Are Natives/First Nations inferior?

Question

I'm not trying to be racist, really. But this has always bugged me. I live in Canada, a country with a significant Native population. They've inhabited the land for a very long time, way before the Europeans came here. But it seems like they haven't made any achievements by themselves. They have no significant architecture, no written language and very little achievements in technology and science. That's when you compare it to the european, south american and asian civilizations and the amount of pre-modern achievements they've made.

And nowadays, natives have the lowest rate of graduation, highest rate of poverty and drug-abuse. I know that we've forced them to assimilate to a western culture but plently of other civilizations have been through much worse. I know that judging intellect by race is controversial. But in this case, would race be telling us something?

Answer 1

The assimilation of western culture created the corruption of native populations everywhere.

Answer 2

European civilization and asian both took advantage of the old civilization in Mesopotamia. A civilization develops from the sum of its experience and from the experience and knowledge of other civilizations that they had the chance to be in touch with directly or indirectly.

You tend to believe that the world is static so those First Nations people will always be the same in the next 2 or 3 centuries just because their present situation is critical...

They are struggling to find a right balance between preserving their culture (the experience they acquired from their ancestors which is not bad) and getting adapted to the "modern" society without being totally assimilated. If they succeed in finding that right balance as Japanese, Chinese and Korean did, and if European do not exterminate them (in a way or another...), they actually might become a threat for North American stability... Have you ever thought this way?

Answer 3

Yep, the white man has brought polution, cleared all the old growth forests (except one) raped the landscape with strip mining and makes the water unusable by dumping toxic waste into it.  Yep.  Were sure showed those indians who was smarter.

Answer 4

"They"?

When a society starts going down a certain road, then the members of that society have the fruits of that available to them.

When a society starts developing technologically (BTW, Europeans had the benefit of being able to piggy-back off of the far East, Middle East, and northern Africa), then members have the existing technology available to them to piggy-back off of.

Edison, to take one example, wouldn't have been able to invent anything he invented if he'd not been in the society he was born in to.

There is no such thing as race. There is the human race, but no way to divide us into sub-divisions. Biologically, we're the same.

There IS NO SUCH THING AS a superior or inferior race.

If you came from a group that had been nearly annihilated, and otherwise abused for hundreds of years, you'd be messed up, too.

BTW, Native Americans HAVE, in fact, contributed to every field.

We hear of only a tiny proportion of scientists, inventors, social scientists, and scholars. That the ten people most people have heard of aren't Native Americans has nothing to do with anything.

Answer 5

That sounds pretty racist to me. I am Native, hold both an associates degree and B.S. degree in medical technology, and working on a masters degree. There are many of us that do break out of our culture and make something of ourselves. I am from the Ojibwa tribe, which in fact was one of the few Native nations to have a written language and a complex society. I do agree with you however that many Natives are still bound to a  feeling of victimization and self worthlessness. Alcoholism, drug use, and violence are rampant on reservations along with extreme poverty. Many reservations are no better than 3rd world countries because the people refuse to change. Please don't stereotype as not all Natives fall into neat little boxes.

Answer 6

Take a people, subject them to a number of imported diseases, hunt them, grab their land, stick them on reservations and make them wards of the government. Forbid them their language and ban their culture.

After this you expect them to be Rhodes Scholars?

Cut to the chase. Your standards are those of a European culture. There, occupation and settlement have been going on for 40-50 thousand years. The dates for the occupation of the Americas are 16 thousand years ago. DNA testing suggests that just a few people made the migration.From this viewpoint, Native Americans have done quite well.

The civilizations of the Inca, Maya, Aztec, Anasazi Hopewell, and Adena were all founded on agriculture. Aren't most Canadian crops of European origin? Aren't most farm animals used for plowing from Europe?

In short Native Americans are being judge by a foreign culture after centuries of having their own culture being stomped on.

Answer 7

that's what happens when you have a very small population and land that can provide in abundance.  I think they chose to concentrate on self improvement..being at one with nature, love, all of that stuff.

those are acheivments aren't they?

Answer 8

No but the methods and means you are judging "acheivement" by might be.  Some of your facts are incorrect. Some tribes did have written language long before contact with Europeans, but not all.  Architecturally there are plenty of brilliant examples from mound building, to home styles, to monuments.  Scientifically their methods of observation of the natural environment and what works/what doesn't were/are advanced and far better than arriving Europeans that forced the environment to adapt to the technology they brought with them instead of the other way around.  

As far as the social problems they are indicators of poverty and poverty is largely tied to discrimination, not racial ability.

The North American genocide was one of the worst (as in most successful) and longest standing in human history.