Sunday, May 27, 2007

A Different Kind of Courage - The New York Review of Books

Charles Taylor: A Different Kind of Courage:
Jonathan Lear takes as the main subject of his study the Crow tribe of the western US, who were more or less pressured to give up their hunting way of life and enter a reservation near the end of the nineteenth century. The issue is not genocide.


Then what would it be, pray tell? Steal their lands and resources, and extinguish their culture (not to mention their population).

Plenty Coups, describing the transition many years after in the late 1920s, near the end of his life: "When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened."


Add this to the list of statements of persons who have witnessed the genocide of their people in their own lifetimes.

Sometimes it seems to me that there is nothing more moving in the world than the testimony of the annihilated American Indian tribes.

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