; wholesale extermination of enemies – genocide – was organized and executed to seize territory or eliminate military threats; and just about any alien group (now called “subalterns” in Marxist postcolonial studies) was subject to enslavement in support of forced labour, sexual exploitation, trade, or status enhancement.

Around the world, groups that excelled at these practices, including the Aztec of Mexico and Inca of Peru, slowly evolved into state-level societies. In the process they typically conquered, exiled, or absorbed their neighbours. Sometimes they butchered them for food, as the Aztecs did to obtain enough protein to survive in the fauna-scarce Valley of Mexico. They also despoiled their habitats through deforestation and species extinctions. Many of their victims, human, plant, and animal, are now known only via the paleontological record.

What we know about the Mesoamericans comes partly from direct documentary evidence, for theirs was a literate society. Admittedly we don’t know a lot about human life in pre-contact Canada because literacy didn’t arrive until the Europeans, and petroglyphs don’t tell us much. The historical record in these parts thus begins with documents like the 18,000-page Jesuit Relations (1632-1673) based on the reports of Roman Catholic missionary priests. While these and other writings were undoubtedly tainted with ethnocentric and evangelical bias, they consistently and comprehensively report that Canada’s original inhabitants demeaned their foes using vicious quasi-racial stereotypes (from coast to coast); mutilated, tortured to death, and cannibalized enemies (prevalent in southern Ontario and Quebec); enslaved members of neighbouring groups (common among West coast tribes); massacred competitors for land and resources (widespread on the Prairies); and exterminated entire ethnic groups (as in the genocidal annihilation of almost all the Huron by the Iroquois in 1649).

In short, contrary to the idyllic picture painted by Professor Sinclair’s essay and the RRCAP, the preponderance of scientific evidence, as opposed to tales told around eons of campfires, indicates Canada’s first immigrants acted just as beastly as the rest of the human family.

Whatever was going on pre-contact, it was remarkably unproductive in terms of population growth, compared to many other regions of the world. The aboriginal settlers had at least 15,000 years to populate the northern half of the continent, but on the eve of European settlement there were no more than 500,000 indigenous people in what is now Canada, or one person per 20 square kilometres. It was a virtual terra nullius by any reasonable definition. To be sure, they faced technological and environmental challenges that limited population growth (although endemic plant and animal food shortages were not among them), but based on the relatively rapid population growth in Europe and elsewhere over the same period, it is reasonable to hypothesize that inter-tribal warfare was more lethal in pre-contact Canada than it was just about anywhere else, including Europe during its darkest ages. In fact, the kill rate likely exceeded – by a huge factor – the number of indigenous people deliberately killed by Europeans.

None of this seems to have occurred to Professor Sinclair. Instead, he recommends the world look to aboriginal history for guidance on how to reduce modern inter-state and inter-cultural violence: “Indigenous nations have answers to nearly every single challenge facing nation-states and leading to such wars today.”

There is no denying that the death of tens of thousands of indigenous people in Canada and millions more elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere because of their susceptibility to infectious Western diseases like influenza, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, smallpox, and measles is a human tragedy of epic proportion, although it’s miniscule compared to the Black Death that killed an estimated 75-200 million people in Eurasia between 1346-1353. And it is outrageous that so many indigenous people died of smallpox contracted from blankets obtained from fur traders in return for animal skins. It’s widely alleged the Europeans deliberately infected their indigenous trading partners, which seems counterintuitive, to say the least. But even if they did, they were petty biological warriors compared to, say, Genghis Khan, who used catapults to toss plague-infested corpses over the walls of castles he besieged.

What Sinclair ignores most of all is that, unlike so many other places in the world, including Western Europe where even the names of most preliterate indigenous groups disappeared millennia ago, the post-contact European treatment of Canada’s original inhabitants involved neither genocide, nor slavery, nor ethnic cleansing, nor total assimilation, nor tribute extraction. On the contrary, though there was an unfortunate and unjustified period of legislated racial segregation for treaty Indians between 1885 and 1951, as well as other small and large injustices from first contact to the present, European settlement starting in 1535 eventually resulted in permanent pacification (the abolition of tribal warfare and the voluntary signing of treaties), the free and lively exchange of aboriginal products for European manufactured goods for 250 years, tens of billions of dollars spent since Confederation in 1867 to enhance the well-being of indigenous peoples, and an Indian Act (1876) and the Constitution Act (1982) – both rooted in the Royal Proclamation of 1763 – which defined, enhanced, and preserved the special rights and privileges of aboriginals (especially their treaty rights).

Warts and all, no country has ever done more for its indigenous people. And Professor Sinclair’s haughty claims to aboriginal moral superiority over European savagery have no foundation in Canadian history.

Originally appeared in the C2C Journal.

