Aboriginal Rights

» bossel - "Some home truths about Native Americans"

"he worst thing people can do is treat aboriginal cultures like delicate little special entities"
Sorry, but I don't even understand the concept of "aboriginal" cultures. Aboriginal is probably used in the meaning of indigenous, but then pretty much every culture is aboriginal. Anyway, you could say that I tend to treat every culture with equal disdain. Some (like the Chinese or Meso-American pre-Columbian cultures) are more interesting, others are less.

""historically established" whose history? that's western history."
Western? Whose west? The Earth is a globe. ;-)

I wasn't referring to politicised history, but to history as a science. OK, you could say that this science is of European (if that is what you mean by "western") origin, but that falls short of the truth.

Science as such should be (although scientists often aren't) culturally indepedent. Therefore, there is no balance in science, if scientists were to review their activities for sensitivities of some parts of society (or mankind, if you like) it wouldn't be science anymore.

"history is some empirical reality with only one version"
If you understand history as such, you are slightly mistaken. History as a science has many sides to it & although there is only one truth in what really happened, historians are usually very well aware that this truth is hardly ever to reach. Mostly, all you can achieve is a model of former reality. How close this model is to the truth depends on the validity (quality & quantity) of sources.

You should not mistake what you read in newspapers or learn at school for history as a science.

Well, since as you said, you want to avoid such "western constructs" like "academia", I suppose, continuing this discussion would be pretty useless. For, I tend to rely heavily on science in my argumentation.

John Two-Hawks is according to his own bio an "internationally acclaimed recording artist", but not much of a historian as it seems.

Sorry to have jumped in here, but obviously we approach history from totally different directions & any further discussion of history would be futile.

-- posted by bossel