Pacific Seafarers and Maritime Cultures

Well, to be honest, these articles were kind of difficult for me to read. Not because the language or vocabulary was difficult to understand, but because I just found it to be kind of redundant and a little tiresome. Personally, I thought that it was talking about too much "this place is this many kilometers from this place" and stuff like that. The one thing (which was also the main point of the articles kinda) that I found interesting was that humans were traveling be sea and discovering land a lot sooner than we may have imagined. My favorite part was actually when the author said that "it now appears that Homo erectus reached the Indonesian island of Flores by 750,000 years ago." That part was just so cool to me because I just imagined cavemen braving the seas on their little simple rafts and boats! Overall, it is an interesting concept. I just thought that it dragged on a little.

The American Indian and the Problem of History

While I am not an expert on the complete history of the Native Americans, I feel that I am quite familiar with their backstory. Having your history class last year, I was able to expand my knowledge about what really went down with the Native Americans and Columbus. This reading reminded me of a lot of things that I had previously been taught about the true history of America. Such as the fact that Christopher Columbus did not, in fact, discover America. Well, I guess you could argue that he did, but then you it would just be that he didn't "discover" it first. The Native Americans lay claim to that feat. Or do they? It seems that Native Americans have, for the most part, been squeezed out of history textbooks and elementary classrooms. And it brings up a question that we were asked to think about in my previous history class: Why? It may be because it is too difficult to try to rewrite the history books. Maybe we are too embarrassed to let everyone know that we've been doing it all wrong, so why stop now. Or maybe, it is just because we are too ignorant to realize the mess that we are creating/have created. Packets like the one that we just read are important because they inform readers about typical historical events but from a different perspective. A perspective that we are not usually familiar with. The way that it causes us to think is both healthy and saddening. Because as some of us begin to hear the truth, we also realize that we are so very late.