We have also the somewhat romantizised  depiction of Amazon Indigenous people in John Boormans "Emerald Forest". Also in that the main character is white even if he was brought up in an indigenous society.

 

One interesting movie that is  about Indigenous people is the Brasilian "A Lenda de Uribajara" from 1975.

 

It is presented like this in IMDB:

"In order to earn a warrior name, the son of Araguaia chief wanders the forest, falls in love with a girl from the Tocantins tribe, and defeats their bravest warrior. When his true identity is discovered, he makes a deal: promises to fight the Tapuias, another tribe which threatens the Tocantins, marries the Indian girl and establishes the Ubirajara nation"

 

That movie is also romantizised but at least it`s about Native Americans and not about a white guy living among them.

It seems that the movie is made after a romance written by Jose De Alancar in the 20th century.

 

 

 

Oh yes, I nearly forget about that one. It really exaggerates the violence among the maya and on top of that the movie indtroduces the spaniards a couple of hundred years to early. Gibson also shows architecture, art and ornaments from different places and time periods mixed toghether.

 

And the rainforest dwelling people, where the hero comes from, is really out of place, there where no such rainforest tribes around the maya cities.

Other movie I liked was New World, where the native actors speak Algoquin (I think), the language of Pocahontas. (If I am wrong with the language, please correct me)

 

Yes, one got to give Gibson credit for that. And also the movie was rather exciting with some good cliffhangers.

 

The Algonquin were a factor in the peltry business in Canada, while the Indians of the Chesapeake were fisherman and subsistence farmers (long enough growing season), as well as hunters.

 

Virginia/Chesapeake = tobacco, corn, beans; Canada = furs. 

 

 

 

For most of the first half of the 20th century, the Maya were caricatured as peaceful, agrarian "intellectuals" so unlike their Meso-American neighbors. The archaeological discoveries at Bonampak put an end to that folderol. 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.

What was found? That the Mayans weren't better or worst than any other civilization of the Ancient times. War, political crimes, displays of pride and power in architecture and power, and all the same things we can find everywhere else.

In short, it has been discovered that Mayans were only humans.

 

Sorry, Pike, but the Tidewater and Eastern Shore  tribes were Algonquian speakers divided from their Canadian brethren by the later invasions of the Iroqouians, which were actually pressing the Algonquins at the time of contact, as well as the Siouans of the Piedmont [hence the reason for the Powhatan "Confederacy"]. These three groupings did have distinct cultural traits with the Algonquin representing the earlier society within what became the Virginia colony.

 

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.

 

Rapa Nui, about Easter Island. Also a rather romantisized movie with conflicts, love and adventure. Also comments on environmental destruction a la Jared Diamond:

 

 

Then we have Ofelas (the Pathfinder) about the Saami people in the middle ages. This movie is made by a saami director (Niels gaup) and most of the actors are saami (some of the tjud people are played by others notably the leader which is played by famous icelandic actor Helgi Skulasson who also appeared in many icelandic historical movies). This movie is exciting and retells an old saami tale about how a saami young man tries to save his people from marauding tjuds (the real tjuds were probably people from todays karelia in Finland/Russia):

 

 

 

Here a couple of clips

From Rapa Nui:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nQPLO6eAAg - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nQPLO6eAAg

 

From Ofelas:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oekcd75163A - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oekcd75163A

 

 

 

"Traci Ardren, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Miami, knows the Maya well. She has studied Classic Maya society for over 20 years while living in the modern Maya villages of Yaxuna, Chunchucmil, and Espita in the Mexican state of Yucatan. Her credentials include contributing to and editing Ancient Maya Women (2002) and The Social Experience of Childhood in Ancient Mesoamerica (2006). Ardren's reaction to the new film " http://apocalypto.movies.go.com/ - Apocalypto ," follows. Scholars are well aware that some aspects of Maya culture were violent, but Ardren finds fault with what she sees as a pervasive colonial attitude in the film."

 

Is "Apocalypto" Pornography? :

 

http://www.archaeology.org/online/reviews/apocalypto.html - http://www.archaeology.org/online/reviews/apocalypto.html

 

Andrea Stone, a specialist in Mesoamerican art, particularly the art of the Classic Maya, teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and has carried out fieldwork in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador:

 

Orcs in loincloth - A Mayanist Looks at Apocalypto:

 

http://www.archaeology.org/online/reviews/apocalypto2.html - http://www.archaeology.org/online/reviews/apocalypto2.html

 

 

 

 

By the way, I agree that the first ten minutes of the movie was the best part of the whole movie, but it was just to show us the carefree noble savage ideal human in action, just to contrast with the cruel and corrupted civilised invaders. It was never meant to show us "life among the Mayas".

 

Conclusion - Gibson is a prick.

 

Niels Gaup has made another very interesting movie "The Kautokeino Rebellion" (2008)about events taking place in 1852 when Sami got into conflict with representatives of Norwegian authorities:

 

 

A really good movie. I like it a lot.

