[news] The Myth of the Passive Indian

[Mostly Water - mostlywater.org = news.resist.ca]

Was America before Columbus just a "continent of patsies"?

by Amy H Sturgis

In 1950 the anthropologist Allan R Holmberg published his classic text Nomads  
of the Longbow (1950), a study of the Bolivian natives known as the Siriono.  
Holmberg had lived with the Indians and studied their habits for two years.  
His assessment, which generations of scholars took as gospel and applied to  
other indigenous groups, was that the Siriono were an unimpressive people who  
had existed for thousands of years without innovation or progress. He claimed  
the Siriono had no real history prior to European contact, when Western  
influences at last put them on a path to genuine social evolution.

URL: http://mostlywater.org/node/4819