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Mendonça, who works at São Paulo’s Federal University, said taking flight at a time of epidemic was a longstanding practice for South American indigenous communities, a survival technique passed down from generation to generation or acquired from personal suffering. “This is part of their ancestral memory,” she said.

But such tactics – which were employed during 2016’s H1N1 epidemic – also brought risks.

If those flocking back to remote villages from towns outside reserves were not properly quarantined or tested before returning it was possible they could carry coronavirus back home with them – with catastrophic effects.

Mendonça said authorities also needed to act swiftly to expel outsiders such as thousands of wildcat goldminers from reserves like the Yanomami territory, straddling Brazil’s border with Venezuela.

“If we don’t get these people out of the [indigenous] areas the chance of contagion is much greater,” she said.

Kaiabi, who is head of the Xingu Indigenous Land Association, said he feared Brazil’s specialized indigenous health system – which has faced dramatic cuts under the country’s anti-indigenous president, Jair Bolsonaro – was “totally unequipped” to deal with the coming coronavirus crisis.

tion in traditional sports, dancing, singing, commercial and cultural exchange and a dose of politics.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was notably absent from the closing ceremony after being booed at the Oct. 21 opening spectacle by demonstrators angry over a land demarcation proposal they say would be catastrophic for Brazilian natives’ traditional ways of life.

The plan being pushed in congress would give the power to demarcate indigenous lands to the legislative branch, which dominated by the powerful agribusiness lobby. The proposal cast a pall over the games — particularly after it was approved by a congressional commission in the middle of the event. Demonstrators responded by bursting into the arena during the 100-meter dash Wednesday night, forcing a premature end to the evening’s activities.

Billed as a sort of indigenous Olympics, the games featured sports that tend to form part native peoples’ traditions, from goggle-less river swimming to log races. Saturday saw the finals in canoeing, spear throwing and dramatic archery events.

The day’s most arresting sporting moment came with a demonstration of a traditional Mexican game, a high-stakes variation on field hockey played with a giant flaming puck.

The next edition of the games will be held in Canada in 2017.

Different species relate to fire in different ways, Costello explains. Wombats, for example, dig burrows to escape, while koalas climb into the canopy.

“When you do that, you get more productive landscapes, you get healthier plants and animals, you get regeneration, you discourage invasive elements, which are sometimes native species that might belong in the system next door.

Dr David Bowman is a professor of pyrogeography and fire science at the University of Tasmania. Bowman describes Indigenous fire management as “little fires tending the earth affectionately”.

In northern Australia, Indigenous land ownership is widespread. Caring for country and ranger programs in protected areas has delivered a degree of autonomy to traditional owners to walk the country, burning according to seasonal need and cultural knowledge.

Professor Bowman says it is possible to “blend Aboriginal with European and modern scientific approaches to create an opportunity for all land users and land owners”.

“These ‘right way’ fire days are getting fewer and fire behaviour is changing along the same lines as over east. Late season conditions are also driving more fires in unusual ways due to the climatic conditions we are currently facing.”

In the Kimberley, the Land council holds community fire planning meetings throughout the early dry season to ensure the correct people are burning their country.

“It was pretty bad before that happened,” Edwards says. “It was just fires running wild across huge tracts of north Australia that nobody was doing anything about.”

“If we want to manage our natural environment properly, we need to be doing prescribed burning. There’s so much cultural knowledge out there still, and it’s being totally ignored. There’s hundreds of Indigenous rangers out there now doing this work.”

The Coag national bushfire management policy includes a commitment to “promote Indigenous Australians’ use of fire”, but Indigenous fire groups like Firesticks Alliance say they need more resources to build capacity.

The Darwin centre for bushfire research at Charles Darwin University maps bushfires weekly. Since traditional burning was reintroduced on a large scale, the centre has collected enough data to show that the area of land destroyed by wildfires has more than halved, from 26.5m hectares in 2000, to just 11.5m hectares in 2019.

“Because in the end there’s two things which are important to [remember]: all humans have come from a fire management background in their cultures, it’s just that some cultures ended up obliterating that knowledge because of industrialisation.

“We need to encourage and promote the philosophy of Aboriginal fire practice because that’s going to be a really important pathway for sustainable fire management and also for healing because so many communities have been traumatised and shocked by the scale of the burning.”