 

Very good point, Jams. It is very interesting the contrast between civilized and tribal Amerindians, that not many people is aware of. In fact, the attitudes of the Aztecs and Incas, with the natives that had simpler life styles, it is very similar to the attitudes of Europeans with the "savages". There was the same bigotry from the civilized man that believes in its superiority, and the "people of the jungle".

 

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.

 

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_3OPfBNQIs - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_3OPfBNQIs

 

The dichotomy between the exotic rurals and city folks is really canonized in John Boormans "Deliverance" from 1972 when a vacation on the river is turned into a nightmare because of attacks from crazy hillbilly inbread madmen. This movie has got a lot of films following in it´s tracks, more and more grotesque (The Hills have Eyes, Wrong Turn and so on).

 

Classical scene from Deliverance, the duelling banjos:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uzae_SqbmDE - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uzae_SqbmDE

That is probably much closer to the theme of the movie than anything Maya related.

 

There is a lot of other small themes in the movie. At one point the leader/priest is executing prisoners, but he knows about the imminent solar eclipse - he pretends to not know about it, and he asks if this is enough, and asks for a sign. It is obvious from that scene that he already knows it is going to happen, but he knowingly deceives the people, probably to keep the power structure intact, despite the famine and diseases. Keeping the populace in check. Actually it's a well executed scene, I have to admit that.

  

Now, what does that mean? I think it could be interpreted in two major ways. It could be seen as a warning that the authorities are deceiving the people, that perhaps science is a matter of faith, and that we're all being deceived (kind of the conspiracy interpretation, me thinks) or it could be interpreted as a claim that religious beliefs are wrong, that religious leaders are deceiving people.

 

Now, I don't think Gibson believes that religion is wrong, rather he has strong religious beliefs. He just believes that other peoples beliefs are wrong. That the major political, religious and/or science based leaders are wrong - and they know it. That we're just puppets.

Something like that.

 

All that has nothing to do with the Maya. The movie really is not about the Maya, it's just a setting.

 

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".

 

Now as to anthropologists becoming involved as critics of the cinema, such a pastime is often inescapable. One wonders why they actually get involved in a discipline whose principal thrust is entertainment and not education. Besides, ever since anthropology emerged as a discipline, it practitioners did have "axes to grind" and often shaped interpretation to suit their own prejudices. They still do, so many a modern pontificator falls into the identical pit that trapped Franz Boas and later Margaret Meade.

 

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

 

 

 

According to a friend of mine who for many years has worked as an archeologist studying the Maya there were no such hunter gatherer like people close to the May centers in Classical Period.

 

Also Mayan expert Andrea Stone find Jaguar Paws village a bit unrealistic:

"The otherness of Jaguar Paw's village relative to the city-dwellers--who were only a day's walk away after all--also strikes me as unreal. I would never have identified this place as the hometown of Classic Maya corn farmers, who lived in a dispersed settlement pattern. The crowded huts made of pole walls, devoid of the mud plaster they commonly used, reminds me, perhaps naively, of an Amazonian village, especially when everyone huddles around a fire at night. Practically lying in the dirt, they look like a merry band of hunter-gatherers. "

(Andrea Stone, a specialist in Mesoamerican art, particularly the art of the Classic Maya, teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and has carried out fieldwork in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador)

 

http://www.archaeology.org/online/reviews/apocalypto2.html - http://www.archaeology.org/online/reviews/apocalypto2.html

 

 

Speaking of Jesuits, we also have the movie "The Mission" from 1986.

 

http://images.google.se/imgres?imgurl=http://www.hindu.com/mp/2006/08/19/images/2006081900230301.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.hindu.com/mp/2006/08/19/stories/2006081900230300.htm&usg=__UuVzaDVN8q2J5jQhin5B-BHYzgM=&h=307&w=349&sz=24&hl=sv&start=5&um=1&tbnid=I9zhG_69zB3xZM:&tbnh=106&tbnw=120&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dthe%2Bmission%2Bjoff%25C3%25A9%26hl%3Dsv%26sa%3DN%26um%3D1 -      

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr1CNUBolu4 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr1CNUBolu4

 

Maybe it´s just a sort of counter reaction on the many negative stereotypes about Native Americans that previously has been so common in popular culture.

 

Oh, I suppose that is so, but negative stereotypes (as all stereotypes) are like rumors.  There is always some truth to them.

 

 

"According to a friend of mine who for many years has worked as an archeologist studying the Maya there were no such hunter gatherer like people close to the May centers in Classical Period."

 

Now it is your assumption that Gibson was portraying the classical Maya--and yes he could take such artistic liberties much as Longfellow did with his Idyll in the Spanish style, Hiawatha--and you were particularly bothered by the introduction of an European onto the setting. In this last instance, Gibson was not as far-fetched as you would like since years before the advent of Cortes and his successors, Gonzalo Guerrero integrated into Maya society at Chetumal [1511-1531] and, besides just as with the Xingu thread current political prejudices and the usual PC palaver have fractured history for their own very modern purposes. However, it is interesting that the history of Mayapan and the later Itza does provide a good base for the premises of Gibson. The Popol Vuh of the Quiche makes interesting reading.

 

Besides, keep in mind that all unqualified negatives are impossible to prove.

 

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.

