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Where is the amish population relatively increasing/ concentrated? What is your opinion of the amish community, and have you yourself ever experience staying in the amish community for a night or more... just out of interest/ experience. What do you think the future would be like for the amish community? I myself still surprise today, knowing communities ( and large) still exist like the amish throught the country.
I also would like to ask the same question about Native Americans ( questions which I asked about the amish).
When I mention Native Americans, I'm talking about tents etc... any communities where many reside in tents within valleys, or mud houses?
Technically speaking, any native born American is a "Native American". The American Indian has been called a "native American" as if that distinguished them from the descendants of immigrants.
As to living in traditional housing, few Indians do so.
In fact, there is no one type of indigenous housing used by all tribes and nations. The movies tend to emphasize the tepee (tipi), a conical tent, used by the plains tribes. But among the various tribes and nations, housing could range from longhouses, wickiups (wigwam), hogans, pueblos, and igloos.
Actually the Amish are one of the faster growing religions in the US. They have a high birthrate and maybe the decline in infectious disease in non-Amish society has lowered their death rate too. Also the Amish have something like an 80-90% retention rate, meaning 80-90% of people born among the Amish stay with it, which is quite high for any denomination. (Hinduism and forms of Eastern Christianity being the closest to that level of retention) I hear there are Amish in our area now and that's a new development.
Alaska's the one place where "Native American" works as it's a state with both Yup'ik Eskimos and American Indians. (Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, etc) In percentage terms Alaska is the most "Native American" state, it might also be the most "American Indian" one too. In numerical terms California, as I recall, has the most American Indians. The Southwest in general is fairly high.
Not sure I see an obvious connection between Amish and American Indians though. Amish are the descendants of Germanic immigrants who've avoided any inter-marriage with other ethnicities and have gained very few converts over the centuries. Amish are also ran by a highly Christian and Luddite code derived from their Anabaptist faith. American Indians are indigenous people who came here thousands of years ago. The majority of them are Christian these days, but of a variety of denominations. Some, like the Hopi, mostly retain their pre-Christian beliefs. They generally do not reject technology as such. Even the most anti-Western of American Indians I think generally embraced technologies that they felt worked with their way of life. (Guns for hunting, etc)
It was an interesting map, I'd never seen it before. I'd always heard of Lancaster county, Pennsylvania as the Amish hub but I guess not. Using the map, and other resources, Holmes County, Ohio is the most Amish county. Followed by those two counties in Indiana. (Lagrange County, Indiana and I forget the other)
However the map seems to be about "Old Order Amish." I don't know if the more liberal "Beechy Amish" have the same distribution or a slightly different one. Also some people mix up the Amish with the Mennonites and the Hutterites. Mennonites are fairly common in Kansas and might be in Colorado too. They don't reject technology so much, but many of them do value plain-dress and they are pacifist Christians. In the US Hutterite colonies, from what I can tell, are most numerous in South Dakota and Montana. Although some are also in North Dakota, Washington, Minnesota, and one colony in Oregon. Of those the Dakotas and Oregon don't seem to have any Old Order Amish. Hutterites live in communal colonies of about 200. They dress more colorfully than the Amish, and allow a bit more technology than them, but I think are generally stricter than today's Mennonites. Unlike the Amish the Hutterites I'm pretty sure don't practice shunning as I believe there are ex-Hutterites who still chat with people in the colonies.
That map is percentage of residents, not raw number of residents who are Amish. So Lancaster could still lead the way in terms of total Amish population.
We have a good number of Amish here as well, Wisconsin. Just last night I went for a ride on my motorcycle and passed a few buggies. I usually get to the bakeries a few times a year. The Amish have a pretty good influence on our building industry around here.
The Mennonites wear plain dress, but in practice, unlike the Amish who wear mostly handmade stuff based on 19th century patterns, most male Mennonites that I have seen wear standard "Western-wear" like Wranglers and such. I'm sure they get the shirts with the plain buttons rather than mother-of-pearl and such.
Mennonite women wear long dresses and, being members of a traditionalist Abrahamic faith, usually wear some sort of small bonnet to hide their shameful heads from God just like most Muslim women and Orthodox Jewish women.
ABQConvict
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