Hi Matt, I'm half-way through 'Radical Hope' by Jonathan Lear. Great Book! Thanks for mentioning it.
Marsha On Nov 12, 2010, at 9:09 PM, Matt Kundert wrote: > > Hey Dan, > > Dan said: > I'd have to say that theism is also particular to Europeans when it > pertains to the Native Americans. > > Matt: > Uh, yes, sorry, that too. > > I've been reading in and around D'Arcy McNickle's 1936 novel, The > Surrounded, about a Salish tribe in Montana for the past month or > two. One of the few examples of published American Indian work > before the explosion in the 70s after Momaday's House Made of > Dawn, McNickle's book is an excellent primer to the moral and > conceptual issues that American Indians are still dealing with. The > encounter with Christianity is particularly interesting and nuanced > (and difficult to summarize here). I have found, in attempting to > get a handle on the ground surrounding the encounter between the > two cultures, a lot of enlightenment in reading the work of > philosophers like Bernard Williams and Martha Nussbaum on the > moral and conceptual role of Greek tragedy. And the reason is > simple to see: the Greeks were shifting between an oral to a > literate society, and so were many American Indian cultures. > Though in a radically different context (both technological and > political), what is similar is highly illuminating. Tragedy was a > way of articulating a dilemma, the death of one era (the Homeric > hero) in the face of another (the rising legal and political traditions > of the 5th C. Greek polis). Some American Indian critics lamented > McNickle's tragic ending (vaguely spoiling it), but that tragic > moment is a necessary condition to move into a realistic future. > Jonathan Lear has written a book, Radical Hope, about some of > the Crow chief Plenty Coups's remarks about their situation at the > end of the 19th century and it rests heavily on the notion that > nostalgia for the past will kill a culture faster than anything, and > that the struggle has been how to face the future while holding to > the past. > > Even if Christianity is not the future, or theism or anti-theism, one > can neither say that the old Salish myths are either. Those myths > were linked indelibly with the buffalo. They are gone. So, how > do we move forward? > > ___ Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
