This Saturday

[Versus]

Well, I'm sure it's not as important as a social commentary, but you know how my attention span is.

[x-deviant-x]

Originally Posted by Miss Absynthe

Paid the owners of the park? I'm not talking about the owners of the park - my point is that it is a park (and an entire country) that has been stolen from another people and occupied against their will. I'M TALKING ABOUT THE ORIGINAL INDIGENOUS OWNERS OF YOUR COUNTRY - THE ONES WHO LIVED THERE BEFORE IT WAS COLONISED BY THE SPANISH AND THE ENGLISH.

Did you even read the article posted?

Sorry I didn't notice the link until after I replied. I thought you were referring to the park owners. But yes you have a very valid point. No one seems to think about the Native Americans anymore. I've never understood why they were treated the way they were but I've forgotten a lot of that history. Some were hostile to invaders, but so many more tried to offer friendship and peace. I think it's probably the most disgusting period of our history, aside from slavery. I guess they pretty much equal each other in level of disgust.

If we had found a way to blend with them and learn from them, instead of corralling them like cattle, i think we would have a very different society today, likely a much better one.

[Miss Absynthe]

Being hostile to invaders is one way to phrase it. Protecting your homeland would be a different way to put it.

[x-deviant-x]

it seems they only got hostile when white man tried entering certain areas that were off limits. otherwise they were pretty welcoming, for the most part. but again i could be wrong as i'm not as familiar with all of it as i used to be.

regardless, it is pretty fucking horrible what happened. but this country has always done horrible shit, to its own people and other nations. i think there's a big dose of karma about to get dished out.

[Miss Absynthe]

I'm thinking that being 'welcoming' didn't really mean 'sure, come in, take the lands, kill the men, **** the women... please feel free to commit genocide and destroy our culture. Whatever you do, just don't go over there into that valley, but we're fine with the rest of it.'

Do you think that it is possible that it wasn't so much being welcoming, as being oppressed?

[x-deviant-x]

That all happened, true, but it didn't start out that way everywhere. There were warring native tribes long before Europeans arrived. They didn't come over with the intention of slaughtering all the natives from the get-go. There were alliances formed between Europeans and Native Americans off and on, who fought other tribes together. American history books do try to paint the natives as the aggressors and the Europeans as the innocent who were just defending their settlements. It was much different than that though. But it wasn't like Europeans decided "hey let's go slaughter all those people across the pond and take their land" and everyone jumped on boats with their guns and canons ready. They didn't come here trying to start a war, they came here to escape British rule and form their own government. Many didn't even know there were natives waiting. And the natives, at least some groups of them, thought the Europeans were the Spanish returning for a second round.

[Despanan]

Originally Posted by x-deviant-x

What kind of crap have you heard about their insurance? I was looking for possible dirt but can't find anything. I just switched to USAA from Geico. USAA wants about 5 bucks more for a full policy than Geico wants for just one month (and for the past 2 years Geico has been the lowest rates I could find anywhere). So hell yeah i switched. I'm just wondering what kind of shit they're gonna give me should I ever have to make a claim.

Supposedly their rates are so low because they don't pay commissions to their employees, just hourly. But that sounds a bit odd to me. Gotta be something else to it than just that.

Geico is known for giving customers one quote that's cheaper than anyone else and then when you sign up they send a bs notice a month or so later about some error in their calculations and require another 10 or 20% increase on the policy. But they've never done this to me, I've just heard they do it to a lot of others.

I've used USAA for my insurance and banking all my life. No complaints at all.

Hy friends have told me horror stories about their banks hidden fees, overdraft stuff and general financial shenanigans.

USAA has avoided all that with me at least.

[Alan]

Originally Posted by x-deviant-x

That all happened, true, but it didn't start out that way everywhere. There were warring native tribes long before Europeans arrived. They didn't come over with the intention of slaughtering all the natives from the get-go. There were alliances formed between Europeans and Native Americans off and on, who fought other tribes together. American history books do try to paint the natives as the aggressors and the Europeans as the innocent who were just defending their settlements. It was much different than that though. But it wasn't like Europeans decided "hey let's go slaughter all those people across the pond and take their land" and everyone jumped on boats with their guns and canons ready. They didn't come here trying to start a war, they came here to escape British rule and form their own government. Many didn't even know there were natives waiting. And the natives, at least some groups of them, thought the Europeans were the Spanish returning for a second round.

