mujeres indígenas

[hennatoes]

Anyone visit indigenous peoples, such as Mayas or Quechuas? What are women like there? If I found an indigenous woman and brought her to the States, how would she get along, compared to a common Hispanic?

If she spoke both her indigenous language and Spanish (if all she spoke were Mayan languages I'd have a really hard time communicating with her), would she probably find it easier to learn English?

Also, are Garinagu considered indigenous? Their language is Arawakan, with lots of Carib influence, but they apparently did not exist before 1600 or so. Africans entered their gene pool around 1675. The first record of what were then called Island Caribs states that the men and the women spoke unrelated languages, which could not have been going on for long.

[JimD]

From Wikipedia:

"Garifuna is an Arawakan language spoken in Honduras, Belize, Guatemala and Nicaragua by the Garifuna people.Their language is primarily derived from Arawak and Carib, with English, French and Spanish to a lesser degree. One interesting feature of Garifuna is a vocabulary split between terms used only by men and terms used only by women. This does not however affect the entire vocabulary but when it does, the terms used by men generally come from Carib and those used by women come from Arawak.

Almost all Garifuna are bilingual or polylingual, speaking the official languages of the countries they inhabit such as Spanish, Kriol and English most commonly as a first language"

I have been to remote parts of Colombia where the Indians can ask for money but that´s the limit of their Spanish.

[michaelb]

I have been to remote parts of Colombia where the Indians can ask for money but that´s the limit of their Spanish.

Don't have to go to a remote area in Mexico to see that. There are thousands of women on the streets in Mexico City who sell candy, peanuts, apples, Chiclets and cigarettes etc. They are know as "Las Marias". Some of them speak fluent Spanish, but many of them speak only their indigenous language, with their Spanish limited to the few words they need to know to sell, i.e. the names of the items in their meager inventory and enough numbers to quote prices and make change.

[william3rd]

And here all these years I thought I had a Garifuna swimming in my fish tank. . . . 

[robert angel]

For many years, the high fallutin, so called scientific 'experts' and anthropologists were quite sure that all the so called 'original' South American, as well as people from Alaska, and into what we today call Canada and the USA (all parts) dating before pre European settlement, all came across the Siberian Pennisula about 12,000 years ago.

It ain't so.

We've since come to realize that by just looking at languages and linguistic characteristics, that many person's descendants from South America, Central America, Mexico, as well as North America, came from the Polynesian islands, as well as South East Asia, 1000's of years before the Bering Strait--Siberian Pennisula, that once connected what we now know as Russia and North America, was a viable, solid land passage way.

It's all but certain that all these people never came down from the north, but that many of them instead came by sea, probably on large straw and/or wood crafts, guided by the stars and at the mercy of the seas.

Besides language similarity analysis, DNA and RNA analysis bears this out as well--there are distinct genetic relationships between indigenous South American people (as well as some North American) and South Eastern Asian--Polynesian people. Futhermore, there are artifacts that have strong African charateristics as well.

I recently found an exquisitely thin and finely worked Clovis point  in the South Eastern USA(most would incorrectly call it an arrowhead) that is somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 years old. Up until quite recently, these were thought to be the oldest man made artifacts in the Americas.

It's difficult at best to do carbon dating on rock artifacts, but carbon dating the soil and other materials found at sites in North America, now seem to indicate there were people living here between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago--even in the South Eastern USA.

The Indians told European settlers in the 1400s that long before they came, that white guys with red beards had been coming over--probably Vikings, who were pretty capable seamen.

I was delighted with my near perfect, museum grade Clovis projectile point, only to find out that there now appears to be an earlier class of points around here that predates it by two or three thousand years!! They're not nearly as pretty as the Clovis and Cumberland points, but I can't put my shovel and screens away yet!!

They sound pretty ancient and while they still are, points  and other tools quite similar to mine have been found in the Sahara Desert regions of Africa and date back as far as two million years, making my collection look like yesterday's Taco Bell takeout.

Maybe that explains with all this multi ethnicity mixing going on, why at Chichen Itza, a Mayan site on the Yucatan Pennisula of Mexico--I observed a Mayan athletic court, where they had to put a ball through one of two hoops--not unlike today's game of basketball. Unfortunately back then, the losing team lost had their heads cut off. Today, they get are more likely to get shipped off to a European basketball league.

The similarities in construction of these 'American' points is just too similar to the Saharan to be a chance occurance--creating them required hafting and fluting techniques that are difficult to do with machine shop tools even today. Strangely it wasn't long before they were abandoned and more crude, 'chunky' like points and tools were used instead.

Know one really knows why and as for the so called 'experts' who claim they do know--as far as I'm concerned, they weren't there and they really don't know for sure....

[hennatoes]

In anthro class she showed some pictures of Clovis points and some very similar tools from Solutré — indicating that some people had come from Europe and brought the technology, which then spread over much of North America. They've also found a few people in some Native tribe (I forget which) with a haplotype that hails from Europe.

So what do you think will happen if I meet a Garifuna girl, we already have a language in common, and I ask her to teach me Garifuna?

