Product Placement wrote:
Did… did you just insinuate that the Indians were the bad guys?

They were the bad guys in American cowboy and Indian movies, which is what he was referencing.
What I was talking about that (Bravo) was that apparently in media there it was implied that the Indians were the heroes in German TV?
haha, I dunno, that was just all implied from some comments I read.

In the movies that I saw, the enemy was usually either some outlaws and we were supposed to root for the Sheriff or vice verse. The Indians were there but they were treated like a neutral but unpredictable party that you wouldn't want to mess with, or risk shake up a hornets nest. They had no love for the cowboys but as long as you stayed out of their way they'd leave you alone. Occasionally you would encounter them and it would result in either a battle or that they would help you out.

And when you look at it from their perspective, the white man was the invader. More and more of those technologically advanced jerks were pouring in from some unknown land, settling in the lands of their ancestors and handing them the short end of the stick. Why wouldn't they resist something like that?

Yeah, everyone is a hero from their own perspective and the baddies are whoever oppose them. Logically.
But what I find interesting is how people from outside perspectives view the situation.

And speaking of technological invaders into the Indian lands I remember reading about your ancestors doing that to them too in the northern climbs… Indians and the related people… like Eskimos, Aleuts, Inuits, whatever people were in Newfoundland…?
Vikings called them something like Skraelings I think.

On the same subject- any films in Australia we make of the old days of colonisation generally have the aboriginal people as victims and the Europeans as thoughtless or savage oppressors.
Films and books on the subject USED to show the native people as innocent, naive, and, barbaric and ignorant, and the Europeans as knowing, fatherly, caring, and strict.
Oh colonialism… T_T

ozoneocean wrote:
And speaking of technological invaders into the Indian lands I remember reading about your ancestors doing that to them too in the northern climbs… Indians and the related people… like Eskimos, Aleuts, Inuits, whatever people were in Newfoundland…?
Vikings called them something like Skraelings I think.

You brought this over yourself Oz; you activated my storyteller mode.

Heh hem…

Vikings lumped Inuits and Indians into the same group, calling them “Skrlingar”.

According to our archives, the Vikings settled the south end of Greenland first, around 980, and the settlements numbered around ten thousand people during its height. The Inuits showed up couple of centuries later, after expanding from Canada/North Greenland. That would technically make them the invaders. Our relations with the Inuits are believed to have been fairly stable but there are all kinds of theories about whether or not there had been hostility between the two groups. There are numbers of old Viking artifacts to be found in possession of Inuit families suggesting that either trading took place or that the Inuits raided the Norse settlers. The Inuits in Greenland also carry the blue eyed gene, suggesting intermarriages or frequent rapes. All we can say for certain is that the last written records of the settlement are from 1408 and it wasn't until 1721 that a Danish expedition was sent out to convert the settlements to Lutheranism, only to find out that the settlements were gone. Naturally, the Danish king continued to claim ownership over the country, despite the notable lack of subjects.

As for America, I really couldn't call that an invasion either. The explorers that traveled south, down the east coast made numerous encounters with Indians and were flaky and unpredictable at best. One of the first expedition made the mistake of attacking a small group of sleeping Indians and the few that got away brought back the entire tribe and drove the explorers away.

A separate and one of our most successful colonization efforts was lead by Thorfinnur “Karlsefni” (sheesh that nickname almost quite literately translates to “manlyman” but it was a nickname boys could gain in their youth if they showed great promise as a leader material and suitor). He lead an expedition of roughly 150 settlers and set up a camp somewhere in the Newfoundland/New England area, where they stayed for roughly a full year. We know that the camp was set up near a forested area, in a defensive location, experienced a very good summer but a snowy and harsh winter. There are theories that his settlement is the same as the one discovered in the L'Anse aux Meadows but it's quite possible that those are remains of a separate expedition and any records of that colony were simply lost in time.

Anyways, after the first winter, the Vikings made a contact with a nearby tribe which was initially peaceful. The language barrier limited all interaction to simple trade and the Indians knew the location of our settlement and not vice versa. The story goes that an escaped bull scared away the Indians during one of their visits and that the next time they came back with hostile intentions. We were able to drive the attackers away but Thorfinnur Karlsefni decreed that this land was not safe to live in and packed up the camp. You see, while we may have been technologically superior on the grounds that we wielded iron weaponry, while they used stone tools, it just wasn't a nearly enough of an edge on the ground that these settlers were many years away from any meaningful reinforcements and these lands were saturated by indigenous people who wouldn't shy away from a fight.

