As a kid, I thought of the natives as being simple and child like… But now I see western expansion into NA as being like the orcs tearing down trees from the Two Towers.
Most obviously, because “native peoples” aren’t a single group. They were/are a large and diverse set of groups with varying beliefs and cultural practices.
But more poiginetly because both views paint native peoples as naive innocents. This is the “noble savage” myth. But this is far from the truth. Native people murdered and enslaved other native people. They had kings and gods. They went to war. They destroyed ecosystems and drove species to extinction. The only real difference between native people and their western conquerors was some technological innovation and resistance to pathogens.
That’s because you and I were force fed Western propaganda from a young age. Indigineous people have an actually sustainable way of living. The Western world has set humanity on a path to extinction, with a bet that technology will somehow save us at the last second.
As a kid, I thought of the natives as being simple and child like… But now I see western expansion into NA as being like the orcs tearing down trees from the Two Towers.
Both of these views are reductionist.
Most obviously, because “native peoples” aren’t a single group. They were/are a large and diverse set of groups with varying beliefs and cultural practices.
But more poiginetly because both views paint native peoples as naive innocents. This is the “noble savage” myth. But this is far from the truth. Native people murdered and enslaved other native people. They had kings and gods. They went to war. They destroyed ecosystems and drove species to extinction. The only real difference between native people and their western conquerors was some technological innovation and resistance to pathogens.
That’s because you and I were force fed Western propaganda from a young age. Indigineous people have an actually sustainable way of living. The Western world has set humanity on a path to extinction, with a bet that technology will somehow save us at the last second.