DU Street Cred 101: Read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

[BannedFromDU]

 Paper Roses (5,233 posts)

Did you ever read a book that broke your heart?

I just finished reading a book that took me far longer than usual for the number of pages. Since I am part of a book swap group, many times I get books that are years old. Most are worthy of reading, regardless of condition.

I just read something that has made me upset. I had to put it down for a while and then go back to reading. Not a complicated book, no big words, only a little over 400 pages.
Can't get it out of my mind. It makes me wonder about so many things that have been done to citizens of this country for the past400 years.

Please, take some time to read:

Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. (All that buildup for one of the go-to books for DUmmies trying to build cred? Geez.)

It is a classic and I'm sure available at your library.

My heart breaks for the American Indian and the horrible way they were treated as the white man started to move west and take over the lands of the native people. (Then you'd REALLY puke at how they treated each other.  The Lakota weren't the nicest people in the universe, just ask the Huron.)

Will we ever learn? (Learn what? How to stay drunk on the reservation all day? I hope not)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021647


I wish you DUmmies would bury that book up your asses.

[BlueStateSaint]

I wish you DUmmies would bury that book up your asses.

Works for me, BFDU . . .

[obumazombie]

Works for me, BFDU . . .

I'm with BSS.

[Mr Mannn]

Any student of History will note that 80% of human history is one people taking land away from another people.

At the time of the civil war, 26 million white men lived on the east coast matched by around 250,000 Indians in the west. The result was inevitable. Let the libs cry. All that land in the hands of a few stone age cultures was like ringing a dinner bell in Ethiopia.

Not all conquest is bad. I think America was meant to be great. If we got to kick some a$$ along the way, then good for us! We needed the practice for the real wars that came along later.

If the libs really felt bad they would move back to Europe.

[BannedFromDU]

Any student of History will note that 80% of human history is one people taking land away from another people.

At the time of the civil war, 26 million white men lived on the east coast matched by around 250,000 Indians in the west. The result was inevitable. Let the libs cry. All that land in the hands of a few stone age cultures was like ringing a dinner bell in Ethiopia.

Not all conquest is bad. I think America was meant to be great. If we got to kick some a$$ along the way, then good for us! We needed the practice for the real wars that came along later.

If the libs really felt bad they would move back to Europe.

     That's what I don't get. If the Indians were so great, so invincible, so correct, and the white man was so inept, destructive, and stupid, then how the hell did things turn out this way? What's that, you say, DUmmy, there were MORE white men? Well, gee, that must mean they had the ingenuity and fortitude to get on boats and traverse an entire ocean using STARS to guide them. Meanwhile, Indians were thinking up novel ways to make DREAMCATCHERS. 

     DUmmies are ALL ABOUT Darwin, survival of the fittest, evolution, and so on, but they cannot countenance the simple fact that Indians GOT SELECTED OUT. And if the white man didn't do it, the Spaniards would have. Even ISLAMISTS were responsible for SOME advances in human history. What, other than 1001 uses for buffalo hooves, are the Indians responsible for?

[diesel driver]

I wish you DUmmies would bury that book up your asses.

It's where their heads are already.  The only thing missing would be a flashlight to read with.

[Dori]

Liberals live in a fantasy world.  It's not that there weren't atrocities committed against native Americans, but it's not like they didn't earn their reputation of being brutal savages either.

I've done my fair share of reading on the subject and have ran across first hand accounts of how the settlers were treated by the natives.  Some of the stories were so gruesome, I couldn't finish them. 

[Skul]

I wish you DUmmies would bury that book up your asses.

Side ways, binder first, with a sledge hammer.

[tanstaafl]

Yep, the noble red man. Peaceful, guardian of nature.

Wait, what? Some western tribes would run thousands of buffalo off a cliff for a few dozen they would need. Wyoming, SoDak and Montana are littered with so-called "Buffalo Jumps".

Earlier in this thread, a poster mentioned that the Lakota weren't nice and you could ask the Hurons about that. I'll just say that the Sioux tribe became nomads on the prairies because the Chippewa gave them the stink eye and a couple of bloody noses, turning them out from their woodland homes and driving them across the Red River of the North.

[DumbAss Tanker]

     That's what I don't get. If the Indians were so great, so invincible, so correct, and the white man was so inept, destructive, and stupid, then how the hell did things turn out this way?

