[HN Gopher] Native Intelligence
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Native Intelligence
Author : moultano
Score : 31 points
Date : 2020-11-21 17:56 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| tgbugs wrote:
| This is one of my all time favourite pieces. Whenever it comes
| up, I am also reminded of another piece which recounts what
| happened to the Native American populations and politics as if it
| were an invasion by space aliens following a plague that wiped
| out 95% of the population, can't find it at the moment but will
| keep looking.
|
| Edit: here it is courtesy of the previous HN thread.
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/11/28/the-story-of-thanksgiv...
| lopmotr wrote:
| Nothing positive to say about the immigrants and nothing negative
| about the Indians. Why can't people stop distorting history to
| fit their own biases? It's no better than the textbooks he
| complains about doing the opposite. Two wrongs don't make a
| right.
| tacheiordache wrote:
| Well, it's a damn inconvenient truth for us, the whites.
| Although I immigrated to the US about 20 years ago I somehow
| identify with the western colonizers, after all I came to a
| country largely shaped by them. So at least one thing I can do
| is to acknowledge the history of the original landowners.
| Another thing is to point out to their philosophy and their
| connection to the land underneath them. Us, westerners may he
| the heroes of industrialization but we may as well have the
| most toxic culture to this planet
| moultano wrote:
| Its purpose is to show the world from Tisquantum's perspective,
| not positive and negative. You can find an abundance of writing
| about Plymouth colony from other perspectives. That doesn't
| make either of them wrong.
| lopmotr wrote:
| The main protagonists are shown to have negative views of the
| immigrants. The Indians are presented as racists and judging
| people on superficial characteristics. That's probably the
| author's feelings being projected onto the subjects of his
| story. Yes, it makes it wrong if it's more historical
| imagination.
|
| I guess I'm coming from a foreigner's perspective where I
| never read any of that writing from the pilgrim's
| perspective. All I see about Indians presents them as noble
| savages.
| moultano wrote:
| The intent isn't to present them as noble savages at all,
| but as real people with their own complicated motivations.
| The author is a white American and knows that he doesn't
| have to put any work in to humanize the European colonists.
| We do that by default. What requires work is to see them as
| the native people saw them, and to see native people not as
| caricatures or plot devices, but as agents themselves.
| lopmotr wrote:
| It's probably my different perspective not being an
| American. I haven't read those textbooks he mentions and
| all I hear about Indians is these blogs which present the
| same general picture. I understand now that Americans
| will have been exposed to different material at school so
| this could appear as a novel viewpoint.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 1491 and 1493 are two great books by the same author, delving
| deep into those topics. I enjoyed every line, and there was a lot
| of them :-)
|
| https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Colu...
|
| https://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Create...
| blueyes wrote:
| Charles C. Mann is a genius among journalists. 1491 was mind-
| blowing for me, and I'm halfway through 1493 (equally good).
|
| Most of what people were taught about pre-Columbian
| civilizations in America is wrong.
|
| They were far more sophisticated than previously thought (and,
| for that matter, more sophisticated than Europe in a variety of
| ways), but their downfall was lack of immunity to Eurasian
| viruses. Reading 1491 is similar to the feeling one might have
| of encountering Chinese or Japanese civilization for the first
| time.
|
| I would also like to plug a third book from Mann: The Wizard
| and the Prophet.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Prophet-Remarkable-Scientists-...
|
| It's about two men, the godfathers of the Green Revolution and
| the modern environmental movement. The first, Borlaug, is a
| techno-optimist solving global hunger, while the second, Vogt,
| is a conservative vis a vis technology, modernity and
| demographics, and takes a Malthusian opposition to tech and
| growth.
|
| I have come to see the conversation happening about tech, and
| between tech and mainstream American culture, as a conversation
| between wizards and prophets.
|
| Neither side is wholly wrong, and both have good reasons as
| well as self-interest to believe what they do. But the way they
| understand the world is deeply different.
| moultano wrote:
| These are some of the most fascinating books I've ever read. I
| really think anyone who lives in the new world should read
| them. Our default understanding of the land in which we live is
| so far off from the reality of its history.
|
| These were some of the notes I took from when I read 1491:
|
| The populations of Native North Americans that European
| colonists interacted with were the survivors of a continent-
| wide holocaust that wiped out 90-95% of their population.
