Word: cm
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...CM: What Columbus landed on were these very, very populous islands [in] the Caribbean, which were just jammed with people-very heavily populated agricultural societies with most of the place covered with farms. Soon after, people came to central Mexico, which was then possibly the most heavily populated place on earth, ruled by this very aggressive, rapidly expanding empire. That's what's normally called the Aztecs. There were all of these other societies. There were these large Mayan states that were basically in the Yucatan...Soon after that, [the explorers] went to Peru, and there was the Inca Empire...
...CM: Well, it's pretty complicated. These were, in many cases, very aggressive, expanionistic societies. When you look at the Triple Alliance, or the Aztecs, as they're commonly called, these are rough customers. And in the Spanish, they met other rough customers...
...CM: In a way, it's re-revisionism. if you actually read the Spanish chronicles and the first English settlers' accounts and the French accounts, I'm just saying what they saw. I'm returning back to what they saw. Politically correct implies a kind of left-wing imagining of the Americas as this kind of Edenic place, a wilderness in which all of these noble savages are treading lightly. It really wasn't like that at all. These were people who were skilled, successful land managers, who used the land heavily, had enormous populous societies and lived in some...
...CM: Part of it is that the Spaniards did what they could, as did in lesser form our own ancestors, to obscure what they saw. And part of it is that these diseases, these huge epidemics, swept through these areas, depopulating them incredibly, so that people would move into areas that had already been depopulated, and were really unable to see what had been there. Following that, these ecosystems underwent huge change. So areas that had been previously been kept clear and full of Indian farms suddenly reforested. There was a tremendous tumult in a period of 200 years...
...CM: A couple of reasons. First, I think, without exception, every Indian I have spoken with uses that term. Second, "Native American" is a term that is used almost entirely in the United States and in Canada. Indians in Latin America and South America don't use that term. Finally, I just think there are some problems with the term. Everybody who's born in the Americas is a native American, right? For this reason, a lot of the American Indian movement activists rejected the term in favor of "Indian...