“There’s all this canopy that’s been burnt away. We’ve got knowledge and techniques that can help heal that country in the future. It’s going to take some time. We’ve got probably two or three years before we can really be effective in some of that country because it needs to recover. But if we don’t get in there after that, then we miss our chance.”

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But not until the Spanish conquest of Peru was the conquest of the Aztecs matched in scope by the victory over the Inca empire in 1532.

A second (and permanent) settlement was established in 1580 by Juan de Garay, who arrived by sailing down the Paraná River from Asunción (now the capital of Paraguay). He dubbed the settlement "Santísima Trinidad" and its port became "Puerto de Santa María de los Buenos Aires." The city came to be the head of the Governorate of the Río de la Plata and in 1776 elevated to be the capital of the new Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata.

Spain's administration of its colonies in the Americas was divided into the Viceroyalty of New Spain 1535 (capital, México City), and the Viceroyalty of Peru 1542 (capital, Lima). In the 18th century the additional Viceroyalty of New Granada 1717 (capital, Bogotá), and Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata 1776 (capital, Buenos Aires) were established from portions of the Viceroyalty of Peru.

During the Napoleonic Peninsular War in Europe between France and Spain, assemblies called juntas were established to rule in the name of Ferdinand VII of Spain

The Libertadores (Spanish and Portuguese for "Liberators") were the principal leaders of the Spanish American wars of independence. They were predominantly criollos (Americas-born people of European ancestry, mostly Spanish or Portuguese), bourgeois and influenced by liberalism and in some cases with military training in the mother country.

These began a movement for colonial independence that spread to Spain's other colonies in the Americas. The ideas from the French and the American Revolution influenced the efforts. All of the colonies, except Cuba and Puerto Rico, attained independence by the 1820s

In 1898, the United States won victory in the Spanish–American War from Spain, ending the Spanish colonial era

It has been estimated that in the 16th century about 240,000 Spaniards emigrated to the Americas, and in the 17th century about 500,000, predominantly to Mexico and Peru.

The population of the Native Amerindian population in Mexico declined by an estimated 90% (reduced to 1–2.5 million people) by the early 17th century. In Peru the indigenous Amerindian pre-contact population of around 6.5 million declined to 1 million by the early 17th century.[citation needed] The overwhelming cause of decline in both Mexico and Peru was infectious diseases.

The Spaniards were committed, by Royal decree, to convert their New World indigenous subjects to Catholicism. However, often initial efforts were questionably successful, as the indigenous people added Catholicism into their longstanding traditional ceremonies and beliefs. The many native expressions, forms, practices, and items of art could be considered idolatry and prohibited or destroyed by Spanish missionaries, military and civilians. This included religious items, sculptures and jewelry made of gold or silver, which were melted down before shipment to Spain.

In 2015, a National Center for Truth and Reconciliation report estimated that more than 150,000 children attended these schools and more than 6,000 died, never returning home.

The report said the residential schools were "a systematic, government- sponsored attempt to destroy Aboriginal cultures and languages and to assimilate Aboriginal peoples so that they no longer existed as distinct peoples."

Morales' allies left the legislative chamber during the vote -- leaving her short of the legal minimum number of lawmakers required to appoint her.Anez has since named members of her cabinet and appointed new people to lead the armed forces.

The United States threw its support behind Anez Wednesday, officially recognizing her government.

"This coup d'etat that has triggered the death of my Bolivian brothers is a political and economic plot that came from the US," Morales said Wednesday.

stain themselves with the blood of the people,"

In the United States, in institutions ranging from the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington to regional natural history museums, the real arbiters of indigenous history these days are representatives of contemporary tribes. They oversee the display of a museum’s tribal artifacts and reshape accounts of the past, in many cases relying mainly on frayed strands of traumatically disrupted oral traditions. And everything is meant to increase self-esteem with promotional banality.

how different all of this is from images of the indigenous past north of the border! There are few areas where evidence of ancient state-size power exists (mainly in the 2,000-year-old relics of societies that once thrived along the Ohio, Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers). There are few places where cultural continuity is even remotely clear, and where ancient languages are still widely spoken. Even before colonization, cultures disappeared, leaving behind neither oral traditions nor written records. And forced migrations and centuries of warfare so disrupted native traditions that the past now seems little more than an identity-affirming fantasy.

