Some writers have stressed that Indians, like Europeans, are immigrants to this continent and some feel that Indians are recent immigrants. Joseph Stauss (2002: xiv) writes: “It has always been a great legal and political advantage to believe a history that relegates indigenous peoples to the category of recent newcomers to the Americas.” Some Indian oral traditions say that their people have always been here. Anthropology, on the other hand, indicates a great time depth for the indigenous population of the Americas. It is presently estimated that Indian people have lived in North America for at least 20,000 years and there are some who feel that the Indian presence on the continent is much longer.

As an alternative to lies, some histories simply ignore Indians. Again, James Loewen (1995: 266) writes: “Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., found himself able to write an entire book on the presidency of Andrew Jackson without ever mentioning perhaps the foremost issue Jackson dealt with as president: the removal of Indians from the Southeast. What’s more, Schlesinger’s book won the Pulitzer prize.”

In their work on the original inhabitants of Vermont, archaeologists Haviland and Power comment about the tenacity of the myth that Vermont was uninhabited when “discovered” by the Europeans. They say: “Today, an awareness that Vermont was once inhabited by Indians is largely confined to their descendants, anthropologists, and collectors of prehistoric artifacts” (1981: 1).

Writing about the amnesia regarding Indians in the Old South, anthropologist Charles Hudson (1971: 2) say: “The whites in the South have had a well-known monopoly on power and wealth, and the history they have written is so white it has become embarrassing.”

In discussing why there is a lack of Indian history and of Indian historical records similar to that of the Lenni Lenape’s Wallam Olum, David McCutchen (1993: 179) says: “The colonists had to see the land as empty, so they erased the people and history that were already there.”

Another factor in the distortion of the European-based histories is fear – fear of Indian cultures. It was not uncommon during the early years of contact for some Europeans “to go native” and to become Indian. In prisoner exchanges, it was not uncommon for European captives to refuse repatriation. “The Pilgrims so feared Indianization that they made it a crime for men to wear long hair” writes historian Loewen (1995: 101).

When Indian histories are told from European, Anglo, and American viewpoints, the stories can be distorted by ethnocentrism and by racism. Lakota writer Charles Eastman (1918: 180) writes: “Racial prejudice naturally enters into the account of a man’s life by enemy writers, while one is likely to favor his own race.”

In his work on the Osage, historian Willard H. Rollings (1992: 3) criticizes the inaccuracy of other Osage histories: “This inaccurate portrayal is a result of examining Osage history solely in terms of white society and culture.” In his work on the Crow, historian Frederick Hoxie (1995: 127) asks: “How might one hear a Crow voice when the mountain of records that contained it was constructed by outsiders?” 

The result of this distorted history is that Americans – both Indians and non-Indians – are denied their heritage. When history begins in 1492, it denies that the great civilizations of the Mississippean people at Cahokia, the Anasazi at Chaco Canyon, and the Hohokam at Snaketown are a part of the American heritage. In a guest column in the newspaper Indian Country Today, Ivan F. Starr (1996: A5) writes: “the Native side of history has either been minimized, dehumanized or eliminated completely from the public realm. This has produced a nation of people who know only half of the story.” Knowing only half the story, or even less, means that people are more likely to minimize, deny, and distort the meaning of ancient features in places like New England.

Historian Howard Zinn (2006: 24) puts it bluntly: ‘We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which millions of Indians were driven off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations.”

The need to correct the distorted historical record that is commonly told in history books, on television, and in the movies is continually expressed by Indian educators, historians, and tribal leaders. Steven Newcomb, the Indigenous Law Research Coordinator at Kumeyaay Community College on the Sycuan Indian Reservation puts it this way (2004: A3): “we need to sort through the misinformation that the dominant society has devised and perpetuated, and to set the record straight by telling our indigenous side of the story. It’s essential that we work hard to continually develop and refine our own explanations and interpretations, something that takes a lot of time, energy, discipline and financial backing.” One solution is for Indian people to record, write, and publish their own histories. The problem of doing this, however, is described by historian John Alley (1986: 601): “Without resources, largely nonliterate, without access to print media, and often punished for expressing traditional cultural values or even speaking their languages, Indians had little opportunity to speak out about their history, let alone do research and publish accounts.”

Indian people today throughout North America are in the process of reclaiming their history. They are in the process of putting their past into a written form so that non-Indians can understand that Indians have not vanished and that their cultures continue. Suzanne Crawford (2000: 228) writes: “History has ever and always been a narrative, written and rewritten to suit the needs of the day; history is constructed, not discovered.”