Warning the following paragraph is a massive ego boast:
It's well worth mentioning that during his stay in America, Thorfinnur and his wife Gurur orbjarnardttir, had their son born there, possibly making him the first European to be born in America. And because I got curios, while writing this, I decided to check to see if I was related to that guy and while I'm not a direct descendant of the first European American, I am a direct descendant of Thorfinnur, his father. I love my genealogy records.

P.S:
Psst, Roku. If we do take that hiking trip we talked about taking, we will pass the area where Gurur was born. We can visit that place, if you're interested.

havin a little fun doodling some female domination art… LOL

Product Placement wrote:
Did… did you just insinuate that the Indians were the bad guys?
There were no good guys in the Indian Wars both sides were equally nasty. Honestly seeing one's family stripped naked, their bodies practically turned inside out and mouths and other orafices filled with dirt is not exactly what the “good guys” do. Next to that passing off a couple of ratty blankets once used by someone with smallpox is kind of lame. But burning and destroying whole villages and turning out women, children and old men to starve is something else. But is that as bad as torture, rape and hideous disfigurement? Yes because destroying the infrastructure that allows a culture to survive is as bad as destroying individuals. Being captured by indians was often a fate worse than death massacring bufflao so the tirbes starved is something else.


And who learned what from whom? Neither. Both sides came into it fully equipped and completely prepared to commit atrocities. My family arrived in Virginia just in time for the great massacre of 1622. Muskets are worthless against someone who can shoot a dozen arrows a minute.

Then of course you have the completely blameless and pure as the driven snow Tuetonic Knights subtly bringing the wonderfuls fruits of Western European plenty to backwards Slavs.

Meet Big Tex Inuktut Running Bull Hafthorsson



A poor tortured soul…

And before you get ants in your fur-pants mister PP, think of those horns as part of Indian Buffalo headdress :)
Oh man I SO want one of those… :(

Looks more like a Mongol warlord than an Indian/Eskimo/Viking/cowboy mashup…
Wow, I've invented the science of ethnic-cultural milliner equations!
Indian+Viking+Eskimo / Cowboy = Genghis Kahn!

John Wayne played Genghis Khan in 1956s The Conqueror, with Susan Hayward.
“I fight … I love … I conquer … like a barbarian.”

“You are bee-you-ti-ful in yore wraath!”

A truly faithful performance if ever the was one.

bravo1102 wrote:
Product Placement wrote:
Did… did you just insinuate that the Indians were the bad guys?
There were no good guys in the Indian Wars both sides were equally nasty.

You, yourself just indirectly called them the bad guys. I never said they were the angels who could do no wrong. I'm fully aware that once both sides start killing, it's hard to say who's the villain of the story, especially if you concentrate only on what the other side did. Hell, if you only look at the state the Allies left the German cities, at the end of WWII, you'd be inclined to call them the bad guys.

*22.000 civilians killed.

You're right that making a surprise attack on a town full of defenseless civilians and slaughtering over hundred people is an heinous act, but the colonists had done the exact same thing to the Indians few years before. That tribe responsible was initially peaceful and traded with the colonists, but the eventual hostility was instigated by the white man. A nobleman tasked with “Christianizing the savages” lead a surprise attack on one of their villages and killed men, women and children indiscriminately and burned their crops (funny how the history books failed to call that a massacre). This caused a war between the two sides which ended in the daughter of the chief, our now Disney famous Pocahontas, being captured and held for ransom. An unstable peace reigned until the chief died and his brother took over and ordered the attack which lead to the massacre and the second war between the two sides.

You can't deny that if aliens would one day land on Earth, put up a base of operations and attack the nearby cities around it, that you wouldn't want to give those bastards a little payback, can you?

And really, the blankets thing is in my opinion one of the most ridiculously sickening acts that I have heard about during the American colonization. It's an early years example of a germ warfare. The settlers had learned that the Indians were vulnerable to smallpox and knowingly traded to them infected blankets. It was a slow and excruciatingly painful death sentence to entire tribes. I don't call that lame. I call that Evil with a capital E. I mean, I get the whole “exploit your enemies weakness” angle but Sheesh!

