Desantis revision of Native American history

[Cow Poke]

Then there is Manhattan Island, originally named Mannahatta, a Lenape term meaning "island of many hills". Originally discovered by Verrazzano in 1524, later mapped by Henry Hudson in 1609, and was purchased by the Dutch supposedly from the Canarsee Indians, who lived in what is now Brooklyn and Long Island, for sixty guilders (or golden pennies). Despite the current jokes that it was sold for a dollar, that is estimated by historians James and Michelle Nevius to be about $2,600 to $15,600. But the problem is that the Canarsee tribe sold land to the Dutch that wasn't theirs: It belonged to the Lenape.

Were the Canarsee the original "if you believe that, I got an island to sell ya"?

[rogue06]

Sure it is 'stolen land'.

It was stolen land when the Lakota drove the Cheyenne and the Crow from the Black Hills, it was stolen land when the Cheyenne and Crow drove the Kiowa and Arapaho out from the Black Hills, it was stolen land when the Kiowa and Arapaho drove the Arikara out from the Black Hills. My wife's people, the Ute, had land stolen from them by the Shoshone.

And so on and so forth, all across the US, the same sorts of things occurred long before the US existed and did it all more successfully than any before them.

You beat me to it. The Kiowa and Arapaho to Cheyenne and Crow to Lakota transitions all took place within something like two centuries with it becoming "sacred land" to each during those short times.

Wasn't aware of the Arikara.

The point is that this is nothing new. I mean the Lombardy region of Italy is named after the Germanic invaders who controlled the area in the 6th into 8th centuries.

[Ronson]

You beat me to it. The Kiowa and Arapaho to Cheyenne and Crow to Lakota transitions all took place within something like two centuries with it becoming "sacred land" to each during those short times.

Wasn't aware of the Arikara.

The point is that this is nothing new. I mean the Lombardy region of Italy is named after the Germanic invaders who controlled the area in the 6th into 8th centuries.

IIRC, the Clovis Culture in North America arrived about 40,000 years ago. No doubt they were transplanted by later migrations, who were transplanted by further migrations, etc.

No doubt Shuny is going to dig in on his technicality, since he has clearly lost the narrative.

[rogue06]

IIRC, the Clovis Culture in North America arrived about 40,000 years ago. No doubt they were transplanted by later migrations, who were transplanted by further migrations, etc.

No doubt Shuny is going to dig in on his technicality, since he has clearly lost the narrative.

Clovis appeared 13,000 years ago -- give or take a week. They weren't the first.

[Ronson]

Clovis appeared 13,000 years ago -- give or take a week. They weren't the first.

I stand corrected.

Is there any data on this 40K-year-old human presence? Or was this debunked?

[Cow Poke]

IIRC, the Clovis Culture in North America arrived about 40,000 years ago. No doubt they were transplanted by later migrations, who were transplanted by further migrations, etc.

No doubt Shuny is going to dig in on his technicality, since he has clearly lost the narrative.

Pssssshhhhh... Don't forget the Nephites, Lamanites, Jaredites and Mulekites arrived in America around 600 BC!

[Gondwanaland]

I stand corrected.

Is there any data on this 40K-year-old human presence? Or was this debunked?

There's a decent bit, quite a few archeologists resisted it as long as they could, but there's clear pre-clovis civilizations in the Americas, potentially 40k years old (in the Yukon IIRC)

And more recently there's some evidence from the Cerutti Mastodon site that there may have been non homo sapiens hominins in the Americas 130k years ago

[NorrinRadd]

So the whole "native" American thing is buffalo turds.

[shunyadragon]

Who cares what DeSantis said. The fact is the natives were slaughtering each other and taking each others territories long before the white man showed up. We just happen to be the bigger more advanced tribe,

DeStantos is a liar pants on fire, and an arrogant white man from the perspective of the Native Americans, I wish there were a few here that could speak up for them. Nice touch you calling them the demeaning term 'Natives.'

Basically the wars between Indian tribes were not just tribal wars. They had more respect for each other and less wars than the Europeans among themselves. We can go into it more if you wish concerning the tribal nature of the white man and Manifest Destiny, slavery and other issues of how whit man viewed other peoples of the world.

