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Progress and its impact on the Nagas: A clash of worldviews

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The term 'progress' is a modern Western notion that life is always improving and advancing toward an ideal state. It is a vital modern concept which underlies geographic explorations and scientific and technological inventions as well as the desire to harness nature in order to increase human beings' ease and comfort. With the advent of Western colonization and to the great detriment of the colonized, the notion of progress began to perniciously and pervasively permeate across cultures. This book details the impact of the notion of progress on the Nagas and their culture. The interaction between the Nagas and the West, beginning with British military conquest and followed by American missionary intrusion, has resulted in the gradual demise of Naga culture. It is almost a cliché to assert that since the colonial contact, the long evolved Naga traditional values are being replaced by Western values. Consequences are still being felt in the lack of sense of direction and confusion among the Nagas today. Just like other Indigenous Peoples, whose history is characterized by traumatic cultural turmoil because of colonial interference, the Nagas have long been engaged in self-shame, self-negation and self-sabotage.

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Article
In discussions of historians and ethnohistorians, George T. Hunt's book, The Wars of the Iroquois, continues to loom prominently. His interpretation of events in northeastern North America during the seventeenth century, which proposed that the Iroquois fought the French colonials and French-dominated tribes for economic reasons, is widely accepted. This paper re-examines the period. It finds, contrary to Hunt and his followers, that the Iroquois did not fight for economic causes, and that the destruction or dispersal of many tribes around the middle of the seventeenth century did not result from the fur trade. A new look at the period reveals a set of forces destructive to tribes from Quebec to Wisconsin, including the Iroquois. Smallpox emerges as the most significant among those forces. This paper suggests that much of the historical and ethnohistorical literature before and after Hunt propounds biases which not only do injustice to the Iroquois, but prevent a deeper understanding of the historical truth.