Richard Seddon wrote:
>
> Carrol
>
> I detect a more vigorous ideology than vigorous history in your last.  When
> Cortez conquered the Aztec the Aztec were some of the bloodiest warriors and
> conquerors in the New World.  They had lived in a perpetual state of warfare
> and conquest with their neighbors for several hundred years.  The Navajo
> used the Puebloans as slaves and were actively raiding the Puebloans until
> almost the 20th century.  Acoma pueblo was not built upon an insurmountable
> bluff because of the Spanish but because of the Navajo and Apache.  Today's
> Bureau of Indian Affairs is almost totally made up of Native Americans who
>

Human history (at least for the last 5000 years or so) is incredibly
bloody. And it would even be reasonable to include the original Spanish
conquests as 'simply' part of that bloodiness. In that sense, it is
legitimate to equate Cortez with the Aztecs and/or Navajo. The 'serious'
European ravaging of the world began with first the slave trade (not
only directly but in its disruption of the internal dynamic of African
civilization)and the butchery of the Irish under Elizabeth & then the
Commonwealth. This latter was qualitatively different from both the
Aztecs and Cortez.

Your description of the Navajo relationship to the Puebloans would fit
very nicely the world we see refracted through the _Odyssey_ or the
relationship of Rome to "barbarian" peoples. Or for that matter, much
that we see described in Thucydides.

Everyone has their own conception of how history moves (whether
explicitly formulated or merely tacit), which is what I suppose you mean
by ideology. (It is one of the many perfectly proper uses of the word,
just not my usage.) And of course such conceptions shape what one
regards as fact and one's interpretation of facts. I do not claim to be
an exception.

Incidentally, I've been New Mexico only once, to see a Mozart
performance in Santa Fe a few summers ago. When our party (some
relattives) went to Taos in three separate cars, Jan & I took a wrong
route and ended up coming at Taos from the wrong direction. The point of
this is that neither of us had even ever heard of the Rio Grande Gorge,
and it is really something to blunder on that by sheer accident, having
no foreknowledge.

Carrol