6) Carlson writes:
“Harry Robinson’s account of literacy being stolen from Coyote by his white twin conform to all the standard criteria associated with a genre of Salish narratives commonly referred to by outsiders as legend or mythology with one exception – they appear to contain post-contact content” (Carlson 56).
Why is it, according to Carlson or/and Wickwire, that Aboriginal stories that are influenced or informed by post-contact European events and issues are “discarded to the dustbin of scholarly interest”? (56).
—
Wickwire’s introduction to Living by Stories is disorienting, throwing the reader into Robinson’s tales of Indians being murdered by settlers or meeting the King of England which seem at odds with the “traditional” First Nations stories about Raven and Coyote that I was familiar with. I felt unsure what to do with these stories, which is Wickwire’s intention, as she was the same way: the stories “were so unusual and so unlike anything in the Boasian collections that I had decided to put them aside.” (Wickwire, 22) Like Wickwire, I judged these stories as odd based on assumptions I had made about a culture I did not understand, but Wickwire’s challenge of the Boasian system allows her readers to challenge their beliefs as well:
“Although the Boasians had recorded hundreds of Aboriginal oral narratives, they had limited themselves to a single genre: the so-called ‘legends,’ ‘folk-tales’ and ‘myths’ set in prehistorical times… The collectors’ goal was to document ‘some overarching, static, ideal type of culture…’ Thus they ‘systematically supressed… all evidence of history and change.’ (Wickwire, 22)
It is easy to mistake history for a science – simply gather and arrange evidence to provide a timeline of what has happened. In practice, history is much closer to storytelling. Historians arrange evidence into a story to helps them make sense of the world, but the wide amount of evidence makes it impossible for there to be a consistent, accurate narrative; in this way, all history is selective.
The Boasian collections represent one story that Western culture tells itself about the First Nations: they lived in a timeless, mythical world that ceased the minute they came into contact with the Europeans. Historians support this by changing stories that appear post-contact; for example, Boas edited out a story’s references to God and firearms to make it seem like a more traditional myth. (Wickwire, 23) The reason we tell this story, according to Carlson, is because this history “ostensibly revealed their pre-contact civilizations to be inferior and incapable of advancement,” allowing “policies to be enacted that actually promoted their political, economic, and cultural disappearance.” (Carlson, 58)
That’s a damning statement, but one I’m hesitant to apply to the Boasian scholars in particular, as it implies an imperialist motive behind any First Nations anthropology. During the time Boas was active in the early 20th century, the residential school system had gone into effect in Canada, the US had gone through the Indian Wars, resulting in acts of violence like the Wounded Knee massacre, and the Trail of Tears was just inside living memory.
How could the government do something like this to civilized people? What if the people weren’t actually civilized? Source: http://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/trail-of-tears
This suggests an alternate motivation for the Boasians edits. By presenting the Indians as primitive and their culture as static, they were able to justify the atrocities that were being committed. They edited out post-contact references, considering them inauthentic additions, in order to make a more comforting story out of North America’s violent history.
Works Cited:
Carlson, Keith Thor. Orality about Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Print.
Wickwire, Wendy. Living by Stories: A Journey of Landscape and Memory. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. Print.
Hi Max,
I enjoyed your definition of History, and admit I sometimes forget that it’s compiled evidence that cannot be tested. It makes sense that people would alter historical accounts to match their understanding or beliefs of said events. These alterations seem more like an interpretation to make the stories fit into society’s idea of what is “right” (socially spread). It’s also not uncommon for people to alter recounts of events to better suit their ideas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_history_textbook_controversies). Is it not a leap to claim these alterations justify the atrocities against the Natives? I can see how those uninformed would find this false image of an uneducated society as justification for forced schooling. However, If a culture that is primitive is attacked by one that is ‘advanced’, wouldn’t it make violence against them more atrocious?