Actually by the time the white Europeans arrived the Native Americans were mostly large regional tribal nations. There were indeed conflicts in history among the Native American Nations, but no they did not spend their time ;just' slaughtering each other.

You and the other posters that make these demeaning baseless accusations need to back it up

[shunyadragon]

This is a part of the efforts of conservatives to rewrite Whiteman's history to be more like 'Little House on the Prairie, and John Wayne movies..

By the way the slaughter of captives and slavery was rare to non-existent among Naive Americans. Many women and children catured were adopted into the tribe including white captives.

[Gondwanaland]

DeStantos is a liar pants on fire, and an arrogant white man from the perspective of the Native Americans, I wish there were a few here that could speak up for them. Nice touch you calling them the demeaning term 'Natives.'
Basically the wars between Indian

Nice touch you calling them a term that a decent number find demeaning after trying to scold someone for using the term 'natives'. My wife is Native American and said her tribe would more likely find your term demeaning than the term 'natives'.
But then you also still use the antiquated term 'oriental' to describe Asian peoples, so......

tribes were not just tribal wars. They had more respect for each other and less wars than the Europeans among themselves. We can go into it more if you wish concerning the tribal nature of the white man and Manifest Destiny, slavery and other issues of how whit man viewed other peoples of the world.

Yeah, no, sorry, genocide, scalping, cannibalism, no more or less respect than the Europeans had amongst themselves.

As to slavery, well, a good number of the people on the Trail of Tears were black slaves of the Cherokee, and a number of other tribes also had slaves (and had to be forced via treaty after the civil war to end slavery.

Actually by the time the white Europeans arrived the Native Americans were mostly large regional tribal nations. There were indeed conflicts in history among the Native American Nations, but no they did not spend their time ;just' slaughtering each other.

You and the other posters that make these demeaning baseless accusations need to back it up

That's simply not historically accurate. You're spouting ignorant nonsense.

[Gondwanaland]

This is a part of the efforts of conservatives to rewrite Whiteman's history to be more like 'Little House on the Prairie, and John Wayne movies..

By the way the slaughter of captives and slavery was rare to non-existent among Naive Americans. Many women and children catured were adopted into the tribe including white captives.

That is patently untrue. Numerous tribes practiced slavery, and indeed quite a few African slaves were part of the Trail of Tears, and many had to fight for years and years and years to be recognized as part of the tribe after the US forced the tribes to end slavery after the Civil war and the 14th Amendment.

[rogue06]

So the whole "native" American thing is buffalo turds.

If you consider that humans arose in Africa we are technically an invasive species everywhere but there.

[CivilDiscourse]

Source: https://www.wral.com/fact-check-desantis-says-u-s-wasn-t-built-on-stolen-land/20594671/

Fact check: DeSantis says U.S. wasn't built on stolen land

In the only gubernatorial debate before the Nov. 8 election, Gov. Ron DeSantis said: "You have people that are teaching -- and actually his running mate has said this in the past -- that teaching the United States was built on stolen land. That is inappropriate for our schools; it's not true." PolitiFact checks his claim.

As Florida's governor, Republican Ron DeSantis has repeatedly stated his conviction that leaders need to fight attempts to "indoctrinate students" in classrooms.
In the only gubernatorial debate before the Nov. 8 election, Gov. DeSantis contrasted his record on education with that of Democratic challenger Charlie Crist and Crist's running mate Karla Hernández-Mats.

"You have people that are teaching — and actually his running mate has said this in the past — that teaching the United States was built on stolen land," DeSantis said Oct. 24. "That is inappropriate for our schools; it's not true."

We wondered what DeSantis was referring to and whether he was right in his assessment of whether the U.S. was built on "stolen land."

DeSantis' campaign did not get back to us. But his remark echoed tweets from Christina Pushaw, rapid response director for DeSantis' re-election campaign. One tweet included a screenshot of a June 24, 2018, Facebook post from United Teachers of Dade, where Hernández-Mats, a former special education teacher, has been president since 2016.

The Facebook post included an image of a sign that read: "No one is illegal on stolen land." Hernández-Mats did not respond to specific questions about the image. The post was shared at a time when U.S. immigration policies were dominating the news.

