Last week, Alabama native John Allen Chau bribed fishermen to take him to the protected Andaman archipelago in the Indian Ocean, where he wished to “establish the kingdom of Jesus on the island.” In a particularly American spin on first-contact narratives, Chau brought a football to the Sentinelese, among the last pre-Neolithic tribes on Earth protected from contact. He was ultimately killed by Sentinelese armed with bows and arrows, an end that raises profound questions about “first contact” moments in history.
For centuries, colonists and conquistadors, missionaries and explorers, have demanded things of native peoples in a language and faith completely foreign to them, almost always with tragic consequences for the natives. Tales of first contact often have certain commonalities: depictions of natives as “noble savages,” lists of trinkets given to the “credulous” aborigines and a condescension that assumes a profoundly foreign people will be conversant with the intricacies of the invading culture.
First contact is the most enduring trope of the discovery narrative of travel writing. For centuries, explorers (or colonizers) have penned their initial interactions with the indigenous people who are always configured as part of the environment more than humans in their own right. The most famous example happened when Columbus arrived among the Caribbean Arawak. In his “Journal of the First Voyage,” Columbus (with his own interest in mind) wrote that the Arawak were “very friendly to us” and he “perceived that they could be … easily converted to our holy faith.” He claimed that the natives were “much delighted, and became wonderfully attached to us.”
But this “translation” of the Arawak language reflects the cultural context and language of Columbus’s own medieval Catholic imagination, not how the Arawak actually saw the Spanish. Columbus described the Caribbean as an unspoiled paradise — an Eden. The English Protestant colonists in what would become the United States deployed similar language, not just comparing the New World to an Eden, but configuring themselves as the new gods of this paradise. In his 1590 “A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia,” Thomas Harriot wrote that the Algonquin who approached the settlers of the Roanoke Colony felt the goods of the English “were rather the works of gods than men.” As with Columbus, we have no sense of what the Algonquin may have actually thought. [Continue reading…]
‘First contact’: What a missionary’s death tells us about the perils of colonialism
Wave of violence against Brazil’s indigenous communities follows Bolsonaro’s election
Even before Jair Bolsonaro won Brazil’s Presidential race last week, many environmentalists were on high alert. The far-right politician’s positions on agriculture and economic development (he’s gone back and forth on whether he’ll keep environment ministries and agriculture ministries separate) could open up Brazil’s precious rainforests to deforestation and economic exploitation.
But it’s not just the Amazon that’s threatened — the lives of many of Brazil’s indigenous peoples are under siege as well. A little over a week ago, the President-elect signaled he might backtrack on his campaign promise to leave the Paris climate accord, but only if he gets assurances that Brazil would not have to cede sovereignty to native tribes.
“Indigenous peoples suffer disproportionately from violence,” Christian Poirier, program director at Amazon Watch, told Grist. “Under Bolsonaro, we can expect to see a growth in this very alarming trend.”
In the first few days after Bolsonaro’s election, there were reports of a wave of violence against indigenous communities, with pro-Bolsonaro militias allegedly destroying villages and gravely harming individuals. [Continue reading…]
Indigenous people invented the so-called ‘American Dream’
By Lewis Borck, Leiden University and D. Shane Miller, Mississippi State University
When President Barack Obama created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the 2012 program that offered undocumented young people brought to the U.S. as children a path into society, for a moment the ideals of the American Dream seemed, at least for this group, real.
We call these kids, many of whom are now adults, “Dreamers,” because they are chasing the American Dream – a national aspiration for upward economic mobility built on physical mobility. Fulfilling your dreams often means following them wherever they may lead – even into another country.
The Trump administration’s decision to cancel DACA – which is currently on hold while it is litigated in the courts – and build a U.S.-Mexico border wall has endangered those dreams by subjecting 800,000 young people to deportation.
But the notion underlying both Trump’s DACA repeal and the wall – which is that “illegal” immigrants, most of them from Mexico, are stealing U.S. jobs and hurting society – reflects a profound misunderstanding of American history.
On Indigenous Peoples Day, it’s worth underscoring something that many archaeologists know: Many of the values that inspire the American Dream – liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness – date back to well before the creation of the U.S.-Mexico border and before freedom-seeking Pilgrim immigrants arrived at Plymouth Rock in 1620.
How the loss of Native American languages affects our understanding of the natural world
Aaron Hawkins/Flickr.com, CC BY-ND
By Rosalyn R. LaPier, The University of Montana
Alaska has a “linguistic emergency,” according to the Alaskan Gov. Bill Walker. A report warned earlier this year that all of the state’s 20 Native American languages might cease to exist by the end of this century, if the state did not act.
American policies, particularly in the six decades between the 1870s and 1930s, suppressed Native American languages and culture. It was only after years of activism by indigenous leaders that the Native American Languages Act was passed in 1990, which allowed for the preservation and protection of indigenous languages. Nonetheless, many Native American languages have been on the verge of extinction for the past many years.
Languages carry deep cultural knowledge and insights. So, what does the loss of these languages mean in terms of our understanding of the world.
Bolsonaro has made grim threats to the Amazon and its people
No more Paris Agreement. No more ministry of environment. A paved highway cutting through the Amazon.
Not only that. Indigenous territories opened to mining. Relaxed environmental law enforcement and licensing. International NGOs, such as Greenpeace and WWF, banned from the country. A strong alliance with the beef lobby.
In a nutshell, this is what Jair Bolsonaro, who is sailing towards Brazil’s presidency after taking a near-majority in a first round vote on Sunday, has promised for the environment.
An enthusiast for torture and the 1964-85 military dictatorship, the retired army captain is famous for racist, homophobic, authoritarian and misogynistic rhetoric. But his views on how to manage Earth’s largest tropical rainforest are just as grim and appalling. [Continue reading…]
Farmers, tourists, and cattle threaten to wipe out some of the world’s last hunter-gatherers
As we hike down a rocky slope, through thorny acacias that snag our clothes and past the emaciated carcass of a cow, we hear people singing. We are approaching a small camp of Hadza hunter-gatherers, and our Tanzanian guide thinks they must be celebrating something.
But as we near a few huts made of branches and draped with mosquito netting, a slender woman in a worn T-shirt and sari totters toward us. “She is drunk,” says Killerai Munka, our guide.
The woman calls her children, and as she puts their small hands inside ours we get a sour whiff of diarrhea. That’s when she tells Munka that her youngest child—a baby boy—died the night before. “He wanted to sleep some more and didn’t wake up,” Munka translates from Swahili.
A couple of pastoralist men, probably members of the local Datoga tribe, are also visiting. They carry wooden staffs, wear brass hoop earrings, and have brought a bottle of homemade alcohol. They have traded that bottle, and likely others, for honey gathered by the Hadza, who by now have had too much to drink.
Times are hard for the Hadza, who include some of the last people on the planet to live as nomadic hunter-gatherers.
Their way of life has been a magnet for researchers for 60 years, and the subject of hundreds of scholarly papers, because it may offer the closest analog to the way our African ancestors lived. The iconic lifestyle persists: Just that morning in another Hadza camp called Sengele, an hour’s walk away, women and children were digging tuberous roots for food. Men were gathering honey by smoking out bees from baobab trees. But that lifestyle is quickly disappearing. [Continue reading…]
The Dreamtime, science and narratives of Indigenous Australia
from www.shutterstock.com
David Lambert, Griffith University
This article is an extract from an essay Owning the science: the power of partnerships in First Things First, the 60th edition of Griffith Review.
We’re publishing it as part of our occasional series Zoom Out, where authors explore key ideas in science and technology in the broader context of society and humanity.
Scientific and Indigenous knowledge systems have often been in conflict. In my view, too much is made of these conflicts; they have a lot in common.
For example, Indigenous knowledge typically takes the form of a narrative, usually a spoken story about how the world came to be. In a similar way, evolutionary theories, which aim to explain why particular characters are adapted to certain functions, also take the form of narratives. Both narratives are mostly focused on “origins”.
Read more:
Friday essay: when did Australia’s human history begin?
From a strictly genetic perspective, progress on origins research in Australia has been particularly slow. Early ancient DNA studies were focused on remains from permafrost conditions in Antarctica and cool temperate environments such as northern Europe, including Greenland.
But Australia is very different. Here, human remains are very old, and many are recovered from very hot environments.
While ancient DNA studies have played an important role in informing understanding of the evolution of our species worldwide, little is known about the levels of ancient genomic variation in Australia’s First Peoples – although some progress has been made in recent years. This includes the landmark recovery of genomic sequences from both contemporary and ancient Aboriginal Australian remains.
The ancient hunt in which the tracker’s skill united reason and imagination
“The San people of the Kalahari desert are the last tribe on Earth to use what some believe to be the most ancient hunting technique of all: the persistence hunt; they run down their prey,” says David Attenborough:
“The hunter pays tribute to his quarry’s courage and strength. With ceremonial gestures that ensure that its spirit returns to the desert sands from which it came. While it was alive, he lived and breathed with it and felt its every movement in his own body, and at the moment of its death, he shared its pain. He rubs its saliva into his own legs to relieve the agony of his own burning muscles, and he gives thanks for the life he has taken so that he may sustain the lives of his family waiting for him back in their settlement.”
