QatzelOk wrote:We have a quite a few Jeanine Anez's in Montreal lately too, many of them well-off from Venezuela or other left-wing Latin American countries that have redistributed wealth to equalize life potential at some point. One formerly-rich Latina (FRL) I know, when I argued that literacy had gone way up "under that bastard," retorted by stressing how ignorant the country folk and First Nations are in her home country. (Was she trying to prove my point? Nope.)
I agree with her notion of the importance of First Nations culture and values, but understand your point of view as well. But for me, it really is about values and recognition - genetics are of zero importance in re-invigorating First Nations culture and governance by changing the paradigm, as Hugo Chavez, Fidel, Morales and many others have attempted to do in various ways. I don't think any of these leaders got too caught up in genetic purity of any kind.
The media (left and right) tries to separate the plights and objectives of First Nations and other residents of the Americas as if ONLY genetically-correct people are permitted to celebrate or defend First Nations values or lifestyles. This seriously limits the number of people fighting for things like livable ecology, socialism, and equality - all First Nations values that apply througout Turtle Island. That's probably why commercial media gives the impression that "Indian culture is only for the following chromosome combinations...". And yet everyone on Earth has to speak English and eat McDonalds and use Microsoft.
So I don't see why Elizabeth Warren should have to distance herself from SAVING NATURE, as opposed to saving European Judeo-Christian notions of INDUSTRY, which is what she and virtually all politicians in the Americas do.
Q, you have to see that what we are fighting at this historical moment in time is the right to have basic needs met and clean water, clean air and arable land. The USA and its imposing of its commercialism and exploitation on the nations of Latin America who are in their vast majority non European in value systems is in conflict with the needs of modern capitalist economics. The USA keep INSISTING on some neoliberal models that have FAILED SPECTACULARLY to deliver higher standards of living in Latin America. It keeps insisting that the model they force and foist on peoples like the Aymara in Bolivia and others? Has to be adopted as the standard way to live.
It can't continue with that. It just can't.
People are products of their cultural environment. The American middle classes have completely false and unrealistic expectations of what kinds of challenges people face in other nations and other parts of the world.
Indigenous cultures and peoples have been decimated in huge quantities all over the world. Mostly through exposure to European diseases they had no natural resistance to, and to institutions like slavery and debt servitude and indentured servants and prison colonizations, and wars and herding them all into reservations.
98% of Indian peoples in the USA are gone. Extinct. Only 2% remain. And of those two percent many of the youth don't speak the original langauges, or practice the cultural traditions. I was moved profoundly by what the few left standing have done to help advance what is left.
But the truth of the matter? Assimilation by eliminating a cultural groups language, their historical contributions and record, by attacking their family structures, by separating them from their ancestral homelands, by changing their diets, by disrespecting their lives and introducing toxic ways of producing incomes like casinos, bars, etc is basically condemning the entire life view of people who have lived off the land for millenia. There is a profound dislike of First Nation ways of thinking.
It doesn't agree with Judeo-Christian consumerism.
What is interesting is that the Left keeps emerging constantly powerful in Latin America. Because the message of fighting for the working people, the underclass and the marginalized is a popular message in Latin America. It is associated with Commies, Socialists, nutjobs, and losers in the USA. Lol.
What they fail to realize is that unless you get control of these one track minded greedy people in charge of imposing their neolibral models on the rest of the world? We are all headed for mass extinction. All of us.
That is what they don't get through their thick skulls.