We reached out to historians of Native and non-Native descent. All of them said it is well documented that the U.S. acquired Native American land through dubious treaties and, at times, forcefully confiscated ancestral territories to bolster the country's expansion.

"As a general statement, yes, the United States stole land from Native Americans," said Philip Deloria, a Native American history professor at Harvard University.

Sometimes the U.S. and Native American tribes struck treaties that defined boundaries and determined land sale prices and forms of compensation. Other times, tribes signed land-ceding agreements under duress.

Deloria said the U.S. often placed compensation for these deals in U.S.-controlled trust funds or promised payment over a number of years, but then failed to follow through.

The Sioux Agreement of 1877 is an example of the U.S. acquiring land from Native Americans through fraudulent practices and treaty violations.

Fact check: Trump says he sent agents to stop Florida 'steal' and help DeSantis win In 1868, the U.S. signed a treaty recognizing the Black Hills, a 7-million-acre South Dakota mountain range, as part of the Great Sioux Reservation. It set the land "apart for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation" of the Sioux, a Native American tribe.
The treaty between the U.S. government and the Sioux said that non-Native people "are not permitted to pass over, settle upon, or reside in the territory." Speculation that the Black Hills contained gold, however, led miners to trespass on Sioux territory.

The U.S. then moved to negotiate with the Sioux to acquire the land. The deal fell through, which led to a war and hundreds of deaths. The tribe later surrendered and signed a treaty that ceded the Black Hills to the U.S.

The U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled in 1975 that the Sioux are entitled to damages of around $17 million for this land seizure. The court remarked: "A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history."

In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. government had acquired the Black Hills through "unfair and dishonorable dealing" and affirmed that it owed the Sioux tribe "just compensation," including interest.

In a dissenting opinion, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote, "There was tragedy, deception, barbarity, and virtually every other vice known to man in the 300-year history of the expansion of the original 13 Colonies into a Nation which now embraces more than three million square miles."

The U.S. sometimes bought Native land from European countries, like France, and claimed ownership even though "France did not treaty with the many tribes who lived upon that land," said Randy Woodley, director of intercultural and indigenous studies at George Fox University.

Fact check: Biden takes credit for increase in Social Security checksThe federal government also forcibly removed Native Americans from their ancestral lands after former President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830. That expulsion became known as the "Trail of Tears," which killed thousands of Native Americans.
The Seminoles resisted relocation, and the result was a half-century of warfare.
Andrew Frank, a Florida State University professor who specializes in the history of the Seminoles, said the U.S. annexed much of Florida through treaties that a majority of the tribal leaders opposed. The U.S. military drove out more than 3,000 Seminoles from the state, according to the Florida Department of State. Around 300 members of the tribe remained in Florida.

"The post-Civil War period is full of people being compressed, contained, and confined onto small reservations within their territory, in order to accommodate non-Native settlement," Deloria told PolitiFact.

In 1946, the federal government created the Indian Claims Commission to resolve legal claims that the U.S. obtained Native American land through questionable or fraudulent economic transactions.
It lasted until 1978, and unsettled claims were transferred to the U.S. Court of Claims. The commission found that the U.S. government's payment of $152,500 to the Seminoles for about 23 million acres of land in Florida was "clearly unconscionable."
The Indian Claims Commission completed 546 cases, awarding about $818 million to Native American tribes.

"It is historically inaccurate to say the land was not stolen from Native Americans," Woodley said.

© Copyright Original Source

I guess the question I have for you is this:

Yes, the US is built on stolen land. Go far enough back, and pretty much ALL land is would be "stolen", so what makes the US's crime special?

[rogue06]

Various ancient pre-Columbian sites in the Americas have helped to establish that primitive cultures (including Native American ones) were far more violent than later civilizations

Source: The Most Violent Era In America Was Before Europeans Arrived

There's a mythology about the native Americans, that they were all peaceful and in harmony with nature - it's easy to create narratives when there is no written record.

But archeology keeps its own history and a new paper finds that the 20th century, with its hundreds of millions dead in wars and, in the case of Germany, China, Russia and other dictatorships, genocide, was not the most violent - on a per-capita basis that honor may belong to the central Mesa Verde of southwest Colorado and the Pueblo Indians.

