Exemple de texte de niveau 1
Archaeology’s Disputed Genius (Nova, pbs.org, September 2015)
Deep inside the Rising Star cave system, in South Africa, in a remote chamber nearly impossible to access, lie thousands of bone fragments that may be from a newly discovered species of hominin, an ancient evolutionary ancestor to modern humans. A team of researchers and cavers, led by paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, excavated the remains of the creature now known as Homo naledi, or “star” in the Sotho language*. (…) Over the course of 21 days in November, 2013, Berger’s team unearthed 1,550 individual hominin bone fragments, more than had previously been discovered in 90 years of exploration in Southern Africa.
The bones come from as many as 18 individuals—male and female, infants to elders. “If you’re an anthropologist this is a really good discovery,” says John Hawks, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin and one of Berger’s collaborators. Hawks says anthropologists have struggled to understand how our ancestors developed before we were human partly because “we just haven’t had fossils that represent the whole life span*.”(….)
“This creature looks like it sits at the base of our entire lineage*,” Lee Berger suggests. H. naledi’s brain is about a third the size of a modern human’s, which would make it the smallest in the genus. Berger describes the shoulders as very primitive. The hands are advanced but curved with a long thumb suitable for climbing trees like earlier hominin species. “The feet are practically indistinguishable from modern humans. This is a walker!” Berger exclaims. “But perhaps that’s not the most amazing thing about this discovery.”
Berger leans forward, and a wide smile spreads across his face. “We are going to tell the world that this nonhuman animal deliberately disposed of* its dead in that chamber. It implies they probably recognized their own mortality and took some level of risk to move into that deep dark zone of the chamber to make sure their dead weren’t touched by the external environment in perpetuity.”
Humans are the only creatures known to purposefully bury their dead, a custom that arose between 60,000 and 80,000 years ago. Berger’s team hasn’t been able to date the H. naledi fossils yet, and many of his claims rest on accurate dating. Radio carbon dating is only effective on artifacts up to 50,000 years old, and while there are other techniques that can stretch back millions of years, they don’t work well with the sediments found in the Rising Star cave. For Berger, the exact age of this new species is not that important. “No matter how old these are, it’s going to transform our field.”
If it turns out that H. naledi is extremely old and indeed sits at the base of human evolution, then Berger suggests perhaps modern humans inherited this practice of burying our dead from H. naledi. (…) However, if H. naledi turns out to be a relatively recent species, say just 10,000 to 20,000 years old, Berger wouldn’t be disappointed. An incurable optimist, he would reinterpret it this way: “Another species of animal stood side by side with us (…) with a level of complexity of that of a modern human in the way it thought about itself and the environment.”
Those are wildly speculative hypotheses, the sort which Berger’s colleagues have criticized him for propagating in the past. “Lee likes to tell as good a story as he can,” says William Jungers, professor of anatomical sciences at Stony Brook University.
Jungers doesn’t dispute that the H. naledi bones belong in the genus Homo and were likely deposited deliberately, but he cautions against “trying to argue for complex social organization and symbolic behaviors.” There may be a simple answer. “Dumping* bodies down a hole may be better than letting them decay around you.” He suggests it’s possible that there was once another, easier, way to access the chamber where the bones were found. Until scientists can know the approximate age of the Homo naledi fossils, Jungers says they are “more curiosities than game changers*.”
Jungers is more dismissive of Berger’s suggestion that we may have inherited the practice of burying our dead from H. naledi, a creature with a much smaller brain than modern humans. “That’s crazy speculation—the suggestion that modern humans learned anything from these pin heads* is funny.”(…)
“Lee is a great story teller in part because he’s excited about what he’s doing,” Jungers says. “When Lee gets in trouble is when he takes off his scientific hat and puts on his salesman hat.”
Vocabulary:
*the Sotho language: one of the official languages of South Africa
*the whole life span: toute la durée d’une vie
*lineage: une lignée
*to dispose of : se débarrasser de
*to dump : jeter
*they are more curiosities than game changers : the fossils are curiosities, but do not really constitute a scientific revolution (they don’t “change the rules of the game”).
