This is a long document. If you are not up for it,
then accept my apologies and skip it. REH
Well Ed and Keith, if I don't answer these things then
people believe they are true. And there is a lot of
just plain old economic paternalism in your post.
Consider how there is very little systematic consistency
in economic thought. When systems are consistent
within themselves that is the beginning of their
usefulness. Of course too much consistency makes
"stale" also. But an inner coherency is the beginning
of knowing whether a system will be coherent with reality.
The wars of the 20th century have been between competing
economic systems. I believe when "conversion" is the
only solution, (sort of a philosophical monopoly as the
only answer), then the system is immature. There is an
inner insecurity and inconsistencies within the system itself.
Capitalism's biggest nightmare was when the "simplicity of
Communism as the only competitor" gave way to "terrorist"
complexity.
Once again we are in the merchant wars of the 18th century
with the same language being used as was justification for
defeating the Chinese Emperor and making opium addicts
of millions of Chinese.
Keith, what I hear you saying, applied to the Chinese
situation, would be that destroying China's sovereignty in
order to open their market to opium was all right in the
ultimate scheme of things. Is that correct?
I would say when systems are so immature that they
must convert other systems, to the monopoly of their idea,
they have a very low probability of non-destructive,
holistically wise action.
(after reading Ed's most recent post)
Yes Ed, the Aztecs worshipped those same destructive
Gods also. And their Pochtecas (export businessmen)
didn't function all that differantly from ours, while
Huitchilopoctli and Tlaloc were the gods paralleling both
Darwin and agriculture.
They did abuse their neighbors, as you pointed out,
in their immaturity and their neighbors did march against
them but it is a mistake to say that was what
turned the tide against them. It is also a mistake to believe
that the brutality of the Aztecs appalled the Spanish
Christians. You can't put tongues in cheeks on paper.
The "night of tears" proved the Spanish and their allies
could not win the war by military means. It was what
William McNeill pointed out about the 98% number for
smallpox that swung the balance in the direction of the
Spanish. When the warriors met for healing in public
ceremony, unarmed, the four hundred Spaniards
slaughtered them as they had done earlier with the
Cholulans. Because they were sick they
couldn't fight back.
They were not as weak normally as the priests of
Cholula but the illness destroyed the entire infra-
structure of the city. One should never forget that
You are speaking of people who would run to the
coast for fresh fish, would fast for nine days
without food or water (I know its hard to believe but
again it is well documented). A people whose soldiers,
(not the ones who fasted), could run anyplace in the entire
empire in a couple of days. So there has been a lot
more research done since your sources put the pen to
paper.
For example, much has been made, in the past of
their failure to use wheels and their lack of an
animal to pull a cart if they did. That this held the
Aztecs back technologically. They knew of both
the Llama and a cousin that could have served.
The people of Mexico refused to use the Llama because
it had hooves that tore up the soil. They didn't use wheels
for anything but toys for the same reason. The soil was
and is sandy and very thin top-soil but when the Spanish
arrived they saw a virtual paradise.
It is only since the horse and wheel became a part of that
environment and the church banned the Aztec farming
methods with plants like Amaranth that the system
collapsed and much of it is desert today.
I would also say that in the "stories" about
the farming methods of the forest dwellers (called
"slash and burn") they also have been ignorantly
maligned. You never read about the way that
the fields are returned to the forest over a fifteen year
period with deliberate plantings of
forest healing plants that will feed and heal the hunters
at a later time. Villages are moved every fifteen years.
No one talks about the farming methods of the peoples
of highland Peru either where the Science Times of the
NYTimes pointed out several years ago that their
canal method of raised fields enriched by fisheries in
the canals had the greatest yield per acre and per
worker of any fields in the world . But it is hard to do and
does not fit well with Western cultural beliefs. The same
reason commercial wild rice is so awful. They insist on
cutting the stalks when they harvest it and so it never
matures.
The French "raised fields" use some of the same methods.
Since the Iroquois have traditionally used the same I
would be interested in knowing whether the French learned
it from them or maybe is just co-incidence.
That cultural problem bodes very poorly for the environment
and leads us back to Steve Hanson. I suspect it, along with
cloven hooves and that deep plow, has more to do with world
deserts than anything else other than maybe global warming.
It got rid of 70% of the top soil of the U.S. and Canada in
less than 100 years in the mid-West. According to the
Canadian government literature.
So it is wrong to consider that the English or European
way of doing things is much more than an aberration
on the skin of history. It has not built a sustainable
world prosperity and without joining the "romantics" it
probably won't.
As an example of this linguistic chaos consider that
they cannot even decide who they are?
