Category: las casas

Canoe notes #2

My childhood recollections of New World history move quickly from Columbus and the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria to Squanto and the Puritans on the other side of the continent. In neither case did we get much real history, but rather sloganeering echoes passed from teacher to student for decades, now centuries. And we got holidays—Columbus Day and Thanksgiving—that were and probably still are occasion for grade school pageantry.

But Allen Pinkham, Jr., our Nez Perce canoe carver, sends me back to Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., my mentor and the “Great Reminder.” Alvin reminds us that Indians were here for millennia before Columbus and the Puritans, that they had fashioned high civilizations as well as many simple but effective ways of living on their lands, that there had been catastrophes even before the Europeans came with the great upset, but that Native peoples and the land have been resilient. (I mistakenly typed “had” in place of “have” in that sentence; Read The Article

From Nasty, Brutish, and Short to the Pope


I’ve not yet seen the Academy Award winning “12 Years a Slave,” but the clips and conversation about slavery and brutality are visceral. Writer John Ridley said in a radio interview that he hoped the film would promote continuing conversations about these difficult subjects. So here are some semi-random thoughts from my end:
By most of the historical markers that we have—journals, histories, memoirs, records chiseled on stone—slavery and brutality have been part of the human condition forever. Wars, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, human sacrifice, human trafficking, purges, and genocide are all over the historical record—and in today’s news bulletins. 
One hardly knows where to start! I just finished reading Brian Fagan’s The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. He begins with the expansion of agriculture in Europe and the travels of the Norse into North America in the warming years—roughly 800-1200 A.D. And finds that even
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