Indigenous science is a science of reality and place. It is never abstract because it is always firmly rooted in the concrete, in the history of a people, in the journeys they have taken, and in their daily obligation to renew the compacts they have made with the world around them. It is said that this science is enfolded within the language a people speak and, in turn, this language grows out of the spirit of a place.
When my Haida friend Woody Morrison speaks in his native tongue he tells me to listen for the sounds of the ocean, to the waves breaking on the shore, and for the cries of birds and the calls of animals. And, from the other side of the continent, the Mic Maq language is an expression of the sounds and vibrations of the Mic Maq's Atlantic coast home.
Western science—the science of analytic chemistry or elementary particle physics—can be carried out in a well-equipped laboratory anywhere in the world, because the knowledge it gives about the world is assumed to be objective, independent of the individual who discovers it and the location in which it is investigated. Indigenous science, however, refers to the particular landscape that The People occupy.
Connection to the landscape is one of the most powerful things within an Indigenous society, which explains the pain and anger The People experience when they see the land around them exploited and destroyed. The Native people I have spoken to refer to the land as their mother, and the Blackfoot say that to walk on the land is to walk on your own flesh. The memory of this landscape transcends anything we have in the West, for its trees, rocks, animals, and plants are also imbued with energies, powers, and spirits. The whole of the land is alive and each person is related to it. The land sustains and, in turn, the ceremonies and sacrifices of The People aid in its renewal.
I have heard many Native people say that they have “a map in the head.” This map, I believe, is the expression of the relationship of the land to The People. Moreover, it transcends any mere geographical representation, for in it are enfolded the songs, ceremonies, and histories of a people. With a map in the head you are never lost; not only can you find your way through the bush, along a river system, or sail the ocean out of sight of land, but you know where you are in another sense. You know where your people have been for hundreds and thousands of years. You can see the marks of Coyote, Raven, Nanabush, or one of the other figures that created the land. The map in the head was something that entered your body in childhood, it was part of your coming-to-knowing and is now part of your very being.
Maybe when that old man in Joe Couture's story referred to his grandson being lost it could have been because the only maps the boy knew were the topographical maps taught in school. He may have been able to determine his position on such a map, but he did not possess within his body that map which is the relationship a people have with the spirits of the land. He did not know that maps contain cycles of time that, while stretching back into the distant past, can be renewed in the immediate present. Such a map is the songs and stories of the land, the language a people speaks, and the expression of their origin.
It is in this direct experience of a map in the head that the two sciences, Indigenous and Western, part company, for Western science has traditionally claimed to be objective and value-free, its particular truths quite independent of where or who discovers them. It is in the relationship to land and history and language, and to a wider sense of reality, that the clash of paradigms between the two cultures can be found, for, to The People, their origin within the landscape is of great importance.
All over the world peoples have their accounts of creation and origins. In some cases they take the form of stories, but others can be songs, dances, drama, rituals, music, sculpture, or architecture.
By contrast, our current Western origin stories, while they are marvelous examples of science, tend to be fragmentary. Thus we have the cosmological account of the big bang, the evolving story of the elementary particles, Darwin's On The Origin of Species, Freud's theories on the development of consciousness, and the many different schools of history that explain the origin of a nation or people. The problem is that, with the exception of cosmology and elementary particle theories, each of these compartments of knowledge has little or nothing to do with the others. Our scientific origin stories may be paradigms of the scientific method but they are not integrative and they provide little in the way of values and meaning that help to bind a society together. One of the last great integrative cosmologies in the West was that of Dante, who, in his Divine Comedy, presented the individual, society, and the divine great image; an image, moreover, that was deeply satisfying at an intellectual, aesthetic, spiritual, and emotional level.
Native America has its own stories of origin, that of the Ojibwaj peoples, for example, going back to the last ice age. I have only once heard a part of this story and only after a purification ceremony had taken place. Although what I heard represented only the tiniest fraction of a great history, nevertheless I understand that it was a matter of great controversy that even that much had been told to a stranger. Some Elders teach that the stories are sacred and must never be passed on to outsiders. Others are beginning to argue that the time has come to speak openly and share their knowledge.