(neo-conservatives or neo-liberals depending upon
where you are from or even "when" you are from.) Note
the term in the late 19th century was "moss-back
liberal", so conservative and moved
so slow that moss grew on their backs? But the
need to sell at any cost permeates all economic thought.
So much so that they have absorbed the old Shamanic
admonition, "Let the buyer beware."
The followers of Say, Keynes, Marx, Ricardo, Veblin,
Freidman, Greenspan etc. can prove anything by
just limiting the epistemological language to
what works in their systems. (Followers
of Aristotle and his ilk. For a good read on this try
"The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" by Blake.) But
as Rifkin points out to "you-alls" chagrin, all of the
above, including theater manager and ballet husband
Keynes and poetry healed John Stuart Mill are infected
by the scientific dualism virus. It is ONLY one or the other
and the third be damned. The only reality is government
(left) or profit (right).
consider:
Keith Hudson wrote:
> Thomas,
>
> I don't disagree with most of what you have written below. But the matter
> of the effects of direct confrontation between invaders and indigenous
> people is really only confusing the issue. The real influence is that of
> trade and the availability of new goods.
I love the word "real" it is the ultimate put down.
Anything outside of government or private enterprise
is "unreal". The same as in International politics.
In the cold war, no one believed Tito's
third world and so both sides of the political duality
beat him and the rest of the third world up at
every opportunity.
Capitalism and Communism conspired to do away
with those pesky threes even though one half
of them claimed to be Christian nations that venerated
three, but who needs consistency? So the Yugoslavs
never had a chance even though they had a better overall
standard of living, if you count perks like in a corporation,
than most of the free world and all of the Communist
world. Do any of you actually know any pre breakdown
Yugoslavians? I had one in my company
and my ex-wife's family is Slovenian. Very interesting
stories like the ones Michel up at Toronto U.
tells. But "real" Keith? how about "one of"? that
would be more real.
> This is the moment when customs
> start to change. This moment is when goods actually cross into the market
> places of indigenous peoples and can often be years (or decades) before
> they ever meet new settlers or are directly affected by them. (Steel blades
> made in Birmingham and Sheffield reached the tribes of central New Guinea
> more than a century before these tribes were "discovered" by white man.)
New Guinea is an interesting example. I know Am. Indian
businessmen who visit there regularly and their versions of
the people are considerably different then the "official" TV
or tourist version. They go places that others cannot and
they are treated as honored guests in their home. They also
insist that the people though forest dwellers are neither
backward or childlike.
I would never say that steel does not change and harden
people's sensitivities and attitudes, but a virus travels faster
and it's destruction is more ruthless. Consider all of those
Puritan narratives that convinced them that God was preparing
the New World for them. They would walk into a village to trade
and in three days 98% of the village would be dead.
The English carried death in their breath. (Andromeda Strain)
Where we didn't die, (we survived two plague hits), we did
fine at trade. We had been doing it for thousands of years.
The DeSoto narratives make clear what Europeans meant
by "trade" although there was some. The Europeans were
much more comfortable when they returned and the economies
were in shambles and fewer armies to protect native
wealth. Personally I consider that pillage more in line with
what you folks call Hunter/Gatherer tribes, than what we
were or are.
Note three plus one points.
1. The English brought in the Scots to trade with us
because they kept getting the short end of the stick
in the trade. The Scots were good so we just had to
marry them to protect our business. Keith, I note
that you had nothing to say about the Tin Drum piece
that I put on this list, but I would suggest you
read the Edward Everett Dale quote. Dale was
the scholar who wrote extensively about the Cherokee
as well as Stalin's treatment of the Kulaks.
No one listened to him until Russia fell and they
confirmed the story. The conservatives took the credit
and the liberals blanched. The rest of us knew it already.
Point two: English customs are notoriously slow to change.
Note the out of date agricultural methods that the English
have used until the only wild life left in the country are foxes.
But you do have that "cat like" beast roaming the countryside.
Possibly just the spirit of all of those butchered
species working someone's guilt?
Native women used fire to make the forest manageable.
They were capable of cutting up a tree with fire as quickly
as a man with an ax. (Don't believe just me, there are plenty
of narrative descriptions of it.) But the ax was a political tool
that freed the man to become superior to the woman. He
didn't need them to do the work equally. Women did the
agriculture and fired the forest while men managed the game.
The key word here is managed. This all broke down upon
contact because the diseases didn't only screw up the human
population but even the beaver, wolves and deer came
down with the viruses. This broke the economic structures
of the society and convinced the survivors that the
Europeans had a better way. At least the men
thought so.
