[Greybeard]

Brother-in-law sent the following and it went well with my first cup of coffee ...

Art, Good mornin'. I noticed ya even roaming with Moderator Hammer over in "General Discussion" this morning, so I figgered posting this here in "Hunting" and let you make determination as to "fit", "zap" - or maybe move over to "Legal and Political" ... ;)

---------------------------------------------

The old Cherokee chief sat in his hut on the reservation, smoking the ceremonial pipe, eyeing the US government officials sent to interview him.

"Chief Two Eagles" one official began, "you have observed the white man for 90 years. You have observed his wars and his material wealth. You have seen his progress and the damage he has done."

The chief nodded that this was so.

The official continued, "Considering all these events, in your opinion, where did the white man go wrong?"

The chief stared at the government officials for over a minute, and then calmly replied, "When white men found the land, Indians were running it. No taxes. No debt. Plenty buffalo. Plenty beaver. Women did all the work. Medicine man free. Indian man spend all day hunting and fishing, all night making love to women."

The chief leaned back and smiled, "White man dumb enough to think he could improve system like that."

[priv8ter]

I must admit that the thread title had me a little leary when I clicked on it, but, it's quite cute.

[Art Eatman]

Well, I ain't workin', but my wife is. Guess I'm at least part Injun. :D

White Man went very wrong.

Art

[winwun]

At the risk of being called a Professional Insult Collector, I have a small problem with those who think it is permissable to insult and degrade Native Americans.

Do they not enjoy the same considerations as other ethnic and some so-called "social groups"?

I guess not.

[ojibweindian]

:D :D :D :D

I needed a good laugh; had a terrible morning of fishing.

winwun, being a "Native American", I thought the joke to be insulting to the "White Man". I, personally, am not offended; life is too short to have a bee in my butt.

[Bruz]

I have a small problem with those who think it is permissable to insult and degrade Native Americans.

Are you kidding? Cute story how white man took a life style we all strive for and screwed it up to our daily grind degrades Native Americans? I agree with ojibweindian that it degrades White Men, but I can take a joke.

[Carlos]

Jup, it appears we have some of the PC crowd over here too.
Get over it!!! :neener:

Funny story, Greybeard.

[Art Eatman]

winwun, I'm probably more egalitarian wrt the roles of guys/gals than the original post's joke. Be that as it may, I've grumbled against White-eyes' foolishness for over a half a century. And I don't romanticize the pre-Euro lifestyles extant in what's now the U.S. of A. I've spent more than enough time "out yonder" to appreciate running water and air conditioning. :D

The thing to remember is that any joke which has no inherent meanness is okay. The key is "meanness". Ethnic jokes aren't necessarily mean-spirited. Folks don't get all bent out of shape and defensive over the alleged tight-fistedness of the Scots, for instance. The stubbornness of Germans. Business foibles of Jews. The braggadocio of Texans...

I admit to getting a bit irked when folks jump up and worry about some other group as somehow being victims, even though the members of that group do not. This political correctness BS has just got to go. Spoils a whole bunch of really good jokes that I know. :D

Remind me sometime to tell you about the bear in the bar in Billings...

:), Art

[Guyon]

The nomenclature "Native American" is a case in point. Most Indians call themselves Indians. Native American is a term that calls attention to the white man's "evil" conquest of Indian culture by pointing to the fact that Indians were here first. What it doesn't call attention to is the very brutal and warlike nature of many Indian cultures. Finger pointing can go both ways, you know.

Funny how so many folks these days want to "celebrate diversity" at the same time that they want to have and elevate their own "culture" (eg. Native American, African American, Italian American, Mexican American, etc., etc., etc.) They should get it straight. Do they want unity or divisiveness?

The old Indian ways are much better than our own. Less stress. More harmony. Better connections with nature. More admirable priorities. Indian time or "spirit" time is a much better way to live your life than white man's clock time. I hope someday to be able to do it.

Good story Greybeard. I'll share that one.

[Art Eatman]

Ya know, Guyon, I've been workin' real hard to find somethin' to feel guilty about. I keep failin' to find it.

I figure I'm a Native American. I wuz borned here. Ain't leavin'.

:D, Art

[makdaddy03]

:D

[ed dixon]

It's cute. But I'm disturbed to think Michael Moore would agree.

[Art Eatman]

Aw, ed, don't ever sweat the Michael Moore's of this world. So he might agree? So what? Heck, even Clinton once made a rational statement--which ain't a very big average to show for eight years. Just remember blind hogs and acorns...