The sacred stories of the Ojibwaj peoples were recorded, using a symbolic language, on birchbark scrolls. As these scrolls age and begin to disintegrate they are meticulously copied and passed on to subsequent generations. The history of these stories can also be found carved and painted on rocks. Some of these rock carvings are known to anthropologists, but I have heard stories of how the location of others remains a secret. The rocks are covered with moss and the writings are only revealed when teachings are given.
The knowledge of the Ojibwaj peoples is preserved and passed on within the initiation ceremonies of the Midewewin, or Grand Medicine Society, and, at each level of initiation, the teachers take whole nights to complete their work. Some of the stories speak of a giant of ice, the Winnebago, of the growling noises he made, and of how The People would face death if they approached too close. Today members of the society interpret this part of their history as referring to the last ice age when they were forced to move south in front of the advancing glaciers. There are also stories of a great disease and of a long migration of The People. Thus it happened that the Anishnabi, The People, came eastward and settled on the shore of a great salt water.
One story suggests that the Anishnabi lived by the shores of the salt water for so long that they began to forget their origins. Then one day a megis shell appeared above the water to remind The People of their origins. The Anishnabi followed the megis shell on a journey east that took them along what we now call the St. Lawrence River, into the Great Lakes, and on to the north shore of Lake Superior.
The birchbark scrolls are quite specific about this phase in the Anishnabi ancient migration. Symbols on the scrolls can be identified with landmarks such as waterfalls and islands in the Great Lakes region. It was from this area that the Ojibwaj spread out, taking with them their history and teachings and inscribing and painting it on rocks and scrolls. But this story represents only a tiny fraction of the long history of The People, which is quite specific about the names of locations, personages, and dates—provided in terms of the number of generations that passed after a given event.*
The Mohawk people also have stories and teachings that are related during special ceremonies, the telling of which can go on for many many days—sometimes for weeks. They speak of the creation of the world, the nature of the different plants and animals, and the journeys that The People undertook. Some of these stories tell of how The People brought corn from its place of origin in Central America and traveled north, stopping along the way so that the corn could be acclimatized and introduced into a relationship with the other plants of the region.
The Mohawk people speak of the times they spent with the ancient Mound Builders of the Ohio Valley until they came farther north and settled on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River. Indeed, some of the shortest and most ancient words in their language refer to the life they led during this great migration in the long distant past.
The Soto people call themselves the People of the Middle for they occupy territory between the Ojibwaj to the east and the people they acknowledge as the Old or Ancient Ones to the west. These Ancient Ones are the Blackfoot who have always lived on the land that Napi created for them, for, as they say, the land is Napi's body. Indeed, the map of the land is the map both of the Old Man's body and the bow he carried and of his journey. Thus one can find parts of Napi's body located in Alberta and Montana; at the Belly Buttes, and on the Chin and Elbow rivers. His bow forms the Bow River.
Stan Knowlton, a Blackfoot, has been researching these stories, along with the medicine wheels and the pictograms and syllabary carved on stones in Blackfoot country. He has even produced a map that shows Napi's body superimposed on the rivers and buttes of his land. Further east he has begun to discover the shape of the Old Man's wife.
After visiting the Blackfoot, Napi traveled north as he created the land, becoming Nanabush for the Ojibwaj, and then moving on to the Cree people. The marks of his passage can even be found in the frozen stretches of northeast Labrador.
Haida Gwaii is the home of the Haida people, on the eastern islands of northern British Columbia and Alaska. The Haida people tell how they have always lived on these islands, but they also relate some of the great voyages they undertook from their homes. The Haida stories tell of expeditions down the coast of North America and on to Columbia and the tip of the world in Tierra del Fuego. There are stories of long ocean trips across the Pacific to meet the other great voyaging peoples like the Polynesians and Maori.
The Navaho and Hopi speak of their origins as being in another world, as did the Mayan people before them. They arrived in their present world by climbing up a ladder from the world below. Today this upward movement can be seen in the ladder and circular hole in the roof of their kivas and hogans. There are also stories, told by some peoples, that their origins lie in the distant stars.
Each group of people on Turtle Island has its own account of its history, origins, and relationship to the land. And, as with so many of the teachings of Native America, a story may contain many meanings and levels of interpretation. Indeed, it is only within Western society that our Aristotelian logic demands a single, unambiguous account of an origin. Some nations, such as the Haida and Blackfoot, speak of having occupied their land forever, while others, such as the Ojibwaj, tell of a great migration to their present land. In all cases, however, it is made clear that the land itself is sacred, that it was created for the People, that they have a special relationship to it, and that there are obligations that must be periodically renewed.