There are too many things wrong in this paragraph, but you admitted you don't remember much of this part of history so let me clear some of the errors.

"And the natives, at least some groups of them, thought the Europeans were the Spanish returning for a second round."
I'm addressing this first because it won't come around afterwards. If you're talking about the British colonies, then no, this makes no sense. The Iroquois had no knowledge of the atrocities the Spaniards did to mesoamerican cultures. You can't just lump in all native americans as if it were one people, and talking about what happened in North America and current Latin America have to be completely separate. An interesting issue would be to ask who was worse. Your hyperbole was actually not that far away from reality with Spaniards. As soon as they came to America, they almost immediately enslaved the natives to work out the land, mostly in mining. The asshole Cristopher Columbis in his second or third trip actually instated a policy in the island which is now Haiti, where each year each native had to fulfill a certain quota of gold found and they were given a token. What was that token for? So that the spaniards would cut off a fucking hand from the token-wearer.


"There were warring native tribes long before Europeans arrived."
This is true, but warring in hunter-gatherer societies are very different than in more 'advanced societies'. They were more like skirmishes. And agricultural and more complex tribes did tend to gravitate towards peace. Remember the Iroquois weren't a tribe but a league, a league composed of five huge tribes living in peace under a federal law.
The warring thing was more an issue in Mesoamerica, where the Aztecs were very imperialistic, but even then when they conquered a tribe, all they asked was for tribute of whatever the tribes already specialized in. So you can contrast that with the Spaniards who conquered, let's say, the Tlaxcala and sent them all to the mines, destroying their lives and societies, and the Aztecs who were still very imposing, and still made the conquered tribes work more, but work more of the same, thus a fishing community was still left intact in their customs, local laws, infrastructure, and economic basis - they just had to make sure their output was enough to cover the yearly tribute.
That's the last I say about Mesoamerica, because we're focusing mainly on what happened to Native Americans in the US and partly in Canada.



"There were alliances formed between Europeans and Native Americans off and on, who fought other tribes together."
I'm pretty sure you're thinking of alliances like the French-Iroquois alliance, but that was an alliance where the French pitted the Iroquois against other Great Lakes tribes just for control over the fur trade. I can't think of any instance where a European power allied with a native tribe with the purpose being to help that tribe with its own military struggles against other tribes.
That said, maybe you were just mixing that with the stable relationships European powers had with native tribes at first. Not military alliances; just peaceful coexistence.
However, that 'peaceful coexistence' was also a myth. While the first thought was not immediately genocide, an initially it was basic commerce, it was not fair commerce. Just remember what happened to the Wyandot people; the French shifter their whole economic basis towards exclusively fur trade, not only buying their furs for a pitiful fraction of their actual value in the European market, but also setting the buying prices even lower by the single fact that the Wyandot stopped having any other means of survival than fur trade, and thus collapsed the whole economy of a people, leaving them in poverty and starvation, just so Europeans could have pretty furs.
The initial commercial approach of the French and some British colonies was hardly any better than the displacing tendencies of the more aggressive British Colonies. And in the end it all just became genocide because they didn't want to make the same 'mistake' of miscegenation that the Spanish did on their colonies. So if both British and Native American wanted the same land, but the British would never mix with the Native Americans, the only option they gave to Native Americans is to pack up their things and leave their homes.

[Alan]

Made a mistake up there. I said the French pitted the Iroquois against the other Great Lakes tribes. That's wrong. The Dutch and English pitted the Iroquois against the other tribes, while the French backed the other tribes against the Iroquois.

Point is, sure, you can say that these Native American tribes had a terrible war between each other, but they were mere puppets of a war started solely for European economic interests.

[x-deviant-x]

wow. that is just completely fucked up beyond all levels of fucked up. that's just pure fucking evil.