| Smallpox spread through the interior of the content faster than
| Europeans explored it, leaving empty civilizations in its wake.
| One of the reasons there wasn't a permanent European settlement
| on the eastern seaboard until over 100 years after Columbus is
| that until that point, the coast was too crowded with people
| already living there. The colonists set up in the ruins of
| towns that were entirely wiped out by disease. Squanto
| (Tisquantum) the Indian who school children will be hearing
| about a lot in the next week, attached himself to the Plymoth
| colony only after escaping from captivity in Europe and
| returning to his home to find everyone dead. The same plague
| swept through Meso- and South America, but the Spanish explored
| faster, so we know more about the civilizations that lived
| there.
|
| Native North Americans are described as hunter gatherers,
| because that's what people revert to after civilization
| collapses. When their cultures were intact, the land of entire
| eastern US was intensely managed by them through a combination
| of direct agriculture, regular burning to clear underbrush and
| encourage game species normally found in the plains to spread
| into the woodland, and selective planting.
|
| At least 10% of the Amazon Rainforest was planted by the people
| who lived there. Rather than clearing land for agriculture,
| they created forest gardens, and this arboreal agriculture
| supported large complex civilizations that we know almost
| nothing about.
|
| There are giant causeways made of earth and full of shards of
| pottery spreading through miles of flood plain in the Beni in
| Bolivia. They were only discovered in the 1960s. There was
| evidently a large civilization living there that we know
| nothing about. That's the level of discovery that's still
| possible in this subject: advanced civilizations that are new
| to science.
|
| Ultimately, the thing that affected me the most that I will
| remember forever is the idea of "earth as garden." Mankind has
| changed irrevocably every land it has settled. Even in the
| Americas, traditionally thought of as a nearly untouched
| wilderness until Europeans arrived, was intensely modified and
| cultivated by the people who lived there. Much of what today we
| think of as wilderness was in its time planted deliberately by
| people. The ethics of environmentalism constantly stumble over
| defining what "natural" is. I propose that there is no such
| thing. The whole earth is a garden. It's enough to try to keep
| it that way.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| Can't help but note the description of a meeting between a
| strong, tall and healthy indigenous man versus short, unhealthy
| European explorer. I recall this being noted in a university
| course I took on early French Canadian history as well. Very soon
| the health of early colonists also eclipsed those back home.
|
| While those in France needed the permission of the Seigneur(Lord)
| to kill a deer, and meat was a expensive food, First Nations and
| Colonists had an abundance of easily available game and fish, and
| had much more freedom to claim it for themselves.
|
| (This is not to say that First Nations didn't have concepts of
| exclusive hunting/farming areas handed down through family and
| political ties, but in general, there was a lot more food to be
| had in NA!)
| briga wrote:
| I don't think the European explorers could be described as
| unhealthy--they certainly wouldn't have lasted long if they
| were. Their lifestyles of back-breaking labor and heavy
| drinking probably didn't help.
|
| Also, fun tidbit: they were short for economical reasons, 5'5"
| apparently being the optimal height for fur-trading. Anyone who
| was too tall would take up too much cargo space, and at that
| time fathers would consider it a bad thing for their sons to
| grow too tall.
| wizardforhire wrote:
| I highly advise "The Wisdom of the Native Americans" [1] if
| anyone is interested in exploring in depth how sophisticated the
| Natives truly are. Curated from court cases with the US
| government, it pieces together a small slice of the oral
| tradition and its nothing short of astounding.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Native-Americans-Kent-
| Nerburn/...
| user982 wrote:
| Conversely, I picked up a book titled "All the Real Indians
| Died Off", which was intended to dispel such myths about Native
| Americans. One of the first chapters was an attack on the
| Bering land bridge hypothesis as "just a theory" with language
| that directly echoed creationist texts, which then went on to
| dismiss any suggestions that American Indians are descendants
| of migration and spiraled out to attack science itself. No
| alternative theory was put forward.
|
| After that, I naturally flipped ahead to the chapter about the
| myth that "Indians are Anti-Science." It opened with the
| sentence, "Few people in the world have more reason to be anti-
| science than American Indians," then said that calling Indians
| anti-science is inflammatory, moved on to reject Western
| science as anti-Indian, and then redefined science as any
| passed-on knowledge that makes life easier. I didn't read the
| rest of the book.
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