I’ve heard and seen Indians on TV and movies mentioned as having “a head for heights” and consequently being hired to work construction on tall buildings. Is there truth to this myth/stereotype?
No, but a number of Native Americans (I think of the Mohawk tribe) were hired in the early days of skyscraper construction in the east. That’s probably the source of the myth. There is no physiological reason-- they just got acclimated as anyone else would.
Working on skyscrapers in the days before safety regulations was difficult and unpleasant, and like much else with that description tended to be filled with minority workers who were not the first choices for better jobs.
Once established in the profession, however, Indians, especially the Mohawks, made it a family affair, with regular commutes to and from their reservation areas and an extended family-like concern for teaching the skills.
Not unlike the community of the coal miners in West Virginia that has been in the news lately.
The rest of society has a tendency to romanticize the necessity it puts the lower classes through: cuts down on the guilt factor. That’s probably the real origin of the “head for heights” cliché.
theres plenty of reason, Indians would run along the girders not walk carefully or crawl. it had to do with tribal customs, one factor was walking by placing one foot in front of the other and running this way as well. also iirc there was a right of passage involving standing at the top of a pine tree in a wind storm using no hands.
dont have time for a search, just some stuff from memory that I picked up in shcool.
And look at what Cecil has to say about that “putting one foot in front of the other” crap.
Where? He doesn’t dispute it in the linked article.
Exapno, working high steel was always a well-paying and skilled job. It also wasn’t all that dangerous – they built the Empire State Building with only one fatality, IIRC, and that was because someone fell down an elevator shaft.
For whatever reasons, the Mohawks did have an affinity for the job, and were well paid for it.
In recent years, with less high-steel construction going on, Mohawks have changed their tough-guy rite of passage to doing a hitch in the U.S. Marines.
I consider the next line “Far be it from me to make light of this portrait of the noble red man…” to be a dispute.
The Empire State Building was at the end at the first great era of skyscraper construction. The beginnings were several decades earlier. In the beginning, the jobs were not as safe nor as well paid. The Empire State Building was a model of construction - read any book about it - but only because the engineers had so much precedent on which to, um, build.
It reads as more of a dispute of the claim that “[They] like to make out as though dancing on some I-beam 600 feet in the air is no more disruptive to their peace of mind than stepping off a curb.”
thats a totally different paragraph…unless Cecil failed some basic english hes not disputing the last sentence from one paragraph with the first sentence in the next.