One big change in recent decades for a lot of Maya has been the weakening of the ejido system for shared land use. In principle they're collectives that support subsistence farming, important for a lot of Maya on the Yucatan peninsula.
In practice apparently a license for banking shenanigans that don't help subsistence farmers there. The weakened protections (beginning in the nineties) mean the land can be sold, usually by poor newly-minted landholders to large businesses.
There's a Maya telenovela, Baktun, partially funded by the state, and Maya language education is getting more support than it did 10 years ago. The model for a multi-lingual society that includes indigenous languages is probably Peru, where Quechua is widely spoken and is maybe less seen as exclusively the language of poor rural people.
Here's the website for the government branch responsible for indigenous languages:
https://www.inali.gob.mx/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Back
"last"??? there is a picture of zapatistas at the top of the story! "one of" is doing herculean labors there ... go, little "one of," go go go! coat that indigenous resistance in sepia, consign it to the faaaar distant past! you can do it!!!
There's a recent Supreme Court of Canada decision on this -- apparently our Anglo friends to the north didn't do the paperwork correctly as they went about dispossessing Indigenous peoples, and now there's going to be a reckoning of sorts.
What's going on with that SC decision about Tulsa? Has anything happened?
5 I don't know, but I would guess that maybe local prosecutors are trying to get the US Attorneys office interesting in taking over some cases they were working on. And the AUSAs aren't exactly lining up to deal with them.
McGirt himself was retried and convicted again.
There's an effort to work all sorts of details out: https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/ag-tribes-reach-agreement-on-jurisdictional-issues/article_eb55c534-dcc1-5c10-a6c3-f3c44bad2cba.html
And they still need federal legislation: https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/cherokee-ag-says-small-minority-of-criminal-cases-dismissed-by-mcgirt-ruling-could-go-unretried/article_5a0954de-9622-11eb-b641-7762e11200bd.html
Just be sure to let me know when insurance fraud is illegal there again.
|| And what did the US Supreme Court do today? Resolved a dispute about which court is charged with deciding what costs to award after an appeal: trial court or appellate. Answer: the appeals court decides who's going to get costs, and the district court actually orders the particular amount, without discretion. Justice Alito for a unanimous court. He dropped a footnote suggesting that maybe the losing party's attorney made a $2 million dollar mistake: they're not deciding an argument not made by the appellant. Maybe the argument would have been futile, but the short text in the footnote looks like it might have had legs. |>
If we apologize to Mexico for stealing California, will they apologize to us for not being able to hold Texas?
The model for a multi-lingual society that includes indigenous languages is probably Peru, where Quechua is widely spoken and is maybe less seen as exclusively the language of poor rural people.
The classic example is Paraguay, where literally everyone speaks Guarani even though very few people identify as having indigenous heritage, but precisely because of that weird dissociation between language and culture/ancestry it's probably not a model that can be easily emulated elsewhere.
Maybe it's just a really nice language?
The Guarani situation is so unusual. I wasn't able to sort out in half-an-hour (not today, I forget why I was looking at it) what resulted in its widespread usage. The pattern of the invaders language but local genetics is so much more common (see like the entire history of Anatolia).
I don't know exactly what the deal is, but it has something to do with Paraguay's very weird colonial history. There was a Spanish civil authority in Asuncion, but most of the area was dominated by a network of Jesuit missions inhabited by Guarani. The area was disputed between the Spanish and the Portuguese so there was frequent warfare with the Guarani caught in the crossfire; however, despite this and for reasons that are not entirely clear, the Guarani are one of very few indigenous groups in the Americas whose population generally increased over the course of the colonial period, which is well documented in the very thorough Jesuit records. In the late eighteenth century Spain and Portugal reached an agreement that divided up the Guarani country between them, but when they went to enforce it and draw the boundary lines the Jesuits and Guarani fought back against a combined force from both countries. (This was around the same time that the Jesuits got kicked out of both countries and their colonies, but I'm not sure of the exact chronology or whether there was any direct connection between that and this incident.) I'm still not sure how this situation developed into a society that is predominantly Guarani-speaking but non-indigenous-identifying, but it must have happened in the nineteenth century somehow.
I saw "The Mission", but maybe that was set elsewhere.
Yeah, I saw something about that, but Wikipedia also says (maximally unhelpfully): "The persistence of Guarani is, contrary to popular belief, not exclusively, or even primarily, due to the influence of the Jesuits in Paraguay.[citation needed]"
TIL. I had no idea there was a South American country where the primary language was indigenous.
I didn't either, but I didn't want to be the first to admit it.