Some shoolars though doesn´t feel that historical or etnographical details are most important, they seem to be more concerned about the portraing of the May as very cruel and violent. The schoolars are afraid that such portrayals can strenghten prejudice against the Maya of today and affect them negatively.

 

Or as Traci Ardren, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Miami. puts it:

 

"I loved Gibson's film "Braveheart," I really did. But there is something very different about portraying a group of people, who are now recovering from 500 years of colonization, as violent and brutal. These are people who are living with the very real effects of persistent racism that at its heart sees them as less than human. To think that a movie about the 1,000 ways a Maya can kill a Maya--when only 10 years ago Maya people were systematically being exterminated in Guatemala just for being Maya--is in any way okay, entertaining, or helpful is the epitome of a Western fantasy of supremacy that I find sad and ultimately pornographic. It is surely no surprise that "Apolcalypto" has very little to do with Maya culture and instead is Gibson's comment on the excesses he perceives in modern Western society. I just wish he had been honest enough to say this. Instead he has created a beautiful and disturbing portrait that satisfies his need for comment but does violence to one of the most impressive of Native American cultures. "

 

http://www.archaeology.org/online/reviews/apocalypto.html - http://www.archaeology.org/online/reviews/apocalypto.html

 

 

It is set in the Amazon, where a young native woman lives together with dolphins. One day she meets a priest and becomes pregnant. In due time she gives birth to a son. She and her son lives for some years happily together with the dolphins.

One day though, she is murdered by a gang of gold seekers. The son survives but is later taken to the civilisation to be brought up there. But he plans to run away and seek revenge upon the people that murdered his mother.

This is a rather romantisized film with a message of civilisation critic in it. It is beatifully filmed.

 

 

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092205/ - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092205/

 

 

 

Originally posted by pikeshot1600 Oh, I suppose that is so, but negative stereotypes (as all stereotypes) are like rumors.  There is always some truth to them.

 

That can of course be said about the picture of Noble people too, there is always some truth in that. People can be both Noble and Bad.

 

I don't agree. It is easy to know the message behind Gibson movies. However, perhaps you have to be in touch with Latin American catholicism to understand it.

 

The idea is simple. According to Catholic's thesis, the conquist of the Americas was justified because brought Christianity to the New World. According to this view, Columbus was a sort of New Prophet of Christianity, second only to Jesus (In fact, Columbus believed that of himself, perhaps), and so much so that they tried to convert him in a saint

Even more, the Catholic Kings are the superstars on this Catholic crusade.

 

 

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).

 

The final scene, where the Spaniards are seen in the boat, represent the comming of Christianism, or of the Mesiah if you preffer. Look now at the standard portrait of the caravels and see how predominant is the Christian cross of the crusades.

 

 

Even today, the unofficial flag of the Hispanic people, the "La raza" flag, has three crosses on it.

 

 

That's why we said in Latin America that the conquest was done by the sword and the cross.

 

 

 

Still noone can forbid Gibson to do a movie like this, but of course one can critisize him.

 

One can really wonder why Gibson didn´t do a film about the Astecs instead. As you say they are more often associated with the kind of violence one sees in Apocalypto.

 

You can see the cash problems Gibson may had when you see the Spaniards just on a boat, and not on a ship as it should be.

 

 

By the way, Pinguin, the first European to contact Maya society, the aforementioned Gonzalo Guerrero and his original companions did reach the Yucatan in a boat rather than a caravel. They had been shipwrecked in Jamaica and reached the continental shore on a boat!

 

That's a good one. Was Gibson portraying them? As far as I know Cortes found some Spaniards among the Mayas, but by them they were totally assimilated to local society so, rather than the Spanish converting Mayans into European culture, Cortes saw Spaniars totally "mayaized"

 

With respect to boats crossing the Caribbean, Tainos did it as a matter of routine: from Venezuela to Cuba, and from there to the Mayan coast and Florida. The Cuban escapees shows that feat is not as difficult as it may seem at first.

 

Most people are caught up  in some assumptions, you too, I believe.

 

Originally posted by drgonzaga 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.

 

Noone denies violence in ancient May culture (or in most other temporay cultures). But it seems that there are some critizism against Gibson that he exaggerated the violence.

 

Originally posted by drgonzaga 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!

 

The science of anthropology also evolves. Yesterdays truths may not be valid today, and todays thruths maybe not will be valid tomorrow.

 

I don´t know if I´m more fond of anthroplogists than of any other people. But the science of anthropology is rather interesting.

 

 

 

That some Europeans where being integrated and assimilated into Native American societies also occured in North America. One example is the colony of New Sweden where the Lutheran priests and also The Swedish governor Jonah Printz complained over Swedish and Swedish-Finnish farmers that married native women and moved in with them. Printz called it "flykten till de vilske" (escaping to the wild ones, or to the pagans).

I was surprised the British didn't pop up and kill everyone out of nowhere. I guess I have to give him at least some credit for not doing that for the millionth time. 

He should have ended the movie like the lord of the flies (actually he did a little bit) with a modern navy with helicopters throwing bombs and using gatling guns to destroy the Maya city, while playing loud music - preferably the "Ride of the Valkyries"c - and people screaming "hell yeah" when a pyramid explodes.

