That is a very simple concept, but it is something that people are resistant to thinking. When I say India's name, the girl not the place and for the record it is not her real name—I don't use real names here, I do not think about her race. I think about who she was and what she meant to me and all the baggage that that entails. Her image dances before my eyes and image that has not updated itself in over 20 years, her voice leaps across the years and her smile . . . I should have called her Smile.
I digress, my point was that she was not her Race. There is no race. Every thing about the word Race is wrong. It implies that someone comes first, and that is not true. It is used to identify the origin of where someone was born and what they look like, and that is so wrong on many different levels. Race is used to identify religion, it is used to categorize someone and that means put them in a box with a bunch of labels. Lately it also means that you share some specific genes that are in a range. And this too is wrong, very wrong, because as I said Race means so little, in the grand scheme of things that actually matter about a person, that it should not be counted.
I have an acquaintance who looks white, is a status native of the Ojibwa People, who became a Sihk, religiously, and married a man whose genetic make up is most common in the Indian subcontinent. What is she? She has a Western Name. She was raised in many places, but in Ontario, northern and Southern. What is she? If you gave her a genetic test you would not find a conclusive answer—because people don't stay in the same place. People don't breed with their family members exclusively usually. People have not been staying put forever and wherever we people have been we have been breeding with whatever was around at the time. We know this genetically.
We know genetically that the first people's to leave Africa, bred with Neanderthals. We know that when we encountered any other people it happened, multiple times and every time. We know that if a thousand years ago a man or a woman went abroad to live, they had decsendents. We know that most people are born and die close to the same place, like within thirty kilometers, but that does not mean that you are born and die within thirty kilometers of where your great grandparents were born. Let's take me.
I was born about thirty kilometers from where I was born. My father is living within thirty kilometers of where he was born, my mother it is sixty. My father's parents died within thirty kilometers of where they were born. My mother's Mother died within 60 km from where she was born. My Mother's father was living 150 km from where he was born when he died, but he died on a trip. You might think that I live near my parents from that and my where a lot of them were from. I don't. People move the don't stay in the same place all the time and if you go back far enough, I have relatives that died thousands of kilometers from where they were born.
But we had technology and we moved because we had technology that allowed us to move, true, but so what? Let's look at a 'stone age' culture, North American people before contact. There are three types. Bands, nations and empires. Village, towns and cities.
Bands, I am going to say small units that lived in small social unit of three hundred or less, usually much less. Typical they lived in poor regions where populations had to be small because the land could not support large numbers. They traveled in large circles through the year, fished here, hunted there, traded with these people at certain times. They moved according to their needs and the traded when they could. They typically had places that they knew where better at different times of the year. They did not move into locations where there were other people, because that area may have been hunted out or because the people who lived there were stronger and better established. They necessarily moved and eroded others territory and people shifted around. I had a teacher that showed the locations of bands at four different time periods in history. I saw that in Boonieland there were four different bands at different time. One of them was the band that occupied BigSmoke in more recent times, 200 km away. The move into better accommodations began during the 1650s when the Iroquios started invading other locations.
Nations, like the Iroquios Nations, but generally any town based centers. People think native people were lived like they are portrayed in Westerns, the genre of movie, which is more like bands, because the hunting was poor and the land would not support large numbers. But this was not the way that was before the Whiteman. Towns of high hundreds to low thousands lived in towns with other towns located close by or associated with others of their cultural group, they had agriculture and they had a claimed hinterland that was larger than their current occupied area that they used to hunt and gather. The Hurons located near Midland Ontario c.1650, claimed ancestral lands from the Oakridges Morraine to Kingston Ontario. They hunted this area and collected acorns from the appropriately named Morraines. They spoke a common dialect and intermarried. They conducted raids on other nations and abducted people. Those abducted people would be treated as native born people in that nation, a culturally accepted forced immagtation. Do not judge, it may not be moral to you, it was to them. Every seven years, there abouts, the town would move to a new location, because they had depleted the soil from growing things. They moved as a nation to another location nearby and over a hundred years they would move hundreds of kilometers. People taken in raids would have moved hundreds of kilometers as well. Nations had populations Over ten thousand people.
Empires, I admit I know less about these, because there were none in Canada, and I was not taught about them historically, but there were a few in the history of the Americas, mostly in Equatorial regions. The Aztecs, Incas and the Mayans. They had cities and they forced people to migrate to them, ie, through conquest. They had trade, so resources were moved from areas of plenty to regions of disparity. The capitol of the Aztec empire had at one time more people than any other city in the world at one time, according to some things I have heard over the years. It was unquestionably one of the world's biggest cities.
Three types of 'stone age' people all moved around and migrated. In modern times bands were added to other bands, nations were added to other nations and mixed up. Blended. The large Native Reservation near Smallville, has populations from four or more different populations from all corners of lake Huron. How can you identify genetically what is a native person from this tribe? Especially when you include that sometimes in the past they accepted white people as native people as an honour to them. I know of two such cases, one in the past and one now. What does this mean then genetically to be Native?
As to Race, it is clear that the only Race we should use is the Race to get rid of the term referring to People as a group; it does not exist. The next time people people ask me where is my girlfriend from, I will tell them that she is culturally Canadian and just stop there.
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