The origins of the linguistic profile of Paraguay can be traced to the very limited European immigration associated with the Spanish Conquest because of the absence of any significant known mineral wealth. Unlike elsewhere in the Americas, the major indigenous language, Guaraní, rapidly became the language of the mestizo population that evolved from the miscegenation of conquistadores and indigenous women. In eastern Paraguay, Guaraní was strongly promoted from 1610 to 1767 in the Jesuit missions, known as reducciones, where the first dictionary and printed works in the language appeared. A Jesuit missionary, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, produced a standardized form of Guaraní from a multiplicity of dialects. His Arte bocabulario de la lengua guaraní (1640) is a classic text on the language.
The isolationist policies of Dr. José Gaspar de Francia, founding father of Paraguayan independence in 1811 and the country's first president (1814-1840), reduced the spread of Spanish at a critical juncture in the nation's early history. Strict control over foreign trade and the requirement of his personal approval for foreign nationals to enter or leave the country discouraged the arrival of Spanish-speaking traders. His prohibition on marriages among Spanish-born foreigners also reduced the spread of the Spanish language.
That's why there are so few native languages in Pennsylvania. All the coal.
It's a widespread pattern throughout the Americas: Native languages and cultures survived best in places that didn't have anything white people wanted. The Maya area is another example, to bring things back to the OP.
How come everybody in Ohio speaks rudimentary English then?
15: Paraguay's so sui generis. In the War of the Triple Alliance in the 1860s, they took on Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina simultaneously. They were more populous relative to their neighbors then, but still, poor and landlocked. Yet they had a much larger army than the rest of the combatants combined. And they lost. Hard. Possibly half their population died (this is controversial), one of the worst defeats for a modern nation. It seems that this has some effect in lessening Paraguay's Spanish character, but even by the war it was substantially bicultural.
23 (And, somehow, riffing on 24): In the US, Native languages fared worst in, broadly, the interior East (Or perhaps another interpretation would be: not where the settlers first got established, but one or two cultures over from them). Any thoughts why? In most cases settlers didn't even document them in time, so I assume somehow it's related to the early pandemics, but I don't know enough epidemiology to suggest a theory. (Another possibility would be displacement by the nations displaced by the settlers, but that doesn't feel very supportable.)
The missing link tying Paraguay to Ohio.
As to the related question of why most people in Paraguay don't identify as indigenous, it's somewhat unclear to me how big a role is played by the truly astonishing death rate among men from the Paraguayan War ("The normal estimate is that of a Paraguayan population of somewhere between 450,000 and 900,000, only 220,000 survived the war, of whom only 28,000 were adult males.") and subsequent immigration of men from Europe and the rest of South America. Genetics studies show mostly Native American maternal genes and mostly European paternal genes, but presumably that's the pattern in most of the Americas so it's not clear to me whether there's a big change in identification caused by the war.
29: That's a good point, but we know (some of) the tribes the Haudenosaunee conquered or took the land of. (Although I guess that map isn't even willing to commit to whether they were Algonquian, Iroquoian, or something else, so I might be reading too much into that.) That isn't the case for most of that territory.
26.last: I got very confused about exactly the question of secondary displacement, because the standard land acknowledgement at my university mentions mostly groups that either seem to have lived well north of here or are displaced from much further east. I ended up at the same place as you, probably the pre-European groups were destroyed by pandemics, but it seemed to me likely that secondary displacement played a role, but it's awful hard to know because there's just not much evidence.
Ah, yes, 29 is what I was missing. Pandemic --> Collapse of Mississippian civilization --> Remaining groups are unable to defend themselves from invasion from the East during the Beaver Wars. There's still the question of why the pandemic didn't cause as dramatic collapse among the Iroquois as it did among the Mississippi, but that could just be about population density?
In the US, Native languages fared worst in, broadly, the interior East (Or perhaps another interpretation would be: not where the settlers first got established, but one or two cultures over from them). Any thoughts why? In most cases settlers didn't even document them in time, so I assume somehow it's related to the early pandemics, but I don't know enough epidemiology to suggest a theory.
It's a complicated and controversial question, and I wouldn't say there's an easy answer. Disease and secondary displacement were definitely factors, but the primary ethnohistoric documentation isn't very good for any of that area so the extent to which those and other factors contributed is really hard to gauge. I haven't gotten that far north in my in-depth reading on epidemics and demographic collapse (I'm proceeding geographically in rough chronological order of European contact and currently on Mesoamerica), so I don't know much about the specific research history or any insights that can be reliably wrung from it. I can check back in as I read up and know more.
