Quote - There were massacres on both sides.  The atrocities were nowhere near as one-sided as some would have us to believe.

If there were two legitimate sides I would agree, but there weren't. There was only one population with a right to be in the area - and they lost, to the point that only 200,000 were left alive in all of the USA in 1900.

And bringing the Aztecs into that is different.
Yes, I noted it as the second largest genocide in history, after the conquest of Hispanolia, but neither of those is in Toltec lands. I am well aware of the fact that Cortez' "conquest" of the Aztecs was actually a Toltec uprising in which he only played a part as an icon of fear which he later used to establish control after the Toltecs were likewise weakened by disease beyond the point of resistance.

• Something that became key a few centuries later, in the late 1800s, when US Calvary, knowing their history, intentionally gave pox-ridden blankets to Natives on reservations in order to finish them off.

For those who say don't rub each other's past into the present... this is the present for many people. There are women my age alive today who were forcibly sterilized by the government to keep Indian births down. There are men and women both my age who were taken from their parents and given to white families to be raised in 'civilized conditions'.

I was born in 1971.

Only a few years before my birth my parent's marriage was illegal in much of the US, due to anti-mysogenation laws.

But... you wanted to know why I find cowboy hats objectionable. You got it.

If you don't like it, too f-ing bad. Deal. Deal with the fact that a lot of people view the western expansion as a wholly unjustified atrocity, and it brings up harsh memories for many. Turkey has its denial of the Armenian Genocide, Japan Denies the Rape of Nanking, and the US denies the west.

This isn't political correctness - this is being the decendant of a person who walked the trail of tears.

It may be intellectual for you, for me, it is my bloodline that was spilled, and the story is in the faces of all the cousins that were never born.

And don't try to sidetrack that by claiming the old 'noble-savage' line - Where did I say native people were 'paragons of tolerance etc'? Nowhere. I'm not talking about white usurpation of our politics to justify their liberalism or their conservatism. I'm talking about my blood.

Like I said, it was off-topic. You should not have asked me - just accept that I don't care much cowboy hats. I accepted that the other poster didn't care for Matadors, although I agreed with him in that case - I could accept it as his view nevertheless and just move on to art.

But if you ask me wahy, I will answer, and if you don't like the answer, too bad.

Truth has no value without backing by unfounded belief.
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