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Post by Allen Wiener on Aug 13, 2007 20:24:19 GMT -5
That's what I liked and admired about Smith right away. This jumped out at me in the first book I ever read about Jamestown. This guy just wasn't acting like most of the other whites I'd read about regarding Indians. He seemed to understand them and what they were doing from the start. Really remarkable.
Another thing that's gotten lost in the stereotypes is the level of development of Indian agriculture and living areas. They had very sophisticated, large towns with populations in the thousands in some cases. I can't recall the source, but apparently the largest towns in America were all in Indian lands until Philadelphia finally eclipsed them sometime in the 18th century. Not at all what you'd expect after being inundated with the image of "wild" Indians, who seemed to have nothing better to do than run around in the woods or ride along the plains all day screaming and attacking anything that moved.
I think the only vanishing Indian as been the real Indian, but thankfully that is being reversed now. Has anyone read "1491" yet? It's near the top of my pile and I'm very anxious to see what he says about all those civilizations. Also, I still need to get to "Guns, Germs and Steel" for that perspective.
AW
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Post by Herb on Aug 13, 2007 20:56:46 GMT -5
Not so far fetched, by the American Revolution, Charleston was the fifth largest town in America (the others: Philadelphia, New York, Boston and Newport RI), and Charleston's population was under 3000.
Still those large villages were only in a few cultures, that obviously were largely agrarian, and not all were eliminated by the White man. The Advanced Indian civilization (the Anzai? )in the Southwest was destroyed by a combination of drought and barbarians, in this case Apaches.
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Post by Jim Boylston on Aug 13, 2007 21:02:18 GMT -5
The troubling thing is the pattern of treatment, whether the tribes were hostile or not. Shawnee, Cherokee (really all 5 "civilized" tribes), Apache, all were bilked of lands ceded to them by treaty even after the removal. Jim
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Post by Jim Boylston on Aug 13, 2007 21:59:13 GMT -5
Something both these books pointed out was how the European Enlightenment ideas of mankind's development affected the perspective of the US government. They saw societies progressing from hunting-gathering toward commerce. A society like the Indians, while developed, wasn't involved in commercial enterprise so was therefore further down the evolutionary scale. Pushing these tribes toward farming moved them one step closer to commercialization. A side benefit was of course, that the Indians would eventually recognize their land as a commodity and be more willing to sell it to settlers. Jim
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Post by Allen Wiener on Aug 14, 2007 0:06:33 GMT -5
Which is why the U.S., among other things, wanted individual plots for Indians to own, rather than their concept of holding it in common.
AW
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