The scalp from Sand Creek

 A rare eye-witness depiction of the Sand Creek attack by the Cheyenne warrior-artist Howling Wolf. Photo courtesy Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio. Gift of Mrs. Jacob D. Cox, 1904.

Even after museums return human remains pillaged from a massacre in 1864, can repatriation heal the wounds of history?

by Chip Colwell is editor-in-chief of SAPIENS and curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. His latest book is Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture (2017). He lives in Denver, Colorado.

On the morning of 29 November 1864, nearly 700 United States soldiers charged towards a village along a gentle bend at Sand Creek, in Colorado Territory. Settled in peace for the winter, there were dozens of Cheyenne and Arapaho families there. Within hours, the soldiers killed more than 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho – mostly women, children and the elderly. Over the next day, the soldiers pillaged the dead for trophies – including ears, fingers, genitalia and scalps. These body parts were taken to Denver, where soldiers paraded them in the streets and displayed them in homes. Most of the pilfered human remains were lost to time. A handful would survive as artefacts in museums and private collections.

The Sand Creek Massacre took place more than 150 years ago. Yet, it has not yet ended. This crime of American expansionism has continued to reverberate through the generations. The original war over land and dominance has transformed into a battle over memory and emancipation. The demand for the return of ancestral human remains from museums is perhaps the most visible – and tangible – struggle for Native America’s cultural survival. Repatriation asks us to consider whether we can ever fully come to terms with the past.

In 2008, descendants of the Cheyenne and Arapaho victims gathered at the newly established Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site in southeastern Colorado. At a specially designated area not far from Sand Creek, religious leaders buried the remains of six victims – one scalp from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, one scalp from the Colorado Historical Society (now History Colorado), a cranial fragment from the University of Nebraska, and three sets of remains from a private collection.

‘A Cheyenne elder told us our nations couldn’t heal and couldn’t regain our strength and we as individuals couldn’t heal,’ Suzan Shown Harjo, a leader of the repatriation movement of Cheyenne and Muskogee descent, once said, ‘until we recovered our dead relatives from these places.’

But did the return of the victims’ remains quiet the phantoms of the past? Can repatriation heal the wounds of history?

epatriation’ is derived from the Latin repatriatum, meaning something that has gone home again. In the past several decades, repatriation has become a global controversy as communities and nations struggle to reclaim their stolen heritage from museums and private collections. In the US, hundreds of Native American tribes have negotiated with some 1,000 museums and agencies over the future of more than 200,000 Native American skeletons, and 1 million grave goods and sacred objects…

more…

https://aeon.co/essays/does-returning-artefacts-help-to-heal-the-scars-of-conquest

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What Both the Left and Right Get Wrong About Race

CONTRARY TO APPEARANCE: The genetic distance between some groups in Africa, such as the Fulani of West Africa (above) and the Hazda of Tanzania, is greater than supposedly racially divergent groups such as East Asians and Europeans.Raquel Maria Carbonell Pagola / Contributor / Getty Images

Setting the scientific record straight on race, IQ, and success.

BY DALTON CONLEY & JASON FLETCHER

Race does not stand up scientifically, period. To begin with, if race categories were meant primarily to capture differences in genetics, they are doing an abysmal job. The genetic distance between some groups within Africa is as great as the genetic distance between many “racially divergent” groups in the rest of the world. The genetic distance between East Asians and Europeans is shorter than the divergence between Hazda in north-central Tanzania to the Fulani shepherds of West Africa (who live in present-day Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Guinea). So much for Black, White, Asian, and Other.

Armed with this knowledge, many investigators in the biological sciences have replaced the term “race” with the term “continental ancestry.” This in part reflects a rejection of “race” as a biological classification. Every so-called race has the same protein-coding genes, and there is no clear genetic dividing line that subdivides the human species. Another reason for using the term “continental ancestry” in lieu of “race” is improved precision for locating historical and geographic origins when we look at the genome. Thus, continental ancestry allows for more genetically accurate descriptors. For example, President Barack Obama was not just the first socially “black” president. He was also the first (as far as we know) who has European and African ancestry.

