Replace Canada day with Reconciliation Day?
- Thread starter White_Unifier
- Start date
So I take it your answer is no then.
OK. Honestly, I'm not decided on it myself. I just threw the question out for discussion as I sometimes do on these forums when I'm bored.
If that's the case, then I will throw it right back to you. BTW, the answer is NO.
If you're bored, to turn on the Blue Jay's game. :lol:
The natives need to reconcile themselves to the fact its the 21st century, and they don't want to live like their ancestors did - freezing their balls in the winter, fighting a desperate battle against starvation every day, and dying in their early thirties. They need to reconcile themselves to the fact their reservations are the product of the twin beliefs among both their ancestors and ours that natives could never live together with whites, and were not established with any economic means of support because natives didn't need money - or anything money bought. They need to reconcile themselves to the fact that living in the bushes with no job and no prospect on federal welfare is a meaningless life which causes many to turn to alcohol, drugs and violence. They need to close the reserves down and move to town and join the rest of the country in the modern world.
Would you care to point out the error in my facts? The largely hunter/gatherer - agrarian societies which were here when Columbus arrived had made no scientific progress in a thousand years. Nor were they likely to if left alone for another thousand years. The Americas lacked some of the building blocks necessary for civilization to grow, such as trainable animals to help with the labour and transportation. There were no horses or oxen, for example, to pull plows or wagons - nor wagons, for that matter. Everyone had to spend every hour of every day working, save for a few scarce minutes set aside to worship pagan gods in various ceremonies.
The natives should be celebrating the arrival of the Europeans, not mourning it.
The facts are true at least in Canada. THere is quite a difference between how natives were treated in Canada and the US. Even more so in the North. To start with we never had mass forced migration like the trail of tears, which some of my ancestors survived.
First, we were working with metals and on the high road to developing bronze and iron, so your "no progress" is BS, as well as ignoring the fact that were centuries ahead of you in plant genetics, to the point that we had produced the world's first (and only) artificial species, as well as improving plant stock to the point that 60% of the food plants on the planet today are indigenous to the Americas.
Research has shown that in many environments, the hunter-gatherer workweek was about 15-20 hours.
I'll leave out cordage stronger than anything until Kevlar and mortarless construction Europeans still can't match.
The lack of beasts of burden (other than the fairly useless llama) was a problem. But your errors are:
1. Thinking that there is only one road to civilizaiton, and
2. Thinking that there is only one form of civilization.
We lost the same way the dinosaurs did, an overwhelming natural disaster, namely disease. Don't get too high on your high horse, opioids may do the same for y'all. Or global warming, or plain old chemical pollution. And space is still full of asteroids.
"We wiped out the Indians before we were wiped out" is a pretty damn pathetic epitaph.
We haven't reconciled, yet.
I don't know about you but I have no intention of getting into a ship and sailing eastwards from North America. The other part of reconciliation is recognising that you can't stuff the genie back into the bottle.
I don't know about you but I have no intention of getting into a ship and sailing eastwards from North America. The other part of reconciliation is recognising that you can't stuff the genie back into the bottle.
No but you can pay until you feel better. Personally I feel no obligation to pay anything since I was too young to have any influence on residential schools.
Throwing money at it clearly doesn't work.
In the part of Ontario that I live in, the native sedentary, agricultural Indians here were completely wiped out by disease a century or more before any white settlers turned up. The Indians that the settlers did deal with were immigrants themselves from nomadic peoples to the north.
Last edited:
This is pure nonsense. The average lifespan of natives was 35, and you can only get away with working a few hours a day in an area so absolutely packed with food animals you barely have to walk a mile to get one. The natives of the 1600s lived largely the same as the natives of the 600s. They had no draft animals, no plow, no wheel.
Anyone who knows anything about how farms were worked before tractors knows it was back breaking labour even with horses and plows - and they didn't have to make their own clothes. Which means native agriculture was largely unproductive and required an awful awful lot of time.
Between the arrival of Columbus and the arrival of the first settlers, 90% of the indigenous population of the Americas were wiped out by small pox and other introduced diseases. Prior to that, most people were involved in some form of agriculture but the decimation of the population made those practices untenable. The life expectancy prior to invasion was probably longer than that of Europe. After the settlers arrived, the life expectancy dropped dramatically because of disease an the whole sale slaughter by settlers.