Africa Speaks Reasoning Forum

excerpt: WHAT IS DEFINED AS HISTORY?

In the last half century the boundaries of "acceptable" history have been expanded by a multidisciplinary approach, including sources previously dismissed: orature (oral tradition), linguistics, anthropology, social history, art, music and other cultural sources. More recently, the social locations of historians have come under consideration as a factor shaping their perspectives, along with a sense that there is no absolutely "objective" view of history. Past claims of objectivity have biases clearly visible today, notably in siding with European settlers and slavers against non-christian cultures, and the almost total eclipse of female acts and experience from historical accounts.

A reader who might react negatively to a blatant expression of racism often misses perceiving one cloaked in scholarly language, in assumptions, judgements and misinformation most people have not been educated to catch. It does not occur to many people to question a pronounced overemphasis on Europe, the smallest continent (actually, a subcontinent of Asia.) If a chapter or two on African and Asian history is inserted in a textbook, publishers go ahead and call it a world history. Typically, media depictions of history have not caught up with information now available in specialized academic sources, and continue to present the old stereotypes and distortions as fact.

http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/articles.html

What I also find interesting is the word Discover, and the Europeans ability to rename everything they came across. It is as if the locals never knew what the geographical features were called until a European could come and tell them the real name, and who was the ignorant I ask?

Give thanks Ras for the post.

The western world's historical pattern has been one of total conceit and (FALSE) sense of superioty.  It seems that unless they "discover" it, or DEFINE it, it doesn't exist in their world. That is the extent of a wicked and over inflated EGO and being totally disconnected to the ONENESS of Creation.

ROOTS

"Yet hear me, people, we have now to deal with another race - small and feeble when our fathers first met them but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and refuse. That nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path.

"We cannot dwell side by side. Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that away from us. My brothers, shall we submit or shall we say to them: 'First kill me before you take possession of my Fatherland . . . "

- Tatanka Yotanka or Sitting Bull - Hunkpapa Teton-Sioux

"Nay, you are miserable enough already, and indeed I can't see how you can be more such. What sort of men must the EUROPEANS be? What Species of Creatures do they retain to? The Europeans, who must be forc'd to do Good, and have no other Prompter for the avoiding of Evil that the fear of Punishment. If I ask'd thee, what a Man is, thou wouldst answer me, He's a FRENCHMAN, and yet I'll prove that your man is rather a BEAVER. For MAn is not entitled to that character upon the force of his walking upright upon two legs, or of Reading and Writing, and showing a Thousand other Instances of his Industry . . . "

- KONDIARONK - Huron Chief