For hundreds and thousands of years these stories have been passed on. They are the heart of Indigenous science and metaphysics. They are what bind a people together and relate them to the powers and energies of the universe. They are what give meaning to the ceremonies of renewal. Within these stories can be found the origins of time, space, and causality. Just as the human body is kept healthy and coherent by its immune system, a field of active meaning that permeates the body, so, too, a people and the land they care for sustained by the relationships and renewals contained within these maps and stories.
Western science, however, has chosen to set these stories against its own account: the version of history and origin created by archaeologists, linguists, anthropologists, and other scientists. Most of the readers of this book, for example, will have been taught in school that the aboriginal population of North America migrated over a landbridge that connected the Bering Strait approximately ten thousand years ago. We were taught this is a matter of fact, not opinion, and thus, at one stroke the stories and ceremonies of entire peoples are wiped out and along with them the meaning of their relationship to the land.
As we shall see in this chapter, the account we were given in school is far from established fact and is, in a sense, a myth created out of the values and beliefs of our own society. Today the question of the origin of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas is a topic of hot debate in which several schools of opinion oppose each other. As we read these arguments we begin to realize how far the practicalities of academic life are from the supposedly dispassionate and objective ideals propounded by Western science. Indeed, what we are and what we do is so very much the product of our own beliefs. Western science is one of those stories that we repeat to ourselves in order to validate our society. Just as Native America renewed itself through its stories of creation, our Western society possesses its own stories of validation.
The history of contact between the so-called Old and New worlds has been one of conquest and exploitation, and this, in turn, has demanded an objectification of the conquered. Likewise, the history of Western science has been one of exploitation and objectification of nature. Put the two together and one obtains a mythical, archetypal story of contact in which human consciousness seeks to create its symbols and stories.
Today these stories are being played out in universities and museums as academics weigh evidence, debate theories, and propose new hypotheses. This is the heady stuff of science, but, for some Native people, it has become the difference between life and death. And this, I should add, is no mere hyperbole, for when it comes to existence and stewardship of the land everything can sink or swim on an academic's theory.
Take, for example, the case of the Lubicon Cree, a people who live between the Athabasca and Peace rivers in northern Alberta. In 1899a government commission traveled along these two rivers and signed treaties with the peoples they encountered, but since they did not venture into the bush they overlooked the Lubicon people. In 1940 the Lubicon were informed that they were not “Indians” and had no claim to their land. The following decades were spent battling with governments and oil companies to be recognized as an autonomous people.*
This story is far from unique. Many peoples across the Americas have been told: You do not exist. You have no real history. You are not a distinct people and have no special rights under law. You are to be moved from the land on which you have lived or hunted for hundreds and even thousands of years. The stories told to you by your Elders are a combination of faulty memory, myth, and fantasy.
Faced with the denial of a land claim most of us would hire a good lawyer and go to court. But at this point another problem arises: North American courts function on the basis of legal and philosophical concepts that are profoundly different from those of Indigenous people. Our courts are based upon the arguments of adversaries who are concerned with the establishment of proof. By contrast, the legal systems of many Native groups avoid matters of proof in favor of restoring harmony and balance within the society as a whole.
Native groups who go to court will be faced with the briefs and arguments of governments, or logging, mining, or railway companies, whose claims will be supported by the evidence of expert witnesses. Anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians will offer their considered conclusions based upon an impartial, scientific examination of historical evidence. Evidence may also be presented in the form of historic treaties and land surveys.
When Native people present their own case they wish to call upon their own expert witnesses, in this case Elders and tribal historians who will present the stories they have preserved for untold generations. They may also offer physical evidence to support their claims in the form of wampum belts, birchbark scrolls, sacred bundles, and talking sticks. In many cases the courts will refuse to hear such people, ruling that they are not expert witnesses and that their evidence cannot be heard because it is based upon hearsay. Mary Ellen Turpel, a Cree lawyer, has told me about the frustration experienced by Indigenous peoples who may have lived on the land for countless generations. The problem is not the fairness of the courts, but simply the extreme difficulty that lawyers and judges have comprehending a society that operates within a radically different paradigm.
