Three sisters in a bed.- veg that is :)

[travis]

Originally Posted by bluelytes

PAPA, LOLROF!! Just HOW is Carolyn speaking the TRUTH = Racist??

Okay, look ...

"Racist" can can be a noun or an adjective. Did my statement use it as a noun? No ... I said "Ouch justa tad racist" meaning what Carolyn said might be interpreted as insensitive to a race or ethnic group ... might be.

Do I think Carolyn Male is a racist? No, I do not. Do I think Carolyn Male intended racism with her statement?
No, I do not think there was any intent to insult or minimize an ethic group. It was apparently a simple faux paux like any number of us would make.

No intent ... no foul.

PV

[Granny]

The Pacific Northwest tribes were not especially agrarian. If you've read Lewis & Clark's diaries, you might have noted that from about Idaho on they complained mightily because there was nothing to eat but salmon, salmon and more salmon. Also, some of the tribes that lived on the Great Plains were more hunter-gatherers than farmers.

The Apache have been handed a bad deal by "history" - probably mostly thanks to Hollywood. We consider them warlike to great extent because of their refusal to surrender themselves and their lands to the United States Army.

And never make the mistake of thinking that those tribes of American Indians who were "agrarian" were thus less "warlike." The various Iroquois nations were feared - with good reason - throughout most of North America.

BTW, before one of you jumps me for "American Indian" rather than "native American" let me quote R. Carlos Nikai to you, from a performance that he gave at Dartmouth College a couple of years ago:

"We here in this room who were born in America are all native Americans. I am a native American, but I am also an American Indian, a member of the Navajo tribe."

"Native American" may be "politically correct" but most American Indians prefer the older term.

[Granny]

Bluelytes, I don't much like the term "racism" - we bandy it about far too much. There is a problem with Carolyn's statement about American Indians: she was not speaking the TRUTH as you call it. Note that I do not blame her for her lack of knowledge about the various American Indian tribes. When Carolyn & I were in school they did not teach such things. (They mostly still don't.) Most of what non-American Indian children learned came from Hollywood.

One of the things that most whites do not realize about those old Hollywood movies is that when they did actually use real "Indians" as actors, they often used Navajo. To this day, one of the greatest sources of amusement on the Navajo reservation is a trip to the movie theater to see one of those old Westerns. The things that are actually being said are pretty outrageous

Before you get all het up about the intertribal raids in the Pacific Northwest, you might study a few of the inter-colonial raids of the East coast, or the various wars we have come to call "the" French & Indian. Europeans of the time were not exactly great slouches in that regard either. Different times.