*a pin: une épingle/ a pin head = someone who has a brain as small as a pin, who is stupid
Deep inside the Rising Star cave system, in South Africa, in a remote chamber nearly impossible to access, lie thousands of bone fragments that may be from a newly discovered species of hominin, an ancient evolutionary ancestor to modern humans. A team of researchers and cavers, led by paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, excavated the remains of the creature now known as Homo naledi, or “star” in the Sotho language*. (…) Over the course of 21 days in November, 2013, Berger’s team unearthed 1,550 individual hominin bone fragments, more than had previously been discovered in 90 years of exploration in Southern Africa.
The bones come from as many as 18 individuals—male and female, infants to elders. “If you’re an anthropologist this is a really good discovery,” says John Hawks, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin and one of Berger’s collaborators. Hawks says anthropologists have struggled to understand how our ancestors developed before we were human partly because “we just haven’t had fossils that represent the whole life span*.”(….)
“This creature looks like it sits at the base of our entire lineage*,” Lee Berger suggests. H. naledi’s brain is about a third the size of a modern human’s, which would make it the smallest in the genus. Berger describes the shoulders as very primitive. The hands are advanced but curved with a long thumb suitable for climbing trees like earlier hominin species. “The feet are practically indistinguishable from modern humans. This is a walker!” Berger exclaims. “But perhaps that’s not the most amazing thing about this discovery.”
Berger leans forward, and a wide smile spreads across his face. “We are going to tell the world that this nonhuman animal deliberately disposed of* its dead in that chamber. It implies they probably recognized their own mortality and took some level of risk to move into that deep dark zone of the chamber to make sure their dead weren’t touched by the external environment in perpetuity.”
Humans are the only creatures known to purposefully bury their dead, a custom that arose between 60,000 and 80,000 years ago. Berger’s team hasn’t been able to date the H. naledi fossils yet, and many of his claims rest on accurate dating. Radio carbon dating is only effective on artifacts up to 50,000 years old, and while there are other techniques that can stretch back millions of years, they don’t work well with the sediments found in the Rising Star cave. For Berger, the exact age of this new species is not that important. “No matter how old these are, it’s going to transform our field.”
If it turns out that H. naledi is extremely old and indeed sits at the base of human evolution, then Berger suggests perhaps modern humans inherited this practice of burying our dead from H. naledi. (…) However, if H. naledi turns out to be a relatively recent species, say just 10,000 to 20,000 years old, Berger wouldn’t be disappointed. An incurable optimist, he would reinterpret it this way: “Another species of animal stood side by side with us (…) with a level of complexity of that of a modern human in the way it thought about itself and the environment.”
Those are wildly speculative hypotheses, the sort which Berger’s colleagues have criticized him for propagating in the past. “Lee likes to tell as good a story as he can,” says William Jungers, professor of anatomical sciences at Stony Brook University.
Jungers doesn’t dispute that the H. naledi bones belong in the genus Homo and were likely deposited deliberately, but he cautions against “trying to argue for complex social organization and symbolic behaviors.” There may be a simple answer. “Dumping* bodies down a hole may be better than letting them decay around you.” He suggests it’s possible that there was once another, easier, way to access the chamber where the bones were found. Until scientists can know the approximate age of the Homo naledi fossils, Jungers says they are “more curiosities than game changers*.”
Jungers is more dismissive of Berger’s suggestion that we may have inherited the practice of burying our dead from H. naledi, a creature with a much smaller brain than modern humans. “That’s crazy speculation—the suggestion that modern humans learned anything from these pin heads* is funny.”(…)
“Lee is a great story teller in part because he’s excited about what he’s doing,” Jungers says. “When Lee gets in trouble is when he takes off his scientific hat and puts on his salesman hat.”
Vocabulary:
*the Sotho language: one of the official languages of South Africa
*the whole life span: toute la durée d’une vie
*lineage: une lignée
*to dispose of : se débarrasser de
*to dump : jeter
*they are more curiosities than game changers : the fossils are curiosities, but do not really constitute a scientific revolution (they don’t “change the rules of the game”).
*a pin: une épingle/ a pin head = someone who has a brain as small as a pin, who is stupid
2 exemples de textes de niveau 2
The Fate of Greenland's Vikings
Archaeology Magazine (February 28, 2000)
Some people call it the Farm under the Sand, others Greenland's Pompeii. Dating to the mid-fourteenth century, it was once the site of a Viking colony founded along the island's grassy southwestern coast (...) What drove the occupants away? Where did they go?