the head of Mexico’s national archaeological administration, explained in her dissertation that it was not easy to balance the needs of archaeologists with a sensitivity toward the local community, which also has its set of demands. “An experienced archaeologist,” she writes, “on hearing ‘the community will decide,’ immediately abandons hope of success.”

the Clovis model was recently bolstered by new DNA analysis ancestrally connecting indigenous peoples in Central and South America to a boy from the Clovis culture whose 12,700-year-old remains were found in 1968 at a site in Montana.

she said she believed that humans had reached these plateaus even earlier, around 100,000 years ago, and might have come not overland from Asia but by boat from Africa.

Professor Boëda, who succeeded Dr. Guidon in leading the excavations, said that such early dates may have been possible but that more research was needed. His team is using thermoluminescence, a technique that measures the exposure of sediments to sunlight, to determine their age.

In what may be another blow to the Clovis model of humans’ coming from northeast Asia, molecular geneticists showed last year that the Botocudo indigenous people living in southeastern Brazil in the late 1800s shared gene sequences commonly found among Pacific Islanders from Polynesia.

How could Polynesians have made it to Brazil? Or aboriginal Australians? Or, if the archaeologists here are correct, how could a population arrive in this hinterland long before Clovis hunters began appearing in the Americas? The array of new discoveries has scholars on a quest for answers.

But he added that if the results obtained here in Serra da Capivara are accurate, they will raise even more questions about how the Americas were settled.“If so, then whoever lived there never passed on their genetic material to living populations,” said Dr. Waters, explaining how the genetic history of indigenous peoples links them to the Clovis child found in Montana. “We must think long and hard about these early sites and how they fit into the picture of the peopling of the Americas.”

“I knew, wow, I have slaves in my family, and I would like to know who they are,” he said. “It was an amazing pastime for me. It kept my mind off the fact that I knew that Monday morning I would have to go back to school and get bullied again.”

Dennis’s great-uncle, John Sherman Merritt, said it had been very difficult to get information from his elders, especially the great-grandmother who had been born before Emancipation and grew up during Reconstruction.

Through his searches he came across the work of a fifth cousin, Teresa Vega, a generation older, who was already engaged in a rigorous study of their ancestors from her apartment in Upper Manhattan.

His father, Dennis Sr., knew that there were family mysteries to be unraveled, though he had not tried to unlock them himself. Many of his relatives“don’t look like they’re of African descent,” he said. “Just visualizing our family, you can see that there’s a relation to different ethnic groups.”

Hangroot was a community once vibrant, but largely lost to history; its Black and Indigenous residents were mostly gone by 1910 — “gentrified out,” said Ms. Vega, by the twofold pressure of white immigrants and the arrival nearby of the Rockefellers. When a relative gave Dennis a photograph from around 1899 showing his great-great-grandfather as a boy in Hangroot, it put a face on an ancestor and a community Dennis knew only from documents.

Dennis learned about the great-great-grandfather in the photograph, how he worked himself to death at 31, and about his mother, born in 1871 in Virginia, the daughter of enslaved parents, who wrote poems that were published in newspapers.

Against his difficulties in school, his ancestors became role models. “Because grandpa John died of exhaustion, if I’m not dying from working hard, then why wouldn’t I continue to work hard?” Dennis said. “If I know that one of my ancestors couldn’t read and write for a few years because of the circumstances they were born into, but taught themselves how to do it, why wouldn’t I go online and look up a word that I didn’t know? So I’m learning from these stories. I’m not just finding these things out. They’re empowering me.”

Further searches revealed relatives of Mohawk descent.

Finally, an archivist at the Rye Historical Society found a bill of sale that Dennis realized referred to his sixth great-grandmother, Margaret Lyon, known as Peg, dated July 7, 1790. For the sum of “Fifty Pounds of New York Money,” she became the legal property of Nathan Merritt Jr., after whose family the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut is named.

Through DNA testing on numerous branches of the family, Mr. Richmond and his cousin Ms. Vega said they were able to determine that Peg bore at least one child — Mr. Richmond’s fifth great-grandfather, who was born into slavery — with a member of the white Merritt family that enslaved her.