P.S. What's your angle with the Teutonic knights? I kinda failed to see where you were going with that.

ozoneocean wrote:
And before you get ants in your fur-pants mister…

So you made a crazy amalgam picture of a Viking, Indian and a Cowboy. Good for you. Love how your first instinct is to assume I'd get upset about the picture and preemptively challenge my standing on keeping Viking helmets historically accurate when whatever that thing on his head is so far removed from anything historically accurate that I wouldn't even know where to start.

And yes, he does kinda look like a Mongol.

I have to agree with PP here. The number of native americans killed by Europeans is impossible to know for sure, but there are some crazy estimates. You make it sound as if the death ratio was 1:1.

I live in a city where around 10% of the population is aboriginal, mostly people who've come down from the reserves. Most are poor, many are homeless. Damaging an entire people so profoundly is pretty unforgivable, even if the other side did some awful things as well. Maybe there weren't any good guys, but there was a bad guy.

Product Placement wrote:
Argh!

I did ask you not to get ants in your fur-pants :(

Speaking of pants: why do pseudo fashion people persist in dropping the “s”. “Pants” isn't plural, “pant” is not singular, it is an entirely different word that describes a type of breathing, not something that covers your arse.

That gives me ants in the pant. …or Trouser.
Actually that makes it sound like Asian pidgin English… Everything goes back to the Mongol, it's a conspiracy!

I had promised myself that I wouldn't comment on this but I wasted almost two hours writing this so I might as well post it. Just consider this a rant and skip to the next posting and we can bury this topic like Iroquois would bury hatchets to end wars. What I meant and and what you read are three entirely different things.

What I meant was this: the Indians waged a guerilla war of terror and the whites waged genocide. The terror of the what Indians did in their attacks can be considered to be to have so terrorized whites that they felt they had to kill every Indian. (a study of 18th C. newspaper accounts upholds this theory as does the “white-captive” literature of the 19th C. as opposed to so many whites going native in the 17th C.) The Indians massacred hundreds, in fact entire areas of the West were un-settled at various times because various tribes were so good at killing whites.The whites ran away after hundreds were killed out of very small populations. Proportionally the killing was huge. The manner in which many tribes killed and tortured make the most graphic slasher film look tame. No one kept accurate track of settlers back then but whole thriving areas would just vanish.

Yet whites weren't very good at killing Indians. Indian warfare was mostly one-sided untilthe development of the rimfire cartridge which allowed quick reloading of revolving pistols and rifles in the mid 19th century. With muskets Europeans would point the weapon inthe direction of the enemy and let loose. Indians took great pride in their marksmanship. The Indians would slink away or if the opposing force small enough, kill or far worse capture and torture the whites.

In most indian wars whites would kill themselves if they could up to Custer's defeat at Little Big Horn (See Skulking Way of War among other works) In contrast the whites could only destroy the Indian way of life by burning villages, torching fields and driving animals to near extinction. As chiefs put it “We killed a handful of your people intruding onto land you pledged to us, where you destroyed our villages and starved our entire people.” (It is a paraphrase because it was said by chief after chief on various occasions from the 1600s-1800s. I've seen it attributed to representatives of nations from the Iroquois to the Cherokee to the Sioux, Komanche and Apache)

If the whites had arrived 100 years in North America earlier before the great depopulation of the Indians following epidemic after epidemic of influenza and cholera they would never have stood a chance. It so happens that whites chanced into a world horrifically depopulated and caught the Indians after they had barely survived a complete demographic (and ecological) disaster. (see 1491and Guns, Germs and Steel, The Jamestown Project, Of Plimouth Plantation, Lies my Teacher told meetc)

The blanket story has been exaggerated to near mythic proportions. It first happened with the British in the 1700's before germ theory when most on the frontier had very little concept of a connection between the blanket of someone who died from smallpox being able to give someone else smallpox. It was an unwanted dirty blanket. There is a good account in a recent biography of Robert Rodgers where the writer tracked down the original story. Everyone in the 18th century was just as succeptible to catching smallpox as everyone else. It killed usually 30% of Europeans who got it as opposed to 50-80% of Indians. Indians are also highly succeptible to influenza, and it killed as many as smallpox so a simple sneeze could wipe out a whole village and a lot better. No one wanted smallpox around and everyone was sneezing. This is back when the common cold could be a death sentence for anyone.

Kids wanting to be the Nazis or Indians when playing is the “coolness” factor. Indians have tomahawks and feathered headdresses and Nazi's have submachine guns and cool accents. So kids want to be them. You have to think like a kid, not someone aware of the Holocaust or the Fire Bombing of Dresden. I grew up on Combat and Hogan's Heroes.

