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Hybridization of History As Illustrated by Native American Case Studies: by M. Zylstra

European expansion into the new world forced “people of diverse origins and social makeup … to take part in the construction of a common world” and thus a common history. (Martin 1987: 11) However, the native peoples of North America have had a history distinctly different from the West’s dating back well before the old world and the new world converged.

Through a Eurocentric perspective anthropologists have defined and confined time and history to a snapshot, a discontinuous moment in time which is vastly different from the unique nature of the Native Americans mythic conception of reality.

“History, for mythic peoples, is ‘sacred history,’ confined exclusively to the time and act of Creation, and its vehicle (voice) or recollection, preservation, and narration is myth.” (Martin 1987: 196) As outsiders constructing history, anthropologists and historians are creating Native American history, tailoring it to Western thought through the West’s accounts of history. On the other hand, by Native American’s constructing their own history, that history also becomes westernized. As anthropologists or historians trained in western ideology Native Americans are using Western constructs. The main audience for Native American history is namely the west. Thus those who construct it will undoubtedly westernize their own history in order to be inclusive to the said audience. Despite this, “the ethnographic record [with regards to Native Americans] reveals a broad range of experience that goes beyond the dualism of slavishly imitating the West or rejecting it outright.”(Pickering 2004: 86) The inevitable homogenizing effects of capitalism and globalization have thus created a hybridization of history which inherently lacks an “objective” Truth although it claims to have such a Truth.

“In writing histories of colonization [anthropologists and historians] are proceeding by way of ideological colonization.”(Martin 1987: 9) The only data available to anthropologists and historians generally consists of colonial military or missionary accounts of historical events which are entirely western in themselves. By attempting to interpret Native Americans through an ethno-historical approach, anthropologists fail to capture the essence of Native American reality and further show their status as the colonizer. "The issue of [the] post-colonial voice, of whom is speaking in and through post-colonial writings [is not as simple as reducing it to] the colonizer or the colonized."(Martin 1987: 9) English, the language typically used to construct Native American history, “carries a great deal of political as well as historical freight ... in ... Native American cultures the prohibition, last century, of native language use in government schools is remembered as a key strategy in the deliberate destruction of native cultures."(Martin 1987: 10)

American history presents anthropologists and historians with a great challenge. Who were the people that occupied North American before it became the United States and Canada? All too often in the past the history of these native peoples of North America have been viewed as null and void before European contact, as merely waiting to be settled so that they may be “civilized.” Thus they have traditionally been voiceless, it is through the European eyes and ears which they have been seen and heard. The difficulty in giving the native people of North America a history stems from the fact that they have seemingly left no written history, no dates, no events, nothing. As a result, it is both difficult to construct a history of them and easy to leave it as such. Anthropologists and historians are left with attempting to piece together history with archaeology, linguistics, religion and folklore. Making it even more difficult is the fact that Native Americans are not lumped together in a single people. While it is tempting to do so and the average person may believe this is so, this is not the case. Native Americans have a wide spectrum of diverse culture, language, traditions, economies, art and religion. This would be akin to lumping Europe together and not distinguishing the Spanish from the French, the English from the Germans.

"[Europeans] American 'civilization' has been defined in opposition to the 'other,' the Indian 'savage.'"(Madsen 1999: 11) Savage in this case “meant hunting and gathering, not agriculture; common ownership, not individual property owning; pagan superstition, not Christianity; spoken language not literacy; emotion, not reason” (Madsen 1999: 207) The construction of race “subsumed a growing ideology of inequality devised to rationalize European attitudes and treatment of the conquered and enslaved peoples.” (AAA) This ideology of inequality has continued to remain throughout post-modernity, although many people can hardly distinguish Native Americans from the rest of the populous and view them solely as they are depicted in Hollywood unable to differentiate them without the stereotypical garb. Museums serve as a paradigmatic academic example of the perpetuations of stereotypes by the west, they serve as “the epitome of stasis” (Madsen 1999: 213).

Western history has been without question shaped and defined by conquest. The technological disparity between the new world and the old world allowed for the west to gain a distinct psychological advantage over the new world. For the west, technology was seen as the demarcating factor for civilization. “The west thus conceived of its superiority relative to the perceived lack of power, self consciousness, or ability to think and rule, of colonized people.” (Madsen 1999: 8) However, it should be noted that “The colonial relationship …is not … a simple opposition between the colonizer and the colonized but a complex network of discursive, power, relationships.”(Madsen 1999: 8)

Those forced “under colonialism, [struggle with] conflicts [which] are so strong and pervasive that they constitute a challenge to one’s cultural identity, and thus one’s personal identity” (Colm Hogan 2000: 9). These drastic “changes in circumstances can be radically disorienting and may lead to great suffering to the extent that the new circumstances degrade or exclude the identity on which one has based one’s life.”(Colm Hogan 2000: 257, 258) Since the late 15th century, Europeans have systematically attempted to exterminate Native American culture. This was first attempted by the literal hunting down and butchering of Native Americans. As early European colonizers began encroaching on Native American lands a conflict arose. Europeans believed that the Native American’s land was unoccupied because they were viewed as “savages,” a subhuman demarcation. As a result of this demarcation, there was no perceived settlement in the area as a result of this demarcation and a lack of traditional western evidence of settlement. This justification was further perpetuated by scientific corroboration. Western ideology stipulated that science reigned supreme, those that were more scientifically advanced could control those who were not. Consequently, there generally became two factions; those with scientific power, the oppressors in the form of the European colonizer, and those without scientific power, the oppressed in the form of nature and the Native American.