Oral Tradition

Indian people today know that their tribes have histories which have been recorded not in books, but in their oral tradition. Writing in 1817, Christian missionary John Heckewelder (1971: xxvi) says: “We know that all Indians have the custom of transmitting to posterity, by a regular chain of tradition, the remarkable events which have taken place with them at any time, even often events of a trivial nature, of which I could mention a number.”

There are many scholars who feel that oral tradition is not really history. Historian James Axtell (1992: 79) writes: “a source with which traditionally bookish historians are distinctly uneasy is the recollection of native peoples who pass down through the generations of oral accounts of ‘events’ long in the past.” The tradition of oral history is, however, far more rigorous than the academic study of history at most American and Canadian universities.

Oral tradition requires that the person telling the histories learn them exactly and be able to recite them in the same way each time and in the same way as those who told the histories before. According to anthropologist Fred Eggan (1995: 22): “To my way of thinking, there’s no fundamental distinction between history written down and history spoken. Each can be wrong or right.” Andrew Fisher (1999: 2) puts it this way: “Present-day literates generally assume that written records have more value as evidence than spoken words, especially in the courtroom. Members of oral cultures, by contrast, often believe quite the opposite.” According to archaeologist Charles Redman (1993: 10): “Oral histories are especially valuable for our study of the past in places where there has been a long continuity of settlement.”

Oral history includes more than just stories: it includes ceremonies and traditions which reinforce the ties to the past. Writing about the Hupa before European contact, Byron Nelson (1978: 3) says: “They kept no written records of that time. Instead, each generation passed the stories, tradition, and ceremonies on to the next.”

The difficulties that many modern non-Indian historians have in dealing with oral traditions, including those which have been written down, is that they are often based on symbolism—symbolism which requires intimate knowledge of the indigenous culture to understand—and they are often expressed as poetry, as poetry is easier to commit to memory. Klara Kelley and Harris Francis (1994: 189) write: “Information in stories that generations have passed down by word of mouth is often given poetically through symbolism, and figures of speech like metaphor and metonymy. If people are to remember and pass down by word of mouth the accumulated knowledge of generations, they must compress it.” Noting that all evidence about the past is interpreted within a contemporary frame of reference, Klara Kelley and Harris Francis (1994: 191) also write: “We see stories passed down orally as highly compressed interpretations of evidence of people’s past in a way relevant to their present lives.”

For many generations, the Native peoples of the Northwest Coast have told stories about great earthquakes, but non-Indian academics have often dismissed these stories as just stories, not reflecting any true history. Anthropologist Jon McVey Erlandson (2005: 5) writes: “But history is also written in the sediments of Oregon Coast estuaries, in tsunami sands discovered by geologists who questioned conventional wisdom and dared to believe what many Indian people had long known: that the ‘legends’ of coastal tribes sometimes recorded historical events.”

In their work on the history of Santa Ana Pueblo in New Mexico, Laura Bayer with Floyd Montoya and the Pueblo of Santa Ana (1994: 248) write: “Together the stories of the oral tradition record not just what the people did, but how they saw—and see—their own origins and history. The tradition records a part of the people’s past that no other source can, for it alone reveals their beliefs and values, their hopes, interests, concerns, and fears.”

In using the oral traditions of the clans of the Northern Northwest Coast tribes in conjunction with archaeology, Philip Drucker (1943: 33) writes: “So matter-of-fact and internally consistent are those of one family line with the traditions of their neighbors, that no ethnographer who has worked in the area has denied their historic value.”  In his work on the Northwest Coast Heiltsuk, anthropologist Michael Harkin (1997: 37) writes: “We must recognize that native historical accounts express fundamental truths about historical processes and therefore constitute an important expression of culture.” 

In discussing the use of oral history by archaeologists, Leora Boydo Vestel notes that Indian oral tradition often presents the past in a high metaphorical way. She goes on to report (2003: 40): “In the same way archaeologists and historians find historical content embedded in the Bible, oral tradition, it’s argued, may contain historical references that elucidate how tribes evolved, lived, and, in some cases, disappeared.”

Sociologist Russell Thornton writes (1987: 5): “Biblical and tribal creation stories constitute a nonscientific paradigm of the creation of the world and human beings and their existence. They do not necessarily compete with science, rather they are apart from it. To compare them with science, and science with them, is simply to confuse both and give neither its due.”

First published at: http://spirittalknews.com/WinterCount.htm

Conclude Winter Count