Tag Archives: Native American

Of Words that Won’t

18 Sunday Sep 2022

Posted by in History, Native American Themes

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I believe I was in college when I first had someone tell me I shouldn’t use the word ‘Indian.’ I had certainly heard plenty of critical commentary about Christopher Columbus, and at least some of that commentary had included a remark or two on the absurdity of applying the word ‘Indian’ to the indigenous population of the Americas. Still, in the lily-white neighborhoods of my upbringing, this word became just another absurdity in a world that already had plenty of them. So, when my Navajo classmate, Wendy, expressed a clear preference for ‘Native American,’ this was new. What was new about it wasn’t the critique of the word ‘Indian’; it was the sense that the critique mattered.

I wish I could say that I responded appropriately, but I’m afraid I can’t.

There was whitesplaining; let’s just leave it at that.

***

Admittedly, the rest of this post could qualify as more of the same. I hope not, but we’ll see…

***

I’ve heard a couple of interesting theories about the origin of the term, ‘Indian,’ but I’m not sure that any of them have really nailed down the concept. Origins are not the only rubric by which we might assess the meaning of a term, and folk-etymologies are infamously inaccurate, so the whole question of where the word came from has to be taken with a grain of salt.

Anyway…

The notion that Columbus thought he was in India is an incorrect correction, at best. Columbus thought he was in the East Indies. That may sound like a fussy point to make, but folks ought not to point out one mistake only to land on another. Somewhere in his work, the historian of religion, Sam Gill, suggests that Europeans used term ‘Indian’ as a kind of catch-all category for everyone who lived east of the Indus River. By this account, the problem with the term is not so much a clear factual error as a kind of vagueness, that and a kind of projection of the European imagination into new territory. It’s not at all unlike those associated with ‘orientalism’ in other historical contexts. Another interesting take comes from the noted activist, Russell Means. According to Means, the term originally meant “‘under God,’ thus making it an accurate observation of the spirituality of America’s indigenous peoples. At a time when many were switching from ‘Indian’ to ‘Native American,’ Means embraced ‘Indian,’ even insisted upon it. Of course, this may have had something to do with branding. Means was of course a long-time member of “The American Indian Movement (AIM),” which might have given him a little extra reason to hold onto the label. In the end, it seems that most of the indigenous peoples of North America, have shifted to ‘Native American,’ and along with them, so have the bulk of those seeking to support indigenous peoples or simply to show respect. Mileage always varies, but ‘Native American’ seems to be the norm at this point.

***

I am occasionally reminded that there is at least one problem with ‘Indian’ that “Native American’ does not solve, that is the vagueness of such a catch-all term. This vagueness facilitates a range of problematic thinking. For example, I lost track of the people who asked me if I lived in a teepee while I was living on the Navajo Nation. The Navajo people had never lived in teepees, but the imagination of the American public (and the world at large) often puts them in teepees for the same reason that it put so many peoples from the great plains in Monument Valley for so many classic westerns. To the public at large, an ‘Indian’ is an Indian, and because we can use the same word for so many peoples they think the word must tell us something about them. That the term is really little more than a default category for a broad range of people whose customs were poorly understood when the term was coined doesn’t seem to enter folks thinking, at least not without first giving them a verbal shove in the right direction. Still, to the degree that this is a problem with ‘Indian’ that problem is not much improved by saying ‘Native American.’ Since I began focusing my Native American studies in grad school, I have had a couple friends and family ask me what “Indians believed” about topics like God, reincarnation, or the afterlife in general. Today, I am sometimes asked what ‘Native Americans’ think about the same topics. I often find myself responding to these questions by asking which tribe? Others might ask them why they are asking these questions of a white guy? In any event, the problems with such questions are not much improved by the change in vocabulary. Whichever word we might use, the question assumes implications that just aren’t there.

***

I happened into an interesting illustration of the problem one day while surfing travel blogs. One of these had a lovely account of a couple’s visit to the National Monument at Little Bighorn Battlefield. Their account was thoughtful and respectful, and I do not mean to direct negative attention their way (and in any event, I can no longer find it, hence the lack of a link), but one thing about their post stuck out in my mind. They made a point to say that their tour guide had been a student at the nearby Little Bighorn College, a tribal college, so they had gotten “the Native American point of view” on the battle. (I believe I got the quote right, but in any event, that was certainly the gist of it.)

When people address the significance of the Battle of Little Bighorn (or Greasy Grass) to Native Americans, they are usually thinking in terms of those who fought against Custer and his troops. That would be Cheyenne and Lakota for the most part, (though there were some Arapaho in the village too.) I can’t help but think, those who read the blog in question will naturally think the “Native American” perspective mentioned in the blog will reflect the point of view of those peoples, but Little Bighorn College is on the Crow Agency, and the student in question was very likely Crow. In fact, his or her ancestors may very well have included some of Custer’s scouts. To the degree that his or her native identity may have shaped the story these bloggers heard, it is unlikely that it was shaped in the manner most readers would have imagined.

Now, I certainly do not mean to suggest that a Crow’s perspective on the battle of Little Bighorn should weigh less than that of a Cheyenne or Lakota, not in the slightest. What I am suggesting is that the difference in this case matters. There is a difference between the perspective of someone whose ancestors fought against Custer and someone whose ancestors allied themselves with him. That difference is easily obscured when using terms like ‘Native American’ or ‘Indian.’

…which reminds me of one discussion I had about these issues with my own students at Diné College on the Navajo Nation many years ago. Fed up with my efforts to problematize every term available for the indigenous people at large, one of my own students just asked; “How about Diné?”

…which got us to the end of the lesson about 15 minutes early.

Don’t get me wrong; there are no magic solutions to any of these problems, but some words help us more than others. There are many contexts in which words like “Indian” or “Native American” are tough to avoid, but when you know which specific people you are talking about, it is almost always better to name the indigenous community in question.

A few pics from Little Bighorn College.

(Click to embiggen)

A few pics from the Little Bighorn battlefield.

(Click to embiggen)

And a couple random pics from around the area.

Decolonizing The Moon!

02 Sunday Jan 2022

Posted by in Native American Themes

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In my last post, I wrote about the notion of outer space as an extension of the western frontier in American popular culture. I mentioned in passing the connection to Native Americans and the dispossession of their lands. As a follow up, I thought I might comment on a little story connecting all three themes in one narrative.