I have Cherokee blood on my dad's side, which somehow makes stories like that even more fucked up for me to listen to, on a personal level.

I don't think it's fair to blame the honkies for what the spaniards did though. wouldn't that be the same as "lumping all the natives together?" which i wasn't doing. of course white man's atrocities are likely just as bad. Unless the Brits and the Dutch were somehow involved in helping the Spaniards do what they did, i think their crimes should be viewed separately. somehow.

but yeah, i don't remember a whole lot about it. I started taking an interest in it again a few years back but it drifted. I remember something about a tribe of natives who were actually half white, who were attacking Europeans as they came over - not Spanish but Brits or Germans, one. As I recall it was assumed later that they were descendants of a settlement that completely disappeared. Was it near Roanoke? I can't remember.

[x-deviant-x]

Wait, I'm thinking it wasn't that they were descendants, but that they were whites who dressed and fought like the "engines" and it was later determined, or theorized, that they were the children of the settlement that disappeared. Still don't remember where it was though - the settlement. I'm thinking it was near Roanoke but i'm not sure.

[Alan]

I'm not sure if my posts sounded the way I wanted them to sound, but I wasn't coupling the British with the Spaniards. When mentioning the Spaniards it was to compare and contrast what was happening to the south with what was happening to the north, not as one same phenomenon.
There are similarities between Spaniards and French, British and Dutch, in the sense that their interactions with the natives were mostly guided by economic interests, but the attitudes were completely different. In fact, it's almost interesting to wonder who was the most brutal, with the divide being roughly genocide (british) and slavery (spanish).

[x-deviant-x]

where did st augustine fall in all of that?

its the oldest city in the country, yet its in FL. so if the Spanish came up through S.America, when did they get to FL on that timeline? in contrast to the brits, germans, french, that is.

[Alan]

Well, Florida is an outlier in that. Its history is a mix of Spaniard policy similar to Caribbean colonies and interactions with North American tribes different than mesoamerican cultures. Besides that, most of Florida's concern was not so much what to do with its native inhabitants, but who has a right to claim it as a colony.

[Miss Absynthe]

The point that I was trying to make is that NO ONE has the right to colonise another land - whether they are doing so 'to start a war' or 'escape British rule and form their own government'.

[Jonathan]

Unless you colonize via the Bering land bridge, that's apparently ok but everyone after is an invader.

[Saya]

Yeah, because when the people crossed the Bering land bridge, they committed genocide against the resident lizard people. That's why they hide among us now, watching, waiting.

[Versus]

Originally Posted by Saya

Yeah, because when the people crossed the Bering land bridge, they committed genocide against the resident lizard people. That's why they hide among us now, watching, waiting.

<3 spookyblacktext

[x-deviant-x]

Originally Posted by Miss Absynthe

The point that I was trying to make is that NO ONE has the right to colonise another land - whether they are doing so 'to start a war' or 'escape British rule and form their own government'.

Why does no one have the right to colonize another land?

I understand not having the right to murder other people in order to colonize, but how does a population grow without colonizing other lands?

[Miss Absynthe]

Wow. Just wow.

[x-deviant-x]

I'm not trying to be a smart-ass, I'm just asking so that I understand where you're coming from.

[Versus]

I think her meaning was pretty clear, dog.

[Miss Absynthe]

This is a reader on the Occupy Wallstreet movement (and it's satellite movements) that explains colonisation (they refer to it as colonisation and colonialism) better than I can.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/68834988/W...AND-DIFFERENCE

[Jonathan]

That open letter is hilarious. Or sadly delusional. I can't quite decide.

"Indigenous consent". You've got to be kidding me. Sovereignty is derived from the consent of the governed, not the number of dead relatives you have in the ground within X square miles.

[Alan]

That would be true... where it not that we're talking about a piece of land. Thus, even a democratic imposition is imposition.
What we should take from this is rather that no one has right over a land and a land's value is tautological to its use, not its history.
It should not be a "in this land you will always be invaders" but rather a "you have no more claim to this land than we gave to the original inhabitants of it."