Two of the many puzzling questions that were faced by the Europeans who first encountered human beings in the Americas were: Who are these people? Where did they come from? The same questions were asked by the priests and scholars who followed them and, finally, are being asked by the anthropologists and linguists of our own time. In the beginning the concern was of a religious nature: Did they possess souls? Were they tainted with original sin or had the fall of man passed them by?
Later visitors began to wonder about Indigenous languages and how they were related to the languages of the Old World. Had the Indigenous population always lived in the Americas or were they originally inhabitants of some other part of the world?
The whole issue became even more puzzling when the full extent of Indigenous civilizations was discovered. Bit by bit, amateur archaeologists began to uncover pyramids, temples, mounds, impressive architecture, and detailed artwork. In the early nineteenth century, when the Turtle Mounds in the Ohio Valley were first excavated, it was evident to the investigators of the time that such imposing structures could not possibly be the work of “Indians.” These mounds were artificially made hills, some of them as high as one hundred feet and stretching over many acres. Associated with the mounds were embanked circular enclosures that encompassed up to two hundred acres of land. Some of the mounds contained human remains, pottery, copper axes, and jewelry. After all, the present aboriginal inhabitants of North America did not seem to exhibit any of the true marks of civilization. Where were their banks, universities, and libraries? Where were their kings, governments, and law courts? Where were their prisons, roads, and cities?
It seemed clear to these mainly amateur archaeologists that the Great Mounds had been built long ago by a lost civilization. Probably the people now living in the area were the descendents of slaves who had built the mounds. In short, these first attempts to explain the Indigenous peoples of North American had more to do with the projections of the worldviews of European society than with the actual inhabitants of the Americas.
The New World presented a host of puzzles to the Europeans, from the monolithic stone heads left by the Olmec peoples to the pyramids of Central America and the lost cities of the Yucatan as well as the legends of the lands of gold and silver.
A variety of hypotheses grew up about the original inhabitants of the New World. People began to speculate that since pyramids appeared in both Egypt and Mexico they must have been built by the same people, and that the Mound Builders must be related to the cultures that had constructed the prehistoric barrows in Europe, and even to the ancient inhabitants of the Near East.
To add fuel to these speculations there were stories that at the time of first contact some Native American tribes had spoken a language believed to be related to Hebrew. Could it be that the Indigenous population of Turtle Island was the true “lost tribe” of Israel? Other visitors heard in these languages words that were Welsh in origin and suggested that America had been colonized by the Celts. Still other theorists spoke of visits by the ancient Egyptians, or proposed that the great statues and temples had been built by citizens who had fled from Atlantis, or from the equally hypothetical continents of Lemuria and Mu!
Stories of lost tribes or expeditions from a sinking Atlantis may seem absurd to us, but, as far as those nineteenth-century archaeologists were concerned, the New World had to have come from somewhere. Don't forget that even in the midnineteenth century when Charles Darwin was studying the evolution of species, many educated people seriously believed in Archbishop Usher's historical dating that placed the Creation at 4004 and the Flood at 2348 B.C. This certainly did not leave much time for human beings to have spread throughout North America. Thus, into the early decades of this century, it was supposed that the first humans had set foot in the Americas only a few thousand years ago.
Today many scientists believe that humans first evolved in Africa's great Rift Valley and from there spread across the globe. Anthropologists have compared the aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas with races from other parts of the world, taking into account hair, teeth, blood groups, and, more recently, genetic structure. Their conclusion is that they are most closely related to the inhabitants of Asia. And thus the idea began to grow that the first peoples of the Americas must have migrated from somewhere in East Asia.
The great confirmation for this theory came in the 1930s when a five-inch piece of stone was discovered in New Mexico. The stone had not been weathered or otherwise shaped by natural means, but had actually been worked into a spear point. What was particularly interesting was that the stone contained a groove—possibly for ease in attaching it to a spear shaft or, as is the case with a groove in a sword, to encourage bleeding from the wound.
Anthropologists immediately recognized that this Clovis point, as it came to be called, was quite different from spear points that had been found in the Old World. It clearly represented one of those great technological breakthroughs in human civilization; in this case, one that had led to a more efficient way of hunting. Pretty soon other Clovis points were discovered in Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Texas, all of which suggested that there must have been a certain uniformity of culture, or at least a cultural exchange, across North America. Anthropologists called this the Clovis culture and dated it at between 10,000 and 11,500 years ago.
