Ed,
Obviously Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop took control of
my hand when I wrote:
I don't believe you cannot
accurately interpret the Jewish bible if you don't know the ancient rules
of writing that are still embodied in the Hebrew letters.
What I meant was just as obviously I
don't believe you CAN accurately interpret the Jewish bible if
you don't know the ancient rules of writing that are still embodied in the
Hebrew letters.
REH
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, September 06, 2003 3:00
PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Tragedy in
Iran, too
The loss was
enormous, it was global, and despite what people have tried to do to recover
some of what was lost, it is forever irrecoverable.
Well put Ed but I would disagree in one
area. Let me give you an example of the principle that I am
arguing. In the arts we believe that there is "found" or "derivative"
art and "original" art. We give importance to advances based upon
derivative (traditional) art and assign imitation of derivation to the
realm of "craft." In the future of work we are involved with the
issues of craft as a basis for "scale" in order to be "productive" but we are
also concerned with the issues of "ab-origin" because it forms the basis for
the type of societal affirmation that gives value to creativity. e.g.
Native Americans are demeaned when they are considered uncreative,
hunter-gatherers who simply drink a lot and have between a 60 and 80%
unemployment level. Such stereotypical thought is
imperialistic in the extreme and is an artifact from an earlier brutal time
when the world was reduced to a "natural resource center" for the little
island countries of Europe and later for European Americans.
If we are to return to an intellectual
honesty then I believe that we should learn the lessons of the Arts and
understand the importance of "ab-original" contributions whether it be
Nezahuacoytl, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Black Elk or Ludwig van
Beethoven. It is important to realize that in the height of the
French Revolution they murdered the father of modern chemistry in
the name of revolutionary vengeance and a demeaning of "ab-original"
thought. Lavoisier pleaded to finish his work and then behead
him but they didn't give a holy "merde." That was not good for any
of us and it meant that they did not value "ab-original" thinking for its
contributions to the value of their lives or ours. I think even
Stalin and Mao were more practical than that.
Should we bring up Cromwell or the Church in Spain?
What all of this means for me
is that we must find a way to respect scholarship and remove it from the
"mini-warfare" or "game" model that we now have. When
someone discovers something then let them take the credit and put it in its
context. When someone brings something from the Rain
forest of the highlands of Peru (like potatoes, ill used in Ireland, or the
raised bed farming so popular in Europe these days or the Sequoia
trees in Italy) let them duly note its origins and the genius of its
developers. Europeans are no more inventors, composers
or discoverers than the rest of the world but more more often are technically
"translators", "bridges" from one cultural situation to
another. I argue acceptence of such cultural
contributions and a benevolent attitude makes us all more human and more
worthy of dialogue and relationships. I argue for searching
out, giving credit and telling the truth. If
Shakespeare didn't write those plays then the only loss is to a name, not the
value of the plays and the complexity of the situation could make us
more historically sophisticated.
I also argue that these wars must stop
and we must realize that people who grow germs for the sake of war are satanic
no matter who they are. As you point out, we understand germ
warfare first hand. Europe understands it as a success
story. I remember in my family history, those smallpox decimations both
in the Cherokee nation and in the Great Iroquois Confederacy with the longest
written constitution of its day. The scandel is not just the
plagues but the self-serving theft of the ideas contained in those belts.
That the European American scholars to this moment had those wampum
belts in their possessions for years (the Iroquois constitution) and never
learned to read them but considered them historical esotericism is a
piece of scholastic travesty. Only when the Iroquois got
them back and began to publish them in Western writing was the rest of the
world able to understand Benjamin Franklin's derivation and the fact that he
could read the belts and took things from them for the American
experiment. Ignorant fundamentalist Christians who use
inadequate resources and claim a Christian basis for the nation are just
that....ignorant. There is no substitute for knowledge and I argue
that we should never demean anyone who brings new knowledge to a circle of
conversation even if they are hard to understand, seem circumspect,
patronizing and out of touch.
Thank you for your statement of
our tragedy. It was clear, accurate and well put.
I would argue differently only in one area. The
knowledge is not lost anymore than the shamanic universe is lost.
