Story of the Day

The winners write history but even their histories don't last. History consists of not only what is written or imaged or recorded, but also is severely affected by current culture. Just think of what the Native Americans were like in their own eyes or how we would have perceived their culture if we could have looked at it with the mind-set of a 1990's American. Nearly everyone who recorded the lives of the Native Americans did so with an agenda or a bias that caused them to alter their own perceptions such that native culture was recorded as though it was an inferior and distorted version of European culture.

It is nearly impossible today to guess what those early Europeans found when they arrived here. I would guess, for example, that native cultures did not include marriage in the form of European Christians. We don't normally stop to think about that, we just assume that it did. The natives were of course called savages and heathens because they did not worship the Christian God. How did they really worship? What did worship actually mean to them? I get the impression that the gods were apart from the people but were approachable and did not require the absolutism that the Christian God seems to require. Then there's the European concept of property.

How did a nation set limits on it's area? How absolute were those limits? There was some form of ownership of real items such as tools and clothing, but what about bedding and the makings of homes? How did slavery fit into the equation?

It would be easy at this point to say that no European concepts were valid for Pre-Columbian cultures in the Americans but that might be too simplistic an answer as well.

January 28, 1996