I’m glad you brought this up, because it’s something I want to make a distinguishment from. I do not want to fetishize or otherwise dehumanize indigenous people. I merely want to acknowledge that every culture has something they do better than anyone else. Us Europeans? We built pan-oceanic boats capable of traversing the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Arctic Oceans. That’s absolutely incredible! We are however, dogshit at land management. Hence the constant European desire to colonize more and more of the planet, taking up more and more land to meet the material needs of an aristocratic class that required closely shorn lawns for leisure activities such as polo and croquet.
Meanwhile, I also do not think that indigenous north Americans were perfect. For example, the Cherokee committed a genocide against the Osage, the Inca, Aztek, and Mayans all had theocratic structures that were not great for a large number of people living in their territories, the various peoples of the Americas hunted mega-fauna they encountered to extinction. However, in order for any plan for a hopeful future, we must draw wisdom from many sources. We know this because the current European global hegemony is failing. So we need to start looking for wisdom from other sources. One of the things when we interrogate history is that prior to Europe leveraging military violence to place the global south into a perpetual state of underdevelopment is that the people of the Americas had INCREDIBLE land management strategies that were interwoven with their cultural heritages (food, language, social structures) and agricultural outputs leading to some extremely interesting crops that have become staples worldwide such as corn, potatoes, sunflowers, beans, and tomatoes.
In conclusion: my point is to draw sources from subjugated knowledge
my point is to draw sources from subjugated knowledge
Really not sure what “subjugated knowledge” is supposed to mean.
In any case this is mostly irrelevant. It’s been hundreds or thousands of years, depending on which culture you’re talking about. The environmental conditions have changed, the land has changed, and the cultures are long gone. We have newer methods and better options for land and resource management, and for studying the current actual conditions, and for understanding local environments in the context of the global whole.
the people of the Americas had INCREDIBLE land management strategies that were interwoven with their cultural heritages
They also had a life expectancy of about 50 years and no methods for treating anything like cancer or sepsis or long-term debilitating conditions. My sister is Type 1 diabetic, she’d probably just be dead by 40.
I agree that we should have more respect for those that came before and the work they did that we are still benefitting from today (such as the selective breeding for crops you mentioned), but we can’t move forward by looking backward. The survival strategies of those past cultures don’t scale up to sustain 8 billion people, we need new methods supported by new technologies, better information and system-wide analysis.
What does that even mean? It sounds an awful lot like noble savage mythology.
I’m glad you brought this up, because it’s something I want to make a distinguishment from. I do not want to fetishize or otherwise dehumanize indigenous people. I merely want to acknowledge that every culture has something they do better than anyone else. Us Europeans? We built pan-oceanic boats capable of traversing the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Arctic Oceans. That’s absolutely incredible! We are however, dogshit at land management. Hence the constant European desire to colonize more and more of the planet, taking up more and more land to meet the material needs of an aristocratic class that required closely shorn lawns for leisure activities such as polo and croquet.
Meanwhile, I also do not think that indigenous north Americans were perfect. For example, the Cherokee committed a genocide against the Osage, the Inca, Aztek, and Mayans all had theocratic structures that were not great for a large number of people living in their territories, the various peoples of the Americas hunted mega-fauna they encountered to extinction. However, in order for any plan for a hopeful future, we must draw wisdom from many sources. We know this because the current European global hegemony is failing. So we need to start looking for wisdom from other sources. One of the things when we interrogate history is that prior to Europe leveraging military violence to place the global south into a perpetual state of underdevelopment is that the people of the Americas had INCREDIBLE land management strategies that were interwoven with their cultural heritages (food, language, social structures) and agricultural outputs leading to some extremely interesting crops that have become staples worldwide such as corn, potatoes, sunflowers, beans, and tomatoes.
In conclusion: my point is to draw sources from subjugated knowledge
Really not sure what “subjugated knowledge” is supposed to mean.
In any case this is mostly irrelevant. It’s been hundreds or thousands of years, depending on which culture you’re talking about. The environmental conditions have changed, the land has changed, and the cultures are long gone. We have newer methods and better options for land and resource management, and for studying the current actual conditions, and for understanding local environments in the context of the global whole.
They also had a life expectancy of about 50 years and no methods for treating anything like cancer or sepsis or long-term debilitating conditions. My sister is Type 1 diabetic, she’d probably just be dead by 40.
I agree that we should have more respect for those that came before and the work they did that we are still benefitting from today (such as the selective breeding for crops you mentioned), but we can’t move forward by looking backward. The survival strategies of those past cultures don’t scale up to sustain 8 billion people, we need new methods supported by new technologies, better information and system-wide analysis.
https://sociology.institute/sociological-theories-concepts/foucault-power-knowledge-discourse/