The question of inequality

Originally Posted by Tola:

Originally Posted by Django:

Originally Posted by Wally:

An India man once told me that I know lots of things about his country and he knows nothing about my country.

My Indian friend from New Delhi said the same,it has to do

with our inquiring minds.

When I was in Kolkata, I tried to find out about the indenture system to the colonies, but the average Indian seems interested only in finding food for the day and seem to care little about their history.

I guess, if they are elevated above their poverty, they might find other interest.

I now know about the indenture labourer monument, Ashook Ramsarran, GOPIO and other efforts to make this more visible.

India Indians were puzzled when they saw Rohan Kanhai. He looked like an Indian but unsure of it. Told to me by an old Indian man from Kerala.

I had a few Indian ladies working at the company. Very smart women. One of dem decided to ask what part of India I came from. I told her my people were from India but not me. I told her the regular story of our odyssey. She remarked that was missing in their history. That evening after work, she went to public library and borrowed the books about Guyana. She was a graduate in molecular physic-Masters.

Originally Posted by Stormborn:

Originally Posted by caribny:

Originally Posted by Stormborn:

Taino is just another word for amerindian not tribe. Luconos, Caribs Mesclados are all Taino by virtue of people claiming blood ties. No such tribe existed no less than any tribe calling themselves Amerindian or Native american. It has become an adopted term to apply to kinship and sense of belonging to the retribalization movement of people who know they have native blood and need an name. It is an umbrella term.

So you can use Arawak, because it was an established fact that there was one group (Caribs) which was chasing another (Arawak) and slaughtering many in the process.

This is a documented fact. Proof was that in Carib islands men spoke one language, and women, another as Caribs killed the Arawak men, and forceably abducted Arawak women.

This sense of kinship of which you speak only began LONG AFTER all were dominated by the Europeans. In fact the Aztecs and Incas were only defeated by the Spanish, because the subjugated Amerindian groups allied themselves against these dominant groups. On their own the Spanish would have not had such an ability, with the few score men who were involved, and their complete isolation from their supply lines.

No group called themselves Arawak. That term was coined for groups of people speaking similar language variants. It means people of the long bow.Arawaks call themselves the people or Locono and their language Locono dian or people talk. Carib is a variant of Locono as are or Makouxi or Yanomamo etc. It is a foregone conclusion that these are one people differentiating due to isolation and inbreeding and clan formation from that perspective. Whether Algonquin or Athabaskian or Quechua they are essentially the same people

You are missing the forest for the trees. You want to conflate tribe with ethnicity and tribe with blood kinship. I say while kinship predominates sin family is seminal to strong group formation, to belong to the tribe was no biggie even if you are Ojibwa and the tribe accepting you is Oglala Lakota Sioux. Today blood descent or blood quantum is set per rules because the US made it so as tribes are legal entities with entitlements and benefits. However, tribal people do not have exclusion rules as blacks have with respect to indian or the reverse. Even today one can get non voting/benefits membership by marrying into the tribe or otherwise included. You also have the conquest theory wrong. In both south and central America. deception, torture, and blackmail were the tools employed in victory and not open warfare. The spanish could not win since the numbers were formidable. It was the same in North America.

Don't you think it odd that a few dozen Spanish men conquered the mighty Aztec and Inca empires? This is all that this was.

Not only was this a small group of men, but many being undisciplined people, most being criminals. Many consumed with a need for drinking and orgies with which ever groups of females that they could abuse.

So how formidable could they be against the very disciplined Aztec and Inca armies, both having the advantage of knowing their terrain and being right in the midst of their supply lines.

The Amerinds, who joined the Spanish, provided the manpower and the supplies to sustain them. This, combined with the eventual spreading of European diseases is what brought down this great empires.

So what is this great bond which links these various Amerind groups with each other?

It is quite clear that the inhabitants of the Andes were very different groups from the Stone Age inhabitants of the Amazonian and Orinoco basins. When those groups encountered each other on the Amazonian facing slopes of the Andes, I am sure that the results were as dire as when the Romans encountered the considerably less developed Germanic tribes.

In fact it is only within relatively recent times that Germanic peoples and those of the Mediterranean began to see each others as being of the same race.

I am sure that in the pre Columbian era the various Indigenous groups would have similarly differentiated themselves. You cannot tell me that the relatively developed groups from what is now the Southeastern USA would have easily identified with the hunter gatherers of the Plains areas. We are talking about radically different cultures and life styles.

Of course in 2015, having been humiliated and marginalized by Europeans (and also by Africans in a few places), Amerinds now have an identity based on collaboration, which now allows them to accept each other, engage in rituals to allow this bonding, and to minimize the differences which were quite powerful in the pre Columbian era.

But in 1491 this was NOT the case.

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