When I described foresters who worked, like artists in various mediums, I didn't just make this up or read the first chapter of Mann's experiences in Bolivia in the book 1491. I drew my own conclusions from the people I grew up with. They were smart, wise and adult and most of the European American world was threatened by that possibility, so we kept quiet to keep the peace. They told me about the forestry methods of the Cherokee and the Iroquois in what is now the state of Kentucky. How the Cherokee Nation shared responsibility with other nations in the upkeep of the hunting park as a ideal place to practice their forestry methods as "Keepers" of the Wild.
Here and there were authors who went to live amongst the people "at the end of the roads" and found vital, alive, systematic thinkers who had good values for the environment and their families. Here and there the clan systems were intact and so a governmental structure that would support larger populations was still in existence. The government schools were a ruination to that systematic way of thinking. If they survived they often didn't know what to do, having forgotten. And yet John Warfield taking his Interactive Management to the Pueblo in New Mexico, found that they already practiced systems thinking in their councils but at a much slower pace because the computer was not available to speed up the questions and the hundreds of syllogisms required to immediately answer the trigger questions. The Kiva was the Pueblo version of the Warfield Observatorium in his "Great University." This is well documented on the internet under the writings of Warfield's protégé, Ben Broome, from the Arizona State University Hugh Downs School of Human Communication. But when you find a group that had kept the systems alive and continued to work in specific ways in the environment, like the dry farming in the American Southwest and the raised beds of the Iroquois gardens borrowed by the French or the methods of weather and forest management in the far North it was a different type of thought from the European models. What Mike G. spoke about when he described their openness to the internet and adapting it to their needs and culture is not surprising. An oppeness to adaptation and change is not unusual to the native peoples of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Else how could you have successful opera stars and US VP/Bankers from that time and of course there were the first five great American ballerinas who were all Native American or as the local newspapers said: "part Indian." Adaptability and mastery is not new to the so called "New World." Today's mess can be laid squarely at the door of European social theories practiced on Indian people for the better part of 150 years. But here is a BBC special about the cloud people who had build an ecologically sustained city only to withdraw out of it and into the back country to avoid the genocidal disaster that came from meeting the people who had abandoned their garden and forgotten how. It's an interesting special on You Tube, Here is the url: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urMcofvcMAU> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urMcofvcMAU REH From: futurework-boun...@lists.uwaterloo.ca [mailto:futurework-boun...@lists.uwaterloo.ca] On Behalf Of Ray Harrell Sent: Wednesday, June 12, 2013 11:41 PM To: 'Ed Weick'; 'Keith Hudson'; RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] The plight of aboriginal people Thanks Ed. What can I say? Capitalism and a woman President who underwent rape and torture by people she opposed. Stockholm Syndrome? Remnant forest nations are easy targets. A single anthropologist will do. <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/world/americas/president-rousseffs-decade s-old-torture-detailed.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/world/americas/president-rousseffs-decades -old-torture-detailed.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 Pinker is such a pretty boy with his curls. Things ARE getting better, for him. As for Jared Diamond? I've gone on about him with Keith. I still think the same way. Pinker and Diamond are Western cultural apologists and stuck in their libraries. You can't be a book worshipper and be a good scientist. Abuse and mass murder need not always lead to revenge and retribution. Just look at the European Romany. No one is nastier than the Europeans to the Romany. They don't seem to be willing to give them an identity or respect for anything they do. Not their music, the dance, not anything. Note the NYTimes article not long ago about the successful Romany in Rumania. The typical response was they "stole" it just like the Swiss stole gypsy children "for their own good." Still, have you ever seen a Gypsy army? Even NBC's Grimm has the evil Gypsy allied with the witches who are anti-Grimm. Hollywood Gypsies are like Hollywood Indians. Now if that were a Drabani, I might worry but in all liklihood it is a simple Gitche Serve' just fooling around with the unclean Gadje. People are more deserving of respect then most are willing to give. Getting to know them and telling the truth is often a hopeless venture. Look at the preacher who brought out the 50 to 70% death rate amongst the First Nation's Boarding Schools and documented it. He lost everything. He was fired from his church and then defrocked by the national church and then his wife left him. You've got to be strong to tell the truth. How do I feel about the Brazil Indians? If they were "dirty" (as in always dirty) as the press claims, then they would not be able to hunt. War is a different matter. War is dirty as are mind altering drugs. The Yanomami's sense of smell is so good that they can tell you where a monkey pissed at thirty yards. (Wade Davis) Do