The disappearance of the Greenlanders has intrigued students of history for centuries. One old source held that Skraelings, or Inuit, migrated down the west coast and overran* the settlement. Ivar Bardarson, a member of a sister settlement 300 miles to the southeast, was said to have gathered a force and sailed northwest to drive the interlopers out, but "when they came there, they found no man, neither Christian nor heathen*, nothing but some wild cattle and sheep (...)." The death of the Western Settlement portended* the demise* of the larger eastern one a century later.
Of the first 24 boatloads of land-hungry settlers who set out from Iceland in the summer of 986 to colonize new territory explored several years earlier by the vagabond and outlaw, Erik the Red (c. 950-c. 1003), only 14 made it, the others having been forced back to port or lost at sea. Yet more brave souls, drawn by the promise of a better life for themselves, soon followed. Under the leadership of the red-faced, red-bearded Erik, the colonists developed a little Europe of their own just a few hundred miles from North America, a full 500 years before Columbus set foot on the continent. They established dairy and sheep farms throughout the unglaciated areas of the south and built churches, a monastery, a nunnery, and a cathedral boasting an imported bronze bell and greenish tinted glass windows.
The Greenlanders prospered. From the number of farms in both colonies, whose 400 or so stone ruins still dot the landscape, archaeologists guess that the population may have risen to a peak of about 5,000. Trading with Norway, the Greenlanders exchanged live falcons, polar bear skins, narwahl tusks*, and walrus* ivory and hides* for timber, iron, tools, and other essentials, as well as luxuries such as raisins, nuts, and wine.(...)
But then life went sour for the Greenlanders (...) The number of Norwegian merchant vessels arriving in their ports, though only one or two a year in the best of times, dropped until none came at all. This meant that the islanders were cut off from the major source of iron and tools needed for the smooth running of their farms and the construction and maintenance of their boats. (…) The dangerous ocean crossing put them at too much risk for too little gain, especially now that elephant ivory, once difficult to obtain, could be gotten easily from Africa and replaced walrus ivory in prominence.
As the Greenlanders' isolation from Europe grew, they found themselves victims of a steadily deteriorating environment. Their farmland, exploited to the full, had lost fertility. Erosion followed severe reductions in ground cover. (...). Overgrazing* and trampling by the Norsemen's sheep, goats and cattle, the core of the island's livelihood, degraded the land.(...)
The Norseman also had to contend with the Inuit, who were competing with them for animal resources. (...) Inuit-Norse relations seem to have been rather friendly at times, hostile at others. Few Inuit objects have been unearthed at the farms. Various Norse items have been found at Inuit camps in Greenland or mainland Canada. These are suggestive of commerce between the two peoples, but they may also have been seized by Inuit during raids or plundered from farms.
Norse mention of the Inuit is curiously scant* in the surviving documents. (...) In his Description of Greenland, Ivar Bardarson reported on the take-over of the Western Settlement by the Skraelings, with the implication that they had killed the inhabitants. Years later, another source describes a Skraeling attack in the Eastern Settlement, in which 18 Greenlanders met their deaths and two boys and a woman were captured. As Canadian archaeologist Robert McGhee has pointed out, there is no physical evidence of massacres, the destruction of Norse property, or the takeover and reuse of Norse shelters by the Inuit, and nothing in Inuit tales of Inuit-Norse contact to back up Bardarson's claim.(...)
Were the Greenlanders killed off by the Black Plague? Iceland's population had been reduced by as much as two-thirds when an epidemic struck in 1402 and dragged on for two years. Norway had suffered similarly. Had the Greenlanders also been afflicted, mass graves would tell the tale of the dying, and none from this period have been discovered.
In the end, the answer to the Greenlander question may be a lot less dramatic than the theories that have surrounded it in mystery. Thomas McGovern of New York's Hunter College, who has participated in excavations in Greenland, has proposed that the Norsemen lost the ability to adapt to changing conditions. He sees them as the victims of hidebound* thinking and of a hierarchical society dominated by the Church and the biggest land owners. In their reluctance to see themselves as anything but Europeans, the Greenlanders failed to adopt the kind of apparel that the Inuit employed as protection against the cold and damp or to borrow any of the Eskimo hunting gear. They ignored the toggle harpoon*, which would have allowed them to catch seals* through holes in the ice in winter when food was scarce, and they seem not even to have bothered with fishhooks, which they could have fashioned easily from bone, as did the Inuit. Instead, the Norsemen remained wedded to their farms and to the raising of sheep, goats, and cattle in the face of ever worsening conditions that must have made maintaining their herds next to impossible.
