Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Agent showing house finds pile of bones

http://www.sandomenico.org/uploaded/photos/Library/sitting-bul-250.jpgA real estate agent showing a house got to the basement and found about 100 human bones in a corner.

James Kenny, a forensic investigator with the Terrebonne Parish Coroner's Office, says the bones found Saturday were so old that dirt had saturated the marrow inside them.

He says they probably are remains of Native Americans buried long before the house was built.

Kenny says he learned that the previous residents would often find bones while mowing the lawn or doing yard work, and would put them in the basement.

Half of the split-level house is on top of a circular mound, which parish officials suggest may be an Indian burial mound.

Neither the agent nor the home's owner would talk to The Courier of Houma.

via Agent showing house finds pile of bones - Yahoo! News.

3 comments:

Ann said...

So, Xeno!!!

What does Tatanka Iyotaka have to do with this article? He is too well-respected by too many people.

The implication is that it was his bones in the house? A bit insulting for such a well-respected person, don't you think? (I think you can find a photo on the internet of T. Roosevelt sporting a headdress.)

Xeno said...

The Native Americans are not alone in being pretty much obliterated by greedy murderous foreigners with better weapons. This is a long time human problem, not an evil specific to American White Men. As Sting, (ironically) said, "History will teach us nothing."

Ann said...

Wow Xeno!

Come on, Xeno, you can do better than that jumbling things together and saying American Indians "not alone." Of course, it's true, but differences make a difference, because solutions are seldom generalities ... unless a real revolution occurs. But, would we be so lucky?

Don't you think you're taking Sting out of context? He wrote and sang "They Dance Alone” about women who dance the "Cueca sola" in Chile. If he didn't know anything about the history of Chile and only looked at the women who danced alone, do you think he would write, sing and produce a song about women who just dance alone? On contrary, he knew how Augusto Pinochet (pronounced Pinoshit) got into power in Chile (i.e. he knew history) and he knew why the women were dancing alone (current history). In that song, he sang, "Hey Mr. Pinochet ... It's foreign money that supports you," which means what, to someone who doesn't know history? Very little.

In "History Will Teach Us Nothing," yes, he sings: "Sooner or later we learn to throw the past away." But, Xeno, how can someone "throw the past away," when they don't know what it is? In that song he sings:

"Our written history is a catalog of crime / The sordid and the powerful, the architects of time / The mother of invention, the oppression of the mild /
The constant fear of scarcity, aggression as its child ..."

Obviously, he is referring to what history tells us. In these lyrics, Sting is portraying himself artistically as a historian summarizing history.

As an example of artistic false presentation of history, have you ever seen "Amistad" by Steven Spielberg? Wikipedia starts off like this: "...film based on the true story of a slave mutiny that took place aboard a ship of the same name in 1839 ..." But, the story of Amistad is far broader than the movie depicted. The event occurred during the abolitionist movement in the US. There weren't heroes, per se, but a very large segment of the country was involved, directly and indirectly. But, if all you know about the event is the movie, you're stuck with a fiction. And, what you gain from that fiction is the false impression about heroic individualism, a great theme in Hollywood movies.

Why do you think the state of Florida recently passed a law saying that the history taught in its schools will be the "facts"? Why do you suppose there was uproar from history teachers about that law? Why do you suppose the US changed its history after the Civil War? Why do you suppose you or most other Americans know nearly nothing about the history of the development of corporations in the US, or of advertising in the US?

Do you know there's a guy (a prof somewhere, no time to look him up) who has spent over 16 years studying only General Motors! Do you know why? He said, "because no one else has done it." Why does he obviously think it is so important to study that history?

Why do you suppose the Russian government wants to revise its history? Why do you suppose the former historians of Apartheid South Africa hardly mentioned Black Africans in its history?

If you think American Indians are beating a dead horse, when they talk about history get this: The people of Latvia, a small country on the east coast of the Baltic Sea, had its history suppressed for almost 700 years! Yet, after all that time, there was a history of the Latvian people.

We are really silly to think we know anything (!) about present without know how the present came to be.