 

From IMDB:

"The storys background is laid out  After the conquest and plundering of the Inca Empire by Spain, natives invented the legend of Eldorado in the headwaters of the Amazon. In 1560 an expedition set off to discover El Dorado. This is the story of the expedition based on the surviving diary of the monk Gaspar de Carvajal"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068182/plotsummary - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068182/plotsummary

 

The beginning on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBnejPEsLec&NR=1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBnejPEsLec&NR=1

 

 

 

Similarly, you hit upon another flaw in Carcharedon's armour when he discussed the Amerind and the Media. It is a mixed bag and while there are plenty of examples appealing to the lowest common denominator, there were also streneous efforts to correct the more egregious representations. The films of John Ford are an excellent example. Even early on as with the caricature elaborated by D. W. Griffith's Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1914), there was also sympathetic realism as found in Edward L. Curtis' In the Land of the War Canoes released in that same year. Further, who can forget Nanook of the North. Now, the East German film industry in the 1960s loved to harp on the theme of the nasty Americans and what they did to the Amerind, but in doing so they had blatant political motives. And in a sense, Carch is making hay with such blather and hoping time has stood still since the 1950s. Perhaps, Carch might like to access the extensive collection of UC (Berkeley) and their Media Resource Center, which has explored this topic in their Race and Ethnicity Collection.

 

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/ - http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/

 

PS: And, yes, as you suspected I am a retired academic with a background in history, anthropology and archaeology.

Traci Ardren is her name and she has studied Mayan culture for a rather long time.

• archaeologist interested in New World prehistoric cultures and the myriad ways the ancient past is interpreted.  Her research focuses on gender, iconography, architecture and other forms of symbolic representation in the archaeological record.   Dr. Ardren has conducted excavations on the west coast of Florida, at the Audubon House in Key West, at a Mississippian period site in Kentucky, and at Maya cities in Belize and Mexico.  She occasionally teaches an archaeological field school at locations throughout Florida during January Intersession.  Dr. Ardren was co-curator of the exhibition Visions of Empire: Picturing the Conquest in Colonial México at the Lowe Museum of Art in 2003, and Curator of Flowers for the Earth Lord: Guatemalan Textiles from the Lowe Art Museum Permanent Collection in 2006. Recent publications include Ancient Maya Women (AltaMira Press 2002), The Social Experience of Childhood in Ancient Mesoamerica (University Press of Colorado 2006), and “Mending the Past: Ixchel and the Invention of a Modern Pop Goddess” in the journal Antiquity (2006).

Research:  Dr. Ardren directs excavations at Xuenkal, an ancient Maya center in the northern Yucatán peninsula that dates to the Classic period (200 - 900 A.D.).  She is examining how the rise of the mega city of Chichén Itzá affected outlying settlements through detailed analysis of economic activities such as shell working, cotton cloth manufacture, and cacao arboculture.  Dr. Ardren is finishing a publication on Maya queens and writing a book on identity in the archaeological record of the northern Maya lowlands.   

 

I didn´t say the Spanish inquisition chasing witches, I just took the Spanish inquisition AND th witchunts as a couple of examples of the not always so civilized nature of the catholic church.

 

Originally posted by drgonzaga Similarly, you hit upon another flaw in Carcharedon's armour when he discussed the Amerind and the Media. It is a mixed bag and while there are plenty of examples appealing to the lowest common denominator, there were also streneous efforts to correct the more egregious representations. The films of John Ford are an excellent example. Even early on as with the caricature elaborated by D. W. Griffith's Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1914), there was also sympathetic realism as found in Edward L. Curtis' In the Land of the War Canoes released in that same year. Further, who can forget Nanook of the North. Now, the East German film industry in the 1960s loved to harp on the theme of the nasty Americans and what they did to the Amerind, but in doing so they had blatant political motives. And in a sense, Carch is making hay with such blather and hoping time has stood still since the 1950s. Perhaps, Carch might like to access the extensive collection of UC (Berkeley) and their Media Resource Center, which has explored this topic in their Race and Ethnicity Collection.

 

Noone denied that there are both better and worse movies about Native Americans and other indigenous peoples. As in film about nearly every topic, there are good ones and bad ones. But still today bad ones are produced.

And there are really a wealth of books on the topic of movies about the Amerind and other indigenous groups.

 

And yes I also saw "Nanook köldens son", a very interesting and moving film.

 

And you are not the only academic here.

 

 

 

 

Noone says she is unbiased and noone says she has the last word in anything. But her opinion about Apocalypto are also shared by other reserachers in the field of Maya studies. Even here in Sweden we have such researchers and they express similar views about Apocalypto as she does.

 

Here is a couple of more voices about Apocalypto:

 

 

 

 

Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film, by http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-url?%5Fencoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books-uk&field-author=Jacquelyn%20Kilpatrick - Jacquelyn Kilpatrick

 

Injuns!: Native Americans In The Movies, by Edward Buscombe. http://books.rediff.com/bookshop/publisherbooks.jsp?lookfor=Reaktion%20Books&search=1 - Reaktion Books .

