I never saw Pocahontas either. The last movie I saw in a theater was Wakanda Forever, and before that "The Woman King". The WOman King showed an aspect of history I wasn't taught as a white kid in the suburbs. When they taught us about slavery, they said that Arab traders would kidnap black people and sell them as slaves to white people. I wondered whether the black Africans were just standing around in the jungle waiting for someone to kidnap them. But they had complex trade agreements between kingdoms, and they had the technology to copy the firearms the white folks sold them. So it wasn't just a bunch of savages carrying spears and wearing skirts of leaves, waiting for a white person to take them away to do agricultural jobs in a faraway land. This was not taught in middle school.
And everything they taught us about the Pilgrims and the other colonists who established settlements in the Americas. The Pilgrims were religious fanatics who practiced a religion which commmanded them to forcibly convert everyone else on Earth. They got thrown out of England for being too Puritanical; they went to the Netherlands, where they were thrown out for the same reason. They came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony determined to build homes, farms, churches, schools, and a town. They originally hoped to convert all the "savage natives" in the New World to their form of Christianity. And all the differing sects who founded colonies were just as unholy as the savages. Anglicans, Catholics, Pagans, Quakers, - nobody's Christianity was as Christian as that of the Puritans. (And when the Pilgrims first set foot on land in New England, they looked for a place where the Native Americans had camped, because they knew there would be food stored there, and the Puritans stole the food because they had underestimated how long the sea voyage would take, and they were running out of food.
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dancing_serpent
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2023-09-09 10:27 pm (UTC)And everything they taught us about the Pilgrims and the other colonists who established settlements in the Americas. The Pilgrims were religious fanatics who practiced a religion which commmanded them to forcibly convert everyone else on Earth. They got thrown out of England for being too Puritanical; they went to the Netherlands, where they were thrown out for the same reason. They came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony determined to build homes, farms, churches, schools, and a town. They originally hoped to convert all the "savage natives" in the New World to their form of Christianity. And all the differing sects who founded colonies were just as unholy as the savages. Anglicans, Catholics, Pagans, Quakers, - nobody's Christianity was as Christian as that of the Puritans. (And when the Pilgrims first set foot on land in New England, they looked for a place where the Native Americans had camped, because they knew there would be food stored there, and the Puritans stole the food because they had underestimated how long the sea voyage would take, and they were running out of food.