Early tribes were, in fact, well organized

By Letter to the Editor on February 21, 2018.

Thank you to this newspaper for publishing letters to the editor. It is always interesting and educational to read different people’s points of view. I find it much more interesting to read those than the reprinted editorials. I also enjoy the articles written by the local writers on your staff.

I read Mr. Mueller’s recent opinion piece. I agreed with everything he wrote and had nothing to comment on. This is not normally the case.

However, I do have some comments to make on a couple of previous letters to the editor. The first was published in the Feb. 9 edition written by Mr. Cote of Irvine, regarding residential schools, an issue that I have followed in the news and in politics for many years. I found the paragraph concerning life before 500 years ago in the Americas to be less than accurate, in my opinion, and worth challenging. The idea that the tribes located in North and South America were somehow more advanced than those of Asia, Africa and Europe is worth debating. I have been a follower of the studies of history, archeology and anthropology. I have been lucky enough to have seen the great Mayan, Aztec, Roman and Greek ruins as well as much of Asia. Although it is open to argument most learned persons place the peopling of the Americas at some 20,000 or so years ago, Australia is around 50,000 and the other three continents, much earlier. You cannot make any strong arguments that the tribes of those continents were not well organized or didn’t have sophisticated social systems, even earlier and before individuals reached the Americas.

Some people try to present the Americas as a place of idyllic contentment and ignore the inter- tribal wars, slave trading, torture and human sacrifice. Read the books called ‘Apache Wars’ or the ‘Tattoo Lady’; books written about indigenous captivity and warfare. Visit the Acoma Pueblo on the Acoma lands in New Mexico. It has been inhabited continuously for 1500 years on top of a mesa. They resided on the top to escape the raiding parties of the Apaches and other tribes who preyed upon the Acoma farmer communities long before the Spanish arrived.

Another good book is called, ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’, the three factors that gave European settlers an advantage over the indigenous people. Germs from Eurasia and Africa were the cause of a major population collapse here. To conclude I think Mr. Cote has no basis for his argument.

Roger Beebe

Medicine Hat

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