Ms. Vega took the genealogy back a generation further. Peg Lyon, she found, was herself fathered by a man from the family that sold her to the Merritts, the Lyons, a comparably prominent family whose name is given to a park in nearby Port Chester, N.Y. Again, DNA testing confirmed her research.

She followed a family trail to Christine Varner, a Lyon descendant still living in Connecticut. Ms. Varner, who is white, said she always believed she might have relatives of African descent. Then Ms. Vega called.

In her childhood, her mother had taken her to the old African-American and Native American cemetery to place flowers on the graves. Now she understood why.

In the meantime, he said, his genealogy had given him a view of Black history far different from the one he’d learned in school — one that included Northern families like the Lyons and Merritts, Black and white, living in the same community for generations. During the pandemic, he wrote and self-published a book that included his adventures in genealogy, “He Spoke at My School.”

“To know that I have Indigenous DNA, on my dad’s side, just makes for a true American story,” he said. “You had slave owners who had slaves, and who had children with the people that they enslaved. You have people who came to this country from Europe and who had children with Indigenous people. And Indigenous people who had children with stolen Africans.

“And then you speed up hundreds of years,” he said, “and you have Dennis.”

Professor Paul Spoonley, Pro Vice-Chancellor of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Massey University, believes New Zealand's parliament is the most diverse in the nation's history in terms of gender, ethnic and indigenous representation.

The study offers one of the most complete accountings of that history, and presents a stark illustration of how, more than two centuries later, the legacy of displacement has compounded the challenges faced by Indigenous groups as they confront the growing threat posed by climate change.

More than 42% of tribes from the historical period now have no federally- or state-recognized land, and the present-day lands that tribes do still possess are an average of 2.6% the size of their estimated historical area.

In terms of climate change, the analysis found that tribes' current lands face more extreme heat and less precipitation. The Mojave tribe (along the Colorado River), for example, experiences an average 62 more days of extreme heat per year than it did on its historical lands. Nearly half of tribes experience heightened wildfire hazard exposure.

The reason why tribal nations are located in the places they are is because the U.S. tried to remove them and get them out of the way, so that the U.S. could build this massive industrial economy, that we now know contributes to increased concentrations of increased greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere," he said.

modern nationalist historians who criticize the Confucian school as taking an overly Sino-centric view of Korean history, reflecting the Chinese bia

colonial historiography, or singmin sahak, is of a fundamentally geopolitical nature and is the direct consequence of Korea's colonial experience under Japanese rule(1910-1945

This school points to geographic determinism as the leading factor in Korean history and argues that given Korea's geographic position, international interaction with surrounding powers, especially China, Japan, Russia, and more recently, the United States, is inevitable

the influence (or interference) of foreign "actors" has resulted in the inability of Koreans to chart an independent course in making policy, leading to a subservient national character and the predominance of acute factionalism in Korean politic

retarded or stunted nature of Korean historical development, as reflected in the continued existence of slavery up to the end of the Choson dynasty and the lack of a feudalist stage in Korea's historical development

not only that historical development in Korea is distinguished by its lack of indigenous progress, but also that what progress that has occurred has been the direct result of foreign influence and/or pressure

the nationalist school, emerged as a reaction against Japanese colonialism

for minjung theorists, Korean history is one of suffering -- of the masses subjugated socially, politically, and economically, whether it be in the form of Chinese cultural hegemony, the domination of the yangban class, Japanese colonialization, the "neo-colonial" influence of post-liberation superpowers (Japan and the United States in the South; China and Russia in the North), authoritarian government rule, or, most recently, international pressure on trade issues

Korea was on the verge of a cultural, political and social renaissance, led by a number of enlightened intellectuals (e.g. the Kapsin and Kabo reform movements and the Independence Club) who saw the decay of the Choson dynasty and recognized the need to bring Korea out of its self-imposed isolation.