 

http://www.amazon.com/Hollywoods-Indian-Portrayal-Native-American/dp/0813190770/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b - Hollywood's Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film , by Peter C. Rollins

 

Thanks to the standard cant of modern day ideologies and posits, the Maya are as much a tool of politics by the "other" today as they were supposedly victimized by the European "conquest"--it is hardly edifying to portray anyone as "eternal victims"--and we totally invert the history of these peoples by refusing to recognize their own internal contradictions [yes, institutionalized violence was an integral part of their society]. In terms of agrarian life, the colonial period was hardly worse than what went before, and for several centuries the integrity of Mayan autonomy was effectively protected by the Church since the marginalization of Mayan society was a product of independence and its disestablishment of the Church--be it in Chiapas and Yucatan or in the Central American republics. Thus to assign contemporary ills to the Church is hogwash. By the way, Carch, the Inquisition had no authority over the Amerind, who, politically, were the direct vassals of the Crown and governed by their own cabildos.

 

https://www.msu.edu/course/hst/380/IND-TOWN.htm - https://www.msu.edu/course/hst/380/IND-TOWN.htm

 

In the history of the Americas, the rape of the Amerind is fully a phenomenon of the 19th and 20th centuries! Blame the political ideologues, moved by "liberal" principles and progressive mentalities shaped by European intellectuals, for the dispossession of the Amerind. Likewise, as I implied in the Xingu thread, much of the current harping comes from contemporary socio-economic palaver moved by questionable motives.

 

 

I never said the inquisition was invoved concerning the Amerind.Ii just used it and some other phenomena as examples to show that the catholic church also behaved rather uncivilized against people in old times.

https://www.msu.edu/course/hst/380/IND-TOWN.htm -  

Originally posted by drgonzaga In the history of the Americas, the rape of the Amerind is fully a phenomenon of the 19th and 20th centuries! Blame the political ideologues, moved by "liberal" principles and progressive mentalities shaped by European intellectuals, for the dispossession of the Amerind. Likewise, as I implied in the Xingu thread, much of the current harping comes from contemporary socio-economic palaver moved by questionable motives.

 

Also in the early days of conquest Amerindians were exterminated and opressed. The opression has been an ongoing process since the beginning up to today. But of course there have been periods with less opression as there has been periods with more opression. And the scale and scope of oppression has also varied geographically.

 

 

You'd be hard-pressed to find a policy of extermination in the Nuevas Leyes de las Indias of 1542 and, in essence, you are more often than not simply parroting the nonesense long known as the Black Legend. Respect the integrity of the past, which was far more complex than you would have it. Expanding historical knowledge is one thing, falsifying history for the sake of contemporary political and ideological agendas or prejudices is reprehensible.

 

Strange discussion.

 

 

Exactly. Still today some people believe "the Americas" mean "the U.S."

The problems for Amerindians started with the Spaniards and haven't ended as yet. All over the hemisphere there are still lot of pending problems with Amerindians, robbery, discrimination, injustice, etc.

 

Strange? Only if you consider your glittering generalities, more akin to the proverbial mackerel than to historical research, a recapitulation of the past. After all, Amerindians themselves conducted "wars" of extermination against rivals. Do you know the origins of the term, Chichimeca? Even Wiki can not obscure it despite the heavy effort at a layer of political correctness. In your efforts to portray the Amerind as historical "victims" you actually demean their integrity and the richness of regional histories. Further, you obscure the intricate patterns of ethnic conflicts and dispersals. Attempt an explanation of distinctions between Hopi and Navajo absent conflict and rivalry? Consequently where does the effort at falsification and disrepect of history really lie?

 

Current social problems can be thrust only just so far into the past. For example, let us look at the construct of the Mexican the intellectual, Jose Vasconcelos known as the Raza Cosmica. As history it is bunkum and as an explanation of the national character it is but a tool explaining the advent of a new oligarchy that chose to ignore what Simpson called in the 1930s the "many Mexicos". As a microcosm of the problem, the famous Guerra de Castas illustrates the connundrum and I heartily recommend this analysis found on-line:

 

http://www.scribd.com/doc/6682675/2-La-Guerra-de-Castas-en-Yucatan - http://www.scribd.com/doc/6682675/2-La-Guerra-de-Castas-en-Yucatan

 

What I find interesting in many of the interruptions raised by Carcharodon is the hint of "guilt" held by many Europeans over the question of progress as they so defined and imposed during the course of a century (1850-1950). Rather than accept blame for their ideological travesties, they are more interested in relegating it into a more distant past and a convenient whipping-boy, those crazed Spaniards and their lusts.

 

 

 

Obviously, the protection of property from thieving hands is a sign of "savagery".

 

A short while back in Mexico City, some luckless thieves broke into the shrine of St. Mary Magdalene to strip the image of the votive gems with which it was garlanded. The alarm was raised in this ethnic barrio and the community poured out into the streets in force and fell upon the miscreants so as to administer "popular" justice. The irate residents also turned upon the police when they tried to rescue the hapless thieves from their fate! Needless to say, the police had to withdraw...

