I study history in a Canadian university. This means that the courses, content and even the expertise of the professors, that are available to me are, for the large part, focused around European history. This means not just the history of the continent of Europe, but a profoundly Euro-centric view of the Western hemisphere. But I’ve set out in my degree to include as much of the Aboriginal version of events, particularly concerning the colonial periods of the 17th and 18th century of Atlantic Canada, as possible: and I’ve discovered that I’ve been asking the wrong question from the start.
The fundamental divide between Aboriginal history and the Euro-centric version is not a variation on the theme of the colonial period, but the question of how the “Americas” came to be inhabited by humans. I’m reading a very interesting book called “Anasazi America” by David E. Stuart, which tells the story of the titular Anasazi people. This is not a specific group, like say the Mi’kmaq or even the Iroquois, but a larger categorization. They were a large group of many “peoples” that lived in ancient America, in what we now call Utah, New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado; upon this point, few Native American historians disagree. The Anasazi are the ancestors of the many peoples that live in the region today, particularly the Pueblo people. Books like this, and the (often quite controversial) discussion surrounding them helped me to understand an idea that has long circulated in the back of my mind; that there are difficulties in reckoning the scientific/European view of history, and the versions held by traditional Aboriginal beliefs, and those difficulties are political.
In the past, I’ve always tried to hold my beliefs to a rational, “scientific”, positivist standard. “Follow the evidence”, and so on. But even this attempt at objectivity is coloured by the cultural context, and it simply doesn’t work from all cultural perspectives.
The Anasazi numbered in the tens of thousands in relatively small geographic areas. Anasazi societies established a large trading hub, with roads, even built urban areas, quite similar to cities, in the dry, arid regions of the “four corners” area of the southern United States. But like many ‘urban’ societies, their methods of cultivation betrayed them; soil loss, floods, and droughts. They were unable to adapt to the severe climate fluctuations of the time, and their civilization, such as it was, collapsed. They spread out into smaller bands, returned to earlier, simpler forms of agriculture, and went on to be the ancestors of the Hopi, Navajo, and other southwestern American Indians.
Historians date the Anasazi culture around the 12th century BCE, based on long decades of study and evidence. This evidence forms the basis of a system of classification that is the cornerstone of academic history and anthropology of the Americas: and this is where also where the trouble starts. But hard and fast dating systems like this often conflict with the versions of peopling or ‘creation’ of the Americas and the world that were and are traditionally held by Aboriginal peoples, many of which hold that history began with the ‘creation’ of the world, animals, and man in one act of manifestation. They hold history as a sort of infinite and cyclical thing, not the finite time, built of numerous lost civilizations, as interpreted by Western knowledge.
Accepting that this alternative worldview is just that – a fundamentally different way of viewing the same, real world – has been a very difficult journey for me. Nonetheless, I hope it doesn’t end anytime soon, as every step of the way has offered a new insight into the scientific ideas that I’ve always held close.
Two-Eyed Seeing for Health 