"It's arrogant and disrespectful to consider our cultural heritage secondary to theirs," said Jecinaldo Satere Mawe, chief coordinator of the Amazon Indian group Coiab.You still lived in grass huts, without the wheel, draft animals, organized agricultural, or writing. Some of you practiced ritual cannibalism. You were showing zero progress.
No, it's not.
-Eric
Well said!
They were offered Christianity, by whatever means, and they rejected it. Shake the dust off your sandals and move on. God will deal with them later..........
The initial charge, however, is wrong ~ genocide simply was not conducted against the Indians. For a variety of reasons vast plagues swept through native populations in the Western hemisphere and tens, even hundreds, of millions of people died.
Traditionaly Western diseases have been blamed for these deaths, but more recent findings by authoritative and competent scientific investigators have revealed that the plagues were probably hanta virus of various kinds.
There are gazillions of reference works on the matter ~ yet they remain unread.
Actually the Indians of the Amazon jungle area had an incredible amount of useful information about a multitude of natural medicines. Scientists are now striving to learn again what has been forgotten about those Indian medicines.
With the exception of the llama, not suited for Brazil's climate, there are no animals in the Americas suitable for draft use. Can't really blame them for not using something that isn't there.
Most Indians in the Americas, including Brazil, practiced organized agriculture. Much of the Amazon is actually an overgrown orchard, in which the natives practiced arboriculture, a form of agriculture in which desired trees are planted, a type of agriculture much better suited to the Amazon environment than our focus on annuals. However, most groups also grew cassava, maize and other crops.
While it does not appear that Bazil's Indians used writing, other groups in Meso-America and the Andes certainly did.