Here is the story as it was related on Indian Country Today:

“When NASA was preparing for the Apollo project, they did some astronaut training on a Navajo Indian reservation. One day, a Navajo elder and his son were herding sheep and came across the space crew. The old man, who only spoke Navajo, asked a question, which the son translated: “What are the guys in the big suits doing?” A member of the crew said they were practicing for their trip to the moon.

“The old man got really excited and asked if he could send a message to the moon with the astronauts. Recognizing a promotional opportunity for the spin-doctors, the NASA folks found a tape recorder. After the old man recorded his message, they asked the son to translate. He refused. So the NASA reps brought the tape to the reservation, where the rest of the tribe listened and laughed, but refused to translate the elder’s message to the moon.

“Finally, NASA called in an official government translator. He reported that the moon message said: “Watch out for these guys; they’ve come to steal your land.”

It’s a great story, but if you’re like me, you have to spend a moment or two wondering whether or not it’s true. Turns out, the answer is ‘no.’ According to Snopes, the joke appears to have come from Johnny Carson. It was part of his monologue on July 22, 1969. Of course it is possible, that Carson’s writers picked it up from an earlier source. There just doesn’t seem to be any evidence for it.. In any event, there is no record of this with NASA or any of the other Federal Agencies that might have been involved at the time. So, the story is very unlikely to be true.

That said…

It’s damned telling that the Carson camp thought to put this joke together back during the days of the space race. They clearly got the connection between the western frontier and the space program. They even got the violence implicit in westward expansion. They got all of this in the service of a joke intended for a mainstream American audience.

These weren’t activists; they were comedy writers working on a relatively non-partisan show, and they decided that it would be funny to compare the Apolllo moon landings to the dispossession of Native Americans. Judging by the longevity of this gag, it would appear that they were right.

The thing is, this joke is only funny if people get the connection between exploration and colonization, if they know that someone planting a flag in ‘new’ territory has generally meant someone else gets screwed.

It’s almost as if awareness of systemic racism isn’t limited to critical race theorists.

Shhhh!

Don’t tell the Republicans!

Map Ain’t Time Either.

30 Saturday Sep 2017

Posted by in History, Native American Themes

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indian_tribesI often see maps of Indian territories pop up on the net. I like them. And then again, I don’t. I’ve seen also some of these same maps in classrooms and academic papers. In such cases, the narrative usually does a bit more to put the visual presentation in context, but on the net, that visual is often all you get.

…along with a couple hashtags, and sometimes a catchy title.

The specific subject matter varies a bit from map to map. Sometimes they purport to show linguistic variation. Sometimes, they show the culture areas used by anthropologists or the general divisions of Native American peoples into related peoples. Mostly, these maps purport to show the specific locations of various tribes.

…whatever that means?

Don’t get me wrong. The basic idea isn’t entirely off base, and it’s a lot better than silence on the topic, but the notion of an Indian tribe carries a lot of baggage, only some of which goes away if we replace the term ‘Indian’ with ‘Native American’. We can also replace ‘tribes’ with ‘nations’ or ‘peoples’.

…we still end up with plenty of baggage.

There really isn’t any vocabulary that just works here. You really have to pick a term, and just bear in mind the distortions it imposes on the subject matter. But my point here today isn’t so much to work over the vocabulary as it is to focus attention on the maps themselves. It’s great to have them, but they too can distort the subject matter, all the more so when the map circulates as a meme-in-in-itelf, so to speak, just an image without a narrative to go with it.

So, what’s the problem?

***

Well, we have a few of them actually. One of the first things going through my own mind is the other half of the contextualization schema. The maps give us a where. That leaves me asking when? These maps purport to show us where different Native American peoples lived, but they rarely give us a strong sense of when they lived there. This goes hand-in-hand with common assumptions about the timelessness of Native American societies. Folks are only too happy to imagine that most Indian peoples had been living in the same place since time immemorial, just waiting for the rest of us to show up and kick-start the history machine. All the timely-changey stuff must have come after Columbus, so the thinking goes. Before that, Indian peoples just stayed put, living in harmony without any real need for big changes like a major population movements.

All of this is of course, nonsense, and I think most people know it is, at least when the question is put to them directly. I repeat, they know it WHEN you put the question to them directly. Until then, I think folks fall quite easily into the assumption that Indian peoples rested in a kind of temporal stasis. Hell, sometimes Native Americans themselves fall into this assumption.Don’t be too surprised. Stereotypes often come in a user-friendly version, an ever-so-inviting role to play, for those who are willing. The noble savage may be a cliché, but it’s not one without its charms, and it’s easily as timeless as any of its less PC counterparts. In any event, folks often seem to imagine Native American societies as timeless communities.

Case in point?

These maps.

DJdFnI-W4AI9LXEI found this little gem to the left on twitter, at least I believe that’s where I got it. It’s pretty cool, really. It definitely matches my general sense of where various people should be. But then again, my general sense of where everybody should be rests on a skewed timeline. I expect them to be in certain places when the stories I read or tell about them in history class take place. So, if the different natives peoples are in the right place on cue for the historical narratives I expect to feature them, then the map matches my initial expectations, and I end up saying stuff like “it’s pretty cool.” The whole thing almost works, but it doesn’t take too many questions to bust up both those expectations and the maps that go with them.

When did everyone get where they are in the map above? It’s controversial question, and one that I may regret raising here, but still… See the Apacheans down there in the Southwest? You might think they had been there since time immemorial, right? Well the archaeological evidence suggests this isn’t the case. As I recall, the earliest evidence for Diné (Navajo) placement in the four corners area predates the Spanish by a little over a hundred years. They came along with the other Apachean peoples by means of a hotly debated route. Of course archaeological finds happen every day, so the historical evidence may change, and I may have missed a recent find or three, but the point is that these people arrived in the area within comprehensible time frame. This placement on teh map isn’t from time immemorial; it begins at the cusp of the 1400s, give or take a bit, and that enables us to place their entrance into a sequence of events for the region. They were still settling into the total territory on this map when the Spanish began exploring the region, arriving well after their Pueblo neighbors. Knowing that helps to put the map in perspective. Not knowing that invites an a-historical reading of the map.

