We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language.
Interpretation
This quote addresses the complex and tragic history of how the English language came to dominate among Indigenous peoples in the U.S.
Jared Diamond's quote illustrates the dark history behind the spread of the English language among Indigenous peoples in the United States. It emphasizes that the adoption of English by Native Americans was not a matter of choice or preference, but rather a direct consequence of violence, oppression, and the imposition of English by colonizers who decimated Indigenous populations through war and disease. This highlights the broader themes of cultural loss and the impacts of colonization.
In practice
In a discussion about the impacts of colonization on Indigenous cultures.
For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.
The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.
But this was the only way of life that humans knew for their first 6m years on the planet. In giving it up over the past few thousand years, we have lost our vulnerability to disease and cold and wild animals, but we have also lost good ways to bring up children, look after old people, stave off diabetes and heart disease and understand the real dangers of everyday life.
We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.
All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.
AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq.
An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view.
History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.
I have not always been wrong. History will bear me out, particularly as I shall write that history myself.
Blacks have experienced a history of victimization in America, beginning obviously in slavery and then another 100 years of segregation. I grew up in segregation. I know very well what it was about and all of the difficulties it placed on black life, and how we were truly held down before the civil-rights movement.
We must never forget that Black History is American History. The achievements of African Americans have contributed to our nation's greatness.
Reconstruction is the great black hole that remains to be filled. Even experts on the Civil War don't really understand its full significance.
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