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Necesary Reforms

icebear said:
When you consider that more than half of those who voted in 2012 voted to re-elect Barrack Obama, that means that on average in this country, knowing more than your neighbors isn't asking for terribly much.
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When you consider that more than half of those who voted in 2004 voted to re-elect George Bush, that means that on average in this country, knowing more than your neighbors isn't asking for terribly much.
 
Polaris said:
Got a synopsis of that book? Sorry, but an Amazon page isn't evidence, it's spam.
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Vine Deloria taught at the University of Colorado, was president of the Nation Council of American Indians two or three terms, and remains the best known of all American Indian authors. Several of his books, particularly his "Custer DFied for your Sins", are standard university texts on Indian Affairs.

His "Red Earth, White Lies" is generally meant as a refutation to the "Overkill" and/or "Blitzkrieg Overkill" theories which blame Indian ancestors for the North American megafauna dieouts which occurred some 10K - 12K years ago. One chapter, however, deals with dinosaurs in Amerind oral traditions and iconography and petroglyphs, particularly the stegosaur which Indians called "Mishi-pishu" (water panther). Oral traditions describe the water panther as having a saw-blade back, a cat-like face, reddish fur, and a "great spiked tail" which he used as a weapon, i.e. as a stegosaur.

Those kinds of glyphs were common when Europeans first got to North America and, in fact, Lewis and Clark noted that their Indian guides were in mortal terror at the sight of them since the original meaning was "
Caution, one of these things LIVES here".

The glyph at Ogawa Rock is the only one left which is fairly representational, others remain which are more like stick figures but even those show the dorsal spikes. The Agawa Rock glyph also has horns which stegosaurs lacked, but those were simply added at a much later date by an artist who figured an animal that size needed them. Indians were in the habit of touching those glyphs up ever few years.

Deloria described the idea of dinosaurs dying out 65M years ago as a kind of a white man's fairy tale.
 
ANTPogo said:
You can read Skeptical Inquirer's review of it here.
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Both the great achievements of Native Americans and the sorry record of United States dealings with them should be widely and honestly taught. I would like to think that eventually enough justice will be done that modern Native Americans will no longer feel themselves a victimized minority, and an articulate leader like Deloria will not feel the need to put his best foot forward into a cow pie of politically motivated, false prehistory.
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When you read between the lines, it's not that bad! :D
 
Polaris said:
and an articulate leader like Deloria will not feel the need to put his best foot forward into a cow pie of politically motivated, false prehistory.:D
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The clown writing that crap isn't fit to shine Deloria's shoes.
 
icebear said:
Vine Deloria taught at the University of Colorado, was president of the Nation Council of American Indians two or three terms, and remains the best known of all American Indian authors. Several of his books, particularly his "Custer DFied for your Sins", are standard university texts on Indian Affairs.

His "Red Earth, White Lies" is generally meant as a refutation to the "Overkill" and/or "Blitzkrieg Overkill" theories which blame Indian ancestors for the North American megafauna dieouts which occurred some 10K - 12K years ago. One chapter, however, deals with dinosaurs in Amerind oral traditions and iconography and petroglyphs, particularly the stegosaur which Indians called "Mishi-pishu" (water panther). Oral traditions describe the water panther as having a saw-blade back, a cat-like face, reddish fur, and a "great spiked tail" which he used as a weapon, i.e. as a stegosaur.

Those kinds of glyphs were common when Europeans first got to North America and, in fact, Lewis and Clark noted that their Indian guides were in mortal terror at the sight of them since the original meaning was "
Caution, one of these things LIVES here".

The glyph at Ogawa Rock is the only one left which is fairly representational, others remain which are more like stick figures but even those show the dorsal spikes. The Agawa Rock glyph also has horns which stegosaurs lacked, but those were simply added at a much later date by an artist who figured an animal that size needed them. Indians were in the habit of touching those glyphs up ever few years.

Deloria described the idea of dinosaurs dying out 65M years ago as a kind of a white man's fairy tale.
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Pity all of that is pure woo BS.

Let's start with the fact that stegosaurs were already millions of years extinct by the time of the K-T Event, and that even when they were alive they weren't water-dwellers. The prehistoric men who painted the cave paintings and petroglyphs knew what their subjects looked like - at a safe distance. There are plenty of examples of these representations that look a little skewed at first glance (Siberian tigers, for instance, look to be sagging towards the middle in paintings but at a distance, this is exactly what they look like in real life). Also see the cave paintings at Lascaux. There is nothing like the distortion in the Ogawa glyph. Whatever it was that the artist wanted to portray, it wasn't a stegosaurus.

I'll need evidence for the part I highlighted. While it seems that Mississippian peoples would update waypoint stones for practical navigation reasons, that wasn't known to be universal among native tribes (but then, what was?). And that's a far cry from modifying existing glyphs to include something that the editor felt an animal "needed". These were prehistoric peoples, with no written language - so how do you divine the reasons here? Perhaps it wasn't meant to be an accurate representation? Maybe the glyphs were from another tribe and this was felt to be some subtle form of magical protection. Maybe it was an update to show that some tribal territory had shifted (that would be a good reason for the L&C indians to fear certain areas - bad things were known to happen to captives among certain tribes). The point is, I don't know and neither do you. And neither does Deloria (but it won't stop him from pretending he does to sell copy).