To: Doren who wrote (1423125)	10/26/2023 10:33:40 AM
From: Maple MAGA	1 Recommendation Recommended By Mick Mørmøny Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572776

Genocide is the only solution for some people. It was the solution for the Ignoble Savages of North America. Waging total war with limited means. War Before Civilization, Lawrence Keeley, Oxford University Press, 1996, 245 pp., $25.00 reviewed by Thomas Jackson Part of the anti-white mentality now prevailing in academic circles is the view that war and its attendant horrors are recent, largely European inventions. Before contact with the West, we are told, primitive man lived in harmony with nature and at peace with his neighbors. Even prehistoric Europeans were happy and peace-loving until their own civilization corrupted them. Lawrence Keeley, who teaches anthropology at the University of Illinois, makes it overwhelmingly clear that this is nonsense. Most primitive and prehistoric societies probably made war so often that their people were far more likely to die in combat than the citizens of even the most warlike 19th or 20th century European nations. They also made war of the most cruel and brutal kind. Although words like “primitive” and “savage” have gone out of academic fashion, War Before Civilization could rehabilitate them single-handedly. Where did the idea of peace-loving tribalists come from? Prof. Keeley gives due credit to Rousseau and his imagined ancestor, the noble savage, but argues that the worst damage has been done since the Second World War. Earlier European wars had been fought either by professional soldiers or, like the First World War, in narrow bands of territory. The horrors of the 1940s were so widespread and so harrowing that they left Europeans with a deep suspicion of their own civilization. This suspicion was part of the loss of will that brought down the European empires, and the rush to decolonize only encouraged sentimental foolishness about wise, long-suffering natives. The myth of the noble primitive is now a central part of the multicultural assault on the West. Prof. Keeley points out that Americans started their romance with the savage earlier than Europeans but the process has been the same: “n the United States during the nineteenth century, the nobility of “savages’ was directly proportional to one’s geographic distance from them.” As Easterners began to mourn the passing of the stalwart red man, “most Westerners still in direct contact with “wild’ Indians . . . regarded them as dangerous vermin, turbulent brigands, or useless beggars to be expelled or exterminated at any opportunity.” Now that tribalism has been pushed so far into the jungle that whites almost never encounter it, they can all get sentimental over a bogus, idyllic past. As Prof. Keeley notes, “the privileged few who . . . are most cushioned from physical discomfort and inconvenience by industrial technology are the most nostalgic about the primitive world.” This has lead to silliness and even falsification. For example, there are remains of Early Neolithic (c. 4,000 BC) ditch and palisade enclosures that can only have been fortifications. Some have clearly been battle grounds and are littered with human bones, but Prof. Keeley quotes from a standard explanation for such finds: “[P]erhaps these camps were places where the dead were exposed for months before their bones were deposited in nearby communal burials.” Likewise, it is typical to explain that early men were buried with spears, swords, shields and battle axes because these were status symbols or were used as money. In Prof. Keeley’s words, those who insist on pacifying the past “ignore the bellicosely obvious for the peaceably arcane.” Lefties also discount bona fide field observations of primitives on the war path. No matter how untouched a society may have been before whites discovered it, any mayhem explorers observed is said to be “the product of disequilibrium induced by Western contact.” Thus, it is impossible to study pristine savagenature because the very presence of white men is a contaminant that sets the peaceful primitives to murdering each other. Many anthropologists and archaeologists appear to believe that war is “a peculiar psychosis of western civilization.” Interestingly, Prof. Keeley reports that some of the initial anthropological justification for this view came from the work of an earlier generation of scholars who had little respect for savage peoples. Anthropologists Harry Turney-High (1899-1982) and Quincy Wright (1890-1970) were both very influential in promoting the view that although stone-age people did make war of sorts, it was mostly stylized ritual and not very dangerous. These men thought that primitive war was defective and trivial because primitive society was defective and trivial. Savages could not mobilize large numbers of men and keep them in the field, had no idea of tactics, and were not trained to “stand and die.” Their warfare was childish. Prof. Keeley’s careful research shows this was far from the case. It is in fact true that when primitives engage in pitched battles, they usually stop fighting after a relatively small number of casualties. This lends credence to the view that primitive war is more for show than for killing, but pitched battles are only a small part of warfare. After sifting through mountains of field studies, Prof. Keeley reports not only that such battles are frequent but that casualties are greatly multiplied by raids, ambushes, and massacres. For example, ethnographers found that the Dugum Dani tribe of New Guinea once engaged in seven full battles and nine raids in just 5 1/2 months. Likewise, one Yanomamo village in South America was raided 25 times in 15 months. Surprise attack is the favorite tactic of primitives, and Prof. Keeley estimates that a typical raid might kill 5 to 15 percent of the inhabitants of a village. Sometimes far larger numbers might be trapped and killed, and “massacres once a generation were not an unusual experience in many nonstate groups.” Archaeological evidence confirms that this is an old practice. In Cow Creek, South Dakota, a mass grave that dates from the 14th century AD contains the skeletons of 500 men, women and children who were slaughtered, scalped and mutilated. All the houses in the village were burned, and from their number