diary thoughts

Etymology from Wikipedia:

'The word diary comes from the Latin diarium ("daily allowance," from dies "day").[1] The word journal comes from the same root (diurnus "of the day") through Old French jurnal (modern French for day is jour).[2]'

Heh.

Logging is very different in origin, from the logbook on a ship, that records the ship's speed, as measured by throwing a log overboard.

There's debate as to what to call various things. Some say a diary is a daily record of your life, while your journal is more personal thoughts and ideas. I'd have said a diary is more personal, while a journal is more specific, like a scientific or writing journal. The show "Roswell" had one precious line for me, from a scientist-wannabe girl:

"I keep this diary, or really more of a journal, because journals are what scientists call their diaries."

I ostensibly kept a diary as a kid, but the entries were very sparse and minimal. I re-read it last year and was not particularly enlightened. Late in college I started writing down the books I read, and my expenses, and the former grew into a general life log. More of an event-record log or journal than an emotional reflections diary, though some of those.

The Diary of Anne Frank probably influenced what I thought a diary should be, and I've never kept up such a "Dear Diary" format, though it's tempting to practice writing "real letters" more than the abbreviated sentences of my log. Re-reading recently, I am in awe of her foresight in doing an initial infodump of her life and the people in it.

Logging or journaling seems to come naturally to me now. I kept a log at my old full-time job, and keep one at my current job. I took notes during various RPGs I've played in, one set of which I made public which helped the GM and other players.

I read about bullet journals recently, and it seemed like a neat idea which isn't very relevant because I do everything electronically now. Don't need a page index when you don't have pages and can just search for things. Some of the bulleting ideas could be useful; I already have a couple of my own.

I asked on Facebook recently, and only two friends spoke up about keeping a diary. I wondered later if Facebook itself, or Twitter or Instagram, acts as a diary for various people. Though for me privacy was always a key aspect, so such an attitude doesn't come naturally; posts are about reaching an audience as much or more than musing or recording. My travel posts are an exception -- long record of stuff, little privacy needed, showing off -- where my private log just contains links to my LJ posts.

US Indian history

Why you can't teach United States History Without American Indians. Anthology of essays, aimed at college level history, about various historical topics from a more Indian perspective.

1. Borders and Borderlands. Even hunter-gatherers have a strong sense of the lands they have a right to forage in, and mobile groups like the Apache or Comanche marked their borders with cairns or forced-growth trees. There was no empty territory when the Europeans arrived, except maybe where disease had killed off all the claimants. But US history tends to describe a frontier expanding into empty or vague land, and maps reinforce this -- pre-colonial populations are perhaps marked with names -- sometimes of subsistence strategies or language families -- floating vaguely over a map, with no well-defined border or capitals marked, while maps of the post-colonial era show European colonies in bold colors, pushing into a washed out Indian or empty territory. Maps *from* the period made by Europeans, especially the French and Spanish, are much more explicit and respectful of Indian states and borders.

2. Encounter and Trade in the Early Atlantic World. We don't know much about 1500s North Atlantic America, but there was a lot of European contact and trade, first driven by the cod fishery, with fishermen buying medicine and fresh food. Then the fur trade, with furs bought with cloth and metal goods, and cloth made specifically for Indian tastes, probably driven by Indian women. 60-70% of fur trader expenditures went to buying cloth, dwarfing alcohol (5%) and firearms.

3. Rethinking the American Paradox, Bacon's Rebellion. I don't remember ever hearing about Bacon's Rebellion, but apparently historians have considered it really important, with the usual story focusing on a rebellion by lower class whites against the elites. The essay places it in the context of a long-burning war between Indian nations, and talks about the trade in Indian slaves (which I first really heard about from Charles Mann). The supply of white indentures contracted around 1660, and Virginia planters got more access to African slaves around 1700; enslaved Indians bridged the gap, though many were also exported to the West Indies. Between 1670 and 1700, 40% of slaves on the upper James river were Indians.

4. Recentering Indian Women in the American Revolution. Role of Indian women in owning land and making political decisions. George "Town Destroyer" Washington's 1779 orders to wage total war on the Iroquois, destroying houses and crops and taking women and children as hostages. An odd incident when General Sullivan ran across an old woman in an abandoned village and left her there, against orders.

5. The Empty Continent. Another map about how Indians are erased from maps.

6. The Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, and American Indians. An essay about rather infuriating and indefensible European concepts that 'discovering' land gave them right over the land and inhabitants, with discussion of the discovery rituals Europeans would engage in to mark the territory. The later "Manifest Destiny" of US thought is largely claiming to sweep away existing European rights from discovery, as well as any surviving Indian title.

7. Indiana and the California Gold Rush. Gold was found by white and Indian laborers on Sutter's colony; Sutter made a claim to the governor backed by some local Indian chiefs; Indians workers left for gold mines themselves, leaving Sutter's colony starved of labor. White miners hunted Indians for sport. An 1850 law legalized the enslavement of California Indians.

8. Why you can't teach the history of US slavery Without American Indians. Discussion of slavery by and of Indians. The Carolinas exporting Indian slaves to fund buying African slaves (reflecting a desire to have non-local slaves who wouldn't be able to run away as easily.)

9. American Indians and the Civil War. The Dakota War in 1862 Minnesota. Lincoln signing the Homestead Act in 1862, in gross violation of US treaties with Indian nations. Corruption stealing the annuities promised to reservation Indians. Confederate soldiers treated as POWs, Dakota fighters treated as criminals guilty of capital crimes, with Lincoln authorizing the largest mass execution in US history. Kit Carson's ethnic cleansing of the Navajo. The Sand Creek Massacre.

Continued here: https://mindstalk.dreamwidth.org/496129.html

US Indian history, part 2.

Started here https://mindstalk.dreamwidth.org/495960.html

10. Indian Warfare in the West. Discusses policies of assimilation and allotment, with even "friends" of the Indians advocating assimilation backed up by threat of violence. Total warfare that embraced massacre of non-combatants, unlike Sherman's march in the Confederacy. Some Indian perspectives of "not defeated, just agreeing to not fight."

11. America's Indigenous Reading Revolution. Memoirs of an Omaha boy's schooling (La Flesche, The Middle Five). Indian mission schools as laboratories for pedagogical experiments.

12. "Working" from the Margins. Documenting Indian participation in the New Deal. Ranges from re-intepretation of the "Migrant Mother" photograph of Florence Owens Thompson, a Cherokee woman not identified as such by the photographer, to periodicals about Indian labor in New Deal programs.

I'm running out of summarization steam.

13. Indians and the civil rights movement.

14. Indians moving to cities.

15. Indian religion.

16. Power generation on Indian reservations. Lots of coal mines and power plants located on their land; they get the mining damage and pollution, white cities get the power.

17. American history as settler colonialism. "Settler colonialism" is a framework developed by Canadian and Australian scholars, but also applicable to the USA and Israel. Nez Perce allotment.

18. Federalism. Erasure of Indian sovereignty in talking about federal and state sovereignties, and of course actual erasued by Andrew Jackson and others.

19. Indians and indigenous people elsewhere, global similarities and alliances.