Now look at the plains. The peoples placed there seem right to me, but it’s worth considering that many of them didn’t get there until well after the beginnings of the colonial period. Specific migration routes and the scale of ground shifted are of course open to debate, but I think it is fair to say that a great deal of the population on this portion of the map filled in after the beginnings of the fur trade, and even more importantly, after the horse began spreading through the plains in the wake of the Pueblo Revolt.

243

From the New Mexico Museum of Art

That would be a war the Indians won folks, not simply a battle. a war. But that’s another rant…

…anyway, the point is that the population of the plains as we now understand it changed a great deal during the colonial period. So, if the southwest takes on roughly the territories represented in the map just ahead of the colonial period, the great plains takes its apparently map-worthy shape during that very period. We can point to a time frame sometime on down the road that reflects this mapping, but by then other things have shifted. Case in point? The eastern seaboard. By the time the plains looks like it does on this map, the settler population is already pushing a lot of people out and away from the coasts. By the time Lakota, Comanche, and Kiowa have reached their positions on this map, the eastern seaboard should already be looking a bit white-washed.

These are just the areas I think I know something about (and admittedly, I am often wrong). The rest of the map is full of movement too. Some areas may be more stable than others. The amount of movement is itself variable.

So, what does the map represent? It really isn’t a clear snapshot of any particular time-frame. We really can’t locate a specific time in which all the territories assigned to various indigenous peoples really were under their control. Rather, it seems to be a representation of the territories controlled by various peoples during something like a period of peak cultural autonomy. …as perceived by white people. In a very real sense, each of these territories is set onto the map in precisely the locations at which we non-natives really became interested in the regions and/or first became aware of the native peoples in question. Fair enough as far as it goes, but to say that this leaves out a lot of information is a Hell of an understatement.

***

Speaking of non-native perceptions. Names are a bit of a problem here as well. I hope it will come as no surprise to learn that many of the names appearing on these maps are not those used by the people to refer to themselves. ‘Navajo’ was for example a Tewa term for open fields. ‘Sioux’ is usually described as a shortened version of an Ojibwa term (it has something to do with snakes). As I recall, there is a competing narrative for that one, but the point is that the name DID NOT come from the Sioux themselves. ‘Eskimo’ was a Montagnais term often translated as ‘raw fish eater’, though it is more likely to have meant ‘snow-shoe netter’. Each of these origin narratives is a complicated story in itself (information is problematic all the way down), but for the present, the point is that the names typically appearing on these maps generally come from the neighbors of the peoples in question. They made their way into the popular lexicon after European colonists asked some other tribe who lives over there. The answers to those questions then made their way into our history books and onto our maps.

tribal_nation_map_custom-973eefab3541e8d2c23056100549ac543e59beee-s1600-c85This is one reason I like this map by Aaron Carapella. He makes an effort to identify the native names for themselves and get them onto the territory. That’s a big improvement. Of course, we still have the timeline problem mentioned above, but at least the names are a bit more authentic. I should add that they are more authentic because they are the names the people in question use for themselves, not because they are ‘original’, as folks sometimes suggest. ‘Original’ alludes to a timeless beginning. Talk of an original name just points us back to the timeline problem, but there is definite value in using the name people prefer to use for themselves. We may have to switch back and forth, or introduce a topic using the more popular names, but working with materials that provides the native terms helps to normalize them.

***

imagesOne additionally interesting feature of Carapella’s maps is the fact that he leaves off the territorial boundaries. The names of each people simply appear on the  map without any clear sense of the boundaries around them. We are left to imagine the full extent of each native territory. This avoids one of the larger problems one commonly finds in maps of Indian territory, their tendency to construe that territory in terms comparable to that of nation states. We all know the convention, color-coded spaces with clear boundaries between them. This conveys both a sense clear boundaries between different Indian peoples and a sense of homogeneity within those boundaries. Every part of Cherokee territory on such a map is just as Cherokeeish as any other part. They are all equally blue, or yellow, or mauve. One gets the sense that someone could pinpoint the exact moment they stepped into (or out of) Cherokee land, or that of any other tribe. We can practically see someone stopping on a dime, just like the cops in an old outlaw trucker movie do when they reach state lines. That’s how modern nation states work. It isn’t clear that this is now native territories work(ed).

It isn’t that native peoples didn’t have territories. They certainly did claim specific lands, and even defend them from others, but this system would have worked without the benefit of a scientific grid defining the exact moment one would step over the line from one territory to the next (much less collection of maps to represent them). Of course, natural features such rivers or mountains, and so forth would be used as reference points, but thus too leaves open questions as to just where the boundary rested. Did a given people claim both sides of a river or just one? The answers would vary. The end result was of course a lot of overlapping claims.

I often wonder if some of these maps could be improved by representing the overlapping territories, Venn diagram-style, at least where such instances do occur, but of course, this leaves open questions about timelines and the adequacy of information as to how the territories on these maps have been assigned to begin with. It’s not as though the historical record is entirely silent on these matters, but there is something about the way these maps fill in the details with a little too much precision. Judgement calls have been made on these maps, and the way they have been made is erased by the nature of the maps.

The problem isn’t really unique to Native American territories, but at least as applied to modern states and nations the techniques used by the map-makers matches those of the powers that be a bit more. People who live in and around important boundaries may or may not live life in a way that bears out the conventions of cartography, but the powers that be will likely support the notion that we can pin-point exactly where one state leaves off and another begins. They will also support the notion that we know exactly who belongs on one side or another, if necessary with guns or walls. The trouble here is that these maps purport to describe the territories of a different world altogether, one which reckons turf a bit differently.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s great to have these maps, but they distort even as they inform. I’m always curious about the prospects of improvement. In the interim, I reckon the best cure for the distortion is to be aware of the problems.

…of which, I hope I have at least scratched the surface.

