Modern
Evolution Theory and American Indians
In
her book Reservations are for Indians, published in 1970 &
1991, Heather Robertson makes this amazing observation regarding
Canada (and the USA by extension) <pp 300>:
The
solution for this current Indian problem (poverty,
inability to keep a job, chronic welfare) has not been found
yet, although thousands of bureaucrats, social workers and
politicians are working on it. Soon the solution will be discovered,
and soon it too will fail.
All
these solutions are based on the premise that Indians are not
people. (emphasis mine)
In
his book The Beak of the Finch,
published in 1994, Jonathon Weiner remarks in a different context:
This
kind of resistance (referring to
antibiotic resistance in human pathogens)
tends to follow the same cycle as
pesticide resistance: big companies, big medicine, blanket treatment,
followed by almost immediate disappointment.
This
could perhaps be paraphrased something like:
All
these solutions are based on the premise that people are not animals,
that people are superior (in some nebulous way) to animals.
Lets
see now, we have 1) people are superior to (are not) animals; 2)
Indians are not people (hence: Indians are animals?).
From
the above we see that people can in theory, by virtue of their
superiority and dissimilar status, control animals. This seems to
include the ability and right to eradicate them if desired. People
might desire to do this if or when particular animals become
inconvenient (like they decimate human food/materials sources, or
they are taking up space where people want to build a housing
development, and so on). Failing this, people might settle on keeping
various animal populations in check. As Weiner observes, current
methodologies involve removal of as many of the offending animals as
possible. As he also observes, those animals remaining will mostly be
the ones who have an innate resistance to the methodology employed.
These resistant animals will, so long as the same attempts to control
or eradicate them continue, come to constitute an ever larger
proportion of that population.
So
we have big government, big social programs, same solutions for
everybody followed, as Heather Robertson observes, by yet another
failed solution.
Sounds
like a resistance movement. Maybe the American Indians who want to be
European immigrants do leave the reservations and disappear into
European-American society. For sure, many American Indians destroy
themselves and their lives in various ways, out of all proportion to
persons in the society outside the reservations. I guess you could
call that a sort of success for the control methodology, just like
you could consider mounds of deceased tobacco budworm moth larvae a
sort of success for the massive application of pyrethroid
insecticides to cotton fields.
The
survivors replenish the earth.
What
does it take for Indians to be people? I'm here talking about the
resistance movement, which is mostly out on the reservations, in
Canada and the USA anyway. The answer seems to be something like
honoring the culture of the resistant Indians. This culture will
likely be found in multiple, perhaps incompatible, forms. This
culture will have undergone rapid evolution from the forms extant in
1492 (precisely because Europeans have been trying to obliterate it).
Trying to honor the forms of five centuries ago would likely be a
fruitless exercise. A precursor to this honoring must then be to
figure out what is to be honored. To my knowledge this has not been
done in any convincing way.
So
long as it is Europeans honoring European ideals only, American
Indians must remain beyond the Pale of person-hood.
So
long as we honor mythologies rather than realities, American Indians
must remain beyond the Pale of person-hood.