Korea was the proverbial "shrimp caught between fighting whales," and the ensuing 35-year-long Japanese colonial period, coupled with Korea's subsequent national division and a devastating civil war, essentially wiped out any possibility of an indigenous movement building a modern, civil society independent of outside interference.

the nationalist school was divided over how to interpret the historical legacy of the "practical learning"(silhak) movement of the late Choson period

By the end of the 1970s, Korea's economic success seemed to confirm the nationalist model: Korean development, far from being dependent on outside factors (e.g. Chinese suzerainty, Japanese colonialism, etc.), had in fact undergone its own, unique evolution

Success in the economic field was matched by discoveries in Korean archaeology, which added a timeless dimension to the debate. The discovery of paleolithic artifacts and the widespread existence of bronze culture in ancient Korea were combined with the existence of private landholding during the Three Kingdoms period and the slow emergence of an upwardly-mobile class system during the Choson dynasty to argue that, far from being stagnant, traditional Korean society, while not exactly dynamic, was at the very least much more fluid

Korean history is one of slow but steady indigenous progress toward modern, civil society.

minjung, (populist, grassroots, "the masses," etc.) school of historical interpretation. This school emerged out of Korea's rapid economic development, with its uneven distribution of wealth and the rising class-consciousness of Korean workers, combined with popular resentment against continued authoritarian rule and the widely perceived illegitimacy of the Chun Doo-hwan government in the aftermath of the Kwangju Pro-Democracy Uprising in 1980

there is no single, encompassing minjung theory, and minjung theorists themselves have had mixed success in gaining widespread respect for their views, possibly in part by a reluctance by more conservative academics to give credibility to a movement admittedly inspired by Marxist ideology

Korean development as a modern civil society was thwarted just as it was emerging from the long, slow decline of the Choson dynasty

with the election of former pro-democracy opposition leader Kim Young-sam as president in 1992 following his party's merger with Korea's two leading conservative parties, the rise of a dominant Korean middle class and its concomitant influence on policy making, the emergence of a new generation of Koreans unfamiliar with past hardships, and the rise of globalization (and the decline of nationalism) as a defining influence, mainstream Korean society has all but rejected minjung theory.

where is a minjung historian to go when his erstwhile victims have gone mainstream and have adopted many of the perspectives of their newfound (middle) class?

no single theory is all-encompassing: each explains a part of a much greater whole.

colonial historiography explains Korea's relations in an unfriendly international setting, but it does not explain why Korea was unable to better adapt to an admittedly hostile environment.

nationalist historiography is also unable to adequately explain why Korea was unable to register impressive economic and political development until after its liberation from 35 years of Japanese colonial rule, and even then only in the context of U.S. liberation and protection during the Korean and Cold Wars, and without addressing the roles played by Japanese capital and a receptive U.S. market for Korea's export-led growth

it might benefit the would-be scholar to take a multifaceted approach to Korean historiography. At the very least, a comprehensive understanding of these historical schools is in order for any significant understanding of modern Korean history.

Mr. Stanley was acquitted in 2018 after testifying that he had unintentionally shot Mr. Boushie in the back of the head when his semiautomatic pistol experienced a rare mechanical malfunction. The verdict shocked many Indigenous Canadians.

On Monday Mr. Trudeau told reporters that the treatment of Mr. Boushie’s family and friends “was unacceptable,” adding, “We have seen, unfortunately, examples of systemic racism within the R.C.M.P., within many of our institutions, and we need to do better.”

The National Police Federation, a union representing the mounted police, countered the report’s findings, saying it “advances a perspective that disrespects our members and brings their impartiality, dedication and professionalism into question.”

The killing and the acquittal remain sources of anger for many Indigenous Canadians who have argued the case exposed significant flaws in Canada’s legal system.

The two men came out with guns and also attacked the Escape with a hammer. After Mr. Boushie was killed, the others fled.

As a result, the commission found, police descended on Ms. Baptiste’s house on the Red Pheasant Cree Nation, her Indigenous community, with two goals: to inform her of Mr. Boushie’s death and to search for a member of Mr. Boushie's group of friends as part of a related investigation into theft and attempted theft.

“Ms. Baptiste displayed distress at the news they had just given her, one member told her to ‘get it together,’” the report found. “One or more RCMP members smelled her breath” apparently for signs of alcohol.

The report also noted that the police destroyed recordings and transcripts of their communications from the time of the killing, which did follow standard retention protocols, but occurred knowing that Mr. Boushie’s family and the commission had initiated complaints for which these files would have been relevant.

After emancipation, Black people in Canada still faced segregation, and the looming threat of hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

Slavery was formally ended in the British empire in 1834, including British North America, but legislation was repeatedly passed that would weaken anti-slavery laws in the years leading up to abolition.

