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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
Is Sawant Brownsplaining?
In Chicago, the city I have most experience with, every ethnic group gets a holiday and they are a bigger deal than one might think simply because of this. It's a sign of clout in the city. Cermak was the "Polish" mayor, then Daley, etc. African Americans have Bud Billiken day, and Harold Washington was the AA mayor, but that's another discussion.
I think folks on the West Coast especially sometimes forget how precarious most of the economic and political gains of the second wave of immigrants to the USA really are. In a certain sense, I believe that they sense (rightly) that the world is turning against them. And then, the marginalized groups, in this instance native peoples, turn not in solidarity to them, but to the politically correct elite, who benefit from conflict between these groups who are more often than not economically aligned.
not quite the same as a genocide though...
Italo Calvino.
Dante Aligheri
Diane di Prima
Gregory Corso.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Luciano Pavarotti.
Maria Montessori.
Antonia Vivaldi.
Primo Levi.
Guiseppe Verdi.
Federico Fellini.
Roberto Rosselini.
Giordano Bruno!
"The City of the Sun is coming! I hear it! I smell it!
here, where they have made even the earth a jailer
where not even the shadows of animals sneak over the land
where children are injured & taught to apologize for their scars
the City of the Sun cannot be far now --"
(Diane di Prima/Minnesota Morning Ode: for Giordano Bruno / Selected Poems)
here, let me break it down: on a day normally reserved for celebrating one group, you took it away and now that day celebrates another group. INSTEAD of creating a new, "Indigenous Peoples Day," you opted to shit on someone else's heritage in order to promote yours.
that's equally as racist and annoying.
we honor Columbus for the impact he made, particularly proving that there was land here that could be settled and eventually become the united states. we should continue to do so.
this is like changing "Washington's Birthday" to "Slave Remembrance Day" because the president this state is named after actually broke federal laws by shifting his slaves to and from the white house in order to not have to free them.
is that shitty? yes. does it negate the impact he made otherwise? no. let's treat columbus the same and discuss the FULL impact of his landing, but to simply toss him aside in favor of "We are sooooooooooooo sorry" day is mean-spirited passive aggressive anti-liberal bullshit and pretending otherwise makes you a Willfully Dumb Liar.
When have Italian Americans had any political clout in Seattle or in any major city on the West Coast? Are you also going to get in a snit over black Baptists not having any influence over the Seattle City Council?
I mean, FFS, the dysfunction of old school East Coast politics is one of the reasons why Americans moved West decades ago.
Changing Columbus Day to Italian American Heritage Day would have made the name of the holiday P.C. without really affecting anyone. Changing it to Indigenous People's Day is provocative.
We can change St. Patrick's Day to Irish American Heritage Day without too much conflict, but changing it to Snake Appreciation Day might be seen as a dig.
Early immigrants are still immigrants. Even pre-historic ones.
It's like mascoting native americans. And hey, if they adapted to europeans by allying with some, fighting others, uniting with some to fight their enemy tribe over there, switching sides, attacking and killing whites from time to time in waves, well then. it was a fucking war and one side won it. To think the whites were morally worse is rather naive. You really can't read up on history and conclude any one group is morally worse -- some just more powerful than others from time to time. Indigenous comanche aggressed other tribes. Indigenous people from morroco took thousands of spanish chistians slaves. indigenous norwegians enslaved 30,000 irish girls. indigenous english occupied wales, ireland, then parts of north america. indigenous black people sold others into slavery for money and the black enslaving families are often the leading families of some nations over on the west side of africa today. we're all indigenous and we all aggressed to the limit of our abilities. Maybe the English should have indigenous Celtic day to "empathize" with the people they pushed out, then the danes can have indigenous english day to "empathize" with the anglo saxons they conquered in england, then the norman vikings turned french can celebrate indigenous english day to show empathy for who they conquered, etc. the fucking iroquois should have indigenous potomac day whatever, to show empathy for the folks they conquered. all this empathy, and NO ONE IS INTENDING TO GIVE BACK ANY OF THE LAND. what a cheap moralist stunt.
They already look pretty thoughtless today.
Columbus has plenty of statues. He doesn't need a holiday.
P.S. to 13: Washington is the only founder who actually carried thru on freeing his slaves. The Virginia laws of the time made it tough to do. Each slave had to be given $1000 and had one year to leave the state or be re-enslaved. Since there were over 300 slaves at Mount Vernon at the time of Washington's death, this pretty much was tantamount to liquidating the estate. (And some of these people were dowry slaves who weren't Washington's property to free in any case.)