Louis Liebenberg, author of The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science, argues that the rational skills required by the ancient tracker provided the basis of scientific reasoning.
The first creative science, practiced by possibly some of the earliest members of Homo sapiens who had modern brains and intellects, may have been the tracking of game animals…
In easy tracking terrain, trackers may follow a trail simply by looking for one sign after the other, but in difficult terrain this can become so time-consuming that they may never catch up with their quarry. Instead of looking for one sign at a time, the trackers place themselves in the position of their quarry in order to anticipate the route it may have taken. They then decide in advance where they can expect to find signs, instead of wasting time looking for them. To reconstruct an animal’s activities, specific actions and movements must be seen in the context of the animal’s whole environment at specific times and places…
Since tracks may be partly obliterated or difficult to see, they may only exhibit partial evidence, so the reconstruction of these animals’ activities must be based on creative hypotheses. To interpret the footprints, trackers must use their imagination to visualize what the animal was doing to create such markings. Such a reconstruction will contain more information than is evident from the tracks, and will therefore be partly factual and partly hypothetical. As new factual information is gathered in the process of tracking, hypotheses may have to be revised or substituted by better ones. A hypothetical reconstruction of the animal’s behaviors may enable trackers to anticipate and predict the animal’s movements. These predictions provide ongoing testing of the hypotheses.
Perhaps the most significant feature of creative science is that a hypothesis may enable the scientist to predict novel facts that would not otherwise have been known.
Implicit in this interpretation of tracking there is also a view of science broader than its conventional placement within the sphere of human rationality. From this perspective, reason and imagination work hand in hand.
Thus, when the hunter hypothesizes about the movements of his quarry, he is also engaging in a wild leap of imagination: he becomes the quarry by entering its mind and seeing the world through its eyes.
From this vantage point, there is no conquest or victory in the hunt. Hunter and hunted are one, inseparable in life and death.
This way of knowing non-human life, through a creative identification in which animal “spirits” are experienced, seems to be universal among indigenous peoples, strongly suggesting it is something we have lost rather than advanced above. In a most fundamental way, it signals the degree to which collectively our observational and empathic skills have withered as we withdrew from the natural world.
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Britain First and the first Britons
The white supremacists who chant “blood and soil” (borrowing this phrase from the Nazis’ Blut und Boden) think white-skinned people have a special claim to the lands of Europe and North America.
This is an arrogant and ignorant belief to hold on this side of the Atlantic where every white person has immigrant ancestry originating from Europe, but European whiteness in terms of origin (not superiority) is a less controversial notion. That is to say, even among those of us who support the development and protection of inclusive, racially diverse societies, it’s generally believed that prior the modern era of mass migration, European societies were overwhelmingly white because, to put it crudely, Europe is where white people come from.
It turns out that European whiteness has surprisingly shallow roots, as new research findings based on a DNA analysis of “Cheddar Man” indicate. (Readers who might only be familiar with Cheddar as the name of a cheese should note that the cheese is named after the place.)
The first modern Britons, who lived about 10,000 years ago, had “dark to black” skin, a groundbreaking DNA analysis of Britain’s oldest complete skeleton has revealed.
The fossil, known as Cheddar Man, was unearthed more than a century ago in Gough’s Cave in Somerset. Intense speculation has built up around Cheddar Man’s origins and appearance because he lived shortly after the first settlers crossed from continental Europe to Britain at the end of the last ice age. People of white British ancestry alive today are descendants of this population.
It was initially assumed that Cheddar Man had pale skin and fair hair, but his DNA paints a different picture, strongly suggesting he had blue eyes, a very dark brown to black complexion and dark curly hair.
The discovery shows that the genes for lighter skin became widespread in European populations far later than originally thought – and that skin colour was not always a proxy for geographic origin in the way it is often seen to be today.
Tom Booth, an archaeologist at the Natural History Museum who worked on the project, said: “It really shows up that these imaginary racial categories that we have are really very modern constructions, or very recent constructions, that really are not applicable to the past at all.”
Yoan Diekmann, a computational biologist at University College London and another member of the project’s team, agreed, saying the connection often drawn between Britishness and whiteness was “not an immutable truth. It has always changed and will change”.
Britain First, as a neo-fascist organization that claims to represent “indigenous British people,” should take note.
Whiteness construed as a marker of geographic origins more strongly identifies the diversity of those origins than ties them to any particular place.
Or to put it another way: those of us with fair skins should probably view ourselves as mongrels of the human race.