:), Art

[Wild Bill]

The nomenclature "Native American" is a case in point. Most Indians call themselves Indians.
OTAY? Actually most of us refer to ourselves as First Nations. Indians come from over the pond. Don’t matter what you call us – we’re smart enough to realize the joke isn’t on us. :D

[Double Naught Spy]

Guyon, I don't know how you came about your assessment of Native American lifeways. Your statement, "The old Indian ways are much better than our own. Less stress. More harmony. Better connections with nature. More admirable priorities. Indian time or "spirit" time is a much better way to live your life than white man's clock time" is what is called the Noble Savage perspective. It is basically an unrealistic perspectve built on stereotypes, much of which came into popularity since about the 1960s.

Less stress? Not so. Granted they did not have the same sorts of stressors we commonly associate with western society, they still had many. Food was an ongoing stress factor and many Native American groups suffered seasonal shortages of food. This is often reflected in growth cessation lines that can be seen in radiographs of long bones and are called Harris lines. Similar lines can be seen in the teeth where such shortages occurred while the teeth were forming. These are called enamel hypoplasia.

"Old" Native American groups typically had horrible dental care. The result was no way to stop cavities (called caries) once they started and given time, would result in the loss of the tooth. A mouth with several cavities can make it quite an ordeal to eat without pain, especially anything cold or hot. Many of these eventually resulted in an infection of the tooth and later abcess. Receding gum lines came about as a result of a buildup of plague/tarter, thereby exposing lower portions of the tooth below the enamel, such as the roots, which then would suffer decay more quickly with no enamel or gum to protect them.

The concept that Native Americans lived in harmony with the environment is really only true in a limited number of hunter-gatherer groups. The counter perspective to suggesting these folks lived in harmony with nature translates into the fact that such people were at the mercy of nature. Most hunting/gathering populations are limited to low numbers of people per given area based on the amount productivity of the local environment. When times get tough and the environment does not produce as much, part of the human population succombs to the shortage. When times are good and there is a bounty in the environment, the human population likewise grew.

Horticulturalist Native Americans did NOT live in harmony with their environment, although the use of crops helped make these groups to be not so much at the mercy of the environment. Countless examples exist for over use of the soils and decreased productivity through time such that groups that flourished would eventually peak and then collapse. Not only that, horticultural groups tended to shy away from higher diversity diets and derived much of their caloric intact from crops, predominately corn. This diet bias was unhealthy, but the extra high calorie production made population growth possible and so you end up with populations many times larger than would have been supported in the natural environment. Corn is also terrible on the teeth. Plus, with the higher populations, communicable diseases could spread unchecked.

We have this perspective of harmony with the environment by Native Americans well reflected in the concept attributed to Native Americans to utilize all of the animal. The indication is that Native Americans did not waste recources because they used all of the animal that they killed. No doubt Native Americans did have uses for just about every part of animals killed (meat, marrow, and organs for consumption, brains for tanning skins, skins for clothing, bone for tools of various types, hooves for glue), but they did not always use all of the animal. In fact, they didn't always use the animals killed. Here in the plains, one of the manners in which Native Americans on foot were able to obtain buffalo for food was in the form of what we call a bison drive. Usually a cliff or deep gorge was used. The idea was to drive buffalo over the edge and have them fall to their deaths or near death where injured animals would summarily be dispatched. Drives are far from being surgical precision and sometimes hundreds of animals would be run over he cliff and only a fraction of the dead utilized. It is hard for a group of 30-100 to fully utilize 200+ buffalo before the meat went bad or before the smell of the carcasses attracted all forms of predators and scavengers to the kill site.

Simply put, Native Americans are/were people just like people all over the world and had the same problems and issues as people all over the world. They did the best they could in order to survive.

In regard to where the White Man went wrong, where Native Americans went wrong was by living in an environment that was quite attractive to outsiders and who could not muster an organized defense to keep from losing their lands to those outsiders. The 'whites' (western society) may not be doing a better job on many levels, but they do have the land.

[Art Eatman]

Excellent, D.N.S. One point, though: Yurropeens didn't do all that well on dental care and diet and over-population, up to around the 1700s. European fecundity is a large part of the westward push into Indian lands in the U.S., of course.

Anybody who's in ranching or dryland farming knows full well the vicissitudes of reliance on nature. This is particularly true of us old guys who once plowed behind a horse, or got burned out by drouth.

Side note: Some anthropologists maintain there is no significant difference among any/all primitive peoples, worldwide, as to general lifestyle or mythology. Artwork and decoration is different in style, but not in general meaning. Other apparent differences are due to climate or landform...

:), Art

[Guyon]

DNS, thanks for the dissertation. You make good points, but none of it is news to me.

First Nations is another quasi-political term like Native American. Plenty of Indians, when speaking English, have historically referred to themselves as Indians. You can even find evidence of this simple semantic choice on a "First Nations" web site: http://www.tolatsga.org/Compacts.html

I am guilty of writing "less stress" in my post, and that line can be interpreted as all stress. I do agree that physical stresses (and the resulting mental stresses of survival) were much greater. If you actually READ my post, you should see that I mentioned the "brutal and warlike" conditions of their culture. These include worries about food, other tribes, physical health, etc.