All the rest of your post sounds researched, although revisionist and history from a certain perspective, which is quite normal, history is told from many perspectives with many different readings.

But I find the last bit a little hard to swallow.
No kids I know, especially when I was a kid, thought Indians had bad-guy cool. Nothing about them in their Hollywood portrayal equates to bad-guy cool. They're shown as old fashioned Noble savages. That's not cool.
The cool, slick badguys in Hollywood cowboy TV shows and movies were the outlaws, especially the ones all in black with a black hat! They're shown as being smart, cool, dangerous.
In contrast Indians are shown as being ignorant, rough and crude. The best features they were given was good horsemanship, magical tracking abilities and naturist mysticism… None of that makes for badguy cool.
The most you get is “admirable opponent”

In childhood games, non-one wanted to be the Indians, so that was a role played by the youngest, or sisters because they had the right hairstyle.
None of that is a reflection on the real indigenous peoples, just the version of them put about by Hollywood. :)

I added smilies to the forum!!!!! :)
I doubt anyone could work them all out though :frog:
;)
:o
There are more…

———-

Turns out adding smilies killed the entire site.
That's a robust system riiiight there people.
SO I killed them all. >:(

I swear there must be something weird going on with the moon or something the last couple days. All the forums and spots online I visit are unusually snarly and argumentative, and people are being less than cooperative with each other in real life too, including myself.

ozoneocean wrote:
All the rest of your post sounds researched, although revisionist and history from a certain perspective, which is quite normal, history is told from many perspectives with many different readings.

But I find the last bit a little hard to swallow.

Might be the difference bewteen growing up in Australia and New Jersey with the constant references about Algonquin, Iroqouis Confederation and Lenni Lenape. You didn't have to suffer field trips where picking up an Indian arrowhead was the coolest thing ever.

You didn't have any friends who thought the “How, me um- ugh!” and handling the bow and arrow was cool? There was always a budding Italian girl to be the Indian princess, or even kids with Cherokee heritage. Or lining up the little yellow and red Indian figures to attack the blue cavalry figures and brown cowboys? Did you even have the classic Marx Fort Apache playset in Australia? Were the Marx Best of the West Action figures distributed in Australia? Sitting Bull had the real cool accessories but I was always the cavalry because I liked kepi forage caps and Victor MacLaughlin's Irish brogue from the John Ford cavalry movies.

It's probably a cultural difference because there was always someone who wanted to talk like that, go “How” and hide in the forest to jump out at the stupid cowboys with their capguns and of course the stupid kid with the glasses with the Civil War kepi and musket. And we all did the knees bent, galloping around ala Monty Python and the Holy Grail. We didn't know anything about noble savages, just take their land, line'em up and shoot'em down and “I got you” “No you didn't!” And the beautiful Italian-Indian princess is icky.

ozoneocean wrote:
All the rest of your post sounds researched, although revisionist and history from a certain perspective, which is quite normal, history is told from many perspectives with many different readings.

One of the authors called the viewpoint “revisionist revisions of revisionism” in his introduction. This all would have been a lot nicer over a long lunch in a diner somewhere in New Jersey.

Come to NJ and we'll do lunch. I find that I usually have more in common with diverse viewpoints than I truly disagree with. I just can't express myself very well at times and also have difficulty figuring out what is being said in those long dense walls of text.
—
In fifteen minutes of standing out on the patio after Bamboozle in Asbury Park I saw four people urinate in public within 30 yards of a porta-john. One of them was a woman. I then saw someone walking their dog and the dog squatted and I realized that at times the world really is just a bathroom.
And trying to help a drunken 20-something find out where he belongs and how to get him there is fun. Is it me or does every drunken 20-something have drained batteries in all their electronic thingys? Cell phone, i-whatever all drained. Nothing written down and memory fogged by alcohol. Just give me a number to call and we'll get it sorted out!

bravo1102 wrote:

What I meant was this: the Indians waged a guerilla war of terror and the whites waged genocide. The terror of the what Indians did in their attacks can be considered to be to have so terrorized whites that they felt they had to kill every Indian. (a study of 18th C. newspaper accounts upholds this theory as does the “white-captive” literature of the 19th C. as opposed to so many whites going native in the 17th C.) The Indians massacred hundreds, in fact entire areas of the West were un-settled at various times because various tribes were so good at killing whites.The whites ran away after hundreds were killed out of very small populations. Proportionally the killing was huge. The manner in which many tribes killed and tortured make the most graphic slasher film look tame. No one kept accurate track of settlers back then but whole thriving areas would just vanish.