In attempting to subjugate both nature itself and the Native Americans, Europeans attempted to apply scientific simplicity, rationality in order to control them. “Race” was constructed and implemented by European colonizers as a more scientific justification than “savage.” Scientific racism was implemented by inaccurately measuring cranial capacity of Native Americans vis-à-vis a skewed sample population or by means of inconsistent measurement in order to “conclusively” prove that the Native American was in fact inferior with regards to intellect and thus sub human. This scientific endeavor failed to realize that cranial capacity does not directly correlate with intelligence. On the other hand, European attempts at subjugating nature were equally as successful. Flora was to be exploited and destroyed as well. Fauna was used almost strictly for economic gains instead of sustainability. Consequently, forests were felled and land was cleared in order to make room for agriculture and establishments for settlers. Animals were over hunted to satisfy European materialism. The Native American identity which had been in opposition to that of the Europeans was destroyed in the literal form of genocide and in spiritual and cultural forms of destruction and assimilation. Native American’s have been struggling ever since post-Columbian contact to regain their historical identity of themselves since many tribes are often unaware of their culture past as a result of Europe’s genocide and assimilation attempts.

In recreating history authors often attempt to confine history to a particular perspective. Illustrating this in particular is the Marxist who will focus on the socio-economic power relations between Native Americans and Europeans with regards to what goods are produced. And secondly the cultural anthropologist who will attempt to deduce to what extent that Christianity has played a disruptive role in aiding in attempting to destroy the Native American way of life. Both of which search for the impact of the post-colonial voice through history and its effect on Native Americans, though by different means to the same end.

The Marxist may say something along the lines of: In North America the continuous interactions with Europeans lead to mutual trading. Native Americans received European manufactured goods: cloth, beads, steel, guns etc. in exchange for animal hides. Native Americans became dependent upon European trading which in turn forced Native Americans to alter their cultural structure. They moved from a socialist egalitarian society to that with a class distinction, a disparity between that of the proletariat in the form of the Native American and that of bourgeoisie, in the form of the European. As a result of the increased demand in Europe for American animal hides, both Europeans and Native Americans began hunting more animals than they needed to sustain themselves in order to gain more material possessions. Consequently, some Native Americans began practicing polygamy in order to have the women cure the excess of hides that the men had hunted. “‘Progress’ is [then] an inapt term for the adaptation and cultural borrowing and change that mythic societies engage in.”(Martin 1987: 196) What the Native American’s had in their pre-Columbian society would therefore be an ideal society insofar as it lacked the desire for material wealth and lacked individualism.

The cultural anthropologist may say something such as: Christianity, for example, served to eliminate the social structures of organization, of culture itself, “the system of practical identities.”(Colm Hogan 2000: 103) Christian missionaries in North America “convert[ed] so many members that [ Native American society] is rendered inoperative.” (Colm Hogan 2000: 105) Christianity offered men in matriarchic societies a chance at superiority, inverting the social roles that were once held. The converted Christian Native Americans were not culturally accepted with their European converters, nor were they any longer accepted by their fellow non-Christian Native American brethren. Christian Native Americans thus became alienated, trapped between two distinctly different cultures needing a resolution. This resolution often came in the form of the ultimate rejection of the non-Christian Native American’s killing their Christian brethren, not being able to accept such a large cultural disparity in ideology.

“Native Americans did not need Charles Darwin to tell them that they were parts of the animal world, Sigmund Freud to tell that that dreams were prime animals within … or Albert Einstein to tell them that their dancing bodies were akin to the dancing particles of dust from which we all came.”(Madsen 1999: 109) They had and have their own perspective on life. Friedrich Nietzsche argues that no perspective transcends embodiment, thus we are always forced to view the world from our particular point of view, and consequently no one can ever know absolute truth. Only a god with an omniperspective could know absolute Truth. Since we are not a god and are embodied beings we can only know a partial truth. In lieu of Truth “for the purpose of preserving creatures of our kind … we must believe that such [synthetic a priori] judgements are true; which means, of course, that they could still be false judgements.”( Pearson, Large BGE I 11,316) Thus, humanity needs to act as though it is certain even though it may be wrong since we cannot examine our own actions if we are uncertain.

However, modern science, and consequently modern social science, is searching for Truth as a metaphysical ideal grounded in metaphysical reality. Science is merely attempting to replace the Platonic forms with its search for Truth. Scientists are merely placing faith in science and reason in place of the Platonic forms and attempting to apply empiricism and reason to the world around themselves. “Science and the ascetic ideal are still on the same foundation ….that is to say, both overestimate truth (more correctly: they share the same faith that truth cannot be assessed or criticized).”( Pearson, Large GM 25, 431) Although science is dogmatic in this sense and does not have a privileged access to Truth as it claims, it nonetheless is based on sense-perceptions and is “taken for more than that, and shall long continue to be taken for more, for an explanation.” (Pearson, Large BGE 14, 318)