But what I meant by "less stress" was day-to-day anxiety over the little things--mainly because of the rapid run at which many folks live nowadays. However, I'd be willing to bet some sawbucks that few Indians were having anxiety attacks, heart attacks, or seeing psychiatrists because of mental stresses over who's going to pick up little "Runs With Deer" at bow and arrow practice. First, they didn't have time for it because, as you point out, they had to eat. Second, life simply moved in a slower and more cyclical pattern that reflected the natural surrounding and gave folks at least some sense of security. In other words, they didn't have palm pilots or cell phones. They didn't even worry about railroad schedules (in fact, it was the railroad that demanded a time system that was synchronized and universal... check out a good book by Stephen Kern called "The Culture of Time and Space.")

And if you try to argue that today's average white man is more in tune (or "harmony") with nature than your average Indian of 150 years ago, I'll laugh at you. Yes, maybe you could also argue that these peoples were "at the mercy of nature," but however you slice the pie, you have to admit that they were much more comfortable in this environment because they knew it backwards and forwards. I think my exact words were "better connections to nature." I stand by that assertion, and I think the world would be a better place if the cubicle sheep occasionally ventured into the wild to get a taste of this "harmony."

I know what the Noble Savage ideal is. I was a history major as an undergrad. I have taught "Native-American" literature at the college level. Yet I still contend that a number of their qualities (being in tune with natural environment, devotion to tribe and family, their conception of time, etc.) are all worthy of emulation.

DNS, your perspective is hardly devoid of bias. In fact, it smells a little of the sort of "white man's burden" view (my apologies to Rudyard Kipling) that folks might use to rationalize the civilization of these "savages."

As usual, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle--between a "white man's burden" view and the ideal of the Noble Savage.

I do still like my dental plan.

[Gordy Wesen]

Gee, it was jus a joke.

[Art Eatman]

Gordy, a joke is a set of ideas. One idea leads to another...

Guyon, re-reading DNS' post, it seems to me that his "bias" appears to be more along the line of "long lifespan good, short lifespan bad", moreso than Kiplingesque.

:), Art

[Bigjake]

it was a funny joke, i laughed. you guys have way too much time to read so much into something harmless and funny.

[Oleg Volk]

Double Naught Spy, good points. I would also note that the ability to be in tune with fellow humans, friends, is far more important to many of us than being in tune with nature. Nature is something that is ignored 90% of the time, enjoyed 5% of the time and shot at the balance of the encounters...

[Art Eatman]

Guess I'm lucky, Oleg. I've never had a whole bunch of trouble with being in tune with people in cities or in tune with "The Outdoors". 'Druther be outside than inside, however, and not too many folks feel that way.

Bein' alone ain't the same as bein' lonesome, though.

:), Art

[Guyon]

Nature is something that is ignored 90% of the time, enjoyed 5% of the time and shot at the balance of the encounters...

Likely true, but a pity if you ask me. If folks would slow down enough to actually take a close look at the natural world and feel its rhythms and its depths, my "fellow humans" would be a lot more pleasant creatures with whom to coexist. Now and then, I doubt my ability to be in tune with some people--especially those speeding down the interstate while talking on the phone, scarfing down a Big Mac, and manipulating a palm pilot simultaneously. These are usually the sort who will talk your ear off and never say anything the least bit meaningful. They could benefit from a little thoughtful reflection in the slower paced wilderness.

Bein' alone ain't the same as bein' lonesome, though.

Good point, Art. Maybe it's that I grew up an only child. Maybe it's that I'm a hermit at heart. But sometimes (not all the time, mind you, but sometimes), I'd rather just be by myself outdoors somewhere. Good company never hurts, but it's not requisite to feeling satisfied.

I hunt with friends, and I hunt by myself. Both are equally good in their own ways.

[Art Eatman]

:) Yup. Watching critters, looking for tracks, "just settin'" and suchlike can really be soothing to the soul.

When I first started runnin' this country around Terlingua, folks would ask me if I wasn't worried about getting lost. Well, I figured, how can you be lost when you don't care where you are?

Art

[citizen]

Yes; Art. Ain't that the truth!!!:D

[4v50 Gary]

An cuncer wit y'all Art. Who cares and the same goes for tyme. When yur on vakayshun, who cures wot tyme it is?

BTW, the Indian lifestyle would be great but for the incessant tribal warfare (& associated horrors - I certainly don't want to prove my manhood by being tortured to death) and the lack of modern medicine with its antibiotics, X-ray, MRIs, modern surgical techniques with anesthia, modern dentistry, ambulances, modern guns (hey I like flintlocks, but even Daniel Boone would have carried a Remington 700 or Win M70), GPS & cellular phones, and especially modern clean motels with hot showers. :p