McGovern also believes that as life became harder, the birthrate declined. The young people may have seen a brighter future waiting somewhere else(...) Through the years there may have been a slow but persistent drift of Greenlanders to Iceland or Norway, those places that had been home to their ancestors, further reducing the island's dwindling* population.
Vocabulary:
*to overrun: to invade
*heathen= pagan
*to portend: to announce a disaster
*demise= disappearance, death
*narwhal tusks: défenses de narval
*walrus: morse
*hide: la peau d’un animal
*to graze : brouter, paître
*scant=limited
*hidebound : having an inflexible or ultraconservative character
*toggle harpoon: harpon à tête pivotante
*seal: un phoque
*to dwindle= to decrease
Archaeology Magazine (February 28, 2000)
Some people call it the Farm under the Sand, others Greenland's Pompeii. Dating to the mid-fourteenth century, it was once the site of a Viking colony founded along the island's grassy southwestern coast (...) What drove the occupants away? Where did they go?
The disappearance of the Greenlanders has intrigued students of history for centuries. One old source held that Skraelings, or Inuit, migrated down the west coast and overran* the settlement. Ivar Bardarson, a member of a sister settlement 300 miles to the southeast, was said to have gathered a force and sailed northwest to drive the interlopers out, but "when they came there, they found no man, neither Christian nor heathen*, nothing but some wild cattle and sheep (...)." The death of the Western Settlement portended* the demise* of the larger eastern one a century later.
Of the first 24 boatloads of land-hungry settlers who set out from Iceland in the summer of 986 to colonize new territory explored several years earlier by the vagabond and outlaw, Erik the Red (c. 950-c. 1003), only 14 made it, the others having been forced back to port or lost at sea. Yet more brave souls, drawn by the promise of a better life for themselves, soon followed. Under the leadership of the red-faced, red-bearded Erik, the colonists developed a little Europe of their own just a few hundred miles from North America, a full 500 years before Columbus set foot on the continent. They established dairy and sheep farms throughout the unglaciated areas of the south and built churches, a monastery, a nunnery, and a cathedral boasting an imported bronze bell and greenish tinted glass windows.
The Greenlanders prospered. From the number of farms in both colonies, whose 400 or so stone ruins still dot the landscape, archaeologists guess that the population may have risen to a peak of about 5,000. Trading with Norway, the Greenlanders exchanged live falcons, polar bear skins, narwahl tusks*, and walrus* ivory and hides* for timber, iron, tools, and other essentials, as well as luxuries such as raisins, nuts, and wine.(...)
But then life went sour for the Greenlanders (...) The number of Norwegian merchant vessels arriving in their ports, though only one or two a year in the best of times, dropped until none came at all. This meant that the islanders were cut off from the major source of iron and tools needed for the smooth running of their farms and the construction and maintenance of their boats. (…) The dangerous ocean crossing put them at too much risk for too little gain, especially now that elephant ivory, once difficult to obtain, could be gotten easily from Africa and replaced walrus ivory in prominence.
As the Greenlanders' isolation from Europe grew, they found themselves victims of a steadily deteriorating environment. Their farmland, exploited to the full, had lost fertility. Erosion followed severe reductions in ground cover. (...). Overgrazing* and trampling by the Norsemen's sheep, goats and cattle, the core of the island's livelihood, degraded the land.(...)
The Norseman also had to contend with the Inuit, who were competing with them for animal resources. (...) Inuit-Norse relations seem to have been rather friendly at times, hostile at others. Few Inuit objects have been unearthed at the farms. Various Norse items have been found at Inuit camps in Greenland or mainland Canada. These are suggestive of commerce between the two peoples, but they may also have been seized by Inuit during raids or plundered from farms.
