Seize the Memes of Production
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the “ML” influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
Rules:
Be a decent person.
No racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, zionism/nazism, and so on.
Other Great Communities:
What a load of revisionist / "noble savage myth" horseshit. See e.g. the punishments used by members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy for theft.
Every society has had theft. Every society has had thieves. Every society has had to deal with this.
What I will note is that native Americans didn't invent the prison-industrial complex.
I came here to talk about the "Noble savage BS" myth. I wrote a college paper on it. Society always had a small fraction of psychopaths who didn't follow the laws of man. Society also knew to lock them up, or get rid of them.
Fun fact: the noble savage was originally counted by hateful racists, before it was repurposed by more "well meaning" racists.
There is no theft if you don't have a concept of ownership or value wealth.
See e.g. the punishments used by members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy for theft.
Well it doesn't look too bad:
Theft [in Haudenosaunee/Iroquois society] was comparatively rare, for land was the property of the community, surplus food was commonly shared with needier neighbors, and the long bark dwelling belonged to the maternal family, and the personal property like the tools and weapons of the men, the household goods and utensils of the women, were so easily replaced that they possessed little value. Practically the only objects open to theft were the strings of wampum beads that served both as ornaments and currency; but such was the value the community of spirit of the Iroquoians, so little did they esteem individual wealth, that a multitude of beads brought neither honor nor profit except so far as it gave the owner an opportunity to display his liberality by lavish contributions to the public coffers.
– The Indians of Canada, D. Jenness (1934), pg. 135-139, excerpted in The Iroquois: A Study in Cultural Evolution, by F. G. Speck (1945) pg. 32-33
[In Tsalagi/Cherokee society] Rather than coercion and punishment, social sanctions like ridicule, withdrawal, and ostracism, were used to bring wrongdoers and non-conformists back into harmony with the community.*
The Haudenosaunee/Iroquois also practiced slavery, including ritual torture and mutilation.
Native people are people -- they possess the same capacity for good and evil as anyone else. The only difference is they lacked the industrial capacity for cruelty other cultures had.
Definitely sounds better than what it is now
I hate to criticize your source on this one, but "The Indians of Canada, D. Jenness (1934)" is not going to be a reliable authority on native american culture. At that point in history we still had to deal with shit like Just One Drop policies, and although Jenness was a great deal less shitty than many others at the time, the cultures he had access to weren't representative of the cultures as they stood pre-genocides.
One can do a deep dive in how American Native Peoples dealt with societal issues. Yes, there absolutely were all the same problems we have today, from theft to lazy people to “fame” issues. Look up “Shame the Meat” for example. There were also punishments, some severe.
So the idea that tribal societies had it all figured out is absurd. They were people too, and had problems like anyone else.
It is the "noble savage myth" if it is a quote from a leader in the Lakota nation? https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Fire_Lame_Deer
"Can people incorrectly lionize the past of their own cultures, a past they never even experienced and don't even have the excuse of nostalgia for?"
[quick glance at any number of reactionaries, revanchists, and nationalists]
Yes. Next question.
It's not credited, there's just a picture of an indigenous person that people aren't expected to recognize. The image is meant to imply that this is how all indigenous people lived by not specifying, using the words of one singular person from one singular nation to do so, which may not even be true to such an extent. The image is taking the quote and using it to perpetuate the myth.
No but it is from John fire lame deer
The unilateral and undisputed expert on every single indigenous nation's philosophy, culture, and law, John Fire Lame Deer?
No. Sorry that I answered your question
I understand your feelings but that information was already provided.
Yes.
"Before electricity, we had no dishwashers, therefore we had no dirty dishes"
Dirty Dishes existed before dishwashers. Dirty dishes didn’t exist before Dishes.
If your society doesn’t have a concept of ownership. Then theft (atleast between members) doesn’t exist in the same way.
If your society doesn’t have a concept of law. Then “criminality” doesn’t exist either.
tbf, that post is noble savage bs.
that being said, the number one driver for crime is poverty, police don't fight poverty, they just protect the wealthy from the poor they are exploting.
I do really think that in small communities, there would be no problem abolishing the police. But the problem I see which I don't think I've seen a good argument for, is how it can work at scale. We generally live in much larger and denser communities than the native peoples lived, so it seems like the strategies they used to handle bad-actors won't work in the same way for us.
Don't tell him where horses came from.
Is it when a mummy horse and daddy horse love each other very much?
Where is this quote originally from? There's no attribution
Lame Deer, J. F., & Erdoes, R. (1972). Lame Deer, seeker of visions: The life of a Sioux medicine man. Simon & Schuster.
With citations and photos? You da mvp. Thanks, amigo.
Wait a minute, you trying to tell me that anarchy was better??
A collective society for the benefit of all instaed of a few
Sure they had slaves and the typical patriarchal society where women were treated like property, but at least you never had to worry about leaving your tipi unlocked, those were the good old days.
Umm some indigenous peoples were matriarch societies, and many were matrilineal land ownership.
@Deceptichum So ein Bullshit!
Native Americans waren Menschen wie alle andern auch, haben gemordet, vergewaltigt und sich für irgendwelche Status-Symbole oder Stammeszugehörigkeiten gegenseitig abgemetzelt. Der Kapitalismus hat das nicht besser gemacht aber die waren genauso wenig heilige wie jede andere Menschen Gruppe irgendwo anders auf der Welt!
Die haben wie die meisten anderen Menschen auch in autoritären, patriarchalischen Strukturen der Gewalt gelebt!
Translated to English:
@Deceptichum What a load of rubbish! Native Americans were people like everyone else, they murdered, raped and slaughtered each other for status symbols or tribal affiliations. Capitalism didn't make things any better, but they were just as unholy as any other group of people anywhere else in the world!
Like most other people, they lived in authoritarian, patriarchal structures of violence!
Don’t shit on John Fire Lame Deer just because he challenges your understanding of how society can function.
No one is claiming they were perfect and lived in complete harmony with each other 100% of the time in a utopia. That’s a strawman you’re creating to resist listening to what is being said.
"We had no criminals, we had no thieves, we only wanted things to give them away" is a very curious thing to assert as non-utopian; equally curious to assert it as how Sioux society was, considering they were famously warlike against fellow indigenous cultures. I suppose they wanted to give away violence?
White colonialism made the lives of indigenous people worse. But it didn't do it because it 'invented crime', or 'invented greed'.
It’s easy to have a utopia when you live in a village where everybody knows each other. You don’t have to look to indigenous peoples for that. There are plenty of villages around the world where communities still thrive.
How do you achieve that in cities of a million people or countries of a hundred million? No one has figured that out yet because all the mechanisms we’re born with for building trusting, reciprocal relationships do not scale much more than a couple hundred people at most.
Sounds way better.
I wish I could live this way
So did they