you believe that the monkey could'nt smell a dirty hunter at 80 feet? Do you believe that anthropologists never infer when they are scared? Native foresters bathe at least once a day and have for thousands of years. Indians without plentiful water use a very hot sweat lodge once a day where others "go to the water" whether frozen or not. They don't want to starve. The inference with "dirty" in English also becomes a metaphor for human toxic waste. What some call huckapuck. We call it ukstaha. Indians were pretty good at transformation there, especially in Mexico. No one handled human waste better than the Aztecs who cleaned it and used it in the gardens once it was no longer toxic. Up North the prairie people's used buffalo dung for everything from fertilizer to baby diapers. After a couple of years on the prairie what was left was soft, absorbent and sterile. "Dirty" is a pejorative in the case of Indian people. Mark Twain used it walking, after a hard rain, between the Tipis of Plains Indians. Think "Dirty bear" or "dog" or "snake." A metaphor for "unhuman." That made it OK to steal from us and even kill us. We are "dirty." Sounds like some mother trying to potty train a child. I believe all people have the possibility of nobility and honor but the Noble Savage is a silly stereotype. People are complicated no matter where they are. They also have the potential for significance and nobility. When Napoleon Chagnon admitted sorrow to the Yanomami he said: I was hushuo, in a state of emotional disequilibrium, and had finally begun to act like a human being as far as they were concerned. What was he acting like, as an anthropologist, that wasn't human being? http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/magazine/napoleon-chagnon-americas-most-co ntroversial-anthropologist.html?pagewanted=all Actually, that the remnant nations have survived at all, given the intrusions, speaks reams. They are a beautiful people. Some of the most beautiful I've ever seen. Are they brutal? Is a person working in a kosher slaughter house brutal? Is a Weyerhauser forest farm brutal? Is a nylon fishing net brutal? Is trying to kill one culture to replace it with another in the same human being the act of a brute? The Amazon Indigenous Nations are farmers and foresters. If you don't believe me just read the NYTimes Science section. Even the Newspaper of record with its generics has admitted to advanced farming techniques of the Amazonian Indians spread out over 15 year cycles. Think Terra Preta. The Amazonians would say the point is whether you respect the plants and animals that you kill and eat. There are some good environmentalist anthropologists working in the Amazon. They know the languages and learn the cultures. Some good scientists as well but good science begins with respect and a genuine humane search for knowledge. I would recommend "Advances in Historical Ecology" ed. William Balee Oikos pub. for the latest in the exploration of the ecological practices of the Amazonian Remnant Nations. Balee and his colleagues are the ones who put the lie to so many of the small groups being fundamentally primitive. What they proved was that the small jungle groups were survivors of much more complex societies and were wandering in a kind of PTSD social situation where they had, as Sartre called it, a "No Exit" social pathology. A situation far removed from the "just dirty bad people barely above animal status" or examples of "primal human beginnings." "People just waiting to be discovered by the Europeans so they could begin their history properly." That type of stereotype is on a par with L. Frank Baum the Wizard of Oz who advocated extermination of the Sioux since they were debouched from a former glory or Duncan Campbell Scott's "Final Solution" that was later mouthed by the German Fuehrer. With both a Campbell and a McDonald advocating in Canada for cultural genocide via the native children, might we not say that they were suffering from a Glencoe PTSD passed down through hundreds of years by their warring families? Every attitude comes from somewhere and not just the toxic ones. Whether we care that they continue or are connected to us is a description of our honor, dignity and significance as human beings. What does it mean that their cultural practices will protect the environment in order to make a universe which is balanced and where diversity survives but ours will not? Balee's conversations with certain of the Indians now being displaced by the dams, is an exercise in trying to keep up with a subtle forester's mind. Is the President of Brazil as subtle? Does she think as holistically as the Native forester, or is she just a part of the great religious idolatry founded in Europe on the money ripped from the gold of the Pre-Columbian American Nations? These dams in Brazil are like putting a freeway through the Vatican or a canal through the White House. They've done it before. They did it in the Seneca Nation in upstate New York and flooded the Cherokee Sacred sites and cities in Tennessee. Does "potential" mean the ability to rape the environment with impunity? Just like they raped the President of Brazil? Will they hang the Amazon upside down when they torture it? Has it already begun? REH From: Ed Weick [mailto:ewe...@rogers.com] Sent: Wednesday, June 12, 2013 3:57 PM To: Ray Harrell; Keith Hudson Subject: Fw: The plight of aboriginal people I sent this to Ottawa dissenters earlier today. You will also be interested. Ed ----- Forwarded Message ----- From: Ed Weick <ewe...@rogers.com> To: dissenters <ottawadissent...@yahoogroups.com> Sent: Wednesday, June 12, 2013 10:46:23 AM Subject: The plight of aboriginal people An interesting website: http://www.survivalinternational.org/ Ed
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