31: Thanks. I become really unfairly cynical when people don't do the research to figure out who the pre-contact land owners were*. I understand that it can be unsatisfying if history doesn't give us a clear answer, but we should either be honest about that or not engage in the land acknowledgement exercise. (And honestly, if said exercise isn't just the first step towards something like Real Rent, it's extremely cynical.)
32: That's an interesting idea. I don't think the people on the western slopes as the Appalachians were nearly as dense as the Mississippians, and the poorly documented area is a lot bigger than the Beaver Wars zone. Also worth considering that the Shawnee were nomadic over a large part of it, but that might have only been post-pandemic.
33: Thank you, I'd appreciate that. This has intrigued/frustrated me for a while (probably brought it up here before) but it's so beyond my ken. Anyway, sounds like an interesting project.
* Or worse, assume that it's Five Nations land when it's far away from upstate NY. Given what Moby said.
Pandemic --> Collapse of Mississippian civilization --> Remaining groups are unable to defend themselves from invasion from the East during the Beaver Wars.
This is definitely a possibility, and it has been and continues to be popular as an explanation in some circles, but archaeological evidence seems to show that most of the decline of Mississippian centers in the Ohio Valley took place well before even indirect contact that could have introduced disease. There's also the question of why the Iroquois themselves weren't hit harder, as you note. The first part of the theory works better further south to explain the transition from the Mississippian chiefdoms encountered by De Soto to the tribal confederacies that the English found in the seventeenth century, though.
I have about an eighth of a theory, readily falsifiable, I'm sure, by any of you folks who actually know things.
Roger Williams wrote a book called A Key into the Language of America, having learned a lot when he needed to live in a Native community after his exile. Settlers in Plymouth and Natick might have felt the need to learn local languages for protection/safety. It wouldn't shock me if both French and Dutch colonists included a number of people who learned the local language, since their purpose for being there was commerce with Natives maybe more than conquest. Anglos who went to Ohio wanted land to farm, and wanted the Native folks just gone.
Looking at maps of Mississippian culture I realized I'd also missed a really dumb point: the region I live in probably just always had a low population (for the east). I mean it still does, and since they weren't doing limestone cutting in the 1500s it's a little unclear why you'd want to be here. So of course when you look at where known groups lived the main centers were not so close to here.
Those big quarry holes you can see when you land in Chicago really kind of alarm me.
36 is how the game Colonization was programmed.
36: There's a chronology issue, Anglos didn't get to Ohio until the pre-contact Natives were long gone. I also doubt there was a secret genocide they didn't document since there were a lot of Lenape in Ohio at the time and there's good documentation of bad settler/Lenape contacts. (And IIRC there were evangelists in Ohio at the time learning Lenape to proselytize, too.)
37: Feel like I'm one or two questions about pre-contact distribution before I can triangulate where you are entirely from that.
38: Flying out of Newark I saw this (note: should open in 3D for full effect) absurdly huge quarry in Paterson. In town. Right below a high school. I'm sure nothing bad ever happens.
Has anyone read a good history of the War of the Triple Alliance? My impression is the historiography is mostly nationalist.
re: 40.last
The high school I went to was a bit like that, except the bit behind it was a man made swamp/reservoir that was built in the 18th century for the blast furnaces at Carron ironworks (where the Carronade canon comes from).
Also, more or less, where this used to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur%27s_O%27on
3: perhaps what they're really commemorating is the transition from violent resistance against Mexico, to violent competition for power within it, you know, like normal decent people do.
42: Sir Michael Bruce sounds like a prick.
When these findings of the likely site of the stones of Arthur's O'on were announced by Burke's Peerage
Weird publication venue. Like Cat Fancy publishing Trump admin leaks.
They should run the pee tape when that comes out.
I believe Sir Michael Bruce was descended from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bruce
Who was a famous 18th century explorer (brought back the first copies of the Book of Enoch from Ethiopia, etc).
And as an impressive follow-up, Germany apologizes to Namibia.
Can't be descended, actually. Related in some way, anyway.
I'll hazard that following how much of that German money actually makes it to the Nama and Herero will be a grimly hilarious tale .
So, our statewide elected Superintendent of Public Instruction emails the staff a picture of herself and her kids 'paying tribute to our fallen heroes' and the national cemetery at Little Bighorn.
On the plus side, a district judge has enjoined the new statute making it unlawful for the regents to prescribe students having guns in university classrooms, buildings, etc. This is, sfaic, a straight-up constitutional question that the legislature will lose and the university system win. But it'll rile up the rubes, which was half the point (the other half was owning the libs).
|| NMM to DeJoy ruining the USPS. |>
