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There are still millions of native Americans today, some full blood. Go visit the rez. Their culture is beautiful.

sterlind 7y ago
Navajo alone is spoken by 200,000 people. I'm learning lushootseed, the Salish language of the Seattle area, to help in its revival. Beautiful phonemes and totally unlike English.. it doesn't seem to have nouns exactly, and all words are made of many particles. They're teaching it in reservation schools right now.. hopefully in another 15 years there'll be an active speaker community!
crumpets 7y ago
Not really the same thing. Most are just a shell of their former culture and independence. It’s similar to native Hawaiians. Despite significant effort, that culture is being drowned by tourists and the massive non-native population influencing them. Sure, you can celebrate the culture and the language, but it doesn’t even begin to give you a glimpse of what it could have been without European invasions.
- steve76 7y ago
  So there are real world consequences of your beliefs. A growing black market brings very dangerous weapons to people still in the stone ages. We can't teach them about human rights or social mutuality without being labeled colonialists and genocidal madmen. Good people cannot build a telescope on a mountain because of superstitions. Sorry, but that's what they are. I want to be nice and really don't want this fight. I also don't want to die of cancer and Alzheimer's, something that telescope if it gets good data, could help to prevent by providing insights on observed particles. And it's not there because other people believe in something that's absolutely false and irrational. If China did it, it's okay because they are not European, despite their history of Mongols genociding everything in sight? If Americans and Europeans acted like the superstitious old world, we would have gone silent after Nagasaki, and leveled everyone. We didn't because we aim to limit violence and contention. No one else really even tries. You can only push this argument so far before you encroach on real problems, problems that sentence people to horrible deaths from war and disease.
yonaguska 7y ago
I go to pow-wows annually. It's not all beautiful. There's still lots of racism, drug use and alcoholism. Racism is especially bad, I have friends that we're basically ostracized from their tribes for having non native fathers. The annual pow-wows sometimes feel like one big D.A.R.E. lecture and it's really sad because they talk about how every other generation gets caught up in addiction and grandparents are always raising grandkids. My mother intentionally never got us properly set up for tribal membership because she didn't want us anywhere near the negative aspects of the culture. (I'm also not even sure if I could qualify despite tracing my ancestry back to the baker rolls.) And she didn't even grow up on the rez, just in Appalachia. It's been a blessing and a curse.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

Navajo alone is spoken by 200,000 people. I'm learning lushootseed, the Salish language of the Seattle area, to help in its revival. Beautiful phonemes and totally unlike English.. it doesn't seem to have nouns exactly, and all words are made of many particles. They're teaching it in reservation schools right now.. hopefully in another 15 years there'll be an active speaker community!

crumpets 7y ago

Not really the same thing. Most are just a shell of their former culture and independence. It’s similar to native Hawaiians. Despite significant effort, that culture is being drowned by tourists and the massive non-native population influencing them. Sure, you can celebrate the culture and the language, but it doesn’t even begin to give you a glimpse of what it could have been without European invasions.

steve76 7y ago
So there are real world consequences of your beliefs. A growing black market brings very dangerous weapons to people still in the stone ages. We can't teach them about human rights or social mutuality without being labeled colonialists and genocidal madmen. Good people cannot build a telescope on a mountain because of superstitions. Sorry, but that's what they are. I want to be nice and really don't want this fight. I also don't want to die of cancer and Alzheimer's, something that telescope if it gets good data, could help to prevent by providing insights on observed particles. And it's not there because other people believe in something that's absolutely false and irrational. If China did it, it's okay because they are not European, despite their history of Mongols genociding everything in sight? If Americans and Europeans acted like the superstitious old world, we would have gone silent after Nagasaki, and leveled everyone. We didn't because we aim to limit violence and contention. No one else really even tries. You can only push this argument so far before you encroach on real problems, problems that sentence people to horrible deaths from war and disease.

yonaguska 7y ago

I go to pow-wows annually. It's not all beautiful. There's still lots of racism, drug use and alcoholism. Racism is especially bad, I have friends that we're basically ostracized from their tribes for having non native fathers. The annual pow-wows sometimes feel like one big D.A.R.E. lecture and it's really sad because they talk about how every other generation gets caught up in addiction and grandparents are always raising grandkids. My mother intentionally never got us properly set up for tribal membership because she didn't want us anywhere near the negative aspects of the culture. (I'm also not even sure if I could qualify despite tracing my ancestry back to the baker rolls.) And she didn't even grow up on the rez, just in Appalachia. It's been a blessing and a curse.

deleted 7y ago
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