According to Henry’s research, the earliest record of African enslavement in colonial Canada was the sale of a young boy, named Olivier LeJeune in 1629.

by the end of the 1700s, as many as 2,000 Black people were enslaved in the Maritimes region. About 300 more people were enslaved in the area known as Lower Canada (what is now the province of Quebec) and as many as 700 in Upper Canada (Ontario).

Only in recent years has Canada grappled with the legacy of its residential schools – where many Indigenous students were sent against their will and experienced verbal, physical and sexual abuse – a period which schools have now started to teach.

Linda Burney, an opposition spokeswoman on Indigenous Australians, said more than 430 Indigenous people had died in Australian police custody since 1991. While Indigenous adults make up only 2 percent of the Australian population, they account for 27 percent of the prison population. "I think we should be using it as an opportunity," Burney told Australian Broadcasting Corp, referring to Floyd's death. "Whether we like it or not, it doesn't take much for racism to come out of the underbelly of this country."

Some have seen the US unrest as a chance to highlight what they see as American hypocrisy on protest movements at home versus abroad.  China's foreign ministry spokesperson called out US racism as "a chronic disease of American society". China's comments come at a time when relations with the US are particularly strained. Chinese state media is giving extensive coverage to the violent protests roiling American cities, while the unrest has also featured widely in Chinese social media.

In Europe, thousands spilled across streets in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, to denounce police brutality, and those demonstrating in Paris urged the French government to take police violence more seriously and held up signs including "Racism is suffocating us". The EU's diplomatic chief Josep Borrell condemned the "abuse of power", saying Europe is "shocked and appalled" by the police killing of Floyd. He urged US authorities to rein in the "excessive use of force" as Trump ordered the military to intervene. Germany announced its support for the demonstrations. "The peaceful protests that we see in the US ... are understandable and more than legitimate. I hope that these peaceful protests won't slide further into violence, but even more than that I hope that they will make a difference in the United States," Foreign Minister Heiko Maas told reporters.

Iran's foreign ministry called on the US to "stop violence" against its own people. "To the American people: the world has heard your outcry over the state of oppression. The world is standing with you," foreign ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi said at a news conference in Tehran. "And to the American officials and police: Stop violence against your people and let them breathe," he told reporters in English. Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam, meanwhile, questioned foreign criticism of China, including from the US, over an imminent national security law being imposed in the Chinese territory. "They take their own country's national security very seriously, but for the security of our country, especially the situation in Hong Kong, they are looking at it through tinted glasses," she said.

Ghana's President Nana Akufo-Addo said Black people across the world are "shocked and distraught" by Floyd's killing. "Black people, the world over, are shocked and distraught by the killing of an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, by a white police officer in the United States of America," Akufo-Addo said in a statement. "We stand with our kith and kin in America in these difficult and trying times." Kenyan opposition leader and former prime minister Raila Odinga offered a prayer for the US "that there be justice and freedom for all human beings who call America their country". Like some in Africa who have spoken out, Odinga also noted troubles at home, saying the judging of people by character instead of skin colour "is a dream we in Africa, too, owe our citizens". And South Africa's finance minister, Tito Mboweni, recalled leading a small protest outside the US Embassy several years ago over the apparent systemic killings of Blacks. Mboweni said the US ambassador at the time, Patrick Gaspard, "invited me to his office and said: 'What you see is nothing, it is much worse'." Zimbabwe summoned the ambassador of the United States to the country over remarks by a senior US official accusing it of stirring anti-racism protests following Floyd's death.  In an interview with ABC News, US national security adviser Robert O'Brien referred to Zimbabwe and China as "foreign adversaries" using social media to stoke unrest and "sow discord" after the killing. Zimbabwe's foreign ministry spokesman James Manzou said US Ambassador Brian Nichols was called in to explain O'Brien's remarks. Government spokesman Nick Mangwana said Zimbabwe did not consider itself "America's adversary".   "We prefer having friends and allies to having unhelpful adversity with any other nation including the USA," Mangwana said.

Blaming black Americans for dying from a novel virus because they had diabetes or high blood pressure was precisely what Azar was doing

the moment when the US response to coronavirus escalated into a full culture war is revealing. The big protests at state capitols, with crowds of white Americans demanding their governors reopen the economy, started about a week after national news outlets began reporting in early April that black Americans made up a disproportionate number of the dead.

