Lost Stolen Art

The other day me and my boyfriend were discussing the fresco paintings of the Romans and he mentioned something along the lines of "I wish we had indigenous paintings and arts like that." That launched a discussion about how heart breaking it is that the majority of the masterpieces of our ancestors had been destroyed and their descendants are taught in school to idolize the work of their oppressors. 

Aztec artisans were master metal workers, but we wouldn't know that based on surviving works. That's because colonizers stole the intricate and masterful statues of gods and heroes of our people to parade them shortly in Europe before melting them down for currency. You want to know how Spain funded those expeditions to the Americas? That's how, through stolen gold and sliver, literally building war ships and weapons off the flesh of indigenous gods. The scrolls and books containing the story and culture of an empire, slashed and burned. Stone temples taken apart brick by brick. The only ones spared where the ones already forgotten and abandoned. I love how they don't tell you that in history books, they just raise their hands and say "oh how mysterious the ways of the Aztecs". 

They label civilizations lost when they're the ones that took them. We can see still parts of them in museums, pieces of heart and soul stolen from the body, sitting in the white man's menagerie of conquest.