SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
[Ed note: In observance of the US federal holiday which is observed on Monday October 11, 2021, I am inviting the editorial staff to run stories on a weekend schedule tomorrow. Please join me in thanking them for all their hard work and for the sacrifice of their spare time and energy! --martyb.]
Biden becomes first president to issue proclamation marking Indigenous Peoples' Day:
President Joe Biden issued a proclamation commemorating Indigenous Peoples' Day on Friday, becoming the first US president to do so, the White House said.
"The contributions that Indigenous peoples have made throughout history — in public service, entrepreneurship, scholarship, the arts, and countless other fields — are integral to our Nation, our culture, and our society," Biden wrote in the proclamation Friday. "Today, we acknowledge the significant sacrifices made by Native peoples to this country — and recognize their many ongoing contributions to our Nation."
Biden also marked a change of course from previous administrations in his proclamation marking Columbus Day, which honors the explorer Christopher Columbus. In that proclamation, the President acknowledged the death and destruction wrought on native communities after Columbus journeyed to North America in the late 1500s, ushering in an age of European exploration of the Western Hemisphere.
"Today, we also acknowledge the painful history of wrongs and atrocities that many European explorers inflicted on Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities. It is a measure of our greatness as a Nation that we do not seek to bury these shameful episodes of our past — that we face them honestly, we bring them to the light, and we do all we can to address them," Biden wrote.
More than 100 cities -- including Seattle, Los Angeles, Denver, Phoenix, San Francisco -- and a number of states -- including Minnesota, Alaska, Vermont and Oregon -- have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples' Day, choosing instead to recognize the native populations that were displaced and decimated after Columbus and other European explorers reached the continent. Berkeley, California, was the first city to adopt Indigenous Peoples' Day, in 1992.
Also at Al Jazeera.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Snotnose on Sunday October 10 2021, @09:52PM (28 children)
Using a mortar and pestle to grind spices? To use animal bits to hide what Europeans considered naughty bits? To not kill more than they needed to in order to eat/cloth/house themselves (also called the 40 hour workweek).
Do you really think that if the locals had figured out iron working and gunpowder they wouldn't be killing indiscriminately, just like the feckless white dudes shooting buffalo from a train and thinking they're better than average? Do you really think that if a single tribe had invented gunpowder they wouldn't have overrun the entire continent?
Did they figure out iron working? No
Did they figure out algebra? No
Did they figure out astronomy? No
Did they figure out how to build cities? No
Did they figure out how to build ships to travel for a month or three to unknown lands? No
Did they figure out how to live peacefully with their neighbors? As long as said neighbors could fight them to a standstill, no
Did they figure out how to put feathers on their heads, dance like LSD was invented long ago, and make a tradition of it? Hell yeah.
I can feel my karma draining from my sorta drunk mostly hungry body.
Relationship status: Available for curbside pickup.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 10 2021, @10:01PM
It's their day (technically their footnote to Columbus Day), so you have to pretend they added value and didn't lead miserable short lives before civilized races showed up.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 10 2021, @10:33PM
Who didn't have astronomy, math, or cities? You're full of shit and propaganda. Europe was failing badly, and the incredible agricultural prowess of the Americans is all that saved them from another dark age as everybody starved to death.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 11 2021, @01:26AM (14 children)
How the fuck is this Nazi bullshit getting modded "4 insightful"?
If the new efforts to address sock puppet accounts has been effective, the far-right extremist, fascist, nazi, alt-right, racist scumbags are out in full force on this site again.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 11 2021, @02:01AM (3 children)
Relentless wokeness with it's year-zero, fact-free, revisionist zeal is annoying people. If you see bigotry everywhere, there's a good chance you're the bigot. It is you employing epithets in place of argument.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 11 2021, @02:43AM (2 children)
> Relentless wokeness
No. Just not a fascist spreading lies as fascists do.
Cities:
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/aug/17/lost-cities-8-mystery-ahokia-illinois-mississippians-native-americans-vanish [theguardian.com]
And, the Maya, Inca, Aztec, and Olmec cities south of the US border also were sized similarly to their European contemporaries.
And, this list is not exhaustive; there were others.
And, nearly everybody knows this. Lying about it is just a Nazi tactic to try to win over more ignorant basement dwelling incels into their ranks.