Systemic racism created the health disparities that made black and brown Americans more vulnerable to dying from coronavirus, public health experts say; and now the same racism is also shaping, and undermining, the country’s political response to the pandemic.

It’s not a new idea that thousands of people must die to preserve America’s “business as usual”. It’s not a new assumption many of those people will be brown or black.

Americans don’t have much of a national vocabulary for talking about collective action and sacrifice

a gun rights activist from Austin, Texas, has strong opinions about tyranny and freedom. But he said he was frustrated that some of his usual allies did not seem to understand that dealing with a novel virus, in a country where no one has immunity, required a different kind of politics.

“Our rights are being violated. That is all actually real,” Stokes said. “But this is one of the few times when that’s OK. Pandemics – these call for a collectivist response. They don’t work without one.”

For some wealthy Americans eager to reopen the economy, the motivating fear may be the risk of social change, the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz said.

It’s not surprising that Americans, who are used to tackling every problem through the lens of “individual rights”, would struggle with how to respond to the collective demands of a pandemic. “It’s this mismatch in terms of a social problem, and the tools we have at our disposal to make sense of it,” the sociologist Jennifer Carlson said.

Early Puritan accounts of arriving in the New World and seeing indigenous people dying of illness are marked by a familiar self-righteousness. The Puritans look at an epidemic and “think it’s a divine dispensation”, Blanchfield said. “The very fact that people are dying is taken as both pragmatically offering market opportunities ... but also as a theological vindication of your own survivorship.”

European colonists established their settlements in the midst of the mass death of indigenous people and opened the American market for business “at gunpoint, in the wake of that epidemic”, said Patrick Blanchfield, the author of a forthcoming 500-year history of American gun violence. Enslaved black people died performing the essential labor that kept the economy running.

Today, “who is being asked to die for the market to be open?” Blanchfield said. “It’s black people. It’s Native American tribal communities.”

The coronavirus culture war is “kind of a petri dish of all the psychoses of US history”, as Dunbar-Ortiz, the author of An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, put it.

That Puritan instinct to see infection as a sign of guilt, and health as a kind of vindication, is currently playing out across the political spectrum.

American liberals sometimes treat their belief in science as a kind of religion, Blanchfield argued, fetishizing technocrats and rejoicing when conservatives who do not “believe in science” are punished.

This impulse to blame other people for getting sick is rooted in fear

“Everyone wants some narrative, to explain the unimaginable level of illness and death and vulnerability that we’re all feeling,” he said. “Everyone wants there to be a logic to this.

The victim-blaming on the left, though, has come from individuals’ Twitter accounts, not Democratic party leadership. The victim-blaming of black Americans has come from the highest levels of government.

Just days after national news outlets first reported the emerging racial disparities in coronavirus deaths, Trump’s surgeon general, Jerome Adams, said at a White House briefing that communities of color needed to “step up” and advised them to “avoid alcohol, tobacco, and drugs”.

Lecturing individual black Americans about smoking, rather than talking about African Americans’ increased environmental exposure to air pollution, a demonstrated coronavirus risk, was classic “victim-blaming”

Poll results from mid-March had shown black respondents were actually more likely than white respondents to see coronavirus as a serious threat to their own health, he said.

“It’s hard, when you have so many white people who are protesting and not social distancing, to argue that they are taking it more seriously and that’s why they are less likely to die,” he said.

But the same argument that black Americans were to blame for dying simply evolved, Kendi said, to focus more on their “pre-existing conditions”.

In Louisiana, Senator Bill Cassidy, a white Republican and a medical doctor, had already cast doubt on whether inequities rooted in systemic racism were the reason so many black Louisiana citizens were dying of coronavirus. “That’s rhetoric,” he told NPR in early April. The real answer, the answer backed by science, was that “African Americans are 60% more likely to have diabetes” and that “we need to address the obesity epidemic”.

Blaming the victims of American racial disparities for what they suffer has a reliable outcome: nothing is done. The deaths mount.

Ronald Reagan attacked America’s post-war investment in social programs, Kotsko said, “by pointing out that the generosity is now extending to black people” and suggesting that “it’s better to tear down the system of solidarity than to allow the wrong people to get the benefits”.

