Can We Stop with the
‘Indigenous’ Bit Already?

PROUD graduate of the 1894 Presbyterian School for Creek Indian Girls - aka the University of Tulsa.

In th Smithsonian I am looking at the Northwest Indian exhibit. People cooing over the crafts. There is a carved wooden mask and eople are looking at it like its the Sistine Chapel. Its dated 1530AD. So I say out loud, "Thats a wooden mask that a kid in the third grade could have made. Our ancestors were circumnavigating the globe in 1530". That went over well. My nephews wife is a Lakota. They tell me all the time how "advanced" and "mystical the Sioux were. I say the indians were stone age til we came. Not only that but they never developed the use of the wheel. As far as mystical, supposedly they could see the future. Or so i am told. So I asked, "How did they miss the most important thing to ever happen to them, the coming of the white man"?

Give the Siberian Americans their proper due. Although they were still a stone age people when we started to commingle, they did have some impressive agricultural accomplishments. Their 5 crop combination achieved a balance that made crop rotation unnecessary and that Iroquois confederation organization beat the hell out of our monarchies at the time. As I recall we haven't figured out how they engineered Maize but apparently it was no natural accident.

Well said by Mr. Duke. It seems that the 'romantic' lifestyle of the Indians is put on a pedestal by some today, but most of them have naturally adopted the better methods of modern life. And few of these fuzzy headed romantics want to point out that many tribes of Indians regularly starved because the nomadic, hunter-gatherer life is literally feast or famine. Even Lewis and Clark discovered this. Hoping to trade with Indians for food as they traveled, they found that once they passed the agricultural Mandans in what is now North Dakota, many tribes had very little or no "excess" food to trade. Take a realistic look at Indians or native Americans, if you insist, and you will find a stagnant, failed culture struggling to survive. No written language, no understanding of art beyond that of a 4 year old, no metal toolmaking - stuck in the stone age, no wheeled vehicles, the dog travois their "heavy hauler" before the white man brought horses, donkeys and carts. In a few riverside areas, they had developed enough agriculture to be reasonably safe from starvation, and yet the digging stick was the limit of their agricultural advancement, the drop spindle and very simple loom the peak of their textiles. There is certainly some truth to the idea that without the ox or horse, camel or donkey, they were left without useful beasts of burden, and this limited what they could do. But without any written language, knowledge could not be perfectly preserved, only passed by word of mouth, and much lost along the way making advancement much more difficult. When any stone age culture comes in contact with a steel tool making society with 10,000 years of advancement on them, the stone age culture cannot survive. And generally, most of those people realized it, and used the better tools and methods to make their lives better.

I can agree on one point, the media botch it and made it look like it was a mass grave and the bodies were thrown in it. Also, some living survivors of those schools where woken up at night to bury a child in the night at a Roman Catholic run school. Yes the Indigenous people of today love their church right or wrong. They don't want it destroyed. More churches were being burned of late and the indigenous people were wanting it stopped. There are some similarities between the schools in Canada and the US. Some were very far distant from their tribal lands. Some moved their Tee Pees and lived near the Schools and even then were separated from their children. Alaskan indigenous were moved to the lower 48 and did not see there kids. Both systems in Canada and US were to destroy the culture. This movement in the US started around 1890 and in Canada about the same time and were done by both Governments. While the Prime Minister over saw their formation of the schools, it was set up by the legislative bodies and run by bureaucrats. It is well documented and if the writer of the article researched it farther - it would have been a different article. Myself I was a white eye till six years ago, DNA showed me to be Metis with Ojibwa and Ottawa blood. My mother's family goes back to the 1600s in French Canada. Comment to Reply 1, I would be proud too but the school of 1894 is not the Univ of Tulsa of Today. It is good they did not destroy or woked their history.