That is the path that now is ruining the planet
with its business and agricultural practices. They even
have new words for it. The most recent economic jargon
is Dynamists (the so-called Creators) and Stasists (those
who just hang on with the status quo). Proof that in 500
years of contact there has been little to no improvement
in the European's knowledge of balance.
Point three: the bigotry is built around such uses of
language in which the Indian is considered polluted if he
decides to absorb something from trade but the European
is called "flexible and progressive". That allows the
European to convince himself that he is bringing progress
to a stale society. But it never seems to occur to the
outsider that we too have the concept of tradition,
living in the present and developing the future.
There is
an issue here around the way time is conceived. We
have basically two versions of time rather than three.
We have tradition and becoming manifest. That makes
the present much less concrete and gives us more
responsibility for creating the world that is becoming.
"Is" means a lot to Cherokees. Clinton is part Cherokee
and grew up in a state that still has a lot of the traces
in the culture. "It depends upon what 'is' is." We have
no word for "to be" so we really notice it in English.
This is hard. I was raised on Cherokee English
because Cherokee was forbidden being taught by law.
Being is encapsulated in both the object and the
object as process. So you don't say it "is" raining.
There is no present only past and becoming.
So rain is sufficient but because you need to know the
process "rain" will have all kinds of prefixes and suffixes
added to it to encapsulate the information needed. We
are adjective poor but verb (movement) rich.
English is the reverse. I'm a student myself on this
so I'm afraid it's hopeless unless you understand it
already. "No zero complexity here."
Many find my "process use" literary accent in English
to be confusing, except that artists do not. The
problem is that the "concrete" inherent in written
English with its solid present tense,
is "ready made" for bigoted judgment of the "less
strong."
Dale's use of language around mix-breeds is a good
example of such old fashioned racism. Europeans
scream at Black Muslims, when they mirror that
language, for being racist but use it frequently
themselves. We on the other hand get used by both.
I have a new dissertation by a black Columbia history
student where he asserts that the Black blood rescued
my people while the White blood polluted it. Either
way we were wrong. Give me a break! They go around
speaking "Cherokee" but don't have a clue. You can
tell by the way they use English.
Point four: Francis Jennings the preeminent non-native
scholar on Indian society writes that both copper and bronze
were used here. It has been found in graves. But just as
the Aztecs (less than 500 years old) used the Atlatl (their
word) they also did surgery, descended from the people who
created "long fibre" cotton and preferred the use of the
ceremonial war club fitted with obsidian. Obsidian now
used in eye surgery, with the technology of the Aztecs
providing the edges, did not cause keloid scarring.
A big issue for the healing of dark skin. I've already
pointed out the issue with hoofed pack animals and
wheels.
> Earlier still, look at the speed at which the atlatl (and, later, its
> development as the bow-and-arrow) was accepted by the *whole* of mankind as
> it was then (circa 15,000BC) -- because it instantly raised hunting
> productivity many many times over.
I had no idea the Aztecs were 15,000 years old. My
non biological father used to do stone napping and I have
some beautiful ceremonial flint and obsidian knives. He
certainly wasn't paleolithic, he was an engineer, a sailor
and a master chef trained in Cannes. I also have some
tapes of southern drumming that my conservatory trained
friends have trouble deciphering the complexity of the
rhythms. It is the same problem that music programs
have on the computer. They don't have the symbols to
write down what is played so they round it off. The same
issue is found with spoken language. Even the computer
can't compute, (not yet), the thousands of permutations possible
in the stress of a simple seven word sentence.
Stravinski visiting the Pueblos functioned like a
computer and eliminated all of the micro tonal melismas
from the work of the people he heard. A Quapaw composer
who brought him was shocked that he couldn't hear it. I
had the same result with a concert violinist listening to
harmonic singing. All she could hear was the drone.
But Charles Ives said that once you learned to hear
micro-tones you would find the tempered scale dull.
Complexity zero.
Now for a little more recent than 15,000 years ago. So
recent that there are European eye witness accounts as
well as our own teachings. What raised hunting
productivity was the use of fire in the forest and the
development and agreement about hunting parks shared
by several nations. (forest management) I find it frustrating
that there is so much evidence for what I say about
Native forest management while the old Hunter/Gatherer
anthropologist juggernaut just chugs on. It MAY have
been appropriate for paleolithic people but the evidence
is so scanty that they are making stories and applying
them to contemporary peoples with imperialist economic
effects.
The truth IMHO Ed and Keith is that what you and the
economic and social sciences are doing is
no more accurate than astronomy was before Hubbell.
I have some feeling about that for I think if you all
had to know as much about art as I have to know
about your work just to survive in your strange world, I
would have a fortune and artists everywhere would have jobs.
