American Indians

American Indians are a bunch of jerks, like everybody else.  Nice narrative hook, eh?  I like saying this about human groups when I hear blather about them.  Yes, I know that human groups differ, I've said so on this very blog many times.  An interesting paradox in the liberal/neoconservative mindset is on the one hand, their dogma that human groups don't differ, coupled with their constant high praise of favored minority groups, as though they do differ, somehow, from boring old oppressive White people.  The usual notion about American Indians — I'll call them "Amerinds" henceforth, for conciseness and clarity — is that they're some sort of noble savage, living in harmony with nature, yadda yadda yadda.  Well, they were hardly that.  Somewhere in one of Tony Hillerman's books some Navajos are talking about the Hollywood stereotype of Amerinds and laughing about it, because they know very well themselves, that they're a bunch of jerks, just like everybody else.  The only people who live in harmony with nature are the ones who haven't figured out how to harness nature, and there haven't been very many people like that for millenia.  Anyhow, one tacit assumption about Amerinds is that they were somehow static and unchanging and again, all harmonious with nature, till the Evil White Man showed up and spoiled everything.  Such thinking always seems to regard Amerinds as existing only North of Mexico, because the Aztecs and Mayas and Incas certainly weren't unchanging and harmonious.  But even if you do restrict your thinking, arbitrarily, to those to the North, the notion is still wrong.  All kinds of things were going on before Columbus. Tribes were driving each other out of their territories, cities were built and somehow abandoned, and ideas from the South were slowly making their way North.  I've often wondered about an alternate-history scenario where somehow the Western hemisphere was left to itself till the present day, and was allowed to develop without European influence. Somebody needs to write that one.  Well, this stream of consciousness was touched off by this post on Evo And Proud.