Writing in the journal American Antiquity, Washington State University archaeologist Tim Kohler and colleagues document how nearly 90 percent of human remains from that period had trauma from blows to either their heads or parts of their arms.

"If we're identifying that much trauma, many were dying a violent death," said Kohler. The study also offers new clues to the mysterious depopulation of the northern Southwest, from a population of about 40,000 people in the mid-1200s to 0 in 30 years.

From the days they first arrived in the Southwest in the 1800s, most anthropologists and archaeologists have downplayed evidence of violent conflict among native Americans.

"Archaeologists with one or two exceptions have not tried to develop an objective metric of levels of violence through time," said Kohler. "They've looked at a mix of various things like burned structures, defensive site locations and so forth, but it's very difficult to distill an estimate of levels of violence from such things. We've concentrated on one thing, and that is trauma, especially to the head and portions of the arms. That's allowed us to look at levels of violence through time in a comparative way."



Source

© Copyright Original Source

Source: Thanksgiving guilt trip: How warlike were Native Americans before Europeans showed up?

The approach of Thanksgiving, that quintessential American holiday, has me brooding over recent scientific portrayals of Native Americans as bellicose brutes. When I was in grade school, my classmates and I wore paper Indian headdresses and Pilgrim hats and reenacted the "first Thanksgiving," in which supposedly friendly Native Americans joined Pilgrims for a fall feast of turkey, venison, squash and corn. This episode seemed to support the view—often (apparently erroneously) attributed to the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau—of Native Americans and other pre-state people as peaceful "noble savages".

As I've pointed out previously, prominent scientists now deride depictions of pre-state people as peaceful. "Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage," the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker wrote in 2007, "quantitative body counts—such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with ax marks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men—suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own." According to Pinker, the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes "got it right" when he called pre-state life a "war of all against all."

Pinker based his view on books such as War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford University Press, 1996) by the anthropologist Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois, and Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage (Saint Martin's Press, 2003) by the archaeologist Steven LeBlanc of Harvard. "The dogs of war were seldom on a leash" in the pre-Colombian New World, Keeley wrote.

Popular culture has amplified these scientific claims. In the 2007 HBO docudrama Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Chief Sitting Bull complains to a U.S. Army colonel about whites' violent treatment of the Indians. The colonel retorts, "You were killing each other for hundreds of moons before the first white stepped foot on this continent."

Native Americans definitely waged war long before Europeans showed up. The evidence is especially strong in the American Southwest, where archaeologists have found numerous skeletons with projectile points embedded in them and other marks of violence; war seems to have surged during periods of drought. But scientists such as Pinker, Keeley and LeBlanc have replaced the myth of the noble savage with the myth of the savage savage.


Source

© Copyright Original Source

Here is an excellent article (if you can access it) originally published in Skeptic Magazine in 2001 that exploded the myth: WHENCE THE "NOBLE SAVAGE"

The article is largely a review of the archaeologist Lawrence H. Keeley's research that he published in War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. In it Keeley shows that peaceful societies are a rare exception and that nearly 95% of them are warlike or regularly go to war. Of the fraction that doesn't, they tend to fall into two groups: isolated nomadic groups (who also have the option of flight) and defeated refugees.

The attrition rate of the close-quarters combat that is the feature of tribal warfare whether ancient or modern, results in much higher (up to 60 times!^[1]) casualty rates that what we see today. And it doesn't matter if you base your calculations on the total deaths due to war or as the average deaths per year from war as a percent of the total population.

Furthermore, here is the end of chapter 2 from a textbook, Sociology: The Basics by Marjorie Donovan that discusses much of the same information as well as providing more modern examples of the levels of violence and warfare seen among "primitive" cultures compared to more modern ones.

f7a0cb93-ad82-4c98-bf81-daf63585ac03.jpg
28cf535c-d65c-4c22-b854-c37dbb4e0837.jpg
The Chapter ends here with Suggested Readings and Bibliography

And a comparison of the percentage of those killed by violence in primitive cultures compared to more advanced ones

1.jpg

3883b421-66fe-4ffc-84be-0dd7e0e6417c.jpg

Basically, the less technologically advanced the society, the more violent it was -- and that includes Native American ones. Of course there were exceptions but they were rare.




1. According to TJ Nelson's review of Keeley's work.