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Showing posts from May, 2021

An American genocide

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Still today many European descendants in the Americas try to deny the genocides their ancestors subjected the Native Americans to. The deniers often try to blame Native American depopulation on epidemics and similar "natural" causes, or they try to diminish the genocide by claiming that Native Americans killed each other already before the first Europeans arrived in the Americas. They also try to apply so narrow definitions of the term genocide that it excludes everything except the Holocaust during World War II.  But as more and more research is conducted about the genocide(s) against Indigenous American the more hollow the denials sound. One of the books, based on several years of research, that thoroughly documents a genocide in America is "An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873" by Benjamin Madley, a history professor at the University of California. In his book he describes the brutal genocide that the American ...

Real and fake images of Native Americans

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Some Afrocentrists post images of so called "black natives" on social media, trying to prove that they were in the Americas already before Native Americans. But  many of those pictures are "black" (in the meaning of African looking) simply because the artists who made them (many times Europeans who never left Europe) never saw any real Native Americans, and had no real impression of what they looked like. Instead these artists modeled  their pictures after Africans who they often were more familiar with. If those pictures are compared with pictures made by painters who actually visited, or lived in the Americas, or at least saw real native Americans in Europe, one can clearly se the differences. Jus a couple of examples: A fantasy image of the Aztec ruler Moctezuma from a European book from 1671, 151 years after his death, compared with an image made by members of his own people just a couple of decades after his death. African inspired picture made by Johann Ihle 1...

Vikings in America left tangible traces

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About thousand years ago Norsemen from Iceland and Greenland visited, and built a settlement, at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland in Canada. Still today remnants of this settlement can be seen, with houses and even a smithy. Medieval Icelandic sagas do also tell about these settlers and visitors. At the same time Afrocentric extremists claim that Africans (or "black" people) have visited and settled parts of the Americas for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But still there are no traces whatsoever of such alleged settlers or visitors. No houses, no artifcts or other archaeological evidence, no iron (Africans have known about iron smelting and ironworking for maybe 3000 years, but no traces of any African iron working facilities or objects made of iron have ever been found on any archaeological site from precolumbian times in the Americas), no genetic evidence, no artistic evidence, no linguistic evidence.  L'Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site https://www.ne...

The elusive "black" American natives

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Afrocentrics often claim that black / African people have been seen in the Americas for centuries and have been depicted in art or mentioned by early European explorers. But most of these claims do not hold up for a closer scrutiny. Many of them are pure misunderstanding or even wishful thinking. There has even been cases of manipulation of texts or pictures (at least on internet).  It is interesting also that always when isolated, uncontacted Native American tribes are "discovered" in South America they are always Native Americans, never African or "black" (except for body paint). 

Dark, but not African

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 Often Afrocentric debaters use historical texts where it is mentioned that some Native Americans were black, or dark, as some kind of "proof" that they were Africans (or of African descent), or alternatively Melanesian or Australoid.  One example is an often quoted sentence from a travelogue written by the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524, when he saw some natives on the Eastern coast of North America: "They are dark in color, not unlike the Ethiopians". Mostly they forget to put such a quote into any context, for example concerning ethnographic details. They also omit to mention when the same author talks about other natives among the coast as "they are a bronze color, some tending more toward whiteness, others to a tawny color".  Many ethnographic details Verrazano mentions do correspond well with actual paintings which the English painter John White made of natives along the same coast some 60 years later. He depicted the peoples as brow...

Native American children´s right to their own history

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For centuries the cultures of Native Americans have been under attack. From the first European colonizers 500 years ago until now, native peoples got their land stolen, their livelihood destroyed, their freedom taken away and their cultures and religions being suppressed. Even as late as up to 1978 Native Americans in USA were not free to fully practise their traditional religious and spiritual ceremonies. Now their history is also under attack. During the latest decades certain groups among African Americans have started to claim Native American history, claiming that black/African people where those who created, or inspired the great Native civilisations in places like Mesoamerica or the Andes, or in Southeastern USA. Some of these wabocentric and Afrocentric groups even claim to have been in the Americas before the ancestors of the Native Americans. These claims have become a nuisance and have added to the burden of the oppression that Native Americans during so long time been subje...

Advice to African Americans who want to search for their roots

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Advice to African Americans searching for your roots. Do not buy all the pseudo science forwarded by Abocentrics and Afrocentrics where they claim a Black or African presence in precolumbian Americas, and that you all descend from those ancient American cultures. Some even claim that Black peoples where the first inhabitants of the Americas and that Native Americans are later immigrants or invaders.  Abocentrics mostly claim that black peoples were the first in Americas and that todays African Americans mostly descends from those early peoples. Some Afrocentric claim that ancient Africans came to the Americas and created or inspired the civilisations there. They recognize that there might have been Native Americans there already, but seem to suggest that those where so primitive that they could not have created the more advanced civilisations on their own, which is a claim that is as supremacistic as some claims Eurocentrics have forwarded both about African and Native American civ...

The search for roots in Fantasyland

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Some African Americans are desperately searching for their roots around the whole world (but first and foremost in America) with the exception of the places where they actually have their true roots, ie in West Africa and Central Africa. In their search for an identity they have created their own mythology which can be seen in fairytales like the tale of Queen Califia (from the beginning a character in an old Spanish novel) who allegedly shall have been the queen of an ancient black empire of happiness, with it´s centrum in California, but also encompassing other parts of USA, the Pacific islands and even Australia.  In their desperate effort to find their own identity they also trying to convince the rest of America that they are the original inhabitants of the American continents, totally disregarding the real indigenous population (Native Americans) and the real history of the Americas. America seems to be a country with a lot of rotless people, but these Abocentric (people who ...

Misleading video

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This video is in many ways insidious and misleading. It is skilfully made, and has a media-savvy and good-looking program presenter who presents the message in an easy-to-understand and attractive way. The film also uses images of African peoples in a misleading way, insinuating that they depict aboriginal Americans. The real Native Americans are not mentioned at all, but everything that happened to them is presented as if it happened to the African American peoples alleged aboriginal ancestors,  so called "Black Indians". Must be difficult for uninitiated people, and especially children, to guard themselves against this kind of fake history writing.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPRNT5M3YNM

Recently discovered, isolated tribes in the Amazon are always Native American, not African (or European)

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Some Afrocentric extremists claim that African Americans are the true aboriginal population of the Americas. Still African Americans have no  cultural traits that suggest such thing, no DNA that connects them to ancient American populations, and  no inherited knowledge of indigenous American languages.  Native Americans on the other hand show cultural, genetic and linguistic links to ancient American populations. Also at those occasions where isolated tribes are found in for example the Amazon, they are always Native Americans, never African/black peoples (and they are not Europeans or Chinese/Asians either).  The ideas of precolumbian African visitors or black aboriginals in the Americas lack any credible evidence and seem to be pure mythology.   Isolated group of natives in the Amazon

Ancient Olmecs and Great Zimbabwe

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Once Great Zimbabwe was thought to have been built not by a local African culture but by foreigners like ancient Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and even Portuguese. But archaeological research has shown it was built by local African peoples. The old racist beliefs have been debunked. But as a sort of ideological ghost some Afrocentrists perpetuate similar myths about the ancient Olmecs in Mexico, claiming that their culture was created by, or influenced by black Africans. These claims are not taken seriously among archaeologists who actually work with and research ancient Mesoamerican cultures, but they have got followers among black (North) Americans. So today some black people do the same to native Americans as Europeans once did against Africans, trying to deny them their cultural heritage. Which is rather sad.  This can also lead to a divide between Native Americans and African Americans.                          ...