The past week has been occupied with the story of the boys from Covington Catholic high school in Kentucky. These boys came to DC in a bus to attend the 2019 March for Life, an event in which hundreds to thousands demonstrate against abortion in the streets of Washington DC. This event is usually ignored by the American press. This year, two small activist groups also planned to demonstrate. One was called The Black Hebrew Israelites, A small fringe group.
groups of Black Americans who believe that they are descendants of the ancient Israelites. Black Hebrews adhere in varying degrees to the religious beliefs and practices of both Christianity and Judaism. With the exception of a small number of individuals who have formally converted to Judaism, they are not recognized as Jews by the greater Jewish community. Many choose to identify themselves as Hebrew Israelites or Black Hebrews rather than Jews in order to indicate their claimed historic connections.
The group that collected near the Lincoln Memorial, was a particularly obnoxious group that shouted slurs at the teenagers waiting for the bus to take them home.
“They called us ‘racists,’ ‘bigots,’ ‘white crackers,’ ‘faggots’ and ‘incest kids.’ They also taunted an African-American student from my school by telling him that we would ‘harvest his organs.’ I have no idea what that insult means, but it was startling to hear,” Sandmann wrote.
The remark about harvesting organs may reference Jordan Peele’s horror-satire “Get Out,” a 2017 movie in which the black boyfriend of a white girl discovers her family is harvesting the organs of blacks.
The other “activist” group present was The “Indigenous Peoples March” made up of American Indian protestors.
We stand together to bring awareness to the injustices affecting Indigenous men, women and children as Indigenous peoples and lands from North, Central and South America, Canada, Pacific Islands, Oceania, Asia, Africa as well as the Caribbean diaspora are a target of genocide.
“We are lagging far behind comparable countries in overcoming the disadvantages Indigenous people face.” – Malcolm Fraser
This is certainly true of those who live on reservations and maintain the primitive practices of pre-Columbian aboriginals.
That certainly was not true of Ely S Parker, who was the Colonel on US Grant’s staff who wrote out the surrender documents at Appomattox Courthouse which ended the Civil War.
Parker was born in 1828 as the sixth of seven children to Elizabeth and William Parker, of prominent Seneca families, at Indian Falls, New York (then part of the Tonawanda Reservation).[1] He was named Ha-sa-no-an-da and later baptized Ely Samuel Parker. His father was a miller and a Baptist minister.[2] The Seneca are one of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy). Ely had a classical education at a missionary school, was fully bilingual speaking Seneca as well as English, and went on to college. He spent his life bridging his identities as Seneca and a resident of the United States.
The confrontation between Indian activist Nathan Phillips and Nick Sandmann was staged with a cameraperson behind Phillips recording Phillips’ version of the incident. The result was a national uproar that has not settled down yet.
Fortunately for the boys, the Black Israelites had been recording their own video for an hour. It showed that Phillips approached the boys and precipitated the confrontation, which was peaceful.
The blogosphere has been correcting the record while the MSM spreads lies. That may change as the boy’s family has hired a libel attorney. Apologies are starting to roll in. I expect there will be quite a few although some media sources are doubling down.
Part of this story is the media’s war on Catholics. It might just be related to the next Supreme Court nomination.
An excellent discussion this incident has appeared today and makes some additional good points.
Mark Steyn has anatomized with his customary insight.
There is, Steyn noted, a “strange need of the right to virtue-signal to their detractors—as in the stampede of congressional Republicans to distance themselves from their colleague Steve King over an infelicitous interview with The New York Times.” Just so. And here is the kicker: “Democrats never do this; Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam declare that the Jews are pushing defective marijuana on black men in order to turn them gay—which would appear to be a prima facie slur on at least four Democrat constituencies: blacks, gays, Jews and potheads. Yet Clinton, Obama et al speak not a word against Calypso Louie.”
What is it with the cringing right ?
More on Catholic hate from Howie Carr.
Here are a few recent public statements by Democrats and their media pals about Roman Catholics. Consider the reaction if they’d made the same comments about, say, Muslims.
“A bunch of racist (expletive) Catholic kids … Indian Country has dealt with enough (expletive) from racist Catholics.”
“I’m a New York Times reporter writing about #exposechristianschools.”
What if you ranted of Muslims, “I just want these people to die. Simple as that. Every single one of them. And their parents.”
Okay, all of the above vitriol was written by pampered pajama boys from, respectively, BuzzFeed, the Times and something called Vulture.
