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  More Books from the Bargain Table - The Kindle2

  Rick 11:26 am on February 8, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Books (2), History (2), native history, Rick Hendershot

  I was investigating the Kindle the other day. In case you don’t know, the Kindle is a digital tablet designed for reading books in digital form and is sold (exclusively I think) by Amazon.com

  This technology has been in development for quite a few years, and the Kindle is already in its 2nd version (Kindle2), so it is approaching maturity, and obviously quite a few people like the idea.

  Like many others I enjoy what you might call the “tactile experience” of holding a book, turning pages, etc., but when you stop and think of it the idea of having to print out millions of paper pages just to read stuff we can get on our computer screens, iphones, blackberries and digital book readers doesn’t make a lot of long term sense.

  So it’s not the gadget-envy associated with the Kindle that interests me, and it’s definitely not the name. It’s more the idea of being able to download entire books in digital form and read them immediately without having to wait for the physical books to be shipped from somewhere a thousand miles away.

  Turns out you can do that now. There is a version of the Kindle software you can run on your PC or Mac. So you can buy the Kindle version of a book – if it is available – and then just read it on your PC. No Kindle required.

  Recently I went looking (on Amazon) for a number of books on Native American History. There were quite a few listed, and many were available for between $2 and $6 as used copies from various dealers.

  I plodded through the selection process and when I was done the books were about $15 and the shipping about $75. So I looked to see if Kindle versions were available.

  Nope. Just a few of the more obscure ones. So I cut my order back to the bare essentials and ordered the old fashioned Amazon way. About a week later I had one of my books. I’m still waiting (about two weeks later) for the others.

  Apparently the age of the Kindle has not yet arrived. At least not for the kind of books I am interested in.

   

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  The Primitive Indian Myth

  Rick 9:12 am on January 19, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: aboriginal culture, aboriginals (2), american natives, Indian culture, native history, Primitive Indian Myth

  One of the enduring myths about life in the Americas before it was “discovered” by Europeans is that the entire “new world” was sparsely populated by nomadic tribes of simple-minded hunters and gatherers.

  This myth holds that these people had no permanent attachment to any specific piece of land, they did not live in permanent homes, and they did not live in towns or villages like the rest of mankind. Instead they lived in temporary shelters they could pick up and move at a moment’s notice. Their social group consisted of a tribe of 50 or 100 people, and similar tribes were scattered throughout the forests and plains of North, South and Central America. This is what we might call the Primitive Indian Myth.

  We think of these people as living in “harmony” with their surroundings – hunting and foraging for their food – wild animals and plants such as berries that grew naturally in the forest. They had no inclination to hoard or pile up food or any other kind of possession for that matter, so the idea of “selfishness” was foreign to them. They took only what they needed to survive, using only the natural elements presented to them for their day to day survival.

  According to this myth American natives were stone age people living from one season to the next on the very edge of survival. As with any simple-minded animals, they had a wild, untamed, unpredictable side. This made it impossible for them to coexist with others – even other tribes of natives – in a more complex organized society, and unable to be reasoned with in any meaningful and lasting way. Primitive Indians would simply turn vicious when their life, family, tribe or food supply were threatened. That is why there were called “savages” by Europeans.

  The core feature of the Primitive Indian Myth is that American native life before contact with Europeans was basic, simple, undeveloped and primitive in virtually every way. Their tools, their weapons, their craftsmanship, their language, their literature, their art, their religious beliefs, their social structures, their political organization – all of these things were barely developed beyond the primitive level that must have existed thousands of years before.

  The Primitive Indian Myth has been created by stories told and written over the 500 years since “contact” in the late 1400s and early 1500s. It has been reinforced and developed in a very deliberate way in Hollywood movies stretching back to the beginning of movie making in the early 1900s and in popular novels and histories written as far back as the 1600s.

  Undoubtedly many believers in the Primitive Indian Myth were well-intentioned people, but at its heart the motives behind the promotion of the myth were sinister. As with most myths, this one was developed and promoted for specific social and political purposes.

  The promulgation of the Primitive Indian Myth has served as a justification for the systematic marginalization of American natives, the theft of their land and resources, the rejection of their moral and political claims to self-government, and the outright extermination of millions of American natives over the last 500 years.

  There are some important facts about pre-contact native life in the Americas that are distorted and misrepresented by the Primitive Indian Myth, and I will be discussing these in my next few posts. These include the following commonly held assumptions:

  - That the Americas were sparsely populated before European contact
  - That virtually all American natives were hunters and gatherers with no fixed attachment to villages, towns or places of residence
  - That American natives had no use or understanding of technology
  - That American natives did not engage in extensive agriculture
  - That American natives were incapable of more advanced social organization
  - That American natives held only simplistic, primitive religious beliefs
  - and more…