Sundry Maps (Click to embiggen)…

California Indian Territories
Indian Tribes of the U.S.
Aaron Carapella’s map
North American Linguistic territories
Territorial Losses (ironically Native American territories become more clear as they shrink at the onslaught of colonism
Culture Areas Again
Culture Areas
Nuther Aaron Carapella map
AK Natives

A Cosmogony of Gambling

17 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by in Native American Themes, Politics

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What to make of Indian casinos? I expect a lot of non-natives still don’t quite know how to answer that question. Maybe some Native Americans don’t either. But it’s an interesting question just the same, not the least of reasons being that anyone trying to answer it will have to struggle a bit with the larger questions about the politics of Indian-white relations. Some people handle that better than others of course. I’ve known some folks that seem to think of gambling as a kind of racial entitlement. These same folks don’t seem to think of Las Vegas or Atlantic City as a form of racial entitlement, but all foolishness aside, the topic does raise a number of interesting questions about jurisdiction and the economic impact of gaming in such distinctive communities.

miz3ezrd

The impact of Indian gaming on different tribes isn’t uniform. We’ve all heard the stories of wild success of certain tribes whose members became rich overnight. Most of us have heard speculation about the membership of certain tribes. Our incoming President had some words about Indian casinos back in the day. They weren’t any more thoughtful than the crap he’s spewing now. But of course these wild success stories are hardly typical of the many tribal casinos out there. There have been some disasters, or at least some scandals, as well. I recall once listening to Ron His Horse is Thunder, former Chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe explain the significance of casinos in his own community. They provided a certain number of jobs, he told us. That was it. No miracle. No disaster. Just a steady livelihood for a certain number of people. That was his experience with Indian gaming. I hope I remember him correctly on this, because I reckon that’s a fairly common account of the issue. But of course all of these stories come with the benefit of hindsight.

It wasn’t too long ago that the entire subject of Indian gaming was uncharted territory, that the mention of reservation casinos raised all sorts of possibilities and few people had any real experience to bring to bear on the issue. It was around that time (the mid 90s) that I arrived in Navajo country. Numerous tribes had casinos at that point. The Navajo Nation was not among them. Some out there wanted casinos. Others didn’t. Folks kept a wary eye on the operations of other tribes, looking for some sign to help assess the prospects for gaming in their own community. In 1997 the Navajo General Council called for a referendum on the prospect of gambling on their lands. It was the second such referendum (a third would follow in 2004). It set the stage for a interesting debate which I followed as best I could.

Today, you can find a few casinos on the borders of the Navajo Nation, but in 1997 the answer was no. In some quarters, it was Hell No. The reasoning still interests me.

gambler10-2-97One of the most fascinating things about the debate over Navajo gambling in 1997 has to do with an aspect of Navajo origin legends. One of the greatest villains in these stories was a character, named Noqoìlpi, The Gambler. You can read more about him by clicking that link I attached to his name, but to put it briefly, this fellow just about wins the world and everyone in it by gambling. Frankly, I think there’s a lesson about the economic effects of modern financialization schemes and the growth of income inequality there in that story (seriously), but I’ll save that for another day. In 1997, the connection drawn by many on the Navajo Nation was a lesson about the evils of opening up casinos on the reservation. Whatever the strengths or weaknesses of this argument, it certainly added a rich layer of meaning to an already interesting subject.

Of those working references to The Gambler into their arguments on the topic of casinos on the Navajo Nation, my favorite was the late Vincent Craig who ran an extended series of Mutton Man cartoons addressing this and several other issues in the Navajo Times. He really blended his own critique of gambling with a broad range of (extremely ironic) social commentary.

It all begins with a culture pill. .

Unfortunately, I don’t think I have copies of all the cartoons he ran on this topic. I don’t know that he got a cartoon in every edition of the Navajo Times, but I definitely have gaps in my own collection. Anyway, I collected enough to get the gist of his argument down. I’ll let Vincent and some of his colleagues tell the story from here.

Vincent Craig’s work (Click to embiggen):

A bit more on the subject, also from the Navajo Times (again, click to embiggen):

8/14/97
11/6/97
7/31/97
10/23/97
10/30/97
10/2/97

Rural Murals

22 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by in Bad Photography, Native American Themes, Street Art

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Buffalo

Look closely

Just drove north of Flagstaff along Highway 89 up to Kanab. I used to commute from Flagstaff up to Tuba City for work, so a stretch of this was very familiar to me. I was pleasantly surprised to see one new element along the road, a certain amount of street art.

The subject matter is rather distinctive, but I can’t help thinking one of the best things about this material is the background.

An elderly Navajo working one of the craft stands told me there were a couple different people in the area putting these up. I don’t know much more.

Thought I’d share.

(Click to embiggen!)

 

Red backgrouind
“Off the goat” reads a popular T-Shirt (in part).
Stencil
Backside
Nuther Look
Love this one
Under a Navajo Nation Flag
First one I saw
Pink
Dimples

 

P.S. My girlfriend tells me I’m not supposed to include the pictures of the child and a goat on account of she accidentally picked up a black ant taking pictures of those herself. We ejected the hitchhiker on the outskirts of Page. A little Hydrocortisol and a couple Advil had us on our way. The cycle of pain may continue once she realizes what I did here.  I’m not a praying man, but your kind thoughts would be appreciated.

Irony Failure and the Success of Tradition

03 Tuesday May 2016

Posted by in Alaska, Native American Themes, Uncategorized

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Landing a Whale in the Fall

Landing a Whale in the Fall

When I first got into Navajo country (many years ago) my old boss used to laugh and say that Ricola was traditional Navajo medicine. I remember him singing the name lightly as he got out a piece. No, he wasn’t suggesting that Navajos had invented Ricola. As I recall, his throat used to get scratchy during all-night chants. His remedy of choice, Ricola, helped him get through the long evenings with his voice intact. His phrasing was intentionally ironic, of course, but my old boss had in fact made this commercial medicine part of his own traditional regimin.

You can find that sort of irony in all sorts of traditional indigenous activities.  It can produce the sort of wry humor of my old boss and his cough medicine, or it can give rise to deep suspicions. A lot depends on who is calling attention to the irony. The issue often comes up in my classes here on the north slope of Alaska where the dominant traditional themes are associated with hunting and whaling. The indigenous peoples of Alaska retain substantial rights to subsistence activities which include the taking game. That they frequently use modern technology in doing so hasn’t escaped notice, but what of it? That’s an interesting question.