An early-industrial, expanding population, crop-based agriculture society vs. a stone-age hunting and gathering society? The economics of population density and artifact culture alone would determine the outcome.  It was going to inevitably be very, very ugly for the hunters and gatherers by any measure.

[GOBUCKS]

American Indians were just like the African tribes: After thousands of years, their culture had not moved beyond stone tools.

Today on a nature show, I saw monkeys using a rock to break open nuts. Same diff.

Left alone, Indians would live in the Stone Age yet today, as would the tribes of Africa.

Today, Africans are busily moving back toward the Stone Age, while American Indians are simply getting stoned.

[obumazombie]

American Indians were just like the African tribes: After thousands of years, their culture had not moved beyond stone tools.

Today on a nature show, I saw monkeys using a rock to break open nuts. Same diff.

Left alone, Indians would live in the Stone Age yet today, as would the tribes of Africa.

Today, Africans are busily moving back toward the Stone Age, while American Indians are simply getting stoned.

Libs fantasize about the population of the US going back to the days of the plains Indians.

[Dori]

Libs fantasize about the population of the US going back to the days of the plains Indians.

I don't think the feminazis would like it.

[DumbAss Tanker]

I don't think the feminazis would like it.

Well, then, maybe there's an upside to that stupid idea after all...

 

[BannedFromDU]

Libs fantasize about the population of the US going back to the days of the plains Indians.

     Had the evil white man not built the US, it is likely that it would have been contested by Spain, France, and England, then depending on how that turned out, Germany and Russia with perhaps a few years of Japan. The noble Indians would have been routed by ANY of those cultures. BADLY. And I will hazard a guess at how many reservations the Nazis would have set up for whatever Indians they didn't experiment on. Oh, wait, they'd be called CAMPS, not reservations. And then the CAMPS would be "liberated" by the Russians around 1955, when they finally won the war of attrition against Germany after 40 years or so.

     The US is the sweetest piece of real estate on the planet. The Indians were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, like scores of other extinct peoples.

[franksolich]

I wonder if the primitives have any idea exactly how many native Americans were here when we evil white men showed up.

In what's now the continental United States, it's calculated there were, maybe, 350,000 or so.

In all lower 48 states.

One gets the impression the primitives think there once were millions of them romping around.

In Nebraska, all of these great tribes ("great" meant in sincerity, not sarcasm)--the Sioux, the Dakota, the Omaha, the Ponca, the Otoe, &c.--consisted each of maybe a couple of thousand, scattered in groups of 50-200.

The town in the heart of the Sandhills where I spent my adolescence had an "Indian-sounding" name, but archealogical evidence shows that the last time a red man was in the neighborhood, it was about the same time the Duke of Normandy was setting off to invade England.

[BannedFromDU]

I wonder if the primitives have any idea exactly how many native Americans were here when we evil white men showed up.

In what's now the continental United States, it's calculated there were, maybe, 350,000 or so.

In all lower 48 states.

One gets the impression the primitives think there once were millions of them romping around.

In Nebraska, all of these great tribes ("great" meant in sincerity, not sarcasm)--the Sioux, the Dakota, the Omaha, the Ponca, the Otoe, &c.--consisted each of maybe a couple of thousand, scattered in groups of 50-200.

The town in the heart of the Sandhills where I spent my adolescence had an "Indian-sounding" name, but archealogical evidence shows that the last time a red man was in the neighborhood, it was about the same time the Duke of Normandy was setting off to invade England.

     I think that they believe that every attribute they demand of a society was fully present at the height of Indian civilization.  I think the exact opposite is the case, and in fact I would imagine that a new Indian tribe would have been formed of DUmmies who were cast out of all the other tribes. Maybe they'd be the Gimmecuzinowannaworkee Indians, and they'd be as lowly regarded as the Hopi were.

     The Apaches, for one, held the Hopi in very little regard, and still do.

[GOBUCKS]

I wonder if the primitives have any idea exactly how many native Americans were here when we evil white men showed up.

In what's now the continental United States, it's calculated there were, maybe, 350,000 or so.

Over the millenia, though, a buttload of indians lived and died in North America.

Their bones seem to show up whenever someone tries to widen an intersection.

They're always holding up public projects while archaeologists whisk off indian bones with little brushes.

Private developers are better at using a bulldozer.