Anurag Jain's Blog on Bangalore Events, Travel, IIM Bangalore, IIM, IIMB, Management

Friday, October 01, 2004

Posted 1:04 PM by Anurag

Indians: Dots, Not Feathers!

Sometime back, while watching the movie Good Will Hunting, I came across this witty way of differentiating between the India-Indians and the Red Indians (aka Native Americans): Dots, Not Feathers! I had mentioned it somewhere on my blog at that time also. Its interesting because it refers to two very basic features/customs that can be associated with the two races. Dots refers to Bindis (singular: Bindi), the red circular dot that is worn on forehead by (usually married) India-Indian females. Feathers, of course, refers to the customary (chicken?) feathers in the headgear worn by Native Americans.

Talking about Indians of all sorts :), of course, everyone knows that Columbus was looking for India when he accidentally found Americas. But the Americas that Columbus discovered were not uninhabitated. The people who were already there on American land and their descendants are today known as Native Americans.

And what exactly was the touch-down point for Columbus? "There is still much discussion about which island he reached, but many historians believe that it was likely San Salvador Island in the Bahamas (landing was on October 12, 1492)....The first Native American group encountered by Columbus, the 250,000 Arawaks of Haiti, were violently enslaved. Only 500 survived by the year 1550, and the group was totally extinct before 1650. Over the next 400 years, if the contacts between the two cultures rarely amounted to outright genocide, they would typically be disastrous for the Native Americans."

Now, who were these people who were already in Americas before Columbus? I mean, when and where did they come from? Apparently, the most accepted theory is that these Native guys had come from Siberia to Alaska by crossing the Bering Strait (map here). And that seems to have had happened as early as 12,000 years ago!

I remember hearing this funny conversation in a hollywood movie or a sitcom (maybe Friends?). Character A says something like :"She's from Siberia". Character B says: "Siberia, you mean the country?"

How ironically ignorant of their forefathers :)
(Of course, I know it was in a funny context but hey, I just wanted to make a comment :-)

0 comments

Comments: Post a Comment