The issue popped up a number of years back when the New York Times published a piece on the Fall whale hunt here in Barrow. Its title put the between technology and tradition front and center:

With Powerboat and Forklift, a Sacred Whale Hunt Endures

If the purpose of this rather clever juxtaposition wasn’t clear enough at the outset, one didn’t have to read far into the piece to see the point driven home rather clearly. In the very first sentence, its authors (William Yardley and Erik Olden) declare that “The ancient whale hunt is not so ancient anymore.” They go on to quote whalers themselves saying things such as “Ah the traditional loader” and “ah the, the traditional forklift.” And with that introduction, the authors go on to explore the paradox of traditional activities carried out with modern technology.

Suffice to say, many in Barrow were not amused.

Edward Itta, former Mayor of the North Slope, published his own response in the Alaska Dispatch News (ADN), suggesting that the authors had failed to grasp the cultural context in which indigenous whaling takes place. A subsequent ADN article focusing on Wainwright took the time to castigate Yardly and Olden for focusing on the nature of Fall whaling instead of Spring when whalers use walrus skinned boats. Yardley and Olsen too had commented this fact, but the point was easily lost in the overall narrative highlighting the use of technology in whaling practice.

I keep coming back to this piece, because the questions raised in that article keep coming back to me. Often it’s a student new to the region who fields the question in one form or another, is it still traditional if people can use modern technology? I struggle to get across the best answer I can. I can point folks to Iñupiat who can answer the question much more authoritatively than I can, but frankly, I think there is a reason I get these questions. As another outsider, I suppose, I may be thought a safe person to ask. I reckon they figure I won’t get mad.

…and I won’t.

This does strike me as an honest question, at least in the sense that those asking it usually seem to be sincere. Just the same, measuring legitimacy of native traditions by the use or absence of modern technology does skew the issue in some very toxic ways.

On one level, I find myself wondering if the Amish haven’t become the paradigm case for traditional anything in the minds of so many people. I reckon it’s up to Iñupiat to define their own traditions as they see fit, and to the best of my knowledge, there just isn’t anything in there against using the most productive technology available. The tradition is taking a whale, not doing it with a particularly pristine kind of harpoon, much less butchering it using only native equipment. The notion that using technology constitutes a failure of authenticity is an assumption coming from outsider.

It isn’t a particularly helpful assumption at that.

Which brings me back to the jokes at the beginning of that old New York Times piece. I can’t help wondering if the authors might have gotten the point of the humor wrong. Hell, it might have been their editor who skewed the whole piece, I don’t know, but in its final form that article clearly takes each of those jokes to be an admission of sorts, a subtle concession to the inauthenticity of the activities in question.

I read those with echoes of my own boss singing ‘Ricola’ in the back of my head.

It seems at least as likely that the point of the humor had something to do with the adaptability of tradition. The question may not have been, is this really traditional, but rather how could it be otherwise?

IMG_20160419_120130

Not Yet (Nalukataq)

What makes whaling traditional? Yardley and Olsen touched on this when they noted the distribution of boiled muktuk (edible blubber and skin) to those present as the whale was butchered.

Much of the community comes to watch as a whale is burchered. More to the point, much of the community pitches in to help. Even more have helped in one manner or another to provide support for the whaling crews during the course of preparations. Where possible, employers grant leave to those engaged in whaling, and teachers accept absences during whaling season. We’ll work it out later. You would be hard pressed to find a resident of the North Slope who doesn’t provide some sort of support to whaling activities, even if it’s just acceptance of the way the whaling season restructures all of our other activities. Whaling is a community affair, and its impact on the community re-enforces numerous personal relationships.

The tradition is also found in freezers throughout the North Slope, many of which contain muktuk and other delicacies received as gifts from the whalers. It can be seen when a successful crew serves a meal to any who come by their home, and you can see it again during Nalukataq (a Spring festival) when pretty much anyone can walk into a the festival square, sit down, and receive all manner of food from these very same crews. What makes whaling matter is the way that it shapes relations between people all over the north slope, and in that respect it continues many of the same patterns that predate the presence of outsiders like me who ask too many questions, and sometimes fail to learn the answers. If we’re looking for the traditional components of whaling, this is where you will find them.

This social emphasis too is complicated as Hell, but it’s actually relevant. We can ask, for example, how the use of technology ties subsistence activities to modern markets, how use of a snow-machine instead of a dog team changes the work regime for participants in whaling and hunting. We can ask how the presence of grocery stores changes everything, and how the jobs needed to earn money for modern goods and services change the lives of people all over the North Slope. The answers to such questions might also leave us with a less of pristine sense of what tradition means in subsistence activities, but they point to a different sense of the problems at stake in these issues and a different sense of the threats to community practice.

IMG_20160305_095525

Nalukataq II

Simply pointing at a forklift is a bit of a gotcha game. Unfortunately, it’s a game played all too often by outsiders looking at indigenous hunting practices. More and more, I find myself thinking the game begins when people look in the wrong place to understand these practices. They come and they watch the whalers at work on the ice or harvesting a catch on the beach.

Where they ought to be looking is in those freezers.

…okay folks, don’t come up here and literally look in people’s freezers.

My point is that people who want to understand the significance of whaling or any other aspect of traditional subsistence need to look at the way the work and the results are shared. They need to look at the festivals, the potlucks, the serving events around town, or simply at the moments when someone walks up and hands someone else a helping of food. That’s where the tradition is held together, and that is precisely why the damned forklift was traditional after all.

Just like the Ricola my old boss used to love.

R-i-c-o-l-a !!!

An Uncommon Saint -Kateri Tekakwitha

10 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by in Native American Themes, Uncommonday

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(Kateri)Meet Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680). She is Mohawk and Algonquin. She is also the first North American Indian be canonized by the Catholic Church. She is the fourth Native American to become a saint, having been preceded by three central American natives. You might think that is what makes her uncommon, or might have thought it unusual that I am taking time to plug a Catholic saint (which is certainly an uncommon thing for me to do), and fair enough on both points.

What really interests me here is Kateri’s attire. Standing as she is here in front of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe, I can’t tell if her attire is fitting or not. You see, she appears to be dressed as Pueblo, which is a little bit unusual (perhaps not fitting) for a Mohawk woman. How did she get so dressed? It might have something to do with the fact that Kateri’s sculptor in this instance was Estella Loretto of Jemez, which would make her attire fitting after all.

???????????????????????????????…but it’s still just a little odd.

Of course, for some of us ‘odd’ is good proxy for ‘interesting’.