I'd say they're sort of semi-indigenous - the Caribs and Arawaks have been in the Americas since long before Columbus, but the combination that produced the Garifuna didn't happen till after.

[robert angel]

Hennatoes,

I found most Mayan women really shy and not rude, but hard to approach. It didn't help that their English was almost as bad as my Spanish. I was pretty much hours away from any big cities (I always seem to end up far from so called 'civilization' when I travel) and the men and women were almost all short and thick in body form, weathered and hardened by hard work. I don't think they trusted people outside their own fold much and the ways in which they've repeatedly been screwed over, I can't blame them.

Back to artifacts, what's weird is that while the complex way they made the Clovis points seems to clearly have come from Europe (the Folsom Indian points are said by some to be even prettier and from about the same dates) we're very recently finding points in the south western areas of N. America, but more towards Mexico and S. & C. America, that are older and while nothing as finely worked as the Clovis and Folsoms, are truly projectile points and not just crude hand tools.

At first, we just thought Clovis points came from Clovis, New Mexico, but now we realize that the early indigenous people were crafting these from coast to coast and oddly--all at about the same time, before quitting and rather abruptly at that.

My 'guess' is that they, for  whatever reason, had to move more often and no longer had the time required to make them as finely crafted and that making them so nicely wasn't vital enough for hunting large animals. Maybe they didn't have the time to show the younger people how to reproduce them as well. At any rate, the points became much thicker and crude looking.

Some Clovis points were well over six inches long and made of crystal as clear as glass and are worth over  $100,000 each

I think that there probably were human inhabitants in the Americas going back at least 30,000 years ago. Some say it's more like 50,000 years. And while language--dialect pattens can vary so widely and to such a great degree to where a training linguistic scientist can tell from what square mile of NYC you probably came from by your accent and speaking pattern, they can also pick up similarities between tribes of the Americas and South East Asian peoples, although we lose about a language a day worldwide, as we become more 'modern' and peoples are influenced increasingly by other people and technologies. (radio & TV they once had no exposure to, etc.)

From: http://www.mountainsofstone.com/Prehistoric_indians.htm

>>>Scientific evidence links most of the first inhabitants of the Americas to Asia and eastern Siberia populations. The American Indians resemble some Asian populations in outward appearance, in the distribution of blood group types, and in genetic composition as reflected by molecular data, such as DNA (Cordell, Paleoamericans).

Stone and Dillehay believe the indigenous peoples that eventually populated the Americas occurred in three separate migrations. The largest of these groups is referred to as the Amerind (Paleo-Indians). The Amerind, which includes most Native Americans south of the Canadian border, commenced around 11500 B.C.. A second migration called the Na-Dene occurred between 10000 B.C. and  8 000 B.C.. Even though at this point the Bering Sea separated Siberia and Alaska, it was only three miles wide in some places. The Athapascan speaking populations of Canada and the United States belong to this group of migrants. The Apache and Navajo in the southwestern United States are from the Athapascan migrants. The third migration around 3000 B.C. included the Aleuts and Eskimos of Alaska, Canada, and the Aleutian Islands (Taylor).

Archaeologists have established that humans were living in rock shelters at the southern tip of South America by 12500 B.C.. In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond notes that if Native Americans moved southward from the Plains area of North America at a rate of eight-miles per year that they would have reached Patagonia within a thousand years. Based on this, the earliest arrival there by migrating Paleo-Indians would be 10500 B.C.. If the 12500 B.C. dating is correct, the only way these people could have gotten there was by some type of watercraft.

Archeologist Jim Dixon believes that costal migration from Siberia to the tip of South America began as early as 14000 B.C.. Monte Verde, a well-studied site in central Chile, is dated at 12500 B.C. (Dillehay, Paleoamericans)

There is evidence of interaction between the peoples of Americas and Europe long before Christopher Columbus discovered America, as well as, indications of direct contacts between Polynesian cultures and those in the Americas. Most scholars accept the influence of  Polynesian and even Asian cultures on pre-Columbian American cultures, but many are skeptical of African or European influence...this is hard to understand.

The Olmec of Mexico and Central America created hundreds of massive stone heads. An Olmec political-religious center flourished between 1200 B.C. and 900 B.C. Around this center were six colossal basalt heads each measuring eight- to nine-feet in height and weighing twenty to forty tons. The heads were carved from stone obtained 50 miles or more from the center. There seems little doubt the features of the statues are of African origin.

                                                  

The evidence for European influence includes Roman coins found in Venezuela. A painting of a pineapple on a wall in Pompeii; pineapples were indigenous to the Western Hemisphere. A clay head in a twelfth-century tomb in Mexico was made in third-century Rome.

As with all “scientific discoveries” like these, they are subject to interpretation, as is the arrival of early humans...the dates varies from 50000 B.C. to 11500 B.C..

The Paleo-Indian period is defined by three cultures: Clovis, Folsom, and Plainview (Plano).<<

[JimD]

Let me recommend a book to you fellows interested in this topic. It is:

After The Ice, A Global Human History 20,000 To 5000 BC

by Steven Mithen ISBN 0-674-01570-3 published in 2003.

