Word: cm
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...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...
...CM: These subjects are controversial enough that I do expect, and have already received, some knee-jerk reactions: on the right, saying that this [is a way of saying] that the origins of this nation aren't Christian, or some kind of politically correct glorifying of savages; and on the left, saying that I am trashing them by saying they are violent, and not perfect stewards of nature. In fact, Indians were human beings, just like anybody else. Like anybody else, they did some absolutely amazing stuff, and some stuff that makes you roll your eyes...