Tekakwitha is portrayed in Iroquois dress inside the Cathedral itself. I would hardly have noticed that this was the same woman, and I have to thank my friend John for pointing this out to me. Just what to make of the changes in dress, I’m not entirely sure. A visit to a Catholic Church is certainly an uncommon experience for me.

In any event, it is a beautiful sculpture.

Uncommonday Number 2: A Bit of Juxtaposition

28 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by in Museums, Native American Themes, Uncommonday

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Leia-Hopi croppedI seriously wonder what the folks out on the Hopi Mesas must have thought of Star Wars. I’ll leave the commentary at that, because I think the photo here speaks for itself. This piece was produced by the artist Nicolas Galanin. It was part of an exhibit at the Anchorage Museum.

Indians Through the Eyes of A White Kid: In Which I Wax Nostalgic and Feel Slightly Awkward About the Whole Thing

28 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by in Childhood, Native American Themes

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Having spent most of my career working with Native Americans (and more recently,  Alaska Natives), I’ve often had cause to reflect on the differences between the people I have met as an adult and the ideas circulating about them in the public imagination. Often I find myself thinking about notions of Indian-ness I learned when I was little. What were Indians to me as a child? And how did I arrive at those notions? I don’t know if there is any special insight to be gained here, but I seem to think with a keyboard, so anyway…

What do I remember?

***

Beulah, CO

I certainly remember cowboys and Indians on the playground in a small school in Southern Colorado. That and army were all I wanted to play (or tackle football – at least until it dawned on me that I sucked at sports). I remember that playing the Indian was somewhat of a social obligation on our playground, because they had to die more than the cowboys; it was expected. You had to take your turn out there storming the monkey bars which served as a fortress from which the playground cowboys picked off playground Indians with relative ease. As I didn’t mind dying on the playground, I did this more than most of my classmates, except for Joe, (I think that was his name). Joe claimed some Arapaho ancestry. He was happy to play an Indian. I don’t remember whether died more than the cowboys, but I sort of hope he didn’t.

A part of me suspects Joe eventually found something else to do on the playground.

Monkey Bars

I must admit that I got frustrated, because certain folks (like …ahem, Scotty and Paul) never seemed to take their turn as an Indian, and they never, NEVER, died when you shot them with an arrow, not even when you snuck-up close on them and got ’em right in the heart.

Cheaters!

***

I recall a number of class projects. Whether it was kindergarten or first grade, I can’t say, but some teacher had us all dress up as Indians once. This meant cutting holes into brown sacks for us to stick our heads and arms through, then cutting up the bottom for fringe. Mostly, I remember the dull scissors that we used to cut through the sacks, and the terrible blister I ended up with between my thumb and index finger.

I was not a huge fan of Indian dress after that assignment.

***

The wampum beads (colored macaroni on a string) went over much better. We wore them as necklaces. I and my classmates were more than happy to play Indian on the playground for awhile after making those. Naturally, we were plains Indians (pasta wampum having a slightly different regional presence than it’s namesake), but well, the important thing is that we fell when the cowboys shot us. That expectation was written in stone. I mean they could miss a time or two, but eventually you had to give it to the cowboy, grab your chest and fall.

Pasta wampum doesn’t hold up well when you fall on it.

***

I remember a trip to Yellowstone National park netted me a headdress, a toy bow and some picture-books filled with spectacular images of plains Indians. I think I played Indian that night until my parents wanted to shoot me for real.

As a side note, I recall that when my classmates started getting guns for Christmas (this was rural Colorado), and I started hinting, Mom and Dad responded to this by getting me a real bow. As if I couldn’t have killed myself with that. …Or for that matter Lawrence what’s-his-name from 6th grade. (In my defense, it was his idea to sit on the fence below and watch as the arrow fell back to earth; it saved time retrieving the thing.)

I still cringe when I think about that one.

***

I remember once while still living in Colorado, the class had to make models of different types of Indian homes. Somehow I got stuck with Navajo. Some friends are gonna kill me for saying that (and well they should) but that was exactly how I felt about it at the time. The ‘real Indians’ as far as I was concerned lived in teepees; I was stuck representing a hogan. At the time, ‘real Indian’ meant for me something like the plains Indians I had seen on TV so many times, usually charging over the hill to be shot down by the cowboys.

My hogans eventually took the form of an egg-shaped panty-hose container covered in something to make it look like mud; two of them of course. (Yes, the container was my Mother’s suggestion.) I wasn’t anymore pleased to have anything to do with panty-hose than I was to be making the homes of a tribe that didn’t appear in any of the movies I had been watching. (Little did I know where so many of the John Wayne films were made, …or how many Navajos I had already seen on film. I certainly didn’t know to call them Diné, nor did I appreciate the fact that I was setting their architecture back a couple hundred years with this mud-covered L’Eggs-model.) The bottom half of the shell seemed about right, but the top shell was way too pointed.

And my classmates made such perfect teepees, too!

I really hated that project.

***

Several years on down the road, another teacher gave out the same assignment, and somehow I ended up with Pueblos this time. I was a little older and a little less disappointed. …a little. I ended up with a gigantic sugar cube structure that didn’t look too bad until we covered it in brown wood-stain. Truth be told, it looked more like a castle than a Pueblo, but I still counted this as an improvement over my panty-hose hogan from previous years. After getting it back from the teacher, this structure made a really nice fort, one which helped to protect many a plastic army soldier from sundry enemies. What WW II-type army soldiers were doing in a castle-pueblo-fortress, I don’t know, but they fought well, let me tell you.

…at least until one of our cats used the box I had put this in as a substitute litter box.

***

I had a sister-in-law for a little while. She was “part native,” as they say. I remember, she had a lot of siblings, and I recall studying them quite carefully to see which ones looked like Indians and which didn’t. I figured you could see the Indian in about half of her siblings, but the other half looked white to me.

Naturally, I was quite confused.

***

I do believe it was my sister-in-law that caught me talking about ‘bad Indians’ one day and schooled me on the subject right quick. This had a pretty strong impact, not the least of reasons being that I liked all the Indians I knew. I liked Joey, I liked my sister-in-law, and as I recall I had a major puppy-crush on one of her little sisters, …possibly two. So, when she told me that Indians weren’t all bad, I was quite willing to believer her.