 

I am not saying situations are similar. I just said there is still lot of pending problems. For instance, in my country natives usually try to achieve and progress as well as any other citizen, and they do. However, they still had land problems with wood companies. I don't see my local natives marginilized and discriminated here as much as in the U.S. or Canada; countries that had flattened the personalities and hopes of natives, as is seen in the levels there of alcoholism and drugs consumption.

 

 

That's was a good joke.

 

It seems that you deliberately choose to misunderstand what I´m writing. I didn´t mean that the natives had no right to defend their property. What I meant was that the image of them followed the typical stereotyped image of agressive natives seen over and over again in countless movies. In many movies Indigenous peoples are often portraid as agressive, screaming, wild, uncivlized. As examples one can also take the representations, or rather caricatures,  of them in movies like "King Kong" by director Peter Jackson, or "Pirates in the Carribean: Dead Man´s Chest".

 

And drgonzaga, it seems that wherever there are opression, exterminations, genocide and similar gruesome phenomena through history there are always some people who want to defend, deny or diminishe those events and the significance of them. So is it with the cases of Native Americans, Tasmanian Aborigines, the people of Kongo during the reign of Leopold II, the Armenians, the massacre in Nanjing 1937 and the extermination of Jews by the nazis. Always there are some kind of revisionists there trying to diminishe or defend the crimes, many times using arguments like: "but those people themselves also did bad things like this and this and this". And one can hear arguments like "oh the Spaniards were not worst, the British, or the French or the Yanks were even worse (or the other way around)."

 

The motifs of people who try to make visible opression and atrocities, or try to defend people who are victims of opression, are often questioned. But one can also ask some questions about the motifs of people who always try to diminish, or deny or even defend opression and violence. What political agenda do they have?

 

 

I would add the Irish hunger holocaust...

 

Originally posted by Carcharodon ... Always there are some kind of revisionists there trying to diminishe or defend the crimes, many times using arguments like: "but those people themselves also did bad things like this and this and this". And one can hear arguments like "oh the Spaniards were not worst, the British, or the French or the Yanks were even worse (or the other way around)."

 

With respect to Spaniards, the point is own history books describe them as barbarians; specially in the first times of the invasion and particularly in the Caribbean. But that shouldn't blind us to the fact the Spanish rule lasted 300 years, and in all that period there were positive and negative events. On the possitive side, the Spaniards were the only group that vaccinated natives (unlike Americans who gave natives blankets with smallpox ), also, Spaniards promoted the education of Indians, the intermarriage, and gave them the status of free human beings. Of course there were lot of injustices and crimes; but at least Spaniards tried to do it better.

With respect to Natives, they were just human beings, defending theirs lands and at war. They commited a lot of crimes as well against colones, and before Columbus the Americas wasn't a paradise either. That said, the legitimate owners of the Americas were the Indigenous people; and that is it.

 

 

 

 

Indians in the states have casinos, welfare and respect. But how come they don't respect themselves anymore and live in such deep depression? Who is the fault of that?

 

Why you don't see the same depresive behavoir in poorer countries, like many in Latin America, where Indians are progressing working hard?

 

The TV series Moccasin flats from Canada (a somewhat depressing fiction series):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7mHxhDSccs - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7mHxhDSccs

 

Ikpeng children (Brazil) introduce themselves, their village and the grown ups. The children are showing pride and enthusiasm about their culture and way of life:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8376724945473467651 - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8376724945473467651

 

 

A Member of the Kuikuro (in Brazil) indtroduce his people and their history (once again one can see the pride in the representation of the culture):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4r6atkWylk - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4r6atkWylk

 

 

 

*Edit: I formatted your quote.

King John

 

Why you don't see the same depresive behavoir in poorer countries, like many in Latin America, where Indians are progressing working hard?

I can't speak to that, but I can say this; you are working from a stereotype, Indians in America are hard working, they are lawyers, factory workers, teachers, doctors, nurses, and a number of other occupations.  How is this not hard working?  Again you don't know what you are talking about.  

 

 

That's quite a coflation presented in a rather unsubtle attempt at throwing me into the "Holocaust Denier" school. Shame on you Carcharodon given that most Swedes were quite comfy with that attitude just a short time back. Respect history and cease all of this phony moralizing. After all, the Apaches made a life-style of pillaging and plundering their sedentary neighbors be they Amerinds or Mexican villagers. It is a fact in their history, just as it was fact that the Caribs victimized their Arawak neighbors, or that this latter group was not too concerned over the fate of the Taino. Turning the ghosts of the pasts into contemporary monsters does little to explain that past and often generates myths justifying the prejudices of a comfortable present. Ascribe motives of a suspicious type to people who invert the documents of history, I never have and could produce legajos of data on why your stance is a blatant mischaracterization. The redress of abuse and abusive conditions moved hand in hand with the expansion of the Spanish colonial empire almost from the beginning. Not that there were none who wished advantage by demaning the Amerind, but even at the start this approach was challenged as documented by Bartolome de las Casas. You wish to paint with too broad a brush and look for devils regardless of the intellectual violence committed.

 

Try to find a counterpart to Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca within the cultural milieu of other European states contemporary to the Spanish imperial experience. His cultural pride produced one of the great documents on the Amerindian experience.

