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[+] 27 points 10 months ago (10 children)
  • [–] 24 points 10 months ago (6 children)

    The ancient Maya civilization collapsed, but Maya peoples and cultures still exist!

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  • [+] 15 points 10 months ago (5 children)
  • [–] 28 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    My point wasn’t at all that these cultures haven’t been victim to colonization and genocide, but that they are still around today and not vanished. A common refrain I hear from many indigenous people is that it’s important for people to know they still exist, and I always try to put that information out there.

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  • [+] 7 points 10 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 16 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Absolutely, it’s terrible and that loss is irreplaceable. I don’t want to diminish that truth at all, just to respect the indigenous people that want to emphasize their continued survivance.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Speaking of the Mayas, check out EZLN. I was at Zapatista's schools in the high mountains of Chiapas and it was amazing to me seeing how they live there and how they reference themselves, individually, as inheritors of Mayan culture...

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  • [–] 9 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    I always like to imagine if these guys were given another thousand years or so, what would their world have looked like. Would they develop a sustainable form of government that could manage millions of people? What would the Mayan space program look like? What kind of movies would they make? Stuff like that.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago*

    There's no linear path to progress, many of your questions perhaps would make no sense under that scenario. But I like your prompt.

    I am thinking of a world where there was no centuries of slavery in the west. So no imperial power in Europe or North america. So, probably a ver bleak situation in Europe. Also, no chocolate, coffee, corn!!, or potatoes...

    Meanwhile if the Americas and its people would continue on their own, probably the Incas would have expanded more or just live in constant war with Mesoamericans... Maybe the latter would have expanded north...

    And their technology may have "advanced" toward an integral way of living conneted to nature instead of the highly optimized exploitation and demeaning that Illuminism wrote on our frontal lobes as the maximal case of success

    I like these thoughts. Not a writer myself, but I can see some novel saga growing in this alternate timeline...

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago

    The Maya culture was a religious culture, and would not exist if not for religion. You mean "if it weren't for Christianity", or alternatively, "if it weren't for religions that enforce their idea of objective reality on others". You don't hate religion, you hate realism.

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