[robert angel]

Thanks JimD,

That seems like an interesting book, especially in the manner in which the author depicts the subject. Seems like most of the books on this subject area are really dry and this one appears brings some life and humanity, beyond the artifacts that remain--but without claiming to be the end all authoritative source that claims to answer any unanswered questions.

I think I need it, as my wife thinks I've gone a bit bonkers, looking at hundreds, if not thousands of small pictures, showing fracture points, flaking patterns and patinas, and then taking out my loupes and reexamining stuff I have to the point where I'm almost cross eyed.

I'll probably wait another week to see if shows on a great source I use for books, music and video that you might know--half.com where I've picked up things like the entire Beatles catalog remastered, --brand new for $69.95 (versus $299.99 @ best buy,) the blu-ray 'Avatar' for $10 and Overstreets latest--their 11th Edition on Arrowheads, new for $15, versus $31.95, plus tax @ Barnes n Noble...

Thanks again,

Rob

[JimD]

Another you might like is: Bones: Discovering The First Americans by Elaine Dewar

ISBN 0-679-31154-8 published in 2001.

[hennatoes]

Hennatoes,

I found most Mayan women really shy and not rude, but hard to approach. It didn't help that their English was almost as bad as my Spanish. I was pretty much hours away from any big cities (I always seem to end up far from so called 'civilization' when I travel) and the men and women were almost all short and thick in body form, weathered and hardened by hard work. I don't think they trusted people outside their own fold much and the ways in which they've repeatedly been screwed over, I can't blame them.

How would you have found them if you 1) spoke Spanish well, and 2) asked them to teach you some of their language? I'd probably start by learning to count to twenty, since I like numbers.

I once met a Maya on the bus. She was behind me talking on her phone, and I asked her (in Portuguese, an erroneous hunch based on the paucity of trilled "rr") what language she was speaking. She answered "Mam". It took me a second or two to recognize the name of the language. "Mam ... ¿es maya?"

[InnocentVixen]

I've never traveled too far south and I will admit my ignorance on the subject, rob sounds like he knows what he is talking about, sounds similar to the few indígenas I've met. (painfully shy, live away from civilization, marry very young)

I once met a boy that spoke one of this dialects and I was very surprised, he told me that he had to learn it because his grandparents did not speak spanish but he said he was not fluent, so one of his parents was obviously fluent in both languages at least, I think it would be important she is fluent in spanish that way when she is learning english she will be less likely to get stuck with a word nobody understands, but it would be just as hard to learn english as the average latina, they might have sounds we don't have in spanish but those sounds are not used in english, I would dare to say it would help her more with an asian language, so her native language will not give her an advantage, it might result in a very interesting accent though!

[michaelb]

I used to have GF who had to use her mother as an interpreter to speak to her grandparents. She only spoke English and they only spoke Cherokee.

[utopiacowboy]

My wife spent several years in Riohacha in La Guajira as a girl.

Her father was posted there and the family lived in one of the houses reserved for military officers. A colonel lived next door to them and unlike them, he both feared and loathed the natives who lived nearby. As she recalls they lived in groups and had a lot of animals, sometimes horses and cows but usually goats and burros.

This was more than thirty years ago and back then, many, maybe most of them only spoke Wayuu and dressed in the traditional manner. The women wore dresses but the guys just wore loincloths that covered the bare essentials in the front. It used to piss her off that the women seemed to do all the work and she'd often see a woman carrying a lot of stuff while her mate walked along not carrying anything. On the other hand, maybe the guy figured he had paid several goats or maybe a cow for this chick so the least she could do was carry their stuff. She remembered that there was a Colombian policeman who had paid some cold hard cash for a beautiful Wayuu but most of the time the price was paid in animals.

They used to sometimes go to Maicao which was the contraband capital of the universe. She said if it was available you could get it in Maicao and the place was filled with numerous traders and their shops of contraband goods. I guess since she was a young girl what she mostly remembers were the dolls that were available from all over the world for sale there. She and her sisters had a huge collection of dolls which one of her uncles later sold to get money for booze.

There was some kind of arrangement between Colombia and Venezuela that allowed the Wayuu to travel between the two countries without a passport or papers. One time her father had gone to Venezuela for an extended period and her mother needed to go see him to get him to sign papers of some sort. Her mother had no passport so she went with a group of Wayuu women that she knew dressed up as one of them. They chatted away in their native language but she had to keep her mouth shut because she couldn't speak the language well. It was enough to fool the guys at the border however and she was able to see her husband.

Her mother is a spunky woman even though she has a mal genio. Another time she was driving a car, again looking for her husband (what the hell was he doing?), and the car got a flat tire. While they were trying to fix the tire some guerrillas came up and found them and asked them what they were doing there. She told them that she had gotten lost looking for her husband and they had a flat. The guerrillas then fixed the flat for them and sent them on their way with directions.

[whitey]

Cool stories, UC ...