Genetic differences are a potential—but highly unlikely—explanation for national, racial, or ethnic differences in behavior and success.

In sum, racial categories now in use are based on a convoluted and often pernicious history, including much purposefully created misinformation.

It is a good time, then, to dispel some myths about genetic variation that have been promulgated by both the left and the right alike. On the left, many try to discredit the notion that genetic variation underlies group differences by pointing out that there is more genetic variation within these groups than between them. Another favorite approach is to cite the fact that all humans are 99.9 percent genetically identical and that no group of humans has a gene (i.e., a coded-for protein) that another group lacks. Both of these arguments are canards. After all, we are also 98-plus percent identical to chimps and 99.7 percent similar to Neanderthals. Oh, what a difference that 2 percent (or 0.3 percent) makes!

Simply stated: Overall genetic variation tells us less than specific differences that matter. Imagine a group of humans that had a mutation in the FOXP2 gene—­often called the language gene—­such that this transcription factor (a gene that helps stimulate the expression of select other genes) was nonfunctional. These humans would lack the ability to communicate through language. In fact, this gene’s significance was first discovered through the study of an English family in which half the members across three generations suffered from severe developmental verbal dyspraxia—­they could not communicate orally. This family could be 99.9999 percent genetically identical to their neighbors, but what a huge difference that 0.00001 percent makes. This criticality of particular genetic differences, as opposed to global similarity, is not unique to humans. Through genetic manipulation of just four genes, scientists in the lab have been able to turn a mustard weed into a woody tree. It sounds like a genetic version of the 1970s game show, Name That Tune: In how few notes (or genes) can one radically alter the phenotype of an organism?

Highlighting the fact that all humans share the same genes ignores the fact that much of evolutionary change and biological difference is less about the development of novel proteins (i.e. genes) than it is about the regulation of those genes’ expression—­that is, the extent, the timing, and the location of when and where they are turned on and off. In fact, when the Human Genome Project first began, the number of human protein-coding genes was anticipated to be on the order of 100,000. After all, we are certainly more complex than Zea mays (corn) with its 32,000 genes, are we not?¹ As it turns out, we have a mere 20,000 genes (or fewer). So most human difference is driven by the turning on and off of those 20,000 genes in specific tissues at particular times. The same ones may be expressed in the brain and in the liver. They may get switched on by an attacking bacterium and silenced by a hot meal. Each one is like a multitasking parent balancing home and office…

more…

http://nautil.us/issue/48/chaos/what-both-the-left-and-right-get-wrong-about-race

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Magazine Headline: ‘You Don’t Have To Be Racist To Be Racist’

BY TOM KNIGHTON

There may be no limit to the all the ways Social Justice Warriors think human beings suck. I’ve long hoped we would eventually reach Peak SJW, a point beyond parody when even SJWs can’t take themselves seriously anymore, but now I’m not sure such a thing is possible.

For example, here’s an article from Affinity Magazine titled “You Don’t Have To Be Racist To Be Racist.”

Yeah, let’s let that stew just a bit:

Whether you experience it or not, the issue of racism is still very prevalent in a diversified country like America. And whether you believe it or not, there are many actions that are considered to be racist even though being racist was not the intent. It is called “Color-blind Racism”, a type of racial discrimination where people of color are unintentionally disregarded when someone is selecting individuals to participate in an activity or service. Not only is this very prevalent in our current society, but it is very harmful as color-blind racism often stems from cultural racism and predisposed stereotypes.

American Sociologist and Professor of Sociology at Duke University, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, has discussed his views on systemic racism in America even despite the lack of people doing or saying things that are not overly racist. Bonilla-Silva has discussed the four different central frames of racial colorblindness in his book Racism Without Racist that was published in 2013, stating that abstract liberalism, naturalism, cultural racism, and minimization of racism are at the core of color-blind racism.

What little support for this nonsense that exists in the article are some research studies into bias and prejudice, in no way supporting writer Evin Zendejas’ thesis in this piece. Much less the headline.