The GGP is just a far-right racist rant. And, calling it out as such isn't wokeness nor any other B.S. term fascists use to describe non-Nazis and ideologies opposed to Nazis/Alt right/Christian Identity/KKK/fascists/whatever term Nazis are re-branding themselves as today.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 11 2021, @07:21PM (1 child)
and all those "native cities" were engineered by white men, according to the mongoloids own religions. dumb fucking slave.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 13 2021, @03:09AM
APK is a low IQ piece of shit. Wouldn't you agree?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 11 2021, @02:53PM (9 children)
Dude/dudette, you did nothing to counter the claims and are here just name calling. You are the problem here.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 11 2021, @04:14PM (8 children)
Have you read the comments on pretty much any recent article lately?
This site is turning into Parler, MeWe, Gab.
If folks are not going to mod the Nazis into oblivion, this site will be lost to them.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday October 11 2021, @05:02PM (4 children)
If you bother to log in YOU could moderate them - but that is obviously too difficult for you.
There is no need to rant about it - this site is way better than those you refer to and nothing like as bad as you are suggesting.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday October 12 2021, @02:08AM (3 children)
No, I can't, janrinok, even if I log in. Thanks for letting the Nazis take over SoylentNews!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by janrinok on Tuesday October 12 2021, @06:00AM (2 children)
No, YOU can't. You abuse this site far more than the Nazis you accuse of doing the same.
They haven't taken over this site. Your world view is so skewed you see things that do not exist. You earned this ban - you can now wait until it is lifted.
Discussion closed.
(Score: 1, Troll) by aristarchus on Tuesday October 12 2021, @07:43PM (1 child)
Peace in our time, eh? That is a good British politician! Happy Chamberlain, janrinock!
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 13 2021, @03:50AM
Wir sind alle auf aristarchus.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 11 2021, @07:27PM (1 child)
"Nazi" is a Jew slur for national socialists who were just trying to get the Bolshevik insurgents out of the country and the international jew bankers out of Germany's finance. Communist Jews were taking over cities and sabotaging Germany's ww1 war efforts, among all their other corrosive tactics. Talmudic, supremacist Jews are the problem, not "Nazis".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 12 2021, @04:48PM
Aww the degenerate Nazi wants to rewrite history because no one likes Nazi incels. Poor little nazi baby, I hear they have pills for all your personal failings.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 12 2021, @12:19AM
"This site is turning into Parler, MeWe, Gab."
Has been for a long time, nothing new there. The sock puppet hunt was incredibly strict on evidence so only the most blatant offenders got caught. It is 100% still occurring, and the sad fact is that the trolls are paid agitators meant to destroy any conversations that lead to real change. Well, some are just useful idiots spreading their alt-right bigotry and conspiracy theories.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 11 2021, @01:45AM
When did Murrica ever live peacefully with its neighbors, particularly the extant nations that were invaded, conquered, and exterminated?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 11 2021, @02:35AM
Europeans didn't figure it out until 1945, when they became vassals of the United States.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Monday October 11 2021, @02:44AM (1 child)
The Iroquois were working on that overrun the continent thing. And when they conquered another tribe, if at the moment they didn't need any more slaves, they killed the losers. My professional mentor was an Ojibwe chief born about 1900; he had tales from his grandmother's grandmother about fleeing from the Iroquois.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 11 2021, @05:07PM
We can look at the pre-Columbian Americas two ways: 1. A parallel of Europe with some advanced civilizations, mostly in Mezoamerica and South America with some less advanced tribes mostly in the north. The parallels between Rome and the barbarians are definitely there.
2. As peaceful people living in harmony with the Earth until Europeans arrived.
The evidence for 1 is much more compelling, but the political heft of 2 is very much in evidence and not going away any time soon.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday October 11 2021, @03:42AM (4 children)
You mean contributions apart from developing the primary agricultural crop in the Americas today and possibly the world, and a related agricultural system that remained the backbone of the European colonist's diet for centuries after their arrival? Or some of the political ideas that were included in the US Constitution? Or the eagle holding arrows on the seal of the USA, which was straight-up ripped off from the Iroquois? Or establishing trade and travel routes that in many cases would form the basis of modern road routes?
Lots of native peoples had metalworking well in hand when Europeans arrived. One reason we know this is that when Columbus showed up, he immediately noticed the metal jewelry these guys were wearing.