You can find it written all over the walls of the Sistine Chapel and I don't
believe you cannot accurately interpret the Jewish bible if you don't
know the ancient rules of writing that are still embodied in the Hebrew
letters. That is found in the ancient shamanic roots of the
culture of the Habiru as well and reaches all the way to the
Americas. Native American contributions are found
everywhere and should be labeled as such if we got there first and the rest of
the world benefited. I do not claim that Indians invented the
bassoon even though Burl Lane the section leader for the Chicago Symphony is
Indian. But when you eat squash you should remember it as a
product of our deliberate agricultural experiments that took many
generations. The same is true for many things taken for
granted. My complaint is that it seems a European never tires of
taking credit but is not available for giving it. You give lie to
my prejudice. Thanks.
We can and should learn from each other
and tell each other what we know and hear. Thank you for doing
that.
Ray Evans Harrell
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, September 06, 2003 2:09
PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Tragedy in
Iran, too
Ray, Thanks for the summary of Keoke and
Porterfield. I'll try to get hold of it. What strikes me is that
we can't begin to imagine the enormity of the loss of accumulated knowledge,
wisdom and civilization that occurred with the collapse of various
North and South American cultures after the turn of the 16th
Century. With regard to how that collapse took place in Central
America and the Andes, one source says the following:
In the Americas smallpox
generally entered a region within a generation after European conquest.
The disease announced its American arrival first in Hispaniola in 1518,
coming from Spain at a time before slaves reached the Spanish Indies
directly from Africa. It became epidemic in the towns in which the
Spaniards were concentrating the Arawaks of the island and massively
attacked the entire population in December 1518 ( Henige, 1986). The
contagion reached the mainland at Veracruz, probably in 1520, allegedly
introduced by Francisco de Eguía, the African slave of Pánfilo de
Narváez. The epidemic then quickly
spread from that mainland beachhead to the central Mexican highlands,
where it killed an estimated 3.5 million Aztecs during Cortes's classic
conquest. A year or so later it raged throughout Central America, and by
the mid 1520s it had jumped south to the Inca Empire Peru, where its
widespread destruction facilitated the Pizarrist conquest …. (The African
Exchange: Toward a Biological History of Black People. Contributors:
Kenneth F. Kiple - editor. Publisher: Duke University Press. Durham,
NC. 1987)
And with regard to the impact the collapse had
on the lives of people and their communities, another source, referring to
the Mexican Basin, the area in the general area of Mexico
City, says:
While the Basin's zenith population was comparable to that of
selected European national populations, the sixteenth-century population
collapse in Mexico was incomparable to any experienced in Europe. In each
of four periods (each less than 25 years in length), the Basin's
Amerindian population declined more than 30 percent from the previous
level ... . By way of comparison,
estimates for the fourteenth-century European population holocaust
resulting from the Black Death range from a loss of one-third from A.D.
1300-1400 to a 40-50 percent loss
for the same period.
Thus, the sixteenth-century Mexican
population catastrophe virtually equals four Black Death equivalents in
the span of a single lifetime. As dramatic as these depopulation
figures are, however, it is only through an examination of the population
decline by on a more personal level that its impact as a human event can
be truly gauged.
Imagine a young adult (say 20 years of age on the eve of the conquest)
living in a village with a population of 100. If she survived to her
thirty-fifth birthday (1535), she would have witnessed her village reduced
to only 70 persons. By the time she reached middle age in 1547, a further
30 percent of the now diminished total would have perished, leaving only
49. Had she lived to full maturity at age 69, yet another 30 percent would
have been winnowed from the "middle age" total, leaving only 34. And if
she attained great age (80), a fourth 30 percent would have been lost,
leaving only 24. (Thomas
M. Whitmore, Disease and Death in Early Colonial Mexico: Simulating
Amerindian Depopulation, Westview Press,
1992)
The loss was
enormous, it was global, and despite what people have tried to do to recover
some of what was lost, it is forever irrecoverable.
Ed Weick
> You say potaytoe and I say potahtoe. You say tomaytoe
and I say Tomahtoe.
> Lets call the whole thing off.
>
>
Sorry I don't have time to do this more than cursorily but there is a
good
> book that I've been reading that begins to take over the
intellectual
> territory that has been claimed unjustly.
Its called "American Indian
> Contributions to the World, 15,000 years
of Inventions and Innovations."
> Its by a couple of wild Lakota
scholars who have scoured the literature by
> the name of Emory Dean
Keoke and Kay Marie Porterfield. Checkmark books.