You see, being a racist is rather binary. You either are, or you’re not.

Of course, this article is the Left attempting to keep racism alive so as to prove their own worth to society, and to propagate more “social justice” policies. Racism turned into “micro-aggressions” and “structural racism” when the Left couldn’t find enough examples anymore.

Now, we’ve got the lunacy of “color-blind racism.”

While the whole thing elicits laughter from rational folks, the Left is, of course, seriously trying to figure out how to combat this nonsense right now.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/05/23/magazine-headline-you-dont-have-to-be-racist-to-be-racist/

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Caste lives on, and on

image edited by Web Investigator

Indian society deludes itself that caste discrimination is a thing of the past, yet it suffuses the nation, top to bottom

by Prayaag Akbar is a writer and journalist. He is the former deputy editor of Scroll.in, and his first novel Leila (2017) is out in India. He lives in Mumbai. 

In October 2016, a young man walked into a flour mill in Uttarakhand, a state of northern India where the mist-wrapped mountains of the outer Himalayas begin. He was Dalit (Sanskrit for broken, scattered, downtrodden), a relatively recent collective identity claimed by communities across the nation that are considered untouchable in the caste system. Present in the mill was a Brahmin schoolteacher – Brahmins are the caste elite – who accused the Dalit man of having defiled all the flour produced there that day, merely by his entry: notions of purity and pollution are integral to caste. After the Dalit man objected to the insult, the schoolteacher took out a blade and slit the Dalit’s throat, killing him instantly.

The incident caused uproar in the national press. Dalit groups in Uttarakhand staged a series of protests. The Brahmin schoolteacher was arrested, along with his brother and father, who had threatened the murdered man’s family if they went to the police; booked for murder and criminal intimidation, the men were also charged under the ‘Prevention of Atrocities’ act – a vital part of the Indian Penal Code that prohibits a range of violent and non-violent action against members of the lowest castes and tribes.

After the initial flurry of limited upper-class angst – followed by self-congratulation (at the foresight of the lawmakers for how the state machinery kicked into gear to protect the lower-castes) – the violence was then safely imagined as belonging to a distant, retrograde realm, where things would soon change. Silence followed, then forgetting. There was no discussion of the deep-seated convictions and codes that enabled this gruesome act, or how each Indian life was linked to it: the key to living in a caste society is to distance yourself from its most horrifying manifestations.

The American documentary Meet the Patels (2014) illustrates yet another dimension of caste that Indian society has trained itself to ignore. Made by an Indian-American brother and sister team, Geeta and Ravi Patel, it relates how ‘Ravi’, on approaching 30, decides to leave his Caucasian girlfriend and marry a girl of the Patel caste to fulfil a lifelong demand made by his parents. Endearing and witty, the film shows in granular detail Ravi’s painful quest to find a suitable wife, and thereby silence his parents (who are no ogres, I might add, but a hardworking couple of distinctively Indian humour and charm).

Most striking is that at no point do the Patels realise that they are making a film about the endogamous (same-social or same-ethnic) strictures vital to caste. Ravi is a seemingly assimilated Indian American. In speech, bearing, even ambition (he is a comedian and actor), he transcends the bounds of traditional Indian society; still, a lifetime of conditioning ensures that he feels the pressure of endogamy so deeply that he will overturn his life to search for a Patel mate. He travels to huge conventions where young men and women can meet Patel members of the opposite sex. He allows his parents to set up a string of dates. He visits astrologers: and he does all this out of filial duty, never interrogating why his parents demand this of him. Endogamy is shown as a trait of Indian society, not caste society. Yet the documentary stands as a revelatory exposition of how caste exercises control between generations; how, without a whisper of violence or even punishment – simply, the fear of disappointing your parents – caste ensures its own survival, even in lands and cultures distant from its place of genesis.