But that left me with one big problem; how to square this new understanding with all those westerns?

It all came to a head one day as I was looking down at a book illustration. The image is still quite clear in my mind; it depicted a whole bunch of plains Indians mounted on horse-back and charging toward the viewer looking fierce and warlike. Some adult in the household (I believe a guest) asked me what kind of Indians I thought they were. And that created quite a dilemma for me. I still didn’t know one tribe from another, much less how artificial those categories could be. More importantly, I was still stuck on the good Indian/bad Indian thing.

I stared at the image in silence for awhile, and I reasoned to myself that if not all Indians were bad, surely some were. There were bad cowboys and good cowboys in the movies, so why not good Indians and bad Indians? And maybe those bad Indians were the ones I had seen in all the movies. Maybe those were the Indians we had been playing as we stormed the monkey-bar fortress at recess. And if there were bad Indians, I thought, surely these guys (fierce looking as they were) must belong to that group! So, that’s what I said, my tone rising as I spoke; “…bad Indians?” after a bit of a pause, whoever it was offered that perhaps they were Comanche.

Total victory!

Frank C. McCarthy – The Hostiles

As far as I understood it, my theory that there were in fact bad Indians had just been confirmed, and I had just been given a name for at least some of them, Comanche! Comanche were the bad Indians. My sister-in-law and her family and Joey must have been the good ones. The next time I took off after that monkey-bar fortress, I feel quite certain that I counted myself as a ‘Comanche’ rather than a mere ‘Indian’.

Of course someone shot me and I had to fall down dead.

***

Naturally, my perspective on things having to do with Native Americans has changed over the years, not the least of them being my vocabulary preferences. But I often wonder how much of it is due to simply growing up and how much may be due to specific paths I have taken over the years? Most importantly, I find myself wondering how many of the ideas which shaped what an ‘Indian’ was to a little white guy living in Southern Colorado in the 1970s might have been due to the times I lived in? And how much that in itself may have changed?

I guess another way of putting it would be; do Indians still fight cowboys on the playground?

And if so, do the Indians ever win?

***

Many years had passed since all those stories mentioned above when I arrived in Navajo country to receive my first lesson on indigenous perspectives from a native source. My new landlord hadn’t quite cleared out of his place yet, but he had made a fold-out bed available for me. Observing a pile of pillows and blankets arranged in a familiar manner about the bed, I mentioned that his son had built a fort out of it.

A very irritated preschool child quickly emerged from beneath the bed to tell me it was not a fortress.

It was a Pueblo!

Primitive Superstition and Proxy Fundamentalism: Further Reflections on Native American Spirituality

17 Tuesday Jul 2012

Posted by in Anthropology, atheism, History, Native American Themes, Religion

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Stephen Hawking and Leonard Moldinow
The Grand Design

It always bends my thoughts a little sideways to hear my fellow unbelievers dismiss Christianity as primitive superstition, but it isn’t Christianity or Christians that I’m worried about (sorry). It’s the ‘primitives’ that concern me.

Having spent most of my career working with indigenous people, people who until recently might well have been dismissed as primitives, I can’t help but bristle a bit when the cultural heritage of my friends and coworkers (or their grandparents) is used as an insult for someone else. More to the point, I can’t help but feel the comparison is deeply misleading, not just as to the nature of ‘primitive’ people and their customs, but as to the whole shape of human history. In the end, references to primitives and/or superstition always strike me as a bit of self-indulgence, or even an ironic expression of faith.

The notion here is that Christianity (and most if not all of the world’s great religions (certainly the Abrahamic faiths) are essentially trying to explain the world about them much as preliterate peoples are presumed to have done in the remote past. Actually, “non-literate” would a better term, but for the present, I am taking the notion of things-primitive to refer to those who haven’t developed writing systems. That’s putting a rather complex topic into a simple formula, but of course this is a blog, not a book, so you are either with me or not at this point; we’ll see what happens. Anyway, the point is that folks comparing Christianity to primitives are essentially suggesting that Adam and Eve, are for example, erroneous attempts to explain human origins much as Australian Aborigines might explain local geography as the concrete result of events in Dreamtime narratives; just as Norseman might explain the shape of a salmon’s tail as a result of Thor’s powerful grip; …and so on. The idea, as I understand it, is to treat religious beliefs as a subset of erroneous explanations for the world around us, explanations that reflect the ignorance of those doing the explaining.

Take for example the following excerpt from Stephen Hawking’s book, The Grand Design (2112):

Ignorance of nature’s ways led people in ancient times to invent gods to lord it over every aspect of human life. There were gods of love and war; of the sun, earth, and sky; of the oceans and rivers; of rain and thunderstorms; even of earthquakes and volcanoes.

Hawking goes on to explain that the development of modern science has displaced such explanations, and as science progresses these sorts of beliefs should essentially fade by the wayside. Thus, we have the germs of a grand historical meta-narrative, one in which humanity tries various means of explaining the world only to commit numerous errors before settling on modern scientific methods.

***

Paul Zolbrod
The Navajo Creation Story

So, what is the problem?

Let me start with an example. When I first headed into Navajo country in 1996, I hired on as a research assistant for a study of local youth gangs. I can’t say that the study yielded much of value, but we did manage to not get anyone killed (…I think). At any rate, one of the items we were supposed to investigate was the question of why gangs had appeared in Navajo country. In the days just before the study kicked up I recall asking an elder that very question. He looked right at me and said; “The separation of the sexes.”

So, what was he talking about?

It was a reference to a specific phase in the Navajo emergence narratives. The most thorough retelling that I’ve looked at would be the book; Diné Bahane’: The Navajo Creation Story by Paul G. Zolbrod. A portion of the narrative has been reproduced here on the website for the Twin Rocks Trading Post, and it’s definitely worth a read, but I’ll paste in a small stretch here. You could just as easily entitle this passage; “Where All The Trouble Began.”

