Native Peoples & Capitalism?

English is a difficult language when it comes to subtle nuances such as satire and parody.

Your English is very good, but you missed the parody, because the satire was ridiculing the opposite point of view.

In other words, that's exactly what I WAS saying!

Well here we have to part company.

I am certain that you have mis-informed yourself.

The only Humans who were not Communal in the Pre-Columbian New World were the few who lived in, or subject to, the mere hand-full of existing cities.

Both the Cherokee and the Iroquis that you mentioned were well known for their Communal way of life.

As far as I'm concerned, these people were Noble, and Savage as tigers in protecting each other's freedom.

Rousseau, was practically the only European to momentarily break the chains of his Euro-centric thinking.

Rouseau was influenced by the way the People of the New World refused to discipline their children, but encouraged them to freely express their needs.

In his book 'Emile', he pleaded for childrens lives to be released from our harsh structuring, and allowed the freedom of their natural spontaneity.

Originally tolerated as an eccentric, now he's vilified by an intolerant conservative establishment.

What's to discuss? Marx was blind.
Only a Noble and fealessly free people can live Communally.
Not people twisted and crippled by generations of Hierarchical Civilization.

 

I don't apreciate your pent up political anger, I'm speaking of something that is very important and close to me and you're just being a cynical jerk. I wasn't dismissing the atrocities of the past few centuries, I know them all to well, and if you were to go back and properly read my thaughts I'm certain that much would be evident. The point I was trying to convey was that in the face of these atrocities thier spirit and culture HAS survived. It has evolved and manifested itself within the constraints of this fucked up world we live in. People like you just use these peoples as martyrs for your own political biasses, you turn them into helpless victims and fail to see the beauty which eminates from thier culture and firm reslove and hope they have for thier future. My thaughts hold validity simply because I know them to be true from my travels and time spent living and working with natives on and off reserves, whether or not you choose to except my subjective, but highly relative outlook, is your perogitive I suppose.

 

Yovo,

I did think your original post expressed a sensitivity.

But sadly I feel that you under-cut the whole spirit of the situation when you suggest that what happened to them was simply a natural evolution, and that we haven't really taken their culture from them.

Originally their culture was not a reservation-culture.
Their culture was a Communal State of Nature, and that culture does not exist thanks to us.

Until we can face that fact, we can not begin to heal the collective psycho-pathologies that have led us to comit our global crimes.

Custer would NOT call them helpless, but I would call them victims.

True, even in the reservation-cuture, one can still find the spirit of extended families and beauty exists even among the alchoholics and the alienated.

But the pressures of the Market-Place continue to erode that spirit and that beauty.

The pressures of global conformity are so powerful that even the remnant reservation-culture may be forced into extinction.

Politically, I was like any other capitalist american.

It was only when I read and understood the spiritual significance of these people's lives that I began to question my cultural assumptions.

It was THEY who allowed me to understand the existential significance of the Hippie Movement.

It is THEY who are responsable for my political biasses.

 

Has anyone read or heard of this book? It's about two Native American tribes who learned to adapt to the American marketplace,it sounds interesting.


http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/hosame.html


"Hosmer's innovative ethnohistory recounts how these Indians used the marketplace to maintain their distinctiveness to a far greater extent than those who became wage earners in the white man's world. Hosmer shows that, by selectively incorporating elements of American capitalism into their cultural lives, the Menominees and Metlakatlans came to view modernization less as a threat to their tribal life than as a means for maintaining their independence. These tribes embraced the same market accused of hastening the demise of native societies and became comparatively successful in American terms even as they both honored fundamental values and forged new cultural identities."

 

Hosmer is right, these folks have no real choice.

They either join the Market as owners of the means of production, or become mere wage-earners in the "White-man's world."

It's the only way they'll be able to save the few remaining shreds of their Pre-Market culture.

Like a Missionary, Hosmer calls this "purposeful modernization."

The fun never ends.

 

Then what should they do? They seem like they have adapted to the modern world as it is,and in a way that fuses with their culture. Also,is everything about capitalism anti-indigenous? Under a free market people can own their own business and decide how to run it and decide what to do or not do with the earnings. If indigenous people choose to use the earnings to help their people then that's good for them. Also,lets not over look the economic independence that indigenous people can gain from being business owners.

 

" Today, the Menominee Nation is economically stable; its economic base of lumbering and a tribally-owned sawmill and gaming also help to provide economic stability to the community."

http://www.naes.edu/campus/menominee.html

http://www.menominee.nsn.us/

 

ALIENATION is the single word most often used to describe the human condition in the 'modern world'.