It is unsurprising that the Patel siblings are unaware that they are, in effect, making a film about caste. Many Indians watching this movie would experience the same blindness. As caste has been globally castigated as a social evil, upper-caste Indian society has found numerous ways to refer to caste without explicitly mentioning it. In everyday language, media and advertising, proxies include ‘community’ and ‘family background’. Endogamous pressure is condoned as vital to Indian society because it preserves the community (few modern Indians would admit to wanting to preserve the caste group). Another linguistic proxy for lower-caste groups is ‘different’. These proxies carry the full range of meanings that caste categorisations do, and are used in a variety of situations, from school and job interviews to a landlord meeting prospective tenants.

This sleight of hand lets Indian society permit itself the feel-good release of loudly castigating brute incidents of caste violence, even as it perpetuates a self-serving mythology about the nature and limits of caste. As we will see, caste is both varna(hierarchy) and jati (endogamous groups). The failure to break caste stems in part from India’s unwillingness to examine how just how jati feeds into varna…

more…

https://aeon.co/essays/how-india-deludes-itself-that-caste-discrimination-is-dead

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A much-maligned Mughal

Prince Aurangzeb, 1653-1655, gouache with gold on paper. Image © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

The great king Aurangzeb is among the most hated men in Indian history. A historian claims he’s been unjustly demonised

Audrey Truschke is assistant professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University, Newark. Her first book, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court, was published by Columbia University Press in 2016. Her latest book is Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King ( Stanford University Press 2017). 

Aurangzeb Alamgir, the sixth ruler of the Mughal Empire, is the most hated king in Indian history. He ruled for nearly 50 years, from 1658 until 1707, the last great imperial power in India before British colonialism. According to many, he destroyed India politically, socially and culturally.

Aurangzeb’s list of alleged crimes is long and grave. He is charged with fighting protracted, pointless wars in central and southern India and thereby fatally weakening the Mughal state. He is envisioned as a cruel despot who brutally murdered enemies, including his own brothers. He is regarded as a cultural dolt, uninterested in the extraordinary arts of south Asia, even hostile to them.

Above all, many modern Indians see Aurangzeb as a brutal oppressor of Hindus. He was a pious Muslim, and it is widely believed that he spent his long reign, nearly half a century, rampaging against Hindus and Hinduism. The popular story goes that Aurangzeb tried to convert all Hindus to Islam, and when that project failed he supposedly slaughtered millions of Hindus. People claim that Aurangzeb systematically destroyed Hindu cultural institutions, levelling thousands of Hindu temples. Some have even said that the reason why north India lacks the tall, elaborate temples that one finds in south India is because Aurangzeb smashed them all to pieces.

In 2015, a successful petition to rename Aurangzeb Road in Delhi summarised this despised ruler as ‘one of the most tyrannical tormentor perpetrator of Intolerant Inhuman Barbaric crimes in India [sic]’. However, these views of Aurangzeb owe more to myth than reality. Worse, the modern attacks on Aurangzeb are themselves rooted in dark motives.

Over the centuries, many groups have found Aurangzeb a convenient villain, for reasons more to do with their agendas than with Aurangzeb’s reign. The British, for example, disseminated great calumnies against him, as well as against other premodern Indian Muslim kings, because a barbaric Aurangzeb made British colonial rule look civilised by comparison. The British fostered their portrayal of Aurangzeb as a cartoonish bigot with misleading scholarly work, including selective and sometimes blatantly wrong translations of Mughal histories designed to highlight Aurangzeb’s alleged loathing for Hindus.

British colonialism ended in India 70 years ago, but their misrepresentations of the Mughals and other Indo-Muslim rulers have had a long and poisonous afterlife. In India, many still cite biased colonial-era British translations of Mughal texts as evidence of supposed Muslim wrongdoings. At least some of this reliance on questionable scholarship and translations is relatively innocent, but not all of it. Several notable groups in independent India have found maligning Aurangzeb to be useful for other, more sinister purposes, especially attempts to discredit modern Indian Muslims.

