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.
Some of the most moving experiences I've had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights.
I grew up in the middle of a block where there was an Irish grocery store on one corner, an Italian bar on another corner and the Nazi Party was on the third corner.
The white men told lies for each other. They drove off a great many of our cattle. Some branded our young cattle so they could claim them.
I cannot write about the past unless I go where history happened. Some make very good armchair historians, I'm not one of them. If you're going to inhabit someone else's world, the very least you can do is to spend a little time in it.
The Chinamen built the railroad, the Indians saved the Pilgrim,_x000D_ _x000D_ And in return, the Pilgrim killed 'em._x000D_ _x000D_ They call it it Thanksgiving, I call your holiday 'hell-day.'
The frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.