Other Trails
I'm reading a lot about Indians lately. I have a book in mind I want to write and spend some time letting go of it to clear my head, then researching everything I can get my hands on to see what might fit somehow. Read a hundred pages and get a paragraph out of it I want to use.
But these are all books I already own. I love reading. I have many things in my life and so do many different things, but the reading part of it sometimes seems insatiable. Just not enough time and energy to do what I seem to hunger for.
If you try to look at things objectively, Indians did their share of 'human' things. Meaning faults. But people that wanted their land, us, and also culture clash misunderstandings, we just blindly found fault with them and determined they didn't deserve their land as much as we did.
Again, I've seen this in other cultures. I appreciate tons of my own, I don't need to hate us. And when it really sunk in, I guess, is when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Philippines, during the revolution that overthrew Marcos. It also was an unstable time about the U.S. Military bases there, and even the world price of sugarcane.
One of the things America did to keep the bases was to artificially inflate the price we gave for Philippine sugar. When suddenly the bases were gone and also our need to prop this price up, prices there tumbled dramatically. Filthy rich sugarcane plantations were on the verge of bankruptcy overnight. At the same time, the new administration of Cory Aquino instituted some land reforms. This divided up some of this plantation land to thousands of suddenly jobless sugarcane workers. But even that wasn't enough.
Mindanao had already been a 'newly' settled land, like the Old American West, with the Moslem inhabitants being the Indians, and the misplaced Christians from other islands being the cowboys. Some of the tugs and near civil wars were going on while I was in Mindanao. But when I was transferred to these plush sugarcane islands and the latest upheavals occured, I saw first hand some of the results.
These misplaced workers, even as Plantation workers lived a miserable life while the Plantation owners would fly to Manila for a party in their privately owned helicopters. But with the sudden depression, as hard as the Plantation owners had it, the workers, who at least had three hots and a cot before, basic securities, now were landless, jobless, and unskilled. And no Mindanao to take from the Indians.
Some of them went to another island that was rather unsettled. And they drove from the land, the local natives and were ruthless as they did so. Where they had been the 'victims' before, they were bloodthirsty bloodsuckers now.
There is just a trend here, in the world, in the universe. I don't need to hate my ancestors, I need to understand, to grow, to find a way.
I have encounters with people all the time, big things, little things. I react to them. I have my own version of moral codes and rights and wrongs to judge with. What I want to do is understand. Not just intellectually, though that can be an aid. How to limit the judging of others. It's there and probably should be, but the more you grow up, the more you understand, and the more you are judicious instead of just judging others.
'Judge not lest ye be judged'. Sometimes I almost think I know what that means. Not so much the revenge thing, but the mindset thing. If you live in that world, you are subject to its whims.
As I read about the American Indians, and my ancestries' encounters with them, I want to understand now. Human nature. God. That's what the book I hope to write is going to be about anyway. But boy, we did do the Indian a number. From the very beginning, right there with Mamoset meeting the Pilgrims, they had no idea that we were going to take over their whole world and the whole Continent, but they befriended us, traded with us, mutually beneficial. And we took took took and just considered them barbarians so why not.
We can come to grips with this. I don't need to see us as evil and them as purely victims. I want to understand. I want to see what God sees, as Albert Einstein once said. But in the meantime, my mortal eyes do often get in the way.
But these are all books I already own. I love reading. I have many things in my life and so do many different things, but the reading part of it sometimes seems insatiable. Just not enough time and energy to do what I seem to hunger for.
If you try to look at things objectively, Indians did their share of 'human' things. Meaning faults. But people that wanted their land, us, and also culture clash misunderstandings, we just blindly found fault with them and determined they didn't deserve their land as much as we did.
Again, I've seen this in other cultures. I appreciate tons of my own, I don't need to hate us. And when it really sunk in, I guess, is when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Philippines, during the revolution that overthrew Marcos. It also was an unstable time about the U.S. Military bases there, and even the world price of sugarcane.
One of the things America did to keep the bases was to artificially inflate the price we gave for Philippine sugar. When suddenly the bases were gone and also our need to prop this price up, prices there tumbled dramatically. Filthy rich sugarcane plantations were on the verge of bankruptcy overnight. At the same time, the new administration of Cory Aquino instituted some land reforms. This divided up some of this plantation land to thousands of suddenly jobless sugarcane workers. But even that wasn't enough.
Mindanao had already been a 'newly' settled land, like the Old American West, with the Moslem inhabitants being the Indians, and the misplaced Christians from other islands being the cowboys. Some of the tugs and near civil wars were going on while I was in Mindanao. But when I was transferred to these plush sugarcane islands and the latest upheavals occured, I saw first hand some of the results.
These misplaced workers, even as Plantation workers lived a miserable life while the Plantation owners would fly to Manila for a party in their privately owned helicopters. But with the sudden depression, as hard as the Plantation owners had it, the workers, who at least had three hots and a cot before, basic securities, now were landless, jobless, and unskilled. And no Mindanao to take from the Indians.
Some of them went to another island that was rather unsettled. And they drove from the land, the local natives and were ruthless as they did so. Where they had been the 'victims' before, they were bloodthirsty bloodsuckers now.
There is just a trend here, in the world, in the universe. I don't need to hate my ancestors, I need to understand, to grow, to find a way.
I have encounters with people all the time, big things, little things. I react to them. I have my own version of moral codes and rights and wrongs to judge with. What I want to do is understand. Not just intellectually, though that can be an aid. How to limit the judging of others. It's there and probably should be, but the more you grow up, the more you understand, and the more you are judicious instead of just judging others.
'Judge not lest ye be judged'. Sometimes I almost think I know what that means. Not so much the revenge thing, but the mindset thing. If you live in that world, you are subject to its whims.
As I read about the American Indians, and my ancestries' encounters with them, I want to understand now. Human nature. God. That's what the book I hope to write is going to be about anyway. But boy, we did do the Indian a number. From the very beginning, right there with Mamoset meeting the Pilgrims, they had no idea that we were going to take over their whole world and the whole Continent, but they befriended us, traded with us, mutually beneficial. And we took took took and just considered them barbarians so why not.
We can come to grips with this. I don't need to see us as evil and them as purely victims. I want to understand. I want to see what God sees, as Albert Einstein once said. But in the meantime, my mortal eyes do often get in the way.
posted by CottonSr @ 6:21 AM
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