 

"Most Swedes..." now you are oversimplifying things in the same way as you say that I do.

 

 

Originally posted by drgonzaga  Respect history and cease all of this phony moralizing. After all, the Apaches made a life-style of pillaging and plundering their sedentary neighbors be they Amerinds or Mexican villagers. It is a fact in their history, just as it was fact that the Caribs victimized their Arawak neighbors, or that this latter group was not too concerned over the fate of the Taino.

 

New research throws some doubt over the scale of alleged athrocities commited by Caribs against the Arawaks. And the real holocaust for Arawaks and Caribs alike was the coming of the Europeans.

 

And again we have the same reasoning: because the Apaches did this or this, or the Caribs made that or that, or the Arawaks did so and so, then the opression against them is in some way okey?

 

And the stereotyped representations of indigenous peoples in many movies, is that also okey?

 

 

 

 

Originally posted by Carcharodon ... And again we have the same reasoning: because the Apaches did this or this, or the Caribs made that or that, or the Arawaks did so and so, then the opression against them is in some way okey?

Of course it is not. The invasion and extermination doesn't have any justification. No matter those pretty beautiful (and hypocrital) "thanksgivings"-style celebration may some people believe the invasion was great.

 
 

Originally posted by Carcharodon ... And the stereotyped representations of indigenous peoples in many movies, is that also okey?

My stereotype is that most movie makers are a bunch of idiots that make products for people with the same intellectual level

The Gibson movie is different, because of the way it was advertised - as a movie about the Mayans. They made a big deal out of how accurate it was supposed to be, and how they used a language as close to the one spoken at the time as they could. False advertising, imho. According to the film makers it was a movie about the Maya, but in reality it wasn't really.

Raiders never pretended to be a movie about anyone in particular. Actually, the new movie, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" is far worse in this respect than the old one is. 

 

Let's face it, the topic has wandered and moved out of the theatre onto historiography, Carcharedon, but the text you are peddling is as much a stereotype as the tendency you bewail in movie scripts. Caste and Class are both internal and external and just as the Europeans had their hierarchies so too the Amerind. Ask yourself were the Incas "opressors"? Likewise, the Tlaxcalans were not exactly buddy-buddy with the Tenocha, but I suppose one must "tidy up" history so as to suit contemporary prejudice. If educators can construct their own myths (as did Vasconcelos), why not cinematographers. Lrt's keep in mind that in order to have a drama, it is essential to have conflict...how about those nasty Vikings!?! Say, didn't they wander out of your neck-of-the-woods? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.itcaonline.com/tribes_hopi.html - http://www.itcaonline.com/tribes_hopi.html

 

As lirelou pointed out in terms of Florida, it is quite dangerous to generalize. I am still familiar with some Miccosukee who prefer the traditional chiki.

 

Per Florida Statutes, Chickee / Chiki huts are treated differently in the review process than all other Open-Air Pavilions. A Chickee / Chiki hut is defined as an open-sided wooden hut with a thatched roof of palm or palmetto or other traditional materials, devoid of electric, plumbing or other non-wood features, and constructed by either the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida or the Seminole Tribe of Florida.

http://www.boynton-beach.org/government/departments/development/chickee_huts.html -

http://www.boynton-beach.org/government/departments/development/chickee_huts.html  

 

Far from positing that there are no inequities among the individual Amerind nations, I instaed am asserting that much of what appears as "poverty" derives from efforts at maintainig social identity. Hence one must tread carefully when walking the sands of generalization.

 

It´s no vocabular problem to call things with their right name. Invasion, stealing of land, slavery, opression. That is things that actually happened.

 

Originally posted by drgonzaga  Ask yourself were the Incas "opressors"? Likewise, the Tlaxcalans were not exactly buddy-buddy with the Tenocha, but I suppose one must "tidy up" history so as to suit contemporary prejudice. If educators can construct their own myths (as did Vasconcelos), why not cinematographers. Lrt's keep in mind that in order to have a drama, it is essential to have conflict...how about those nasty Vikings!?! Say, didn't they wander out of your neck-of-the-woods?

 

I haven´t talked so much about US in this thread but it seems that some Native Americans themselves feel that they are discriminated against. When one reads articles written by them or read what some of them writes in letters, or listen to voices from their own channels many of them feel that they are not treated equally as others in the American society.

 

But the situation for Native Americans varies of course by region and by country. So the situation can be different in different parts of US, and it´s also different between US and Canada, or Mexico or Brazil, or all the other countries.

 

And the situaition has also varied a lot over time.

 

One big common denominator though, is the stealing of Native American land. How many native Americans today have still full access to all the land where they once lived?

 

 

Also other peoples have to leave their homes, as for example the Lenapes who originally lived in Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York. Another people who lived in those areas were the Susquehannocks who were more or less exterminated.

