[GCFL-discuss] FW: [GCFL.net] Lesson in Marketing

[Discussion of the Good, Clean Funnies List]

Jeanene, if two of your sisters are full-blood Apaches, and you (by
implication) are not, then you must be half-blood yourself, and they are
your half-sisters, or they are sisters by some other standard, such as
adoption, step-sisters, church sisters, etc. etc. etc. I have a twelfth
cousin who is African American, because my mother and hers both have a
small percentage of east Tennessee Cherokee in their respective families.

Siarlys

P.S. Lance: I like a lot of what I have read about Native American
culture too, but keep it in context. The culture we know is the culture
of the period of contact with Europeans. We don't know a whole lot about
previous culture. Also, it is easy to sit in the comfot of a
well-insulated home with running water and electricity, admiring the most
philosophical perspectives of a culture where people in fact were on the
edge of starvation, freezing to death, etc. There is much that is
valuable, but we will never really have it in its original context.

An example from Africa: Prior to around 1890, most of what is now
Tanzania, Kenya, Malawi, south-eastern Congo, Rhodesia, Zambia, Zimbabwe,
South Africa, were inhabited by cattle-raising cultures. The grazing of
the cattle kept brush under control, maintaining grasslands which
provided a relatively healthy environment, and provided little cover for
the tsetse fly. The first (unsuccessful) Italian invation of Ethiopia
brought with it a herd of cattle to feed the troops, which as it happened
were infected with a virus called rinderpest. It spread epidemically
across southern Africa. Ninety percent of the herds died. Many African
starved, others became dependent on employment among the European
colonial enclaves. Without the cattle to control the brush, large areas
became impenetrable wilderness, the preferred breeding environment for
the tsetse fly. When Europeans penetrated deeper into the continent a few
years later, they wrote about the "primordial" wilderness (and some began
a movement to preserve it) while bemoaning the primitiveness of African
economy and initiative caused in part by epidemic sleeping sickness
spread by the tse tse fly.

A more positive example from Native American practices: the current round
of California wildfires would not have happened prior to Spanish
penetration, much less American sovereignty, because the peoples
inhabiting the hills and coastal plans set fire to the landscape every
few years. This created a landscape free of brush, preserved forests of
mature live oaks and other trees (not damaged by the relatively small
fires at frequent intervals), with a good deal of open space under them,
some of it grown with fresh grass. It wasn't the "natural" landscape, it
was man-made, and well made.