Wednesday, October 17, 2018

George Monibot on the True Legacy of Christopher Columbus

About 15 years ago, I remember someone asking me “Max, I didn’t know you were a historian?”   And I replied “I didn’t know either.”

I grew up not liking history, or so I thought.  The history I was taught in school didn’t make sense to me – didn’t explain to me why things are as they are.

The history I was taught in school wasn’t useful to me.

All these years later, I’ve written hundreds of articles requiring thousands of hours of historical research, and I can more clearly see and understand why things really are as they are.

Some people fear history, because they’re unsure what they will find.  Some see history as liberating and vindicating, while others may see it as an indictment of who they are…the legacy of ancestors rather forgotten.

This is all understandable, however history has already happened and I believe its best understood as uncensored neutral information that may satisfy old curiosities and shed light on current ideology, economics and social structures.

Part of the research my book project Beyond Oppression: Colonization and the Language of Heroes is a book I’m reading, entitled Columbus and Other Cannibals.  Written by an American Indian named Jack Forbes, who taught at UC Davis, this book tells a very different history of the United States than what I was taught in high school.  And the same can be said for the video below by author George Monibot, entitled “The True Legacy of Christopher Columbus:”


Monday, October 8, 2018

The Loss of Language Equals the Loss of Identity, Feeling, Imagination and Memory

For all the languages that once existed in what is today The United States, how many are taught in schools - how many have been lost?

A new article speaks to the loss of American Indian languages  In the article, Rosalyn R. La Pierre writes that losing language "can be considered as extreme as the extinction of a plant or an animal. Once a language is gone, the traditional knowledge it carries also gets erased from society."

The article can be found here, and what follows is one of the videos embedded into the piece: