Columbus Day

Today is a holiday in the USA. Most people work right through it, but mail is not delivered, school children are indoctrinated with the myth of Columbus, and here and there, protests are held in honor of "Indigenous People's Day," which doesn't actually exist. Today in Portland was yet another spectacularly beautiful, unseasonably warm autumn day. Shirtsleeve weather. I got a haircut and an ice cream cone and thanks to the book I'm reading, I contemplated colonization in a new way and thought about how our tall city trees dwarf the people and cars beneath them.

"Farmers assume a right to enter the wild, tame it, reshape it, farm it.... Moving on, making progress, wondering if we might prosper there rather than here--these are necessary conditions both for many kinds of individual achievement and for the collective achievement of our social order."
--Hugh Brody in The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers, and the Shaping of the World.

In this very fine book recommended by Spitzimixi (if you have time, read her text in that link, which talks about the same book), Brody exposes how violent agrarian people have been as they have colonized the planet to tame it and arrange it for their own uses. Brody talks about how much damage farmers, and their heroes like Christopher Columbus (see the real scoop on the horror he brought to the "new" world here ) have done to the respectful ways of life of indigenous hunter-gatherer people, who were less "nomadic" than the farmer-colonizers. Brody did his homework. He lived for many years among Inuit and other northern people. He didn't just visit. He wasn't a tourist. I find it enlightening to follow where he leads and to meet the elders and the sages of the cultures of the North in the pages of this book.