Norse mention of the Inuit is curiously scant* in the surviving documents. (...) In his Description of Greenland, Ivar Bardarson reported on the take-over of the Western Settlement by the Skraelings, with the implication that they had killed the inhabitants. Years later, another source describes a Skraeling attack in the Eastern Settlement, in which 18 Greenlanders met their deaths and two boys and a woman were captured. As Canadian archaeologist Robert McGhee has pointed out, there is no physical evidence of massacres, the destruction of Norse property, or the takeover and reuse of Norse shelters by the Inuit, and nothing in Inuit tales of Inuit-Norse contact to back up Bardarson's claim.(...)
Were the Greenlanders killed off by the Black Plague? Iceland's population had been reduced by as much as two-thirds when an epidemic struck in 1402 and dragged on for two years. Norway had suffered similarly. Had the Greenlanders also been afflicted, mass graves would tell the tale of the dying, and none from this period have been discovered.
In the end, the answer to the Greenlander question may be a lot less dramatic than the theories that have surrounded it in mystery. Thomas McGovern of New York's Hunter College, who has participated in excavations in Greenland, has proposed that the Norsemen lost the ability to adapt to changing conditions. He sees them as the victims of hidebound* thinking and of a hierarchical society dominated by the Church and the biggest land owners. In their reluctance to see themselves as anything but Europeans, the Greenlanders failed to adopt the kind of apparel that the Inuit employed as protection against the cold and damp or to borrow any of the Eskimo hunting gear. They ignored the toggle harpoon*, which would have allowed them to catch seals* through holes in the ice in winter when food was scarce, and they seem not even to have bothered with fishhooks, which they could have fashioned easily from bone, as did the Inuit. Instead, the Norsemen remained wedded to their farms and to the raising of sheep, goats, and cattle in the face of ever worsening conditions that must have made maintaining their herds next to impossible.
McGovern also believes that as life became harder, the birthrate declined. The young people may have seen a brighter future waiting somewhere else(...) Through the years there may have been a slow but persistent drift of Greenlanders to Iceland or Norway, those places that had been home to their ancestors, further reducing the island's dwindling* population.
Vocabulary:
*to overrun: to invade
*heathen= pagan
*to portend: to announce a disaster
*demise= disappearance, death
*narwhal tusks: défenses de narval
*walrus: morse
*hide: la peau d’un animal
*to graze : brouter, paître
*scant=limited
*hidebound : having an inflexible or ultraconservative character
*toggle harpoon: harpon à tête pivotante
*seal: un phoque
*to dwindle= to decrease
A 124-year-old statue reviled by Native Americans – and how it came down, by Jose Fermoso, (The Guardian, September 2018)
In the middle of the night and with dozens of Native Americans watching, San Francisco city workers tied safety ropes around a 124-year-old bronze statue and pulled. Carefully, they dislodged the piece from a granite platform and laid it on top of a truck. It was a moment filled with meaning. After decades of effort, the Early Days statue, a symbol of colonization and oppression to many, was gone. That’s what happens when civic institutions, in this case the city arts commissions, finally see a people as worthy of protection. “I feel like it is a win. I feel good about it. [But] there is still a lot of work to be done,” Desirae Harp, a member of the Mishewal Wappo tribe told me.
Erected in the aftermath of the California mission era*, the Early Days statue depicts a Native American on his back, a Catholic priest above him pointing to the heavens, and an anglicized vaquero* standing in triumph. The statue is part of the Pioneer Monument* celebrating the state’s origins. Native Americans saw it as dehumanizing art but no one had managed to convince politicians to take it down. It wasn’t until gender- and racially-diverse city boards*, as well as backlash against Eurocentric depictions of dominance, that change came. Over the last few months, I spoke with Native Americans who said the existence of this type of art in a public sphere kept alive false narratives. That native people’s systematic killing was a necessary means to an end of the state’s development and current prosperity. It’s the type of thinking that becomes gospel if only one side tells you what to believe in. The journey to the statue’s current undisclosed location – where officials say it’s safely preserved – has been long and winding.
In 1996, a plaque was added to Early Days to explain what happened to natives but political pressure resulted in language filled with false objectivity. Catholic leaders rejected fully blaming missionaries for Native deaths, using disease and malnutrition as top factors rather than mistreatment and murder. Last year, concern grew over Early Days in the aftermath of the deadly riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, incited by the removal of a statue of confederate General Robert E Lee. On 2 October 2017, after the public asked leaders to remove the statue, the arts commission passed a resolution to initiate a review. At a following meeting, it voted to put it in storage.(….)