(1) Thanksgiving should be CANCELED - white Europeans butchered those native peoples after they learned how to survive from them. The pilgrims were murderers. If you celebrate this holiday, it shows you support this kind of butchering & you are a hypocrite.
(2) 4th of July should be CANCELED - our venerated founding fathers were all slave-owning, misogynist anti-equality hypocrites. They were probably anti-gay marriage too and saw homosexuality as a perversion. Get rid of it!
(3) Presidents' Day? CANCELED - Washington, Lincoln, etc - same as #2, how the hell can we celebrate these bigoted, racist, homophobic, anti-equality motherfuckers? You seriously support these bigots? End it NOW.
Fuck it - no holidays for anyone, we should just work all the time. Or just celebrate no one but "the indigenous"... for just staying in one place. Good on them. For staying where they were born. Celebrate! Of course… Seattle wouldn't exist if it weren't for all those manifest destiny white people plowing thru the nation. Ya know, all your ancestors. None of your redneck, Oregon-trail asses would be comfortably sipping lattes in a coffee shop right now if it weren't for them. Huh, you kinda forget this though.
(or as Italians call it Festa della Repubblica)
*chuckle*
Also, @12/16/40, why no love for Nikola Tesla - now there's an Italian I could get into celebrating, especially if it's accompanied by high-voltage discharge entertainment!
Explain to me what influence the Sioux for example had on world history. The Cherokee? Any tribal group at all predating Columbus?
Two things are true, whatever historical revisionism suggests otherwise. The intense depopulation of the Americas following exposure to Europeans was neither intentional or at the time avoidable. Disease, not genocide, killed off the people here.
And for better or worse the Americas were going to be discovered and treated to the same kind of behavior Europeans visited on everyone they deemed less civilized than them.
Native Americans lost. We won. End of story.
I'll set even a lower standard for making Indigenous Peoples Day anything but a PC run amok bit of stupidity.
Tell me how any Pre-Columbian culture made notable contributions to who and what Americans are.
Nothing? Nada? Well, what do you know!
BTW, given that you lost the battle for marriage equality, that's extra hilarious.
@47- The greatest feat of bio engineering in human history is the creation of maize. No go fuck yourself with a cleaver you dishonest, hateful piece of shit. Some other library patron needs that computer.
Really? Your arrogance is matched only by your ignorance. Try these on for size:
If the Navajo hadn't been there to speak their language, we might all be speaking German or Japanese today. Show the Navajo Code Talkers some respect, you racist cunt. For that matter, one of the six Marines who raised the Stars and Stripes over Iwo Jima, Ira Hayes, was a Pima Native American.
Also, a certain young lady of the Shoshone peoples was largely responsible for the success of an American mission to reach the Pacific Ocean by land, such that she is today honored with currency bearing her visage. Countless other Native American guides, trailblazers, and interpreters were integral to the mapping and exploration of what is today the United States.
The Iroquois nations were significant in the origins of the USA. They were key British Colonial allies in the French and Indian Wars (with their allegiance somewhat divided during the American Revolution). The federalized structure of the Iroquois League/Iroquois Confederacy was much admired by several of the Founding Fathers and may have inspired our own system of government. That's the CONSTITUTION we're talking about.
If you're looking for pre-Columbian influence on American culture, you need look no further than the American Southwest, where we've benefited from cultural exchange with modern-day Mexico, a nation that keeps in such close touch with its Aztec heritage that the Aztec origin myth is present on the nation's flag. For good measure, the Mayans and/or Olmecs discovered the delightful plant known to science as Theobroma cacao; chew on THAT.
As for scientific advancement, the indigenous peoples of the Southwest, such as the Tohono O'odham, developed drought-resistant strains of food crops such as beans, corn, melons, and squash that would grow in their arid homelands. These traditional crops have proven invaluable in the search for better and more resilient cultivars capable of making use of marginal land. Other Native American peoples were, unsurprisingly, early proponents of environmentalism as they saw their way of life destroyed by overhunting and overlogging.
Any further questions?
who do voodoo
ragga regatta
don rocka the bota
LOOK, THERE! EVIL PURE AND SIMPLE!
*************
No, all employers should transition to floating holidays. Give each employee a set number of days on January 1, to be used by December 31, to celebrate whatever holiday they see fit. Given the diversity of ethnic and religious groups in the US, its the only logical option. I can see a plethora of holidays being suggested for various groups in the future (such as those for Islam, Wicca, Web-Footed Albinos from Albania) to the point there are so many its laughable.
