As everybody knows here, as of recent I've been
reading this book called "Keepers of the Game" by
Calvin Martin. It is an interesting book. It is
Calvin's first book. I'm near the end, and here is
another quote from the book. I keep quoting some of
the book here, due to its' unique perspective that
tries to side-skirt traditional western concepts and
perspectives on Amerindians. Calvin tries to
incorporate what Amerindians said on issues, and he
took value in their voice in being a great way to
understand their culture. It may sound odd that to
rely on the experience of anothers culture to be the
voice of their culture, but we may well-know that it
has been the tradition of the western perspective to
believe it can say it better than the actual people
who live another culture. I know it is still
difficult, and ethnocentrism may still show up in the
translation of anothers culture, yet, I find his
writings to be an effort to further avoid something
that, though it may be impossible, at least it's an
effort.
This quote from this book is on the core of this
book I'm reading. It describes how the abandonment of
Amerindian spirituality by Amerindians may have
started. It is also note worthy to add, that this
fits in with the many spiritual renewals that occurred
from time to time in North America, and those
spiritual renewals helped many to see the roots of
Amerindian culture because the overlay of European
culture began very, very early due to first contacts
of Europeans spreading disease amongst the Amerindian
population.
From an moq standpoint, I discuss not only the
woods, but Amerindian culture for I find these roots
to be inherent in the U.S. culture as Pirsig puts it
in Lila ch. 3 as follows:
"From that original perception of the Indians as
the originators of the American style of speech had
come an expansion: the Indians were the originators of
the American style of life. The American personality
is a mixture of European and Indian values. When you
see this you begin to see a lot of things that have
never been explained before."
["Keepers of the Game" copyright 1978]
"...the same sort of thing was observed among the
Micmac; people were rejecting the traditional
spiritual answers because they no longer proved
satisfying. The corrosive element in each case was
undoubtedly disease: European-derived disease. For
not only were shamans incapable of curing the new
diseases but initially, at least (before there was
sustained contact with Europeans), they could not
explain them. Or could they? Is it not reasonable to
assume that these people, who were seemingly
accustomed to blaming offended wildlife for their
sicknesses, would have blamed them as well for the new
contagions? It was precisely this suspicion - that
animals were unduly punishing man with sickness-which
triggered the secularization, or profanation, of the
aboriginal spiritual world.
Never had the Indians experienced diseases of
such magnitude and severity. We might hypothesize
that after the initial outbreak, whenever it occurred,
the distraught victims resorted to their usual methods
of relief: herbal remedies, sweatbaths,
blood-letting, and emetics. Finally the conjurer was
directed to summon his potent spiritual powers. But
this time the spirits in the shaking tent could give
no cure, although they may have identified the source.
Surely an epidemic so widespread could not have been
caused by sorcery; anyway, even the suspected
sorcerers were succumbing. Somehow the connection
must have been made between the sickness that stalked
the land and the animals that were overrunning the
earth. Perhaps, in the Indian mind, like that of
Thompson's and Henry's informants, the contagion was
construed as part of a conspiracy of the beasts. In
an attempt to extricate himself from their morbid
grip, the Indian sought to destroy his wildlife
tormentors: he went on a war of revenge, a war which
soon became transformed into the historic fur trade.
This would explain the strangely vindictive, hostile
posture of Micmac, Cree, and Ojibwa sources, mentioned
above, toward the beaver and other wildlife. Man
stood helpless before their onslaught; the dialogue
between man and Nature became acrimonious and
eventually nonexistent, and shamans were powerless to
mend the shattered universe...
The next several hundred years would find many of
these people reverting to aboriginal beliefs,
reaffirming their faith in the old ways of their
pre-Columbian ancestors. The Wabeno cult of the late
eighteenth century marked one such renaissance among
the Ojibwa. Another followed in the Shawnee revival
under Tenskwatawa, Tecumseh's visionary brother. [and
there were others I add, such as Neolin (the Delaware
prophet) in Pontiac's War, Wovoka (the Paiute prophet)
of the Ghost Dance; the name two somewhat end-point
spiritual renewers]...