Native people like Harp say part of the problem with statues is not just that they’re disrespectful and emotionally triggering but that they’re factually inaccurate. The Native American depicted in Early Days, for example, was from the Plains but native people of the Bay Area were Ohlone. There’s also not enough educational support to help people contextualize complicated history. Sara Chase, a UC Berkeley educator, says California school curriculums fail to provide accurate perspectives of Native Americans or other minorities. Asian, Latino and black colleagues of mine remember school-grade projects about the missions without learning of Native genocide. And sometimes, poor education about minorities is by design. In Arizona, ethnic studies curriculums are banned and many schools were forced to focus on standardized tests as opposed to culturally-accurate history. “California schools teach for tests or lose [public funding]. So certain histories of people are not taught. It’s a test-taking obsession, monetization of knowledge,” she told me in a call.
So if the statue doesn’t provide an accurate idea of history, is it valid as a piece of public art? Jeff Hou, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Washington, says no. He says the public realm is accountable to one audience – the public. “In the public realm, works of arts and design are subject to the public process. In other words, the public can have a say in what’s appropriate in a public space in a democracy,” he told me. For the public to decide what’s appropriate art, Hou says, systems in power shouldn’t be weighted to a “limited category of individuals, such as members of particular gender, class and race”. In San Francisco, this means commissions should embody societal changes. “As society changes,” he says, “it’s natural those who are historically marginalized must gain a stronger voice”.
And art seeking to express history doesn’t need to stay the same. History is always revisited based on new discoveries and affects how it’s interpreted. In Yale professor Dolores Hayden’s The Power of Place, the role women and minorities had in creating Los Angeles were reclaimed through ethnic public street murals. In creating a new open space in front of City Hall, the commissions may have provided a new space and place for a similar reclamation. (…)
Vocabulary:
*the Missions era: The California missions began in the late 18th century as an effort to convert Native Americans to Catholicism and expand European territory. There were 21 missions in all, lasting from 1769 until about 1833. Spanish Franciscan priests set up the first mission in 1769. They were preludes to the colonization of the territory by the Spanish. The territory was a Spanish colony until 1821, then became part of Mexico. It became a US state in 1850, following the Mexican War and the Gold Rush. By the 19th century, the number of Native Americans in the state had severely declined, from 300, 000 to 15, 000.
*a vaquero: a Spanish cowboy
*the Pioneer Monument (dedicated in 1894) is composed of statues representing important steps in the creation of California and of portrait medallions of important characters.
*a city board: le conseil municipal
In the middle of the night and with dozens of Native Americans watching, San Francisco city workers tied safety ropes around a 124-year-old bronze statue and pulled. Carefully, they dislodged the piece from a granite platform and laid it on top of a truck. It was a moment filled with meaning. After decades of effort, the Early Days statue, a symbol of colonization and oppression to many, was gone. That’s what happens when civic institutions, in this case the city arts commissions, finally see a people as worthy of protection. “I feel like it is a win. I feel good about it. [But] there is still a lot of work to be done,” Desirae Harp, a member of the Mishewal Wappo tribe told me.
Erected in the aftermath of the California mission era*, the Early Days statue depicts a Native American on his back, a Catholic priest above him pointing to the heavens, and an anglicized vaquero* standing in triumph. The statue is part of the Pioneer Monument* celebrating the state’s origins. Native Americans saw it as dehumanizing art but no one had managed to convince politicians to take it down. It wasn’t until gender- and racially-diverse city boards*, as well as backlash against Eurocentric depictions of dominance, that change came. Over the last few months, I spoke with Native Americans who said the existence of this type of art in a public sphere kept alive false narratives. That native people’s systematic killing was a necessary means to an end of the state’s development and current prosperity. It’s the type of thinking that becomes gospel if only one side tells you what to believe in. The journey to the statue’s current undisclosed location – where officials say it’s safely preserved – has been long and winding.
In 1996, a plaque was added to Early Days to explain what happened to natives but political pressure resulted in language filled with false objectivity. Catholic leaders rejected fully blaming missionaries for Native deaths, using disease and malnutrition as top factors rather than mistreatment and murder. Last year, concern grew over Early Days in the aftermath of the deadly riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, incited by the removal of a statue of confederate General Robert E Lee. On 2 October 2017, after the public asked leaders to remove the statue, the arts commission passed a resolution to initiate a review. At a following meeting, it voted to put it in storage.(….)
