[Paddlewise] stupid natives

On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 7:01 PM, MATT MARINER BROZE

<marinerkayaks_at_msn.com>wrote:

 

> 

> My point is that the native paddlers may do it the way they do because 

> that is what someone in a position of influence thought (and their 

> ideas remained dominant long after they were dead) and the few who...

 

What we have here is the stupid natives syndrome. 

 

In the book "Longitude" that I mentioned the other day, the European sailors
that first found their way to the Pacific islands considered the "NATIVES"
to be uneducated primitives. The hotshot Europeans at the time could not
tell how far around the globe they were. At a time when the Europeans had no
answer, the Pacific navigators new latitude by the north star and by the
position of other stars at their zenith. They knew the stars that marked
true east and west and they knew which islands were located along which
latitudes. For a thousand or more years before Europeans invented clocks,
the natives were the masters of navigation in the pacific and the Europeans
were the primitives-by far too primitive to listen to anything the native
mariners had to say. 

 

Remarkable that anyone would have the attitude that arctic hunters were
using long paddles because they were too stupid to use short ones. I agree
that in these matters, there seems to be a serious ego barrier involved.

 

Chuck Sutherland
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