-Landon
🙂
Hey there 🙂
Excellent blog, you made a very rational, and realistic summary of the biases that form most documented history. On the other hand, wouldn’t most authorities in Canadian society claim that documented history is the only proof we have to state that an event in history was real and authentic? I suppose that “that Aboriginal stories” are “discarded to the dustbin of scholarly interest” because our nation has been ruled with the opposing tradition of oral history. Like you had mentioned, pre-contact civilizations were supposedly “inferior and incapable of advancement,” which enabled settlers to take advantage of First Nations groups. The outcome of this today as we know are assimilated Indigenous groups fighting to maintain their culture and Aboriginal title. Perhaps the reasons that the policies which promoted the political, economic, and cultural disappearance of First Nations groups were simply brought upon by their external influences (European settlers), and not brought upon by themselves.
🙂
Hi Max,
I am no Boas apologist, but as an anthropology student, I will step in and take up the mantle of my discipline! There is much to criticize with Boas, but I don’t think his was part a program of intentional erasure to support large scale dispossession (forgive me if that wasn’t part of your point).
Boas and his ilk were doing salvage ethnography, which (wrongly) believes that there is a kind of pure, untouched indigeneity that can be grasped through data and object collection. The view was definitely one of extinction, but that this was happening as an inevitable force of social change, that all societies will “evolve” out of their “traditional” forms. In the face of that concept was the rabid collection of materials and research – always focused on the “authentic” rather than the more complicated contemporary lives of indigenous peoples. Now, salvage ethnography is definitely its own kind of violence, but Boas introduced the concept of cultural relativism, which was liberal for the time. His work, if it now appears apolitical and complicit to the forces of colonization, emphasized culturally specific contexts and local histories as central to doing any kind of cultural analysis. This doesn’t change how crazy it is to study other cultures as some kind of empirical science, and nor does it change that Boas and people in his tradition left things out and edited and willfully and unknowingly ignored things (like, you won’t find much NWC ethnography about women!) and came in and mined communities for treasures and information.
Your statement “all history is selective” is absolutely correct, and there is something terrifying in how simple and concise that is – it made me think about the Asch reading and the quote about remaining in a “delusional world of our own making, a world in which privilege is our only reality” (13).
Which is really only to say that we must continue to look at who really profited from colonization – it isn’t a mystery: Canada itself (and its prime ministers, premiers, resource companies, banks, etc, etc) – I doubt very much anyone who wrote the Indian Act *or any of its amendments* read Boas, much less was mislead by him.
Whoops for writing such a long post! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Heidi
Hi Heidi,
I must have given the wrong impression entirely in my blog! Carlson made a claim that this sort of selective anthropology carried with it an agenda of promoting erasure and colonial expansion, which didn’t sit right with me, for the same reason you put much more concisely in the last part of your comment – I doubt any colonial policymakers would have paid much attention to anthropology. I was hoping to provide an alternate theory about why the Boasian collections were shaped in the way that they were.
Thanks for taking the time to comment – you did a great job explaining and contextualizing Boas for me. This is all quite a ways out of my comfort zone so I really do appreciate it!
🙂
I love the duality of your comment that “it is easy to mistake history for a science”. I don’t know if it was intentional, but it makes me think about how science is also always evolving. There are constantly new hypotheses being tested, new theories being reworked. Is anything really a fact? (Funnily enough, I want to write “a scientifically proven fact”, but where does that leave us??)
As you say, history certainly is selective, which is interesting to consider with Thomas King’s “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial”, where he challenges the term “post-colonial” being applied to Native literature. He says “the term itself assumes that the starting point for that discussion is the advent of Europeans in North America. At the same time, [it] organizes the literature progressively suggesting that there is both progress and improvement … it also assumes that the struggle between guardian and ward is the catalyst for contemporary Native literature … the idea of post-colonial writing effectively cuts us off from our traditions … that were in place before colonialism ever became a question … and it supposes that contemporary Native writing is largely a construction of oppression.” (King 185) (Sorry for that obscenely long quote!) I find it fascinating, because while I agree with most of the points he makes about the label of “post-colonial”, I don’t particularly agree with his point about how it suggests both progress and improvement. I believe, however, that this is a difference in the lens through which individuals have been told history, or, as you suggest, how the story was told.
history “ostensibly revealed their pre-contact civilizations to be inferior and incapable of advancement,” allowing “policies to be enacted that actually promoted their political, economic, and cultural disappearance.” (Carlson, 58)
Oops. Ignore those last two lines! I copy + pasted from your post because I was going to look at it more closely for my response.
🙂