Today, Hindu nationalist groups lead the charge in creating a popular image of ‘Aurangzeb the bigot’. For Hindu nationalists, Muslims are a threat to India’s alleged identity as a fundamentally Hindu nation. Through most of the 20th century, Hindu nationalism was not a mainstream view. Especially after a Hindu nationalist assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, India’s beloved independence leader, in 1948, many Indians recoiled from the idea that India was or should be a Hindu nation. Instead, they embraced a view of India as a secular state, and a pluralistic one with equal room for followers of all religions. But, in the past decade, Hindu nationalism has surged in popularity, and in 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu Right-wing political party, swept to power. More recently, in March of 2017, the BJP dominated legislative elections in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state.

Despite its recent popularity, Hindu nationalism is an ideology with little, if any, grounding in Indian history. For most of its past, India was neither Hindu nor a nation, in the sense that Hindu nationalists typically use these terms. Mughal rule, a period in which a Muslim minority ruled over a Hindu majority in South Asia, embarrasses Hindu nationalists. If, as Hindu nationalists aver, India has long been a Hindu nation, why was it for a long time ruled by Muslims? Even more troubling to the claims of Hindu nationalism, why was Mughal India characterised by fruitful Hindu-Muslim relations in many areas, including state administration, literature, painting, music, and even religion and spirituality? Instead of admitting the complexity of the past, Hindu nationalists insist that religious oppression must have been the signature trait of Mughal rule. Aurangzeb’s reign in particular has become a focal point for this distortion…

more…

https://aeon.co/essays/the-great-aurangzeb-is-everybodys-least-favourite-mughal

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Over 70,000 White Citizens Of South Africa Have Been MURDERED BY BLACKS

 

image edited by Web Investigator

Over 70,000 White Citizens Of South Africa Have
Been MURDERED BY BLACKS – It Hasn’t Stopped

By Patricia Doyle
3-29-17

Hello Jeff – Let’s go back a couple years to 2015 South Africa.  Virtually no one knows because of the communist socialist US MSM that well over 70,000 whites of European heritage were butchered by sub-human blacks. Most were tortured before they passed on and were relieved of their horrific suffering.  This is the new millennium and then sub-aunimal black creatures are still living as they always have…breeding, sleeping, eating, raping and murdering.  That’s it and that’s the sad, factual truth.

  This number of 70,000 does not reflect the multitudes of whites who were killed and buried in unmarked mass graves. There are countless White South Africans who are buried alive never to be found again.

There have been scores of White South Africans who were raped by savage blacks who have HIV Aids and TB which gave their victims death sentences.  Many others were the victims of beatings and robbery, and had their homes and property stolen or burned to the ground.

Where is the outrage? Where is Trump with an EO immediately opening the doors to America for REAL refugees whose lives are REALLY at risk and who share our same cultural history?  He is nowhere…he can’t even say a few words about it.  Not even a simple tweet.  “Race war on whites in SA must STOP”.  Nothing.

 The world showed outrage at Apartheid in South Africa but not one word of outrage about the torture and genocide of people who are white.  They are massacred because of the color of their skin but no cries of racism come from Academia, Political institutions like the US Congress etc.  No one talks about the world’s most outrageous Apartheid government in the zionist state of Israel.  What does the US do?  We recently gave them nearly $35 BILLION of the next tens years.  America supports racism and Apartheid in Israel because we are an israeli vassal state.

So, where are the cries to save South African whites who built an entire civilization in that formerly virtually DESERTED portion of Africa hundreds of years ago.  (Look it up)  When the blacks came in numbers because life was good there, they were welcomed and integrated into society.  Yes, there was Apartheid but only because it was necessary…African blacks there hadn’t built even a 2-story building on their own, let alone possessed the skills to build skyscrapers and then to compete on the sophisticated world economic stage.  It was necessary to keep the nation prosperous and functional and that is why there was Apartheid.

Since the western communists and the communist blacks (the Mandelas et al) in South Africa overthrew Apartheid, the country has been in a steady dive of death, horror, and economic ruin administered by countless black incompetent idiots who are intent on destroying a wonderful first world nation and sending it to a dystopian rape and genocidal hell.

