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Post by dietspam16 on Sept 10, 2005 0:43:40 GMT -5
btw, I've eben having a blast because all the canadians know way morea bout us history than 80% of the american population, its great!
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Post by Random on Sept 10, 2005 0:45:52 GMT -5
are most of them proud that their country burned down the white house? well it wasn't really white at the time but you get the idea
somehow i'm not really surprised that they know more about US history, i mean its not really tough to know more than next to nothing now is it?
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Post by Arachis on Sept 10, 2005 10:39:53 GMT -5
you all should have failed your us history ap tests. actually, your fifth grade us history. hey, lets shoot the buffolo as the train goes by so the indians don't have nothin' ta eat! harhar! *yuk* actually shooting the buffolos had nearly nothing to do with the indians use for them. They were shot out of trains for sport. The people back then couldnt even believe that they would be able to kill off enough of them to actually matter. Its sort of like ants, you dont think that killing an ant will "reduce the population" you kill it because you do. Back then there were so many buffalo's that killing a couple hardly dented the population (although when everyone killed a couple and a couple people killed a lot, that severely dented their population) but few people knew that at the time.
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Post by dietspam16 on Sept 10, 2005 16:52:05 GMT -5
Actually, though it was for sport, it was actually intended to harm the indians as well it was kinda like having your cake and shooting it too
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Post by Monolith on Sept 13, 2005 23:38:18 GMT -5
you all should have failed your us history ap tests. actually, your fifth grade us history. hey, lets shoot the buffolo as the train goes by so the indians don't have nothin' ta eat! harhar! *yuk* actually shooting the buffolos had nearly nothing to do with the indians use for them. They were shot out of trains for sport. The people back then couldnt even believe that they would be able to kill off enough of them to actually matter. Its sort of like ants, you dont think that killing an ant will "reduce the population" you kill it because you do. Back then there were so many buffalo's that killing a couple hardly dented the population (although when everyone killed a couple and a couple people killed a lot, that severely dented their population) but few people knew that at the time. The ignorance demonstrated in this post appalls me. The Buffalo are extinct, Ali. Their entire race was wiped out. You're downplaying this to an absurd level. Those 'buffalo' that now wander around America are a completely different species than what the Indains hunted. As for shooting Buffalo out on the plains, this was hardly insignificant. This was encouraged by the train companies and the government, as the government was intentionally killing off their food supply. 'Not knowing how to deal with them'? Give me a break. They knew 'how to deal with them,' genocide. What you are doing is basically saying that murder was an insignificant accident.
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Post by dietspam16 on Sept 14, 2005 0:10:42 GMT -5
he must be watching CNN too much, all the ministry of propaganda crap is getting to him...
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Post by Arachis on Sept 14, 2005 0:48:08 GMT -5
actually if you do research you will find answers slightly differently. First of all, conrtrary to what you have been claiming, the killing of buffallo as "sport" (ie with no purpose other than to have fun killing the buffallo) is much overplayed and actually hardly contributed to the extinction of the beasts. Most of the buffallo deaths were caused by fur traders, who sold buffalo fur and tongues overseas for coats and other goods. If you know anything about economics, or common sense, people arent going to randomly go and become a fur trapper (or in this case hunter) just because the government says so, the reason you kill the buffalo is to make money. And without a large demand there is no place to make that money. So, the only way that the government could have actually gotten people to kill buffalo (in order to exterminate the indians food resources) is by creating demand for buffalo. This would entail either putting a bounty on every buffalos head, buying up buffalo, or through propoganda, getting people to buy buffalo skin coats. To my knowledge the government did none of these things. Therefore, while the government may have foreseen the outcome of the buffalo dieing out, its not like they purposefully went out and "killed" the indians as you put it. I mean, even the killing of buffalo isnt indian genocide. It forces them into another way of life maybe (which can be just as bad) but you cant say that killing buffalo directly killed the indians. Overexaggerating the US's indian policy to make the US look bad is a cheap trick considering the amount of other terrible things they have done.
Im not trying to say that the american government actually treated the indians fairly or anything, but I am saying that you are attributing way too many accidents, and actions based on poor judgement to the US government, and blowing it way out of proportion. There were many factors besides the US government that lead to the Indians downfall and depopulation, but in reality the only real trouble the US made for the Indians, is their relocation and promising them certain grounds for reservations and then revoking those deals. Thats really what the US did to the indians. The rest was mostly just a lack of help rather than an active crusade to kill them off.
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Post by Random on Sept 14, 2005 1:53:04 GMT -5
If you know anything about economics, or common sense, people arent going to randomly go and become a fur trapper (or in this case hunter) just because the government says so alright, i don't know much about this, but thats ok, i'm just going to post this so alex or nick don't have to because i'm pretty sure this is what they were getting at ever heard of a bounty? you ought to know plenty considering australia seems to have one on your favorite small animal (rabbits). . .
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Post by Arachis on Sept 14, 2005 10:26:35 GMT -5
if you read further into my post, you would have realized I said, that the only way the government could have influenced demand and therefore gotten people to shoot the buffalo is "through a bounty, buying up buffalo or through propoganda/advertisement getting people to buy buffalo skins." I dont believe that the government did any of these things however. especially because there was no need for a bounty considering that people were willing enough to go out on their own and kill the buffalo.
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Post by BlueDolphin on Sept 14, 2005 11:45:54 GMT -5
According to wikipedia at least, hunting of bison was promoted by railroad companies to attack native american food sources and also to remove herds that would hold up trains or damage them while they were crossing tracks. Of course, money receieved by hunting for pelts and tongues also encouraged this.
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Post by Arachis on Sept 14, 2005 12:31:43 GMT -5
in reading that, the conclusion is pretty much what I summed up. The government had no direct influence in killing off the buffalo, they only vetoed legislation protecting the veto (ie did nothing to stop the killing of the buffalo). Most of the buffalo killing had little to do with killing off the plains indians, and mostly to do with money. The US was at war with the indians, and calling war related deaths genocide is exagerration.
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Post by Monolith on Sept 14, 2005 21:06:22 GMT -5
Perhaps I was wrong about the Buffalo, but someone else brought that up. My information came out of a school textbook, and they're not always the best source. Regardless, that's hardly all that was going on.
I find the term 'war' to be a rather poor term, considdering the generosity the native people often showed, at least at first. The reason genocide is more apropriate is due to the fact that not once would the US government, or even the settlers, accept any form of peaceful coexistence with these people. There are even instances of a tribe somewhere in the South east attempting to assimilate into the settler's culture. They were driven out. I don't see how that can fall under the term of 'war.' Whether or not the hate was always there, the goal was not toconquer the Indigiounous people, but to eliminate them. In California bounties were put not on Buffalo but on Native American villages. They paid people to kill them. There are also quite a lot of instances of the government trading blankets and tissues taken from Small Pox wards to the native people. I don't think you can classify these as accidents. Even if You don't considder this genocide, the monstrous and inhumane caliber of the warfare is hardly something to be brushed off.
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Post by Arachis on Sept 14, 2005 23:53:11 GMT -5
but its hardly something to linger on either, unless you are a native american rights activist. Monstrosities worse than that have gone on in the world, and pointing a finger at the US as though its the only imorral country is a little unfair.
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Post by Monolith on Sept 15, 2005 19:05:10 GMT -5
I'm not saying it's the only one. Returning to the original topic, I was trying to point out that the US isn't as noble as it's often made out to be, or at least not as noble as many Americans think.
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Post by Arachis on Sept 15, 2005 19:23:17 GMT -5
but in doing so, you evoked the feeling that America was much worse than the rest of the world, which I dont believe is the case either.
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