Perhaps shame was too strong a word but really.. I feel for them.. everything they had was taken by force and given to someone else.. now as a people, they are scattered and losing their heritage. Same thing is happening to the people of Hawaii. If I had a time machine and the means to do it, I'd go back and stop this from happening. i'd stop a few other things too like The Crusades, The Holocaust and Christopher Columbus and his men murdering the Haitian people and almost wiping them out for their gold. History writers often make thugs like Chris to be heroes. How does one not feel for these people and the wrongs that were done to them? The passage of time does this. We celebrate Columbus Day but not Native American Day, that's disgusting IMO.
By these metrics you'd have to undo most of known Western European, Central American, South American, African, and Asian Civilization. Cherry-picking these particular examples underscores your various biases and perhaps historical ignorance (What about the Moors? Mongols? What are you doing about Darfur _TODAY_? Did you forget the Greeks, Caliphate, and the Ottomons? Greeks and India?). Is your
sense of Arcadian superiority due to the fact that, for geographic reasons, you avoided invasion and direct involvement in thousands of years of both sides of conquest, invasion, liberation, and politics? Oh wait... you didn't.
How many regional and ethnic groups during the time periods you are talking about didn't apply their power in ways that we'd consider by today's standards misguided, irrational, and full of zealotry?
On top of all that you don't acknowledge that many sessions of Congress and the Executive have continuously expanded Native American and Native Alaskan recognition while simultaneously stopping ~all~ further Federal Holidays based on economic grounds almost entirely. Undoing existing Federal Holidays has been proposed numerous times and may indeed one day gain traction for both economic and historical reasons.
Native American Heritage Month
That used to be just a week. And before that just individually proclaimed days.
There is A LOT of history everybody would like to go back and redo in a vacuum. Unfortunately that's not how time and space work.
What we can do is make sure that what remains is preserved and we learn from history. We might even be able to mend some of what Andrew Jackson's only great gaff created. Heck, did you know that just the other day the Feds violated the sovereignty of Native lands as part of the Drug War?
Thanks Orly. Sometimes I speak matter of factly because that's what I believe and it rubs folks the wrong way - but these things I believe about history are from researching the subjects beyond what they teach you in a class room. Here we are trying to help people stop smoking and that's a good noble thing but I hate to think of all the other terrible things we cannot help.
Again, absolute language and inferred superiority. Those that disagree are just not agreeing with you because we didn't go outside the classroom? Oh wise one, where were we educated? Born? What are our ethnic and historical backgrounds? What volunteer service do we do? What seminars or conferences have we attended?
Not to mention somehow you've now brought smoking into the mix of geopolitical injustice.
I appreciate your
sense of humanity but you need to salt it with a
sense of reality if you actually want to effect change. Nothing you said would give one iota of relief to Native Americans, Haitians, Aborigines, Polynesians, the majority of Africa, the Amazon basin, etc.
As someone, who in my lifetime, has had to flee a country, lost a family member due to religious persecution, has been politically abused, and has stood alongside Native Americans fighting for their sovereignty and history you are repeating lines that we call YNH lines. "You're not helping"...
-Magnus