>
Amongst other things it has several pages of comparisons between the
>
Iroquois "Great Law" and the American Constitution and descriptions
of
> native roots of 19th century European political theories borrowed
from us.
> Perhaps this cultural ill fit may have something to do with
why they don't
> work there, if your observations are
correct. I can't tolerate wheat
> glutin or lactose either
and the doctors tell me the roots are in my blood.
> Could be that
cultural institutions don't travel as easily as ideas.
>
>
Keoke and Porterfield have an Encyclopedic discussion of such things
as
> Trade, Asphalt, Asepsis, and all of the games that we
now do including
> football, basketball, women's football (remarkably
like soccer which all of
> the old worlds banned women from playing
until recently). Indians
> invented the hollow
rubber balls and brought rubber to the world. They
>
had universal gender equality and much of current psycho-analytic work
has
> its roots in Native American dream techniques and free
association. The
> Gestalt psychologists studied with
native practitioners in the 1950s and
> incorporated much of the group
techniques into T groups and therapy groups
> that have found there
way into modern business management as well. And
> then
there was the syringe used for such things as enemas and it almost
>
seems like we must have invented bathing since there was so little of
it
> done in Europe until quite recently. (joke) While the
Europeans didn't
> bother to boil the water to bathe wounds until the
last couple of centuries
> pre-Columbians were bathing wounds with
sterile water and using Balsam as an
> antiseptic I realize Guy
de Chauliac proposed such aseptic practices in
> 1300 but the
Europeans couldn't see the sense of it until Joseph Lister
> "proved"
it by writing it down. (not a joke)
>
> There were
co-inventions of various other devices used by the Sumerians
> about
the same time such as the use for certain petroleum products.
Its an
> amazing book. Trade? We had it from
Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic but
> no draft animals so there was no
reason to tear up the ground with wheels.
> And the lists of foods
that we traded? 75% of the staple food stuffs, all
>
listed, freeze dried and moved over great distances as well as the
most
> productive food plant in the world, the sweet potato.
>
> Freedom? its built into the religion from the base up as a part of
empathy
> for the various ceremonials of
reconciliation. Trade followed.
>
>
What did those European folks trade over the silk
road? We traded long
> fiber cotton and all kinds of
exotic paints, rubber products, flint tools,
> medicines, cocoa
and other foods like corn, beans squash, peanuts etc.
Our
> medicines are a cornucopia including primitive surgeries that
worked like
> "drains" for sutured wounds, etc.
>
> The
problem has always been the kind of "ignorance of the other
cultures"
> that America has shown in Iraq. American
Europeans seem to assume if they
> don't know about it then it doesn't
exist, or if a European can take a
> vacation there and spend a few
weeks then, like the anthropologists, they
> become
authorities. Well, I've spent many years doing European art
and
> culture and I know ours as well. You can't do it in
a week, a month or a
> year. Like Bel Canto voice
writings, if you "know" then books can be
> useful but if you don't
know then they are not enough to "know" what the
> other side is
doing. Like trying to learn how to sing from a book.
Not
> possible. You need holistic images to
imitate. Culture and the roots of
> conflicts are the
same. You have to experience it if you are to know.
>
There are problems, (as I have said endlessly), with writing and with
book
> learned history.
>
> Today we are beginning to
fill in the holes on our own as we get the money
> to resist the power
play from the dominant society. All of this as a
> result
of having casino wealth. Wealth is not freedom in that sense
but
> power and that gives us the power to resist the educational and
economic
> slavery of those who would keep us
enslaved. The Pequot's have built a
> world class
museum next to their casino for the education of the children.
>
> The internet is amazing and native scholars are beginning
once more to
> claim our heritage that was taken and claimed as
"inventions" for
> Imperialists. Sort of like making
European names the only official names
> for the mountains of the
world. We're taking that back too. Maybe
that
> tendency to claim common knowledge as official only when some
scientist has
> written about it and stuck his name on it could have
been a part of the root
> cause of such non-European anger amongst
folks like Islam? Who was Al
> Jabar?
>
> I
guess I couldn't "call the whole thing off." Well this is
the last I
> will write on this thread. If you want you
can read the book, its links
> and references including the roots of
what we call "liberal democratic
> theory." It
seems that they document what I have been saying about the
> roots
which go back thousands of years in this place. And what
they say
> is short because it is one volume but it opens up old roots
and puts down
> new ones and flowers mightily.
>
>
REH
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