But the real purpose of this investigation has
been to determine what the trade meant to the Indian
on his own terms. I have argued that the scholarly
fraternity's infatuation with Western economic theory,
combined with an unfamiliarity with the ethnography,
have caused it to think of the trade essentially in
supply-and-demand terms. From a Western standpoint
the theory is admirable, but unfortunately it gives
little thought as to how the Indian may have conceived
of the experience.
The thesis, here, has been that the fur trade
must be reconciled to the supernaturalistic world view
of the Indian if it is to be seen as a two-dimensional
experience. By reconstituting the native belief and
value system as it functioned in late prehistoric
times throughout Eastern Canada, we discerned a
behavioral environment that encompassed wildlife and
plant-life in a reciprocating relationship of
courtesy. A kind of contractual agreement existed
between man and animals: the one was possessed of.
The Indian hunter, for example, had the right to
harvest game, in return for which privilege he was to
perform proper rituals of disposal and consumption and
observe taboo. Yet from legend and ethnographic
analogy one suspects there must have been discord
within the system. Informants spoke darkly of a
conspiracy of animals against man; there was a strange
aura of bitterness in the hunting of commercially
valuable game. It is my conviction that Old World
diseases had a part in alienating aboriginal man from
the game spirits. More specifically, because shamans
lost their ability to cure diseases-diseases that were
probably originally assigned to offended wildlife-the
Indian lost faith in the traditional avenues of
spiritual redress. Man thus became hostile toward an
animal kingdom which he was convinced had broken faith
with him...
As for the actual trade, it furnished the native
with the means to vanquish his enemies, the
treacherous wildlife, as well as improve his chances
for living a leisurely existence-or so he deluded
himself [for research shows aborigines around the
world had/have more leisure time than the emerged
cultures of agricultural/industrial/post-industrial].
This latter goal proved, of course, to be chimerical.
As it happened, the Indian trader bec ame locked,
first, into an alien economy and, then into a
life-style which left him impoverished and,
paradoxically, busier than ever. In the beginning,
however, before this juggernaut quality was
realized-when it was, it was too late to undo-the body
ornaments and other baubles, clothing, liquor, and
such domestic conveniences as the copper kettle were
compelling inducements to barter. And yet these could
not have been of themselves sufficiently alluring to
prompt the Indian to renege on his spiritual
commitments. The fact is that the spiritual edifice
had already rotted from within by the time these
became craved necessities. In order to procure them
the Indian hunted and trapped recklessly -his
conscience only slightly troubled. The
fur-to-trade-goods exchange, although it exacerbated
this spiritual decay, was thus more a symptom than its
cause...
Lucien Levy-Bruhl, the French anthropologist,
entitled the book he had just written "Primitive
Mentality"... its thesis is basically that the mind of
the nonliterate is mystical, or magical, in its
identification of causation. Behavioral patterns that
have perplexed Western observers become perfectly
clear when we accept the supernatural epistemology and
phenomenlogy of the tribesmen, he argued. Only by
divesting ourselves of our Western rationalism do we
appreciate the true meaning of the ordeal, native land
tenure, the nature of death, witchcraft, taboo, and
the shattering consequences of European intrusion on
such a closed and delicate universe."
SA continues: How a people are conquered, I'd say, is
by usurping their worldview, the very core of their
beliefs and values, then replace it with another.
This is an example of what the disconnected western
rational does to people, not just Amerindians but U.S.
Americans. ZMM tries to find the happy medium between
this struggle that has gone on for centuries.
Also, note the copyright for this book above:
1978. ZMM is copyrighted 1974. Something was in the
air then. Something was and I would say still is
awakening in the consciousness of people. And the
finger is pointing at a worldview that is no longer
adequate, that of SOM.
woods,
quietness,
SA
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