Clearing the pollution out of Euro-peon arrogance!

Hey, i'm a non-indigenous european person and i've been having a discussion with an elder lady friend about the topic of exactly what indigenous folks were like compared with europeans, and whether there was always a shared mentality of severe alienation in both cultures, and here's what she said to me...(i'm looking for insights from others, including possible proofs or info leading us to seeing such)

My lady friend said:
>Please I don't mean to offend you.,
but the reality exists that long before europeans came to this
continent that war, starvation, incest, slavery and genocide was a
reality for the people. There has always been inhumanity in every
cultuer and indeed the natives were particularily ruthless and felt
justified by there culture.... that europeans were so capable of
overpowering thier foes had alot to do with the developement of steel
and manufacturing, but the mentality of consciousness is universal
and although the european culture was colonistic they did not/ do not
hold the strings of brutality and even within european cultures there
existed a great deal of enlightenment.... Also let us not forget the
stong hold and influence of the church which is probably much more
influencial than any european country ...
---
i replied:

Where do you get this information, S? How do you know these things for certain? How can a european know what happened long before europeans were here?

Oh, yes, you are partially indigenous; yet what does that really mean if you look only through the lens of the european way of seeing? (a way that has, by the way, systematically utilized fraud and sleight-of-hand to conceal its own history not only during conquest of the indigenous people here, but also on *every* topic after "legally" securing this land). Every topic you can think of, i bet that there is a long history of suppression of truths that simply are not allowed.

Some questions:
Where do you get the idea that the original natives practiced genocide against each other?

What does slavery really mean between varying cultures, and do severely alienated cultures like european cultures truly have similar ways of seeing these things? After all, indigenous folks never had *wage slavery* (they tended to look out for each other, realizing the value, i see and think); nor did they have all of these long lists of ways to keep some marginalized while others, via deceit, gained wealth!

Why is starvation spoken here? If a group, say the Irish, die of a "potato famine" is there a context that is deeper? How about when others, say indigenous folks began to starve? In what context, again? Perhaps because their food stores were destroyed by europeans always taking and hardly giving anything in return? And before europeans arrived? --Okay, some starved at times, just as the Irish, just as the peasants in a world dominated by feudalism.

Does incest mean the same thing in all cultures?

For instance, if there is no heavy-negative-feelings in a culture about sexuality or *bad touches* then would people have the same kind of a taboo feeling about it that a culture that *has* such heavy-feelings?

I mean, look at the European history of the state-backed church's way of aiding in the control over the masses via the prohibition and demonization of ALL sex acts except missionary-position procreation made by heteros married by the chruch! Now compare that to ways peoples free of such influence and orders might behave (of course, most of we colonized folks are so well poisoned, er, trained, that all we can imagine is what people in our society would be like as soon as the bars of the cage we live in are lifted--obviously, a berserk situation!). On the other hand, a society that has survived thousands of years and didn't have this "manifest destiny" need to conquer others and move roughshod over them at whim, would naturally have a very different approach.

So i'm wondering, are there grey area ways that make it possible to approach things which are taboo in one culture and yet not at all similarly viewed in another? (We can compare and contrast on several topics to give us light here, you know!)

So, no, i see very heavily-loaded value assumptions being thrown, blanketly, upon those labeled the "primitives" in general by you and so many others who don't seem to see what they do. i say, read some critique and demystification of anthropology (and any other usually politically-suberservient social "science") before you make your sweeping judgements (which have a curious way of making the conquering society sound so much "better", notably)! i know an author off-hand that could help you in that area...i'm trying to recall his name...um...oh yes, Theodore Roszak (spelling?) went into this in some detail in his book about the 1970s counterculture.

And i don't agree, either, on the "mentality of consciousness" as you seem to believe it was some universal. Look at indigenous medicine, look at how shamans were created and when, look at every facet of pre-colonized life and then tell me that they shared a "mentality of consciousness"! i don't see that at all!

But when the europeans arrived, a ton of shit began cropping up. Tribes were divided up and the old trick of "divide and conquer" was employed systematically (to this day); indigenous folks did not understand this. Nor did they understand the selling of lands. You read any account of old-way chiefs talking to europeans and you see that there is a QUALITIVE difference between the two cultures! Once indigenous folks were pushed into the insanity of european seeing and believing, all of these pollutions began cropping up, and peoples, seeking to remain in harmony, did what they could to get along; but systematically, they were fooled and tooled! Only now have they, as a whole people, begun to get a full understanding of we colonized peoples' mentality.

So the point i'm trying to make is that we can see, often too clearly, that indigenous society wasn't nearly as insane as european society! How?

By recalling that the waters were not polluted, the forests were not decimated, the wild animals were not decimated by hunting, nothing was wasted, and so on and so forth. Guns were not invented, not even the wheel. Alienation did not exist as we know it today, if at all; Mom nature (aka wakan tanka) was always there in everything they were and did. Animals, when killed, were prayed to (before and after death).

Even if i'm somewhat "romanticizing" the indigenous, pre-"civilized" way of life, you know you cannot help but to see the truth when comparing with european feudalistic society, right?!

The other info is interesting to me, thanks for sharing about the jewish guy who saw in his captors their lostness; do you have a title in mind? i'd like to read about that one.

As for the stronghold of the church? Back when the church ran states, okay. Yet, after they became *subordinate* to states, all they did was its bidding. We can see examples of this in movies like "At Play In The Fields of the Lord", where missionaries are tolerated to change
the indigenous peoples, but if they don't, the military will kill and terrorize them. The church (and every state-subordinate religion!) is yet only one more example of the bigger picture of the meta Chess Game being played on all diverse humans who subordinate their individualities to such a dumbed-down way of being in the world.

Do you see what i'm saying?