Altse’ hastiin the First Man became a great hunter in the fourth world. So he was able to provide his wife Altse’ asdzaa’ the First Woman with plenty to eat. As a result, she grew very fat. Now one day he brought home a fine, fleshy deer. His wife boiled some of it, and together they had themselves a hearty meal. When she had finished eating, Altse asdzaa’ the First Woman wiped her greasy hands on her sheath.
She belched deeply. And she had this to say:
“Thank you shijoozh my vagina,” she said.
“Thank you for that delicious dinner.”
To which Altse’ hastiin the First Man replied this way:
“Why do you say that?” he replied.
“Why not thank me?
“Was it not I who killed the deer whose flesh you have just feasted on?
“Was it not I who carried it here for you to eat?
“Was it not I who skinned it?
“Who made it ready for you to boil?
“Is nijoozh your vagina the great hunter, that you should thank it and not me?”

To which Altse’ asdzaa’ offered this answer:
“As a matter of fact, she is,” offered she.
“In a manner of speaking it is joosh the vagina who hunts.
“Were it not for joosh you would not have killed that deer.
“Were it not for her you would not have carried it here.
“You would not have skinned it.
“You lazy men would do nothing around here were it not for joosh.
“In truth, joosh the vagina does all the work around here.”
To which Altse’ hastiin the First Man had this to say:
“Then perhaps you women think you can live without us men,” he said.

…and things get worse from there.

Ultimately, the fight between this Ur-couple will lead to the separation of all men and women from one another. The longing that each gender feels for the other will in turn lead them to unnatural sex acts, and these will in turn lead to the birth of monsters (really the story does get quite interesting).

So, what was the elder telling me? On the one hand, he was suggesting that the gangs were themselves the sort of monster that had its ultimate origins in the time of separation, just as had the giant and all the other beasts slain the by Hero Twins later in this same set of legends. On the other hand, he was suggesting something more subtle; he was calling attention to a high divorce rate on the Navajo Nation. In effect, that brief response served to point out not just one but two answers to my question, and to suggest some sort of relationship between them. Either way the separation of men and women from one another was, in this man’s view, the reason that gang violence had begun to appear in Navajo country.

The first of the two answers presented above could be classified as mythology. It is an attempt to explain a known fact by means of a reference to an old (and quite unverifiable) legend. The second approach treats the story in question as an allegory about the importance of marriage, and the elder’s answer becomes a direct social commentary on the relationship between changing family conditions and the rise of gang-related violence in the area. Right or wrong about the issues at hand, this interpretation would suggest the elder had been directing my attention to real world behavior. It would not have been difficult to measure that behavior, and even to formulate strategies for testing the causal connection he had asserted. But the most interesting thing about this whole fashion of speaking is really the interplay between the two forms of explanation. The elder did not choose which approach to communicate; in fact he chose language that suggested both lines of thinking to anyone familiar enough with the issues to know what he was talking about.

***

Standing Rock Sioux Reservation

Standing Rock Sioux Reservation
(September 2011)

So what, right? Thus far, what I have presented is fairly comparable to untold other religious texts. What is the difference, you may ask?

Well, for a start, there is no catechism here. Neither is there any equivalent to the Apostle’s or the Nicene Creed (or any other). Recourse to the emergence narratives presents no set doctrines about which one must agree, nor are there mechanisms for establishing what those would be. Until folks like the early anthropologists make it into the southwest, these stories were not written down at all, and until Zolbrod one could find no single text to unite them all into a single Holy Text. In the old days, as they say, this story might well have been a complete performance in its own right, one told for reasons specific to those present, and adapted a little for that precise purpose. Folks would have understood how this little story related to a number of other stories, but no set canon could be found against which to measure each individual performance or determine its precise meaning. In short, thesignificance of the text above ought to be understood without recourse to any of the mechanisms by which mainstream religions streamline their message and create a uniform set of doctrines.

To understand the elder’s reference one needn’t start by assuming he literally believes in the events described in the narrative above, or even that such a belief is relevant to his answer. One need only recognize that he found the story to be a useful reference point, and that he chose to use that reference point as a means of communicating a sense of the current state of his community.

I think this is the sort of thing John R. Farella must have had in mind when he said in his book, The Main Stalk, that one ought not to assume all natives are fundamentalists. It isn’t even that such folks aren’t out there, but they do not necessarily control the traditions in question. We shouldn’t be too quick to assume that a literal interpretation of things drives every reference to native oral traditions. That is what people raised in the Abrahamic traditions (whether we have accepted those traditions or not) tend to do when encountering the oral traditions of various people around the world, or even when we read ancient texts (such as Genesis) with an eye towards understanding something about the oral traditions incorporated within them.

Understood in these terms, the literal value of mythic events loses a lot of ground to the other implications of the narrative. A god of lightning ceases to be an explanation for lightning, and the lightning becomes a convenient means of letting nature call the name of the god to your mind. References to actual geography in mythic narratives cease to be a means of explaining those geographic features and become a variety of social conventions from territorial claims to moral lessons. The oral traditions become less of an attempt at understanding nature and more of an attempt to use nature as a means of expressing principles of social organization.

***

And where does that leave us?

I think it leaves us without a coherent central theme for the grand meta-narrative. Absent the assumption that every story is supposed to contribute to a single coherent theory (much less the assumption that that theory is a truth the recognition of which all mankind is obligated to acknowledge), we lose any clear reason to treat such stories as pre-scientific explanations of the world around us.

No, this does not mean we must accept any and all religious assertions after first checking to make sure they are offered in a less than literal spirit. What it does mean is that we lose one religious tenant to which not-a-few atheists seem quite prone, namely belief in uni-lineal Progress with a capital P. We lose that tenant, both as a short-cut to understanding the past of humanity, and as a promise of future success.

This does not mean giving up reason as a value, just letting go of the illusion that this value is the axis mundi around which all of human history turns.

Hawking is perfectly right to insist on the superiority of scientific approaches to explaining the world; he is wrong to think that explanation is the key to all those other traditions now conveniently (if quite inaccurately) summarized as a god of this and a god of that.

If there is an explanatory feature to religious tradition, it is largely a function of the means by which religions derive actual doctrine from such narratives and demand that others acknowledge the truth of those doctrines. In this respect the Abrahamic traditions do not merely carry forward the problems of earlier, so-called primitive, traditions. Instead they bring with them a brand new sort of problem, an effort to realign all the creativity one finds in oral tradition with a single obligatory and highly inflexible paradigm. We ought not to be too quick to let the God of Abraham share the blame for this problem with the figures of oral tradition from around the rest of the world. Nor should we be too quick to assume the course of history has been driven first and foremost by the values of scientists and philosophers.