Then, maybe banks, the post office, etc...would have enough staffing to be open for at least a few hours on days we normally expect them to be closed.
thankfully venomlash is here to explain to you how science and language moves through centuries and influences and educates what we do today.
also, since you don't actually live in seattle maybe you can change your moniker to something more fitting. Rural Whites sounds good.
It's probably just as well that he get all of this out of his system here in the bosom of Slog before the mantle of adulthood hangs too heavy on his shoulders.
"I think the achievements of modern America vastly exceed anything native people have done or would have done had we not killed most of them."?
Uh, did you REALIZE you wrote that?
" It's hard to imagine the Navajo or the Aztecs putting satellites in orbit or sequencing the human genome."
Because you find it hard to imagine non-European people doing anything important?
You've revealed some deeply unpleasant things about the inner workings of your mind, Mr. Mehlman. My deepest condolences on your having to be you.
There are so many amazing people(some listed above)that Italian-Americans COULD celebrate. Why would they go to the mat to defend a holiday for a bloodsoaked imperial berserker who was probably Iberian rather than Italian?
All right. We should all move into longhouses, or adopt migratory patterns. We should stop using electricity, synthetic fabrics, steel tools. Basically we should all live as pre Columbian tribal people did. But you first, okay buddy?
Earning the sobriquet Mile High a bit earlier than usual this morning, aren't you?
@63
"We" didn't kill a single person. Well, at least I didn't. Nor did "we" in a historical sense engage in genocide systematically. Some estimates range as high as 93% death rates post European contact, conservative ones still accept 75% provisionally. Numbers here are Ricky, since there's no way to know certainly what pre contact population numbers were. But here's the thing. Most of those deaths were from disease. Sp unless accidentally spreading disease is murder, "we" didn't "kill most of them."
Umm. But hey, at least you're acknowledging your problem. Maybe there's hope for you yet!
Colombian Exchange had been conducted as an exchange instead of a rape.
It is easy to imagine unless you're blinded by a smug, casual racism.
Dude, have you HEARD of the Trail of Tears? Or what happened to the Taino at the hands of Columbus and his men? There's stuff in the history of European exploitation of the Americas that was basically the Holocaust minus the gas chambers.
I notice you don't have anything to say about what pre-Columbian peoples did for America's growth and advancement. Care to admit for once that you're wrong?
Oh. Well, than let's talk about how all those things happened in the Americas. Before Europeans set foot here. Slavery? Check. Vicious warfare? Check. Another tribe treated as less than human. Check, check, check.
See, like it or not we can be grateful for living in more humane and settled times without lying about the past. And we can be grateful without feeling pointlessly guilty about the behavior of people.who lived centuries ago.
If we're sane, rather than liberal we can at least.
Wrong? Nope. Vague statements of 'this group may have influenced modern American society' while intriguing speculation, aren't history. People hiring out as guides to European explorers, or American, speak go those hiring them. My carpenters are great guys. Love their work. But without me obtaining and directing the work they'd be sitting ay home. And native guides pointing out paths are infinitely less important than the impetus to explore which hired them. Modern (ww2 and on) American citizens acting as American citizens don't speak to their Pre-Columbian culture. They speak to their American culture.
.
But hey, keep beating the
You said that pre-Columbian peoples in the Americas didn't do anything useful, anything significant to our history, so I corrected you. Now you're walking that back, saying basically:
"Oh, this historically-significant stuff they did doesn't count! European Americans were involved with it too!"
If you want to know what historically-significant stuff Native Americans did that didn't involve Europeans, you might consider the thousands of years of history between pre-Columbian peoples. They have their own history, full of migrations and alliances and vendettas; history doesn't only happen when white people are around to write it down.
It's also super-cute that you're JUSTIFYING colonial persecution of Native Americans by pointing out slavery et cetera in their history. If we brought such civilized customs to the continent, you'd think we as a nation would have been able to resist the urge to war against a tribe, pressure them into a disadvantageous treaty, and then violate the terms of the treaty anyway. It's on par with the antebellum attitude of "those poor Negroes should be thankful that we're taking them here to Christianize them".
Top fucking kek.
If you want to give us an "Italian American Heritage day," put up or shut up. It would be easy enough to put Indigenous People's Day on any other free day of the year without fucking the Italians, wouldn't it? All this focus on pre Columbian civilization and culture kind of obscures the fact that it was damn greasy Italians and Spaniards that killed all the American Indians, but good old Brits and Yankees out killing the "heathens."
This entire country is built on genocide. At least give the Italians their holiday without the farcical "closing the barn door after the horses have bolted" that this Indigenous People Holiday represents. Have another federal holiday, it isn't like the American Worker couldn't use another day off, we have the least paid vacation day in the industrialized world FFS.