Modern Evolution Theory and American Indians

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.