> This totally transformed the customs and
> social structures of pre-atlatl hunter-gatherers. Probably, only a trace
> of their oral history survived the transition. Would we really want to
> preserve their customs, too?
If you had, you might have "discovered" quantum
mechanics a lot sooner.
> (The atlatl and the bow-and-arrow wiped out
> most of the big game species that were alive then. Before that time, many
> of their customs and folklore would have included these animals in their
> pantheon. How could their pre-bow-and-arrow customs have continued in a
> realistic way when the objects of their veneration had become extinct?)
Maybe that happened in Europe. But the Atlatl is
Aztec. Very confusing. And just because that is
the most recent official story does not make it so.
We do have stories about the animals getting together
to protest the slaughter after the bow was given. That
was the beginning of the "food as gift" and "everyone is
food" realization. In our ways, the little deer was given
the power to enter the slaughterer's mind and make
him insane. (who can resist those big eyes?)
Almost all Indian people's believe that
the only way reality can be explained is through metaphor.
That story speaks to me of the need to never lose the
power of empathy whether for plant or animal or human.
But like Europeans, there have always been Indian
people who swore more allegiance to the ideal than
they followed it. But we don't judge Christians or Jews
by the least but by the best. I would ask the same for
our spiritual and technological ways. We have done very
well with food, certain artistic forms, pedagogy, astronomy,
the use of plants as medicine and the society as a mirror
of the universal order.
Richard Leakey believed that ultimately they would find
Cro-Magnon artifacts 500,000 years old in the
Americas. He based that story on his feelings about
very little data. If that were true then it would make
the Americas the home of modern man and all of
those myths about the movement of the four races
out of the American Southwest would be true.
(Cherokees have stories and artifacts about the
Saber tooth Tiger also.) Or you would have to have
the story of multiple genesis's to explain why Cro-
Magnon were found in Europe 50,000 years ago.
The truth is that neither Leakey nor any of us were
there. And so this is all interesting but it is really just
playing games in the library. The problem is when
those games get projected as truth off on the less
powerful, it then becomes justification for all kinds of
mischief.
> You say you respect the culture of North American Indians. This implies
> that I don't respect them. Of course I do. All I am saying is that large
> chunks of their culture (such as languages) have disappeared because
> they're irrelevant in modern-day practice and that no amount of artificial
> encouragement (unless it be for the tourist trade) will save it. New
> customs will arise in due course, and those will be respected, too.
Keith, if you want to know what you are losing with the
death of the languages then consider the following:
it ultimately won't effect the outcome because the
battle over this is not scientific or economic,
(efficiency is cheaper) but political and cultural imperialism.
The way that people see and symbolize the world
around them has a profound effect upon practice.
It is that practice which has so devastated
the world wherever the Europeans have wandered.
David Bohm the physicist wanted to create a new
language that could encompass the ambiguity of
uncertainty. He said that the standard languages that
he knew could not and therefore needed to be adjusted.
As physicist David Peat points out: "even language
itself is viewed through the perspective of European
languages and world view." Thoughts are inseparable
from language and with the invention of writing, dumbing
down the subtlety of sound, thoughts become intimately
tied to the linearity of writing. But reality is not linear.
This is why Bohm needed his language. I forget what he
called it but he didn't succeed. He did, however, just before
he died, discover a human language that encompassed
what he had needed for his science. It was when a group
of indigenous Algonquin scientists visited him that he
found that they simply understood his concepts. It was
imbedded in their language.
So, will the world progress into quantum speech by abandoning
English and learning Algonquin? Not on your life. They
will just assure their survival by making sure that Algonquin
doesn't survive instead and struggle to squeeze these new
concepts into old wineskins not made for such a thing.
That is what it is all about IMHO and not trade or
economics or any of those other rationalizations for
destroying your neighbor.
If this doesn't do it, I give up. I have much to much
to do as a private impresario and teacher to put this
much work into any of this. But I just can't stand by
and let the mis-conceptions pass for science or historical
reality. Obviously there will be those who think I am the
prejudiced bigot but I have put bibliographies written
by non Indian scholars on this list many times in the
past. I just don't have time to do it now, but thanks
anyway. I like both Keith and Ed but I think you are
both wrong on these issues. I also know that Ed
has worked with native people in Canada. That is
why I am surprised by some of his opinions but I
don't like all of the people that I have worked with
either and I have difficulty with some of their cultures
as well so......As for the native land
in Canada, why should any of us ever believe that
a country would give back land to a sovereign
people without strings. They don't do it in Iraq or
Turkey or anywhere else. Why should it be done
here?
REH