 

Originally posted by lirelou Yet you can find some of their descendants still living in their original areas, though many were removed to Oklahoma. That was a theft, under color of law via the Indian Exclusion Act. As for the nomadic plains tribes, they could hardly expect to retain the territory they roamed over when the buffalo covered the plains. In most cases, they got "displaced". White settlements grew up in areas they had crossed, and White economic activities (the cattle industry, the railroads, etc) reduced the great buffalo herds their society depended upon to a memory. So what should have been done? Should we have prohibited settlement of the Great Plains, so that today modern tourists could travel out to this "world park" and watch Native Americans ekeing out their survival with no intrusion from any government? In essence, making the Great Plains some form of "human zoo"? Where life for its human inhabitants would be brutish and short?

 

Even if the plain tribes would have kept much more of their native land and if the relations with US had been somewhat different they would probably also adapted to the modern world and it´s circumstamces, maybe just in another way. Noone says that their only alternative would have been living short and brutish lives. Many other nations round the world still have their own territories and still they don´t live short or brutish. Development can occur in different ways.

 

Originally posted by lirelou The settlement of the Americas was to the benefit of the greater part of mankind, and that included Native Americans.

 

Noone really knows how the world would have looked like today if the Americas hadn´t been settled. Maybe it would have looked better or worse, it´s impossible to say.

 

Colonization was unavoidable. However, what destroyed the Americas was the settlement of outsiders from Europe and Africa in larger number than local populations. That broke the backbone of a continent that had the right to live by its own: like Africa and Asia did.

 

Many other cultures than the western one has concepts of right and wrong, they have etics and moral. That is not specific for the western culture. And many times in US history sence of right, ethics, moral and similar haven´t been the first priority.

 

Originally posted by lirelou Generally, when two cultures come into contact, it is the dynamic culture that wins out over either a static or an underdeveloped culture. Cultural relativity is a myth. Cultures are like sports teams. There are superior teams, mediocre teams, and inferior teams, and the superior teams come out on top. And they last only as long as they can maintain the skill sets that put them there, or they too pass into history.

 

Many times the "winning" culture is not superior in anything else than just raw power and military technology. It can enforce it´s values on others but it doesn´t have to be superior in any other way.

 

 

 

Indeed. People has the right to keep theirs lands, to not beeing invaded or killed in genocides.

 

Originally posted by lirelou Second, your "No one really knows how the world would have looked today" is irrelevant.

 

False. That's very important, indeed. The invasion is the more important event in the history of the Americas. That was the time when all the developments on this continent were stopped by an allien and violent people who robbed as much as they could.

 

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Indeed. Even more, the Western Culture didn't have concept of right and wrong. The greek were a homo-phedophile society and Roma a culture that killed people for fun. Those are the western values? Nope, the so called Western values come from the Jewish culture, and particularly from Chirstianism, and are not Western in its origin at all.

 

With respect to natives, only people that ignores the history of the Americas can say such wild claims about a supossed lack of values in native cultures and civilizations.

 

 

Originally posted by lirelou Many times the "winning" culture is not superior in anything else than just raw power and military technology. It can enforce it´s values on others but it doesn´t have to be superior in any other way.

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Carcharedon wrote:

"Another people who lived in those areas were the Susquehannocks who were more or less exterminated."

 

Your implication fails to complement the inference since the Iroquois were responsible for the elimination of most Susquehannock villages by 1675.

Almost completely forgotten today, the Susquehannock were one of the most formidable tribes of mid-Atlantic region at the time of European contact and dominated the large region between the Potomac River in northern Virginia to southern New York. Little is known about them, since they lived some distance inland from the coast, and Europeans did not often visit their villages before they had been destroyed by epidemic and wars with the Iroquois in 1675. The Susquehannock have been called noble and heroic. They have also been described as aggressive, warlike, imperialistic, and bitter enemies of the Iroquois. They may also have warred with the Mahican from the central Hudson Valley. When he first met the Susquehannock in 1608, Captain John Smith was especially impressed with their size, deep voices, and the variety of their weapons. Their height must have been exceptional, because the Swedes also commented on it thirty years later. The constant warfare between Iroquian-speaking tribes gave the Susquehannock a military advantage over their more peaceful Algonquin neighbors to the east and south. Using canoes for transport, Susquehannock war parties routinely attacked the Delaware tribes along the Delaware River and travelled down the Susquehanna where they terrorized the Nanticoke, Conoy, and Powhatan living on Chesapeake Bay.

 

"That the indigenous peoples have fought each other doesn´t justify stealing their land, enslave them or opress them in other ways."

 

Perhaps you should familiarize yourself with the oft-quoted, by me, Leyes y ordenanzas nuevamente hechas por su magestad para la gobernación de las Indias y buen tratamiento y conservación de los indios (Barcelona, 1542). This decretal of the Emperor Charles V, began a long and repetitive legislative narrative whose sole intent was the protection of the Amerinds' essntial liberty and the integrity of their communities. That individuals would often perpetrate abuses is one thing but to assign your colorful adjectives as official policy is a historical travesty. Or have you forgotten that one of the reasons Columbus was brought back to Castille in chains was as result of the charge that he had sought to enslave the Amerinds of Hispanola?

 

 

It was actually the policies of the Europeans to divide and conquer that escalated the wars between the different tribes in the east.

 

And the final blow against the Susquehannocks was delivered by whites (the so called Paxton boys) in 1763.