I must be getting deaf in my old age as I cannot hear the cries for asylum for these innocent white South African peoples.  I do hear the cries of the white children, the elderly, and the parents of people tortured and murdered for the color of their skin.

How is this not condemned by ANY American media and not called racism or hate crime?  This is yet another great shame on our once compassionate, wonderful nation.

So, now you know why White South Africa had to protect their families and lives with Apartheid.  Apartheid was a tool that kept White South African families from being massacred by the blacks.  It was indeed necessary.  Now, the whites ARE being massacred.  No apartheid…and now as of 2015 70,000 whites massacred.

Remember, that is the number of deaths we can count. I would venture to project with all the mass graves and the rapes of innocent whites by infected blacks the real death toll will be well over 250,000 white lives by 2017.  There are over 40 million negroes in South Africa and only 4 million whites.

This cannot and must not continue.  The US is able to bring in 50,000 muslim ‘refugees’ this year who agenda it is to kill us.  Why not bring in TRUE refugees and TRUE Asylum seekers, bring in the White South Africans before they are all extinct.

Time is running out.
White Lives Matter

Patty – See more at: http://www.rense.com/general96/70000whites.htm#sthash.nDamvAsx.dpuf

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Political Correctness Has Gone Mad

As a black man and former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, you might think I would be surprised to face a charge of racism — but I was not

The day I was accused of being racist, I knew political correctness had gone mad, writes TREVOR PHILLIPS

By Trevor Phillips For The Daily Mail

A few weeks ago, I observed that Barack Obama’s iconic status as the first African-American U.S. President should not obscure his mixed political record.

For that, I was accused by one Radio 4 commentator of peddling a ‘racist narrative’.

As a black man and former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, you might think I would be surprised to face a charge of racism — but I was not.

For at a time when this country is crying out for frank discussion on issues such as race and sexuality, debate is being closed down because those who find offence in every-thing cry ‘racist’ or ‘sexist’.

The result — as I argue tonight in a TV programme — is that our political and cultural elite seem unable to speak plainly about things that concern many citizens.

While our rulers seem to have all the time in the world to debate who should use which lavatory (in deference to the transgender lobby), they dismiss anxieties about overcrowded schools or doctors’ surgeries as merely a bigoted dislike of migrants.

How has this come about?

Forty years ago, ‘identity’ politics was about trying to end discrimination. It led to revolutionary legislation on gender, disability and race.

But recently the recognition of diversity has grown into a cancerous cultural tyranny that blocks open debate.

In higher education, it has spread like wildfire.

Efforts to keep real racists off university platforms have been perverted so bans are imposed on, for example, speakers with unfashionable views on transsexuals.

Harmless academics are falling prey, too. Sensible people are appalled at the way Nobel Laureate Sir Tim Hunt was hounded out of his post at University College London for a weak joke about women crying in laboratories.

Hardly a day goes by on campuses without a demand for a statue to be removed or for ‘safe spaces’ where sensitive students can be sheltered from robust views in a cultural debate or sexual violence in a classic literary text.

But how is a young person to understand how precious are the freedoms we enjoy today without learning what the world was like before them?

Should I not tell my children about the agony and struggle for liberation of their own ancestors, who were once slaves on sugar plantations?

Unfortunately, this thin-skinned refusal to engage with the challenging realities of life is not restricted to academia.

There is no hiding place from the language police, even if you belong to a ‘vulnerable’ group.

Ten years ago, I suggested Notting Hill Carnival had become an international event and outgrown its roots in the West Indian community — hardly a deeply provocative observation.

In response, the then Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, opined I had become so Right-wing I really belonged in the British National Party.

Sometimes the pressures to conform are subtle and insidious but no less powerful.In 2009, several Labour MPs, including some ministers, mounted a private campaign to get Prime Minister Gordon Brown to dismiss me from the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC).

My principal sin, I think, had been to support the appointment of a leading black evangelical Christian.

I thought the thousands of black and Asian Christians who are reviving our churches should be represented…

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-4251306/Political-correctness-gone-mad-writes-TREVOR-PHILLIPS.html#ixzz4ZnPOltOk
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