Deloria isn't refuting anything. He's handwaving away valid theories based on incredulity, and proposing ◊◊◊◊◊◊* nonsense in their place, coated in a thick frosting of White Guilt for good measure.

The most convincing theory at the moment remains that early human settlers to the New World (as well as Australia and other regions in which humans had not evolved alongside indigenous megafauna) simply killed that megafauna off, or led to conditions that did the job just as well. Humans are the common factor in the extinctions of Pleistocene megafauna, just as the K-T Event is the common factor in the end of the Cretaceous.
 
icebear said:
The clown writing that crap isn't fit to shine Deloria's shoes.
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Perhaps Deloria should go without shoes for a time. Just long enough for his inner cave man to bonk him over the head with his club and say, "We never lived with dinosaurs, moron!"
 
What Vine once told me was that he'd been working on a sort of a compendium of Amerind oral traditions and had basically spoken with pretty nearly every story-teller and keeper of such traditions from Alaska down to Tierra del Fuego. He said that if there was anything which got to him at first it was the extent to which seemingly 80 or 90% of those traditions retaind ideas about ancestors dealing with dinosaurs.

He said that, knowing Indians as he did, he'd assume that if such stories were fictitious, he'd expect most of them to be about the Indian hero killing the monster with his spear and saving the girl. But the stories usually were about building log stockades to prevent the clumsy creatures from trampling the villages. He said that factor made it highly unlikely that all such stories were fictitious.
 
icebear said:
What Vine once told me was that he'd been working on a sort of a compendium of Amerind oral traditions and had basically spoken with pretty nearly every story-teller and keeper of such traditions from Alaska down to Tierra del Fuego. He said that if there was anything which got to him at first it was the extent to which seemingly 80 or 90% of those traditions retaind ideas about ancestors dealing with dinosaurs.

He said that, knowing Indians as he did, he'd assume that if such stories were fictitious, he'd expect most of them to be about the Indian hero killing the monster with his spear and saving the girl. But the stories usually were about building log stockades to prevent the clumsy creatures from trampling the villages. He said that factor made it highly unlikely that all such stories were fictitious.
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This probably isn't the forum for you (unless you really like being laughed at).
 
icebear said:
What Vine once told me was that he'd been working on a sort of a compendium of Amerind oral traditions and had basically spoken with pretty nearly every story-teller and keeper of such traditions from Alaska down to Tierra del Fuego. He said that if there was anything which got to him at first it was the extent to which seemingly 80 or 90% of those traditions retaind ideas about ancestors dealing with dinosaurs.

He said that, knowing Indians as he did, he'd assume that if such stories were fictitious, he'd expect most of them to be about the Indian hero killing the monster with his spear and saving the girl. But the stories usually were about building log stockades to prevent the clumsy creatures from trampling the villages. He said that factor made it highly unlikely that all such stories were fictitious.
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Many cultures have stories of fantastic creatures (dragons and unicorns, anybody?) that aren't real and never were. Deloria might as well be looking for the source of Jack's beanstalk beans.

Humans and dinosaurs never shared the same space while both were alive.
 
icebear said:
What Vine once told me was that he'd been working on a sort of a compendium of Amerind oral traditions and had basically spoken with pretty nearly every story-teller and keeper of such traditions from Alaska down to Tierra del Fuego. He said that if there was anything which got to him at first it was the extent to which seemingly 80 or 90% of those traditions retaind ideas about ancestors dealing with dinosaurs.

He said that, knowing Indians as he did, he'd assume that if such stories were fictitious, he'd expect most of them to be about the Indian hero killing the monster with his spear and saving the girl. But the stories usually were about building log stockades to prevent the clumsy creatures from trampling the villages. He said that factor made it highly unlikely that all such stories were fictitious.
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What is even more amazing is that the natives actually referred to the creatures as "dinosaurs", a name derived from Greek and not invented until 1842.
 
icebear said:
What Vine once told me was that he'd been working on a sort of a compendium of Amerind oral traditions and had basically spoken with pretty nearly every story-teller and keeper of such traditions from Alaska down to Tierra del Fuego. He said that if there was anything which got to him at first it was the extent to which seemingly 80 or 90% of those traditions retaind ideas about ancestors dealing with dinosaurs.

He said that, knowing Indians as he did, he'd assume that if such stories were fictitious, he'd expect most of them to be about the Indian hero killing the monster with his spear and saving the girl. But the stories usually were about building log stockades to prevent the clumsy creatures from trampling the villages. He said that factor made it highly unlikely that all such stories were fictitious.
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So you're going to just take his word for it?

The same could be said for ghost stories. Or bigfoot stories for that matter. I have yet to hear a ghost story in which the ghost was killed by the story teller in order to save a girl. By Vine's logic, this makes it highly unlikely that ghost stories are fictitious.
 
icebear said:
But the stories usually were about building log stockades to prevent the clumsy creatures from trampling the villages. He said that factor made it highly unlikely that all such stories were fictitious.
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And what evidence does he have? Is there anthropological evidence of Native Americans finding or using dinosaur hide and bones?


...wow, this is just beyond silly. I struggled to just write a response to this.
 
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