Native people like Harp say part of the problem with statues is not just that they’re disrespectful and emotionally triggering but that they’re factually inaccurate. The Native American depicted in Early Days, for example, was from the Plains but native people of the Bay Area were Ohlone. There’s also not enough educational support to help people contextualize complicated history. Sara Chase, a UC Berkeley educator, says California school curriculums fail to provide accurate perspectives of Native Americans or other minorities. Asian, Latino and black colleagues of mine remember school-grade projects about the missions without learning of Native genocide. And sometimes, poor education about minorities is by design. In Arizona, ethnic studies curriculums are banned and many schools were forced to focus on standardized tests as opposed to culturally-accurate history. “California schools teach for tests or lose [public funding]. So certain histories of people are not taught. It’s a test-taking obsession, monetization of knowledge,” she told me in a call.
So if the statue doesn’t provide an accurate idea of history, is it valid as a piece of public art? Jeff Hou, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Washington, says no. He says the public realm is accountable to one audience – the public. “In the public realm, works of arts and design are subject to the public process. In other words, the public can have a say in what’s appropriate in a public space in a democracy,” he told me. For the public to decide what’s appropriate art, Hou says, systems in power shouldn’t be weighted to a “limited category of individuals, such as members of particular gender, class and race”. In San Francisco, this means commissions should embody societal changes. “As society changes,” he says, “it’s natural those who are historically marginalized must gain a stronger voice”.
And art seeking to express history doesn’t need to stay the same. History is always revisited based on new discoveries and affects how it’s interpreted. In Yale professor Dolores Hayden’s The Power of Place, the role women and minorities had in creating Los Angeles were reclaimed through ethnic public street murals. In creating a new open space in front of City Hall, the commissions may have provided a new space and place for a similar reclamation. (…)
Vocabulary:
*the Missions era: The California missions began in the late 18th century as an effort to convert Native Americans to Catholicism and expand European territory. There were 21 missions in all, lasting from 1769 until about 1833. Spanish Franciscan priests set up the first mission in 1769. They were preludes to the colonization of the territory by the Spanish. The territory was a Spanish colony until 1821, then became part of Mexico. It became a US state in 1850, following the Mexican War and the Gold Rush. By the 19th century, the number of Native Americans in the state had severely declined, from 300, 000 to 15, 000.
*a vaquero: a Spanish cowboy
*the Pioneer Monument (dedicated in 1894) is composed of statues representing important steps in the creation of California and of portrait medallions of important characters.
*a city board: le conseil municipal
Exemple de texte de niveau 3
The text is a speech given by Frederick Douglass on July 5, 1852, at an event commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence, at Corinthian Hall, Rochester, New York, at the invitation of the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society. Frederick Douglass was a former slave, who had managed to escape slavery, and had become a renowned orator, touring through the northeastern states to promote the cause of the abolition of slavery. This speech was reported and reprinted in Northern newspapers and was published and sold as a forty-page pamphlet within weeks of its delivery. The 500 to 600 people who heard Douglass speak were generally sympathetic to his remarks. A newspaper noted that when he sat down, “there was a universal burst of applause.” Nonetheless, many who read his speech would not have been so enthusiastic. Even Northerners who were anti-slavery were not necessarily pro-abolition. Many were content to let Southerners continue to hold slaves, a right they believed was upheld by the Constitution. They simply did not want slavery to spread to areas where it did not exist. In this Independence Day oration, Douglass sought to persuade those people to embrace what was then considered the extreme position of abolition.
Text: “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852 (extracts)
(…)
Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory....
(…)
...Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate* and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the "lame man leap as a hart*."
But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale* of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?
(…)
Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!" To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America.is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery, the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate; I will not excuse"; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.
(…)
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
(…)
...Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. "The arm of the Lord is not shortened," and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from "the Declaration of Independence," the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind.
Text: “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852 (extracts)
(…)
Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory....
(…)
...Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate* and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the "lame man leap as a hart*."
But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale* of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?
(…)
Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!" To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America.is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery, the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate; I will not excuse"; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.
(…)
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
(…)
...Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. "The arm of the Lord is not shortened," and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from "the Declaration of Independence," the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind.