Good Singing + "An Indigenous People's History Of The United States"

New technique for Sunday Nights : I am writing in my sleep. Not bad, eh? I wish I'd thought of it months ago. Well at any rate, the singing was good in church this morn. This afternoon, I began a new book called "An Indigenous People's History Of The United States" by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. I discovered this book during a Google search for American Indian history books after watching "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee" a few weeks ago. That was the movie where the dvd froze up and I was unable to finish watching, but what I did see caused me to want to read more about the subject, and about Indian history as well. I have been curious ever since I began visiting Santa Susana State Park, and after my Google search I ordered the above mentioned book from the Libe and today I began reading.

I will be honest and admit up front that I was just a wee bit skeptical because the author, while part Native American herself, is also a left wing college professor, and a feminist, and so - while the reviews for her book were great and led me to order it - I figured she might have an agenda and therefore I trod carefully upon beginning the first chapter.

Before I go any further, I'd like to explain my wariness of Ms. Ortiz' credentials and beliefs. Very briefly, anyone who reads this blog knows that I have a problem with "isms" as John Lennon once called them. I have a problem with ideologies of any type, especially "right wing" and "left wing", because life is not that simple to allow us to simply choose a side and be done with it. So I am very tentative about considering the opinion of anyone who does espouse an ideology rather than their own individual thought. I am afraid also that I must include the ideology of "feminism" in my overall rejection of such categories of identity. While I certainly agree with and support the platform of equal rights for women in society, and though I feel that these rights should have been a given from the beginning of time, and while I detest and stand against the oppression of women in every way, I still do not agree with a strident ideology - feminism - in which only a carefully chosen leadership of women are allowed to speak and therefore to form group opinion. To me, that is just one more example of Groupthink, one more ideology to contend with, and at the end of the day, while the issues I have mentioned are of the utmost importance to resolve, the opinions of political ideologists are not in the least bit important, be they Left, Right, Feminist or Old White Guy or what have you.

I have always beseeched you to go above all of that stuff and think for yourself.

Anyway, after that lengthy caveat, I can report that the author Professor Ortiz plays it straight, as far as her writing and reporting of history is concerned. She may be an ex-1960s radical, but she tells the tale of the people who lived in North America before the arrival of Columbus with only the facts as she has learned them. And it is one hell of a story so far. I am already on page 50, and the main thing that has surprised me is that - according to Ortiz - North America was not a wilderness inhabited by savages when Columbus arrived, but was instead a very developed land mass for it's time, inhabited by hundreds of nations ("tribes"), who used fire to burn thick brush and then cultivated the land for large scale farming. In one location she describes acres of corn measuring six by six miles. The Indians also had a cross country road system that connected nations with one another, and allowed for the trading of seeds and feathers and blankets and other goods.

What blows my mind is that many of those Indian roads - which would have been trails at the time - are the same roads that eventually became the highway system for modern day Americans. We had the technology, and we created highways, but the road system was already here, created by Indians.

That's a mindblower, and it is something I didn't know, although I get a small sense of it whenever I go on many of my hikes and walk along a known Indian trail. It is because of these hikes, in places like Santa Susana, that I have become interested in American Indian history. The author Ortiz says that before Columbus arrived, there were 100 Million Indians in North America, and that 300 years later, that number was reduced to 10 Million, a 90% reduction. She uses the word genocide, and it is very likely an accurate word to use, though as she points out, the genocide was not entirely a result of slaughter, but more because of a long lasting and determined policy of superiority and entitlement by the European colonialists beginning with Columbus. They did not just murder tens of millions of Indians (although they did some of that), but rather they stole land and initiated policies that forced indigenous people into various hardships that led to starvation and disease and tribes fighting against one another, which resulted in much of the destruction of the Indian civilisation and death of it's people.

The author Ortiz writes in a concise way that only lays out the information of the way in which the North American civilization existed, and then the way in which it was overtaken.

"Just the facts, ma'am", as Jack Webb would say.

Are these the facts? Was North America a well developed agrarian landmass, with criss-crossing routes of trade, and evolved systems of government amongst it's tribal peoples?

Reading the first 50 pages, it sounds pretty legit to me. I am an amateur and very minor level student of Indian culture, just because I live in their surroundings. We all do. And it blows my mind, and has always done so, that they had a civilisation that lasted for eight thousand years, right up until the time the Europeans came. So they must have been doing something right, for their way of life to have lasted for eight millennia.

Please note that I am also not anti-European. I have no agenda, and that is my background after all. My ancestors came from England. I don't feel the way they felt, and I would never want to subjugate anyone, nor force my will upon them.

But I am here, and I live in the country, and on the land mass, in which they did these things to the Indigenous people.

I can't help my heritage, and so I make no apologies for it. I also think that there is something positive to be said for some of the technological progress that was made possible by the European people.

Some of the progress; not all of it.

So it's a complicated subject, as is any study of history. For me, though, this is the first time I have ever read any American History from the Native point of view.

So far it is very enlightening.

See you in the morning.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)