Other Americas 3299

    Christopher Columbus is known by most Americans as the hero who found the land we now call the United States but what is lesser known is the way he and his crew treated the Native American population. In the film they talk about how Columbus was intrigued by some of the weapons and tools they had but wouldn't give them credit for them. Columbus also took the Native Americans hostage in order to set sail again in hopes to find Japan but instead found Cuba. They also used religion as a way to expel Native Americans and used the fact they wouldn't convert as reasonable means to take their land and even kill the Native Americans. One of the worst things that Columbus and his crew did was bring diseases from Europe which the Native Americans had never seen before therefore had no way of treating the illness and in most cases they would die. Diseases were quickly spread as sanitation at the time was pretty sub par leaving the Native Americans helpless as they wipe...

      In the extracts from Christopher Columbus's journal he speaks about his journey from Europe to the Americas. I think one of the key points of this piece is in the beginning preamble before the article even begins. The preamble begins by saying " The meaning of this voyage is highly contested." this is referencing the journey Columbus was sent out to sail has two sides of the argument of what the main goal of the voyage was. The first reason is, "it is witness to the tremendous vitality and verve of late medieval and early modern Europe - which was on the verge of acquiring a world hegemony." saying he was sent on the voyage as Europe was at a point where they were financially and political flourishing making them able to begin exploring other parts of the world. The other side of the argument is "he direct result of this and later voyages was the virtual extermination, by ill-treatment and disease, of the vast majority of the Native inhabitants, and t...

    In the "Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory" by Peter Childs and R.J. Williams they start off by defining what post colonialism is and how it isn't just the colonization of the Americas. The introduction also talks about how there is many definitions of 'post-colonial'. Throughout the piece there seems to be an over arching question about when does 'post-colonialism' end and how long does it last. There seems to be no answer for this as there is no strict point where it "ends". In addition, there seems to be no set period of time that a nation will be in the post colonialism era.  The word post colonialism is a word that seems like it can be slowly phased out but then on closer observation its prevalent that the word cannot easily be thrown away. The word itself describes a time after colonialism and without the word there would be no name for the era we currently in.     Another big point that the article brings up is how different the leng...

     In the documentary, "Tongues of Heaven" it focuses on the culture loss of small Polynesian tribes more importantly the loss of language in the tribes. This documentary focuses on the Polynesian tribes but it can be seen all throughout the world as with new generations the culture shifts. As seen in the documentary with each passing generation the language begins to degrade even more, leaving the older generations with no way to fix it but instead have to take a backseat and watch the culture and language slowly fall apart. Unfortunately with the language degrading so much it is starting to cause communication issues as newer generations only know the new dialect. There was one statistic at the beginning of the documentary that really surprised me, the statistic being, “among the 6000 languages or so in the world, an average of 2 disappear every month.”  This really surprised in two ways, the first being I didn’t realize there were 6000+ different langu...