archaeologists estimate that the total population was about 800. This village was wiped out and never reoccupied — 150 years before Columbus arrived. There are burial sites in Gebel Sahaba in Egyptian Nubia that also show unmistakable signs of frequent violent death. A large number of the skeletons buried 12,000 to 14,000 years ago show smashed heads, mutilation, and the hacked left forearms common in battle casualties. Early anthropologists like Turney-High and Wright assumed that because primitive societies did not have the power to draft soldiers they could not mobilize many men. Prof. Keeley says they were wrong. Although the Germans mobilized just over 30 percent of all men during the Second World War, Tahitians, Zulus, and some New Guinean tribes commonly mobilized 40 percent or more of their men. Moreover, in primitive war, there are essentially no support troops. Unlike the American army in Vietnam, which had a “tooth to tail” ratio of only 1:14, virtually every savage carries a weapon. High mobilization rates and frequent battles mean very high cumulative casualty rates. Prof. Keeley calculates that every year during the 20th century, Germany and Russia lost an average 0.15 percent of their populations to combat. No other modern countries come close. For primitive societies, however — the Chippewa Indians, Fiji islanders, the Dinka of West Africa, and certain New Guinean tribes — annual battle deaths could exceed one percent, or seven times the most lethal “civilized” rate. Prof. Keeley notes that as a result it was not uncommon for tribes and sub-tribes to be driven to extinction by warfare. One important difference between savage and civilized war is that tribes do not have the economic base to sustain prolonged combat. They run out of supplies and have to stop. In New Guinea, battles have lasted for several days or even weeks, but only because the combatants live so close to the front they can come home to sleep at night. During the most sustained New Guinean warfare, truces might be called for soldiers to tend crops. Otherwise both sides might starve. Fighting close to home is a great advantage for the wounded. A New Guinean warrior who caught an arrow might be home and in the bosom of his family within an hour or two. Until the 20th century, “civilized” soldiers often lay wounded for many hours and were then treated in unsanitary, impersonal field hospitals that may have done more harm than good. Otherwise, though, Prof. Keeley leaves no doubt that warfare among the savages was cruel business. Surrender was never an option, since captives were always killed on the spot or tortured. The Iroquois, for example, liked to let women and children torture captives to death over a period of several days. Then they would eat parts of the body — often the heart. Mutilation and trophy-taking were common, and some tribes left a distinctive “signature” on enemy corpses. Some New Guineans, for example, sliced off enemy genitals and stuffed them into the body’s mouth. After the battle of Little Bighorn, Indian women used marrow-cracking mallets to smash the faces of dead cavalrymen into mush. ‘In Tahiti,’ notes Prof. Keeley, ‘a victorious warrior, given the opportunity, would pound his vanquished foe’s corpse flat with his heavy war club, cut a slit through the well-crushed victim, and don him as a trophy poncho.’ Revisionists have sometimes made the improbable claim that European colonists taught the Indians to scalp enemies, but Prof. Keeley says that both ethnographic and archaeological evidence for indigenous scalping is overwhelming. Scalping had a double purpose: Primitives often thought that mutilating an enemy would inconvenience him in the after-life, and battle trophies were proof of work well done. Captive women were sometimes taken home as wives. In some societies women also had an economic value because they provided most of the farm labor. The Maoris of New Zealand, however, were not so chivalrous. During battle they disabled women so they could later rape, kill, and eat them at leisure. Prof. Keeley notes that although it is fashionable to claim that cannibalism is the stuff of hysterical missionary tales, it was unquestionably practiced by Maoris, some American Indians, Australian Aborigines, Aztecs, and some Africans. There is also clear archaeological evidence for prehistoric cannibalism. Primitive warfare was extremely destructive to property as well as lives. Victors commonly burned or sacked anything they could not carry away, instinctively adopting the tactics of Sherman’s march to the sea and the civilian bombings of the Second World War. As Prof. Keeley puts it, “primitive warfare is simply total war conducted with very limited means.” Savages had unsurprising reasons for making war: fights over land, quarries, fishing streams, and hunting grounds. Homicide or adultery could start a war, and many conflicts were “disaster-driven:” During a hard winter one hungry village might ambush another, kill its occupants, and live on their stores. Prof. Keeley also writes that trade and intermarriage have not usually bound peoples together. Business deals gone bad, mistreated brides, and welched dowries are all frequent causes for war. One problem for tribal peoples is their lack of central political authority. A few hotheads can go on an unauthorized raid that plunges the entire group into war to the knife. Nevertheless, Prof. Keeley has unearthed a few human groups that appear not to have made war. Invariably these are small bands of nomads who live in very difficult country, far from others. They have very few possessions, and move away rather than fight. Prof. Keeley reports that in North America the Great Basin Shoshone and the Paiute “never attacked others and were themselves attacked only very rarely; most just fled rather than trying to defend themselves.” But even these “peaceable” societies were by no means idyllic. “Armed conflict between social units does not necessarily disappear at the lowest levels of social integration,” writes Prof. Keeley; “often it is just terminologically disguised as feuding or homicide.” When people do not have strangers to kill, they have to make do with killing each other. As War Before Civilization makes clear, Rousseau was a dreamer. His 20th century descendants who think modern whites invented war are just as deluded.