Where to start: First, there were major differences in the approach to warfare between tribes and over time and geography. The whole conflict actually takes place over 300 odd years and huge tracts of land, but everyone likes to focus on the ‘classic West’ period and locales of 1860-1880 (give or take a few years). However, by this time some tribes had been resettled and removed multiple times, and had changed in terms of population size and tactics. The ‘guerilla’ period of ‘indian’ warfare is a very small period, and only applies to a handful of tribes, and comes after tremendous unheavals and betrayals for many of the tribes concerned.
Second, newspaper accounts of the period are not very reliable … even less so than today (and that's saying something). Take the current example of the drug P, which in my natioanl media is often described as a killer drug, and media commentators earnestly tell how the fabric of our society is being torn apart by this deadly menace. Well, last week the police actually admitted that there is one confirmed case of someone ODing on P. One. But I bet if you asked the average person on the street how many lives it had claimed you;d be told hundreds, if not thousands (now, I'm not saying the drug hasn't destroyed lives, I'm just saying the media hype over the subject is overblown). Indian massacre stories sold papers. But look closer and you'll find many a story of “How I Lived with the Peaceful Natives” (there was little in the way of editorial policy, and it wasn't uncommon for two newspaper articles on the same page to contridict each other on the same event or subject). Sure, there were settlers killed by the native americans. Sure, some of it was truley gruesome and horrible, but newspapers were not a reliable source of the true extent of what was going on at the time. There has been some great work done that looks at soldier and settler diaries, letters and other such sources that paint a very different picture to the newspaper articles (which were often written from thrid-hand accounts many days, weeks, or months and miles after the event).
Third, there were actually some very detailed records kept of settler numbers in many parts of america, some of which have survived. Disease was a bigger killer than anything else.
I get what you're trying to convey, but I think you're taking some very specific events and time periods and generalizing across a very diverse peoples (and area and time).

I can cite all kinds of examples to prove my points but it's worthless because I'm trying to point out that our conceptions of the Indian Wars are wrong in many fundamental ways and we're spouting a mantra made up by 19th and 20th Century reformers as opposed to being honest about what happened. Many of the my points hold up with specific examples from across the 400 years of European settlement in North America whether it's Creeks, Algonquin to Sioux and Komanche from Rodgers' Rangers to Texas Rangers.

Next you'll try to convince me that massing soldiers together in dense formations and volley fire wasn't an effective battlefield use of the smooth bore musket. Conventional wisdom is wrong. We don't remember history so much as every generation re-write it to suit the opinons and outlook of their own time. So therefore since we know weapons would one day be developed that would make massed formations of soldiers pure folly, it is also wrong for armies before the invention of those weapons even if it was the best use of the weapons available at the time it was employed.

ozoneocean wrote:
Meet Big Tex Inuktut Running Bull Hafthorsson

Oh look, it's a Klingon!

lba wrote:
I swear there must be something weird going on with the moon or something the last couple days. All the forums and spots online I visit are unusually snarly and argumentative, and people are being less than cooperative with each other in real life too, including myself.

It's often hard enough to pin down exactly the mental state that people are in, when reading through their forum posts. Sure, you can attempt drawing evidence from certain ways people are saying things but when you're missing all the crucial tools we use during a more personal conversation, like tone of voice and facial expressions, often enough you end up misinterpreting it.

In real life, this indian debate might have taken place in a form of a screaming hizzy fit or a passionate conversation in a coffee shop, like Bravo mentioned.

I, for one, was never really in a particularly upset mood when writing my post, although I suppose I did raise an eyebrow over Oz and his comment under his picture (and those horns really shouldn't be there).

ozoneocean wrote:
Product Placement wrote:
Argh!

Anyways, back to the Indian debacle, I suppose I jumped on the whole “kids like playing the bad guy” thing because I never really viewed the Indians as the bad guys. Oz kinda summed up my view on them quite nicely with this post:

ozoneocean wrote:
No kids I know, especially when I was a kid, thought Indians had bad-guy cool. Nothing about them in their Hollywood portrayal equates to bad-guy cool. They're shown as old fashioned Noble savages. That's not cool.
The cool, slick badguys in Hollywood cowboy TV shows and movies were the outlaws, especially the ones all in black with a black hat! They're shown as being smart, cool, dangerous.
In contrast Indians are shown as being ignorant, rough and crude. The best features they were given was good horsemanship, magical tracking abilities and naturist mysticism… None of that makes for badguy cool.
The most you get is “admirable opponent”

Perhaps you can lump it down as “different upbringing”, iike you do, Bravo, but it seems like the Icelandic and the Australian viewpoints on the topic is a similar one.