Metzl argued in his book Dying of Whiteness that the way racism has shaped gun policy and healthcare choices in this country has led to outcomes that hurt black and brown Americans, but that also led to measurable increases in the deaths of white Americans. Today, he’s afraid that same dynamic is playing out again.

The Puritans had a form of torture called “pressing”, used during the Salem witch trials. They made the accused person lie on the ground, and then very slowly, over many days, placed one rock on their chest, and then another.

But all of this, Graeber and Wengrow argue, is wrong. Recent archaeological discoveries, they write, show that early humans, far from being automatons blindly moving in evolutionary lock step in response to material pressures, self-consciously experimented with “a carnival parade of political forms.”

It’s a more accurate story, they argue, but also “a more hopeful and more interesting” one

Reviewing the book in The Nation, the historian Daniel Immerwahr called Graeber “a wildly creative thinker” who was “better known for being interesting than right” and asked if the book’s confident leaps and hypotheses “can be trusted.”

At first, they thought it might be a short book on the origins of social inequality.

“The more we thought, we wondered why should you frame human history in terms of that question?” Wengrow said. “It presupposes that once upon a time, there was something else.”

“We are all projects of collective self-creation,” they write. “What if, instead of telling the story about how our society fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?”

Graeber and Wengrow, by contrast, write in the grand tradition of social theory descended from Weber, Durkheim and Levi-Strauss.

And Immerwahr deemed at least one claim — that colonial American settlers captured by Indigenous people “almost invariably” chose to stay with them — “ballistically false,” claiming that the authors’ single cited source (a 1977 dissertation) “actually argues the opposite.”

Wengrow countered that it was Immerwahr who was reading the source wrong. And he noted that he and Graeber had taken care to publish the book’s core arguments in leading peer-reviewed scholarly journals or deliver them as some of the most prestigious invited lectures in the field.

he said the two men had delivered a “fatal blow” to the already-weakened idea that settling down in agricultural states was what humans “had been waiting to do all along.”

But the most striking part of “The Dawn of Everything,” Scott said, is an early chapter on what the authors call the “Indigenous critique.” The European Enlightenment, they argue, rather than being a gift of wisdom bestowed on the rest of the world, grew out of a dialogue with Indigenous people of the New World, whose trenchant assessments of the shortcomings of European society influenced emerging ideas of freedom.

“The Dawn of Everything” sees pervasive evidence for large complex societies that thrived without the existence of the state, and defines freedom chiefly as “freedom to disobey.”

“We’ve reached the stage of history where we have scientists and activists agreeing our prevailing system is putting us and our planet on a course of real catastrophe,”

“To find yourself paralyzed, with your horizons closed off by false perspectives on human possibilities, based on a mythological conception of history, is not a great place to be.”

What is your reaction to the article? What did you learn? What emotions, thoughts or questions did you have after reading? Respond to these questions in your journal.

Look closely at the photograph you selected and ask yourself these questions from Ms. Farr’s lesson:Does the photo have high-contrast colors, low-contrast colors or a mix of both?What’s the first thing you see in the photo? What’s the next thing you notice?

Finally, choose one quotation from the article to pair with the photograph you selected. How does the photograph help illustrate an idea from the quotation? You can share your selection with classmates and then discuss which photographs and quotations you selected and why.

About 4,000 years ago, people started burning the forest, which was mostly bamboo, just enough to make small openings. They may have planted maize or squash, weeded out some underbrush, and transported seeds or saplings to create a partly curated forest of useful tree products that Dr. Watling calls a “prehistoric supermarket.” After that, they started building the geoglyphs. The presence of just a few artifacts, and the layout of the earthworks, suggest they weren’t used as ancient villages or for military defenses. They were likely built for rituals, some archaeologists suspect.

in contrast with the large-scale deforestation we see today — which threatens about 20 percent of the largest rain forest in the world — ancient indigenous people of the Amazon practiced something more akin to what we now call agroforestry. They restricted burns to site locations and maintained the surrounding landscape, creating small, temporary clearings in the bamboo and promoting the growth of plants like palm, cedar and Brazil nut that were, and still are, useful commodities. Today, indigenous groups around the world continue these sustainable practices in forests.

Sugar was a luxury in Europe prior to the 18th century. It became widely popular in the 18th century, then graduated to becoming a necessity in the 19th century.