They by all appearances had a very good understanding of geometry. We don't know about their algebraic knowledge one way or another, since they mostly didn't keep written records.
But also importantly, the Europeans hadn't really figured out algebra in the late 1400's. An Arabic guy had figured it out and was responsible for the name "al-jebra", and it was just starting to be understood in Europe well enough to refine it, so Columbus and his crew probably didn't know algebra very well. They probably knew enough math to use a astrolabe reasonably competently, but couldn't solve quadratic equations or anything like that.
Since they had documented accurate calendar systems, including in societies near the equator where the sun doesn't provide much of a clear measurement, yes, they probably did have a decent understanding of astronomy. Since we can't read the written languages of the cultures that had writing, we don't know exactly the extent of their astronomy knowledge, but it was definitely more than nothing.
Oh, and this is another one of those areas where in Europe around 1500 had their knowledge cribbed from Arabic scholars. This was decades before Brahe, Galileo, Newton, Kepler, et al.
That's absolutely ridiculously wrong. Maya cities had had large populations and significant cultural influence centuries earlier. Aztec Tenochtitlan was, according to the Spanish, the largest city they'd ever encountered by a wide margin. Even if you just limit it to the present-day US, Cahokia had been a thriving city located near present-day St Louis, exactly where you'd want to be for a major hub of commerce. Like in Europe, there were lots of different-sized settlements depending on the needs of the people living there.
... unless you count the native Hawaiians, who like pretty much all Polynesian peoples did exactly that.
Like all people, sometimes there was peace, sometimes there was war, and which one you're talking about depended a lot on politics and diplomacy. There's no evidence that suggests that Americans in 1450 were any more violent than Europeans or Asians or Africans or Australians in 1450.
A common use of feathers was to stick it on the side of their face to shade their eyes from the sun glare. A cheap, easy innovation that has been tested and works nicely. Sure, some of them also used feathers as decorative bling ... just like Europeans did at the same time and would continue to do into the Victorian period.
As for the drugs, as lots of hippies can tell you, they'd discovered psychedelic mushrooms a very very long time ago. So if your the sort that likes tripping, that's definitely a native contribution.
And that's just the stuff before European contact. After European contact, there's stuff like code-talkers that saved a lot of people's butts in WWII.
To summarize, I don't think you have the faintest idea what you're talking about and are instead commenting based on stereotypes rather than reality.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 11 2021, @04:32AM
Does that mean in all those staged pictures of indian chiefs with all the feathers, that those bonnets are on backwards?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday October 11 2021, @06:09PM (2 children)
The Maya had sailing craft that could travel long distances, though they tended to keep it to coastal voyages. Trade routes also existed in the Caribbean, which perforce required sailing long distances.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday October 11 2021, @06:22PM (1 child)
GP was suggesting that natives couldn't handle journeys in the thousands of miles, not the much shorter distances between, say, what's now Honduras and Jamaica (not saying the Maya couldn't do that - basically any culture that isn't completely landlocked figured out ocean-worthy boats). Whereas the Hawaiians were part of a culture that was navigating the Pacific with remarkable levels of skill long before any Europeans showed up, and by all appearances doing things like making the 2500 mile trip to the North American coast to do some trading and swapping of knowledge.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 12 2021, @01:27PM
Sure. Pacific Islanders were by far the best navigators and seafarers of that time, far better than the Europeans. I was only adding in that those in the Americas proper had some maritime chops too.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Monday October 11 2021, @09:52PM
They had no need of it, so why bother?
Of what use would this have been to them?
They could probably navigate over land and knew seasons by the stars, so yes.
They most certainly did build cities. Most of course were wiped out when Europeans introduced new diseases, but the sites were there and in several cases were used by white settlers for their cities. They also grew orchards and cleared land for agriculture, most of which were again abandoned after disease swept through native populations.
Why on earth would they ever have to do this? Most lived in what they considered paradise.
Most did at least as well as Europeans did, and it is probable a whole lot better. We don't find evidence of continent wide wars continually ravaging the land.
Ah I see, you've watched Hollywood movies.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 12 2021, @04:20PM
Did they figure out X? Well, no. Mostly because they didn't need to. Necessity/desperation is the mother of invention. Somehow we have managed to crank up that desperation fuelled invention engine into terminal overdrive, starting around 100 years ago.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end