mingwan0,
>>there are agendas amongst the academics just as there are amongst message board posters! lol<<
Oh, indeed yes but ignorance is the worst of it, especially a determined ignorance.
Prejudice is so deeply ingrained into discussion of race that it is nearly impossible to discuss race without using terminology based on popular prejudices rather than any sort of science.
I got the usual forbidden thrill when a Swedish lady was going through the usual denunciations of American imperialism. I asked her why the Swedes were practicing genocide against the Saami.
In terminology that might well have been read directly from the catechism of the Southern segragationist, my Swedish correspondent announced that Sweden treated its Saami very well.
Sweden is loving their Saami to death I guess. A U.N. body has determined that the genocidal attack on the Saami by Scandinavians, Finns and Russians is well along towards their extermination.
Oh the genocide of the Saami is not like the current pogroms against Roma (Gypsies) in Eastern Europe but is considerably more effective. Maybe it is little more than modernization overwhelming an inferior indigenous culture but it is surely accompanied by racial prejudice.
In Finland, with which I have a little more familiarity because my grandparents immigrated from Finland, the Saami are regarded as inferior with crude "Asian" features.
When I was quite young and visiting my Aunt Vera in Puget Sound, I was informed that my grandmother was not a "Laplander." (The Saami resist being termed Laplanders today.) I had not asked.
As I presume you guessed, when I saw many long years later a picture of my grandmother it was quite obvious that a quite beautiful lady was a Saami.
My brother says Aunt Vera worried about such things because she looked like a Saami while her sister (my mother) had the look of a prototypical Finn. The latter was quite odd since my grandfather looked like a Swede but it would have been risking your life to mention that since Finns have no sense of humor and tend to be very large.
Now I am most confused about DNAP's ancestral software that can classify people by their continental origin. Would Saami AIM's reflect their origins in Mongolia or their current residence in Europe?
The Finns are thought to have originated in Mongolia too BTW.
Best, Terry