When I picture cowboys vs Indians, I do picture “opposites” who'd fight each other but there's a different element to them then “Cops vs Robbers” angle where it's more clear who the “bad guy” is. I don't remember ever picturing them as the bad guy as a kid either. The cool cowboy movies were always cowboys vs outlaws, where the Indians occationally played the part as the third party, who carried a strange affection for a peace pipe. Seriously, how many movies have we seen of cowboys sitting in a tent, with the chief, getting high as bonkers with him?

…

As a kid, I did dream fantasies of an Icelandic spoken America, back when I pictured the “What if” scenario of the Vikings managing to settle these lands and was annoyed when the history books taught me that my ancestors were too afraid to deal with the Indians back then. I sometimes suspected that it was the fault of Christian mentality. Both Leifur “The lucky” Eirkson and Thorfinnur Karlsefni, who lead the two biggest documented exploration efforts into America were Christian and I couldn't help but wonder how a pagan Viking who believed in the “Die in battle and rise in Valhalla” mythos would have reacted to the prospect of a rich land full of primitives who'd fight for it. Hell, imagine if the Vikings who committed themselves to conquering England had instead settled in America. It would have profoundly affected the entire global history.

At very least, it would have made an interesting story. (and it would have been a better story then that stupid Pathfinder movie )

ozoneocean wrote:
Product Placement wrote:
Argh!

Ugh… it's raining. Thanks to a tropical storm that formed after it passed us. So if it's past us what's the problem? The thing leaves a trail of rainclouds and thunderstorms and it can last for weeks or more… oh, well… at least it's an opportunity to find all the leaks in my roof…

bravo1102 wrote:

Next you'll try to convince me that massing soldiers together in dense formations and volley fire wasn't an effective battlefield use of the smooth bore musket.

Will I? Okay. Always good to know what I'll be doing next. – The Straw Man.

Gunwallace wrote:
Will I? Okay. Always good to know what I'll be doing next. – The Straw Man.

You're right. I wish my keyboard allowed me to use accents so I could type touche properly but you are correct.

As for Indians having “bad guy cool” in Aus and Iceland were you raised with the image of Sitting Bull, Geronimo and Cochise as mega-super baddies that no one could bring to rights? Did you ever see the “Geronimo, master of warfare!” in movie after movie that only the noble cavalry officer could bring in because the bad Indian Affairs guy keep screwing over? The Indians had “bad guy cool” because they were the “noble and righteous” enemy that you respected the heck out of while fighting.

I'd upright those little red and yellow figures several times each because Indians were tough and righteous and respected enemies. The cowboys got their butts kicked until the cavalry came in and saved the day. But the indians were still the “bad guys” The same thing when playing Army. The Americans were the “good guys” but the Germans were the enemy you respected because they were tough and had the cool looking equipment and the cool kids wanted to play them. Sure you'd lose but you'd make those Americans pay before you did. And maybe every once in a while you'd play Germans vs. French or Blitzkrieg Germans so that the Krauts could win. And yes I even knew kids who wanted to be the Japanese because you could jump up and down and scream “BANZAI!” I was a very avid wargamer as a tween and teen and I was always stuck playing the Allies because everyone else wanted to play the Axis because they were “cool”

Yeah, it must just be a cultural difference and I can sort of see where it comes from now: You're American, that's your own history, so of course it will always have far more personal resonance to anyone from there.
Idiotic of me not to have seen that. I always miss the obvious. Always!

All countries have their own histories and myths and things central to their DNA that only someone from that culture can ever truly understand a certain way.
I mean, even with a super close country like Gunwallace's New Zealand, there's no way I could understand the relationship with the Maoris there and all the history with the treaties and wars and things from a New Zealanders perspective.

———–

@Product Placement-
That movie poster is AWESOME! Even the ship has horns! o_O
You didn't just make that up did you?

Pathfinder is a real movie. It could have been excellent, instead it's just dull.

Pathfinder was a dull movie, Outlander was a bit better but that's just because I've got a tiny mancrush on Ron Pearlman…