Great post, but you should have mentioned the Catholic Church that went after the boys as well. I guess they’re taking “love your enemies” to a whole new level.
I think the Covington Diocese was using that as a cover up for more homo pedo priest activities that are probably going to be coming out soon. They probably figured that if they come out on the lefties’ side, at least they will eave them alone.
In other news, young hockey players, in Fort McMurray AB, were also subjected to a social media lynch mob for appropriating First Nations dancing and drumming, despite being Metis themselves.
The Covington incident was theater for the nuts and chumps. It was a variant of the “crybully hoax”, in which the instigator feigns being the victim. It’s a scam, a con, with a very long history. It is analogous to the “Swoop and Squat” accident in the world of insurance fraud. It works for the same reason that any ambush works and because it is so hard to disprove. The Covington kids were just lucky that they 1) didn’t take the bait, and 2) that the fates intervened with the recovery of the second video which was meant to be deleted. The real story, here, was the effort to target and setup children; how corrupt is that?
Just to be clear, I’m not saying that the Native American guy premediated setting up these particular Catholic school boys, rather they were targets of opportunity, the confrontation was a set up and the victimhood was feigned. I don’t know how or why kids could be expected to handle that kind of intrusion/pressure/aggression. There was no way to win, they were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t. Phillips set up a good trap. I’m not even sure I could have eluded him, except that I would have kept my distance from iffy people, due to a Chicago childhood.
I can’t believe that targeting children and Catholics won’t have a price.
I’m not saying that the Native American guy premediated setting up these particular Catholic school boys,
A Kentucky radio guy said he was told by a chaperone that the kids did not buy the MAGAS hats. They were given to them and I would love to know by who.
Maybe it was a setup once the activists knew those boys would be waiting there.
Remember the video, taken by a couple of doctors waiting in line for seats at the Kavanaugh hearings, that showed a guy paying the demonstrators who got expelled from the hearing room.
It’s a miracle that these kids held their composure as well as they did. If they had said anything at all offensive to either group of provocateurs, that tiny segment of tape would have been released and absolutely ruined their lives–why else do people think the “Black Hebrew Israelites” were taping them the whole time?
I doubt the Phillips gang ever intended the story to blow up the way it did. I suspect they thought it would circulate purely in fringe circles the way all their nonsense does. Publicity means doom for them, because they’re nothing but a bunch of frauds. Then they thought they had hit the jackpot for 24 hours, until the fact that another group of conmen were playing the same game blew up in their faces. It really was something out of a Tom Wolfe novel.
Always remember–never believe stories based on anonymous sources, never believe short video clips, never believe today’s media, period.
The follow-on to the incident has got me thinking. Bearing in mind that liberalism is a religion*, it has long tolerated, though uncomfortably, Roman Catholicism because A)it has a long history of social activism that is second-cousin to what liberals do, and B) they needed the votes of Irish Democrats in the older cities. (One could add in French-Canadian liberals in the Northeast and a majority, though not unanimity of Hispanic Catholics.) Yet they were never comfortable with them, because of abortion and particular, and the statements about birth control, even though many Catholic women ignored them.
Perhaps the calculation is that the Roman Catholics are now expendable.
*Communism is a Christian heresy, borrowing some language and ideas and repurposing them for its own needs. Liberalism is the accommodating, less-fundamentalist version of that.
A dear friend wrote the well-reasoned, articulate piece linked below. He not only cites good techniques for thinking about what media presents, but some thoughts about how business decisions shaping media wrestling with a changing landscape directly influence what gets presented and how it gets presented.
http://www.batesline.com/archives/2019/01/covington-catholic-and-the-gell-.html
Good god, you think Washington is corrupt? Try City Hall. Some of the worst stuff I saw as a reporter happened there.
Roy, that brings up an experience that I have posted about somewhere,.
Here it is. This is my own experience
…groups of Black Americans who believe that they are descendants of the ancient Israelites.
That’s crazy talk. Everyone knows Jesus looked like this.
Current Church “leadership” won’t stand up for itself, or for its members. I guarantee some lefty church bureaucrat in Kentucky saw the MAGA hats and in immediate disgust threw that press release together throwing the poor kids under the bus.
Last week Andy Cuomo said he was standing the pope to oppose the death penalty, the day after jubilantly signing the most permissive abortion bill possible, and no Church leaders called him out.
Catholics are on their own, and the left is out for blood.
Some conspiracy-minded observers were speculating that since Ruth Bader Ginsburg appears to be knocking on heaven’s door, there may have been some incentive for publicly targeting Catholics in order to head off the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett.
I’m skeptical Trump will actually nominate ACB. He loves Ivy League resumes.
The true conspiracy nuts think RGB is essentially dead already and they’ll keep her secretly on a ventilator until the Dems impeach Trump…
I’m skeptical Trump will actually nominate ACB. He loves Ivy League resumes.
Oh, I think he will nominate her but is she willing to go through the awful confirmation hearings?
She has seven children.
You’ve seen newspaper death first hand, Mike. They tend to write their own obituary.
And, wow, has that Mission Viejo area changed over the decades. What a story of how crony capitalism influenced that change.
Reminds me of a few years ago finding online maps of So Cal dating back to before statehood. I scanned them with great interest, curious about who lived in/owned the land where a century later I’d be born, live, and attend school thru undergad. Hispanic ranches. Data gave a lot of credence to Mexican conflict of interest, stuff I had never ever heard in school. Two results: made me grateful for San Jacinto and aftermath of Treaty of Hidalgo; led to lots of pondering about the subsequent dividing of So Cal.
My wife is a 5th generation Californian. Her grandparents owned a 4,000 acre ranch in north San Diego County near San Marcos.
When her grandfather died, her grandmother sold the ranch in spite of her children begging her not to do so.
Her father had some interesting stories about southern California in the 1920s
Notre Dame surrenders to political correctness.
The murals present us with several narratives not easily reconciled, and the tensions among them are especially perplexing for us because of Notre Dame’s distinctive history and Catholic mission. For the native peoples of this “new” land, however, Columbus’s arrival was nothing short of a catastrophe. Whatever else Columbus’s arrival brought, for these peoples it led to exploitation, expropriation of land, repression of vibrant cultures, enslavement, and new diseases causing epidemics that killed millions.
That “whatever else” was Christianity. One of the murals depicts Columbus standing prominently in front of a large cross preaching to and converting natives.
Is it any wonder that Catholics are facing a backlash when their own institutions volunteer their religion to be slandered and scapegoated?
Whatever else it was, the discovery of the western hemisphere ended the 10,000 year isolation during which the aboriginal peoples did not discover the wheel and had driven horses and camels extinct by hunting them for food and failing to recognize the potential of domestication.
There were no useful domestic animals when the European discovery occurred.
Many of the inhabitants made use of their exposure to modernity and education, like Ely S. Parker, who served as a colonel on Grant’s staff and who was the individual who wrote out the terms of surrender at Appomattox Court house in 1865.
Parker was born in 1828 as the sixth of seven children to Elizabeth and William Parker, of prominent Seneca families, at Indian Falls, New York (then part of the Tonawanda Reservation).[1] He was named Ha-sa-no-an-da and later baptized Ely Samuel Parker. His father was a miller and a Baptist minister.[2] The Seneca are one of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy). Ely had a classical education at a missionary school, was fully bilingual speaking Seneca as well as English, and went on to college. He spent his life bridging his identities as Seneca and a resident of the United States.
The parents strongly supported education for all the children, who included Spencer Houghton Cone, Nicholson Henry, Levi, Caroline (Carrie), Newton, and Solomon.[2] Nicholson Parker also became a prominent Seneca leader as he was a powerful orator. Beginning in the 1840s, the Parker home became a meeting place of non-Indian scholars who were interested in the people, such as Lewis Henry Morgan, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and John Wesley Powell; they were connected to the discussions and studies that formed anthropology as a discipline.
In fairness, I should point out that the Iroquois were highly developed by 1750, many with glass windows in their houses. Dartmouth College was founded in 1759 to educate their children and those of the settlers. Sadly, the Iroquois chose the French side in the War that broke out after this. The Cherokee were also quite developed but suffered from the agitation of a Scottish renegade, John Ross,. who was of mixed blood and encouraged the Cherokee to refuse assimilation (sound familiar?) and resist the white settlers. The result was the “Indian Removal Act of 1828.
The Plains Indians were far more primitive and are thought to have arrived millennia later than those that settled in the east and in South America.
I am very tired of fake Indian activists who play upon the delusions of the political left.
“Sadly, the Iroquois chose the French side in the War that broke out after this.”
Which war are you referring to? The Iroquois were on the British side during the French & Indian War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois#French_and_Indian_Wars
During the French and Indian War (the North American theater of the Seven Years’ War), the League Iroquois sided with the British against the French and their Algonquian allies, who were traditional enemies. The Iroquois hoped that aiding the British would also bring favors after the war. Few Iroquois warriors joined the campaign. By contrast, the Canadian Iroquois supported the French.
Fair point but The French Indians played a much larger role.
This I think is a better source.
My point was that the Iroquois were far better prepared for assimilation but did not do so. The Cherokee were more hostile although they also were well prepared for assimilation.
The Plains Indians were just too primitive in their culture.
Yes, in the American Revolution the Iroquois mostly picked the wrong side. But you said they sided with the French in a war, which must mean the French & Indian War, which is not true except for some very small minority of them, who lived in Canada, which is not the primary Iroquois land. They always tried to stay neutral as long as they could, and only pick a side when it seemed unavoidable, and they could pick the winner.
The only Iroquois who sided with the Americans in the Revolution were the Tuscarora, who are long since vanished, and the Oneidas, most of whom left for Canada or Wisconsin not long after, leaving a tiny number behind who in the last few decades are doing at least somewhat well because one of them went to Harvard Law and then with the help of cronies in state and national government set up a casino, though you have to be beholden to him if you want to get anything from that.
The fact is that the American Indians never had a chance. The main reason was disease, and the secondary reason is that people don’t play nicely with those outside of their close groups. Not anything unique to the time or the people.
You are probably right about the Iroquois. The French Indians came down into the colonies as at Fort William Henry.
The battle of Fort Henry was further south but there were still Iroquois there on the British side.
The battle of Fort William Henry in the 1743 War involved many Indian nations but Canadian Iroquois were involved as well as Senecas.
The diseases were a consequence of the isolation of North and South America for 10,000 years. Greg Cochran in his book, “The 10,000 Year Explosion” goes into these consequences in detail. Not only diseases of the old world killed them off but they had reduced immune systems and the incidence of rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases is low. The Indian susceptibility to alcohol may be related to the absence of wheat to be fermented into alcohol. There are problems of Type II Diabetes in Indians because of no exposer to wheat.
Syphilis evened the score a bit. For 100 years after Columbus it was horrific in Europe.
If you go back far enough, this is not unique. The Indo-Europeans did the same thing. The hunter gatherers show mitochondrial DNA but the Y chromosome appeared with the Yamnaya people.
DNA is starting to sort this out
Furthermore, 90% of the Bronze Age period mtDNA haplogroups were of west Eurasian origin, and the study determined that at least 60% of the individuals overall (out of the 26 Bronze and Iron Age human-remains samples from the study that could be tested) had dark hair and brown or green eyes
Another big reason Indians never had a chance was because they had already been doing a good job of decimating each other, such as in the the Beaver Wars, mostly fought between the Iroquois and the Algonquin, but also encompassing other tribes all over the Great Lakes. The interplay between local alignments and rivalries spilling over into a great war between two different multilateral alliances was somewhat similar to World War I, only worse because entire tribes and villages were wiped out. Men, women, and children indiscriminately killed and enslaved.
You’ve heard of the University of Illinois’ mascot, the Fighting Illini? Well, long before the university was founded, long before European settlers even arrived, the Illinois tribe tried to fight the Iroquois during the latter stages of the Beaver Wars and probably lost 1/4 to 1/2 of their tribal population in the wars and massacres. They were completely driven out of the state that now bears their name by the end of the 17th century.
The “Noble Savage” killed and ate his neighbors.
The Apache constantly terrorized the Spanish in New Mexico, but every so often they would come to the missions en masse and ask to find out more about Christianity, to live in peace there inside the walls for a while, etc. The Spanish soon figured out that meant that the Comanche were out in force, and they made the Apache look like pussycats.
This – the Comanche came down out of the mountains (they were s subset of the Mountain Shoshone) once they adapted to the horse – and drove the Apache; the eastern or Lipan Apache threw in their lot with the Texans, as a matter of searching for protection against a particularly vicious enemy.
The Navajo are from Alberta and there is DNA evidence that they moved south to New Mexico and Arizona in historical times, attacking the Hopi and Zuni who were peaceful agriculturists. The history of the Amerindians is being unraveled by genetics.
There are a couple of new books that are quite interesting.
One ifs Reich’s book, “Who we are and how we got here.
“In this comprehensive and provocative book, David Reich exhumes and examines fundamental questions about our origin and future using powerful evidence from human genetics. What does ‘race’ mean in 2018? How alike and how unlike are we? What does identity mean? Reich’s book is sobering and clear-eyed, and, in equal parts, thrilling and thought provoking. There were times that I had to stand up and clear my thoughts to continue reading this astonishing and important book.”
—Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies
Another is Plomin’s “Blueprint, which is more about psychology.
Blueprint is a landmark. In this brief book, Robert Plomin distills 50 years of behavioral genetics research, much of which is based on studies he and his collaborators around the world conducted using twins separated at birth.
Plomin’s main findings are that virtually every trait that we care about is heritable, that what are often thought of as environmental effects are shaped by our genetic propensities, that parenting and schooling have very little effect on our capacities or personality, and that most of the traits that make us who we are result from many genes interacting with each other rather than, say, single genes for intelligence or schizophrenia or extraversion.
It is basically Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” with the DNA evidence. Reich has pulled a few punches due to blowback about “race.”
Brian: “The fact is that the American Indians never had a chance.”
Whenever a more technologically-advanced civilization meets a less technologically-advanced one, the outcome is more or less inevitable. Romans versus the Egyptians. European Canadians versus their “First Nations”. European Australians versus their “aboriginals”. Europeans versus Africans. Brits versus the peoples of the Indian sub-continent. Brits versus 19th Century Chinese. Americans versus 19th Century Japanese. But as the Chinese and Japanese examples show, once the people of the less developed society adopt the more advanced technology of their invaders, they can hold their own. Another example would be the success of the Comanche versus European settlers after the Comanche adopted the horse brought in by the Europeans.
The only counter-examples I can think of are (a) the “First Nations” Canadians preventing the more technologically-advanced sea-faring Scandinavians from establishing a foothold in North America during the Viking era — probably because of lack of interest on the part of the Scandinavians, and (b) the successful Mongol invasion of more technologically-advanced medieval Europe — which was going swimmingly until the death of Ogedei Khan caused the Mongols to break off the invasion and return to the homeland for the election of his successor.
Science fiction story idea: Indian casino billionaire develops time travel, sends doctors back to 1500 to vaccinate the Indians.
Would it have made any difference if the American Indians (“First Immigrants”) had been inoculated against European diseases (which were also cutting down the Europeans themselves)?
A successful vaccination campaign could have resulted in more Indians to fight back against the European invaders. But the Europeans would still have had an overwhelming technological advantage. Historical example — the Battle of Omdurman in Sudan in 1898. Invading Brits with Maxim guns wiped out a native Sudanese army, despite being at the far end of a long supply trail and outnumbered 5-to-1 or more. Bullets beat spears. Interestingly enough, a young Winston Churchill was there for the slaughter.
Vaccination would probably have been no more effective a use of time travel than sending back a few of today’s feminist activists to tell the invading Europeans that they were racists displaying male privilege. Sending back geologists, metallurgists, machinists, etc would have enabled the Indians to gain a technological edge over the pre-industrial European invaders — but would have eliminated their then-existing Indian culture as effectively as any disease or invasion. Destroying Indian society in order to save it?
And let’s not forget that the Americans supposedly sent syphilis back to the Europeans.
sending back a few of today’s feminist activists to tell the invading Europeans that they were racists displaying male privilege.
That might have worked as I, for one, would have avoided any place with angry feminists. However, the indians might have kidnapped them and made them into squaws. Angry squaws but I’m not sure the Indians cared that much what squaws said.
Maybe it might be more practical to send back Mao’s ‘On Guerrilla Warfare’ along with a few Eight Route Army commanders.
My understanding is that the Pilgrims found an empty landscape because disease had wiped out the local tribes. Perhaps the Norse were pushed out because they didn’t have the same urban diseases as other Europeans and so they didn’t infect the local tribes. If the Europeans never get a foothold that does change things perhaps…
…would it have mattered enough? Nah. The Indian lifestyle just didn’t produce enough kids to compete with Europeans.
Brian, I think that is why the Indians liked the French better. The French did not bring their wives. If they married at all, it was to Indian squaws.
“The Indian lifestyle just didn’t produce enough kids to compete with Europeans.”
That is an interesting point. Somewhere or other, I saw an estimate of the population of California natives when the Spaniards invaded — about 250,000 total. In the 10,000 years since the First Immigrants arrived, their population had reached equilibrium with the capacity of the land (or mostly, the water) to support them — given their Stone Age culture. To squeeze 30+ million human being into California today requires a much higher level of technology than the Indians had developed.
Back to Brian’s science fiction novel — the impact of the casino billionaire’s well-intentioned move would have been to jump the American Indians out of the Stone Age ahead of the then-primitive level of European technology. This would have led to the Iriquois Federation’s later invasion & conquest of Europe … and music today would have been very, very different!
“The Indian lifestyle just didn’t produce enough kids to compete with Europeans.”
Interestingly, that was one of the reasons recorded for the various Comanche divisions to adopt child captives of a certain age into the tribe. The hunter-gatherer-warrior-horse-raiding lifestyle was so harsh, according to TH Fehrenbach in his history of the Comanche, that they had to replenish their numbers through forcible adoption of children captured from raids into Mexico and in Texas.
The fertility rates of Comanche women were pretty low, due to hardship – and survival rates for children born to the tribe were equally dismal.
Another reason for infertility among Comanche women was the common practice of war parties to gang-rape captive adult women as a way of utterly crushing their resistance. So, imagine what happened when a woman infected with syphilis is taken captive in the borderlands, and infects all the warriors in that band … who go back and infect their wives.
According to Fehrenbach, there was a semi-mythical Comanche tribal division known as ‘those whose private parts have rotted off.’
https://www.amazon.com/Comanches-History-People-T-R-Fehrenbach/dp/1400030498
“The Indian lifestyle just didn’t produce enough kids to compete with Europeans.”
Maybe it was part of the problem, but a lot of the Indians were living by hunting and gathering, and that doesn’t support near the population density that agriculture does, and the level of agricultural technology that the Indians had was significantly behind that of Europeans, at least for awhile. Even if the Indians could have had the size of (esp farm) families that European-Americans were having in what is now the US by the 19th Century, at the latest, maybe much earlier, they had already lost the demographic war. Of course, disease and technology played a part, but I think it likely that by the 19th century, all they did was hasten the end. r
Along with then wheel, agriculture was not a feature of Amerindian culture. Some of this may have been related to the time since arrival from Siberia. The eastern tribes, like the Iroquois, had agriculture.
The Iroquoian people were predominantly agricultural, harvesting the “Three Sisters” commonly grown by Native American groups: corn, beans, and squash. They developed certain cultural customs. Among these developments were ideas concerning the nature and management of property. The Iroquois developed a system very different from the now-dominant Western variety. This system was characterized by such components as common ownership of land, division of labor by gender, and trade mostly based on gift economy.
Contact with Europeans in the early 17th century had a profound impact on the economy of the Iroquoians. At first, they became important trading partners, but the expansion of European settlement upset the balance of the Iroquois economy. By 1800, following the American Revolutionary War, in which most of the nations supported the British and had to share their defeat, ?
Corn, also called Maize evolved from a grass found in Mexico and was used by the Iroquois along with beans and squash. Europeans referred to wheat as “corn” and so the distinction.
Corn is deficient in some amino acids but beans are legumes and supply protein.
The Plains Indians were mostly hunter/gatherer and had a diet similar too the Australian aborigines plus, of course the buffalo. Before the Spanish introduced the horse, they must have had a difficult time hunting bison.
“Before the Spanish introduced the horse, they must have had a difficult time hunting bison.”
Find a herd of buffalo close to a cliff; stampede the herd by shouting and throwing stones (required co-ordination among a fairly large group of hunters), hoping that some of the buffalo would charge over the cliff; proceed to the bottom of the cliff and divide up the haul (again, required co-ordination).
There would undoubtedly be long periods when the buffalo were not close to a suitable cliff, and people would go hungry. The people who survived were the ones who could over-eat and bulk up when the opportunity existed, and go without much food for fairly long intervals when hunting was poor. This may be why today — when food is always plentiful (except where politics intervenes, e.g. Venezuela) — a lot of us tend to get fat.
“I saw an estimate of the population of California natives when the Spaniards invaded — about 250,000 total.”
And that “estimate” is absolutely absurd. The California Indians were almost all hunter-gatherers and lived on fish and game. There was no large scale irrigation or agriculture. Most of SoCal was brown hills and sagebrush.
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Anonymous shared her wisdom: “And that “estimate” is absolutely absurd. The California Indians were almost all hunter-gatherers and lived on fish and game. There was no large scale irrigation or agriculture. Most of SoCal was brown hills and sagebrush.”
California is larger than the Los Angeles basin. And, yes, the First Immigrants were mainly Stone Age hunter-gatherers, which is why the population was so small (compared to today) and why they had no chance against the more technologically-advanced European invaders. But we are all here to learn. Do you have a better estimate of the Indian population of California prior to the invasion of the Hispanic conquistadors? Please share.