Movies about Native Americans

Originally posted by pinguin  Even more, that's the same kind of bigotry that discriminate poor "hillybillies" and separates them from the rest of Americans. The people of the cities have always discriminated the "mountain" people.

Originally posted by Carcharodon Originally posted by drgonzaga    Not that other misconceptions are put in their place; e. g. : "there where no such rainforest tribes around the maya cities". Placing aside the misunderstanding of "cities" rather than ceremonial centers within a dispersed agrarian hub, the idea does violence to the actual complexity and overlapping time spans unique to the Maya complex. Nevertheless, the Maya are but one of two peoples to actually develop a form of urbanization within a tropical rainforest ecology. In the movie the people of Jaguar paw is portraited as some kind of hunter gatherers. In the period of classical maya time most people round the ceremonial centers, or cities, or whatever one prefers to call them, were agriculturalists.

Originally posted by drgonzaga  Respect the terminology Carcharodon, and while one is at it understand the complexity of the chronology in any discussion of the Maya. The Maya were, even at the height of the Classical Period prior to AD 900, slash and burn agriculturalists [scarcely different in pattern from the Tupians we discussed in another thread]. Certainly, there were ethnic Maya throughout the rain forest disassociated from "ceremonial centers" whose agrarian practices bore more resemblance to "gathering" than to intense exploitation [e.g. the random sowing of food crops such as maize supplemented by wild plants and fruits]. If one understands the broad spectrum of time involved, one easily accepts the fact that the more complex settlement patterns were the exceptions to the general rule. This characteristic even permitted the continuance of ethnic Maya separateness first after the Toltec incursion and later with the Spaniards. Think of the "Lacandon".

Originally posted by pikeshot1600   A Rousseau-like "noble savage" fad seems currently to be in fashion on the Web, but a lot of it is romance.

Quoth Carcharodon:

A somewhat odd movie is "Where the River runs Black", from 1986.

Originally posted by Carcharodon ...  Of course it´s hard to know exactly what Gibson thought when he made this movie, but it seems that most May experts who has critisized the film tend to compare the things they see in it with classical Maya. And in that setting the whites are an anachronism. But, of course noone forbids Gibson to include whatever anachronism or other things he wants in his movie. ...

Originally posted by pinguin The conquest is, therefore, explained as the way to bring salvation to a New World, which was a pristine Eden, but that was also dominated by the forces of evil (represented here by the Mayan civilization; but better, by the Aztec civilization which is really the one represented symbolically in the film through the Mayans).

I can see that both Carch and Ping are caught upon their own assumptions and could give a hang about either Gibson or the Maya. As I've always iterated one learns little of the past by imposing one's contemporary exigencies and politics. The Classical Maya were no less violent than either the Europeans of their day or the hapless neighbors of Tenochtitlan in later centuries. As everyone should know by now, slash-and-burn agriculture requires the "protection" of territory far larger than the existing population might envision in modern terms to protect against soil exhaustion. Violence for the protection of territory and the guarantee of a reliable food supply was not only a fact-of-life in Maya Culture but became ingrained ritually as result of this economic reality. It was not so long ago that vaunted anthropologists [yes, those same folks you are so fond of Carch] incessantly iterated that it was the Toltec incursions of the 11th century that brought violence to the Maya! Such folderol is more than antihistorical it is entirely ahistorical. A simple review of any Maya stela lauding the feats of a particular "king" underscores just how foolish the refusal to recognize factual violence as a means of establishing identity really is...after all within the Maya concept of time, violence and destruction consumes the social axis!

Edited by drgonzaga - 24-May-2009 at 17:54

Originally posted by drgonzaga I can see that both Carch and Ping are caught upon their own assumptions and could give a hang about either Gibson or the Maya.