'Fusing' the mental illness of alienation into their once healthy Communal Culture is the neurotic preoccupation of 'modern man'.

YES, EVERYTHING!

Every grasping, anal-retentive impulse of Capitalism is the exact opposite of the unique individual sacred-path of each Brave.

Harnessing ourselves to a business, traps us into the never ending cycle of working that business for profit or going broke.

There is no more freedom in the so called 'Free Market' or the 'Free Enterprise System' than there is in an army of wind-up toy monkeys all banging their little toy drums as they were programed.

Civilized Men are mere toy monkeys unconsciously obeying their nuerotic psycho-sexual impulses through competitive capitalism.

In many White-Eyes,
the ultimate instability of cutting down the sacred forests, wasting ones spirit-life in a 9to5 sawmill, or gaming as grasping for material profit rather than the manly test of letting go of mere material possessions,
is today's answer for Menominee progress.

When in reality, it is simply the contagious and spreading mental illness known as Hierarchical Civilization.

 

How do you describe the wealth of the Mayans? Their economy probably wouldn't be considered capitalist as we know it today,but didn't some aspects of their economy and economic activity parallel some aspects of free market capitalism? Free trade is an aspect of capitalism and the Mayans became wealthy from engaging in such trade.


THE ANCIENT MAYA
A COMMERCIAL EMPIRE

http://www.mexconnect.com/mex_/travel/dconrad/dcmayatrade.html

The Menominee people are spirtual people I'am sure, but they aren't Zen monks. They are doing what they see needs to be done to help make themselves self-sufficiant in today's world. I'm also sure that they consider themselves to be doing well even from their standards and not just from white eyes's.

 

I agree with you concerning the Mayans.

Though I know little about them, I do know they were very hierarchical, and that they had submissively surendered their own unique individual spirit-paths to conform, like ourselves, to hierarchical authority.

This symbolic self-castration is expressed by the latent-homosexual state known as Hierarchical Civilization.

Where-as men in a State of Nature, being secure in their manhood, engage freely in mutual ritualistic gift-giving, Civilized Men, surrendering to their effeminate fears, must trade with their fellow man for profit.

This was true of several other Indigenious Peoples such as the Aztecs and Incas, and is why, of all the Indigenious Peoples, we relate more closely to their hierarchical slavishness.

Perhaps you are right, but remember this;

The path of a Zen Monk is to re-awaken to the spontaneous perfection, and natural freedom that was once possessed by many of the Indigenious Peoples of this land.

 

There's no need to feel sorry for natives. They're all getting rich on casinos. In the U.S at least.

 

Let's not forget ALL red nations of the world that have been crushed, raped, walked upon, used, prostituted and annihilated over time by invaders posessing gold, land, trees, profit, more money and slaves to create the money.

Indians, the South Americans, Africans, the Polynesians, Native Americans have ALL been touched and still are today. And it's normal because the white races automatically treat each other like crap, so who cares when they treat someone else like crap who, within their own tribe, knows how to honor another human soul. The red nations have also fallen as well, some of them fighting amoungst themselves over resources.

The red nations ARE taking their power back from the false white gods and reclaiming thier earth more and more each day, just as white people are awakening to the truth around them and in the witnessing of the horrible truth, desire to change the way they live within their own lives and bring back a more communal, close to Nature and Self, way of living.

Namaste, there is hope for a new day, just have to work for it TOday, while you still can, so that it becomes more of a reality.....

Blessings
Francine

 

Rubbish.


The natives were killing and scalping each other long before white people came. WHy were they so 'nice' to white people while killing each other off? Doesn't sound like harmony with nature to me. And of course many white women and children were killed by them later on.

 

Heh heh, it is too complicated to explain here. And again, you are only speaking of Native Americans in this instance. Some Africans and the Hawaiians, very recently, up until before the White Americans came and settled, were warlike.

But, every tribe lives in harmony with Nature, they just do not have harmony within themselves which then translates into warfare. But HELLO, how many other tribal peoples are out there, which I MENTIONED. You do not know enough about the red way and how it is lived throughout the entire Earth to speak of just one form of the people upon one continent.

Learn more about ALL the peoples and then talk.

And ...

"The red nations have also fallen as well, some of them fighting amoungst themselves over resources."

I said....

Why am I not listened to????

Blessings
Francine