At the time, this date was far too early for some anthropologists—they just did not want to believe that the Americas had been peopled so far back. But, by the mid 1930s, it became generally accepted that around eleven thousand years ago a hunting society appeared and flourished across the Americas. Scientists were also quick to associate the coincidence of this date with the occurrence of the last ice age.
During an ice age much of the world's water becomes locked up as ice and, as a consequence, sea levels fall. Geologists knew that some twelve thousand years ago the level of the Pacific Ocean had dropped to such an extent that a land bridge called Beringia appeared that connected Siberia and Alaska.
These two dates—the appearance of the Clovis culture and the Beringia landbridge—coincided in a remarkable way with the supposed similarities between the aboriginal population of the Americas and the inhabitants of Asia. Twelve thousand years ago, the new story went, a landbridge appeared and linked the Old World to the New; a small hunter-gatherer group, following the animals they hunted wandered across the bridge. By one thousand years ago this small band had spread to cover the entire Americas.
The ancestors of all Native Americans, according to this theory, came from what is known as the Siberian triangle, a region formed by Beringia, northern China, and Lake Baikal. The initial group, so the scientific story went, may have been composed of some thirty people, just two or three families, who on entering the New World found abundant game and food for their gathering. Scientists calculated that only a modest increase in each generation (in this case assuming a new generation every twenty-eight years) combined with a fanning outward at a rate of four miles per year would be sufficient to populate the American continents in just five hundred years!
An even more bizarre theory emerged with this account. The combination of the Clovis point spear with a throwing stick, it argued, represented an enormous leap in hunting technology for the human race. This must have led the new inhabitants of the Americas into an orgy of overkilling of the indigenous animal population. In this way the appearance of the first humans on the continent was made to coincide with the extinction of many species. Throughout history there have indeed been major disappearances of animal species, and certainly one did occur in North America toward the end of the last ice age. By exploiting the appearance of the Clovis point, a landbridge, and a hypothetical hunter-gatherer band, scientists were able to tie all the facts together in one neat package.
Gradually, what had been only a hypothesis about Native American origins began to be taken as an accepted theory and the sort of historical fact that forms part of North American school textbooks and museum exhibits.
Not everyone felt comfortable with this hypothesis, not least the Native Americans themselves, who had never been asked about their own origin accounts. Some linguists were concerned about the large number of different language families in the Americas. This is not simply a matter of different languages in the sense of Italian, Spanish, French, and German on the European continent. Rather, it is a matter of whole families of languages, each as different as English from Chinese, or Arabic from Bantu. How could it be that the descendants of a small aboriginal band came to speak not simply a number of different dialects, or even different languages related to the one family, but developed several totally different language families in only ten thousand years? Some linguists argued that there had not been sufficient time for so many radically different languages to have developed.
Other scientists were uneasy about how, in less than a thousand years, a single hunter-gatherer group, that arrived some eleven thousand years ago could have spread right across North America and down into the tip of South America, leaving behind Clovis spear points as they went. The cat really came out of the bag when a few anthropologists began to claim they had evidence of human occupation, long before that first, hypothetical, hunter-gatherer migration twelve thousand years ago.
The B.C. Clovis migration hypothesis claimed that the aboriginal people of the Americas were all descendants of two or three families that had left Asia some twelve thousand years ago. But Incas, Mohawks, Cree, Hopi, and Haida do not really look like Asians, nor do they speak an Asian language. The supporters of the Clovis story had to present a credible account for the way in which these differences could have developed in twelve thousand years.
Scientists began to look at such things as the changes in tooth structure, rates of change of genetic material in human cells, and the way in which human languages evolve. Research included, for example, a comparison of the frequency of different blood groups among the Indigenous peoples of the Americas as compared to people in Asia and the rest of the world. Other comparisons were made between body proteins, blood antigens, and enzymes within the red cells of the blood.
Human teeth are the favored evidence of everyone from a police pathologist assisting in the investigation of a murder trial to an anthropologist attempting to identify the origin of a human settlement. The reason is that teeth are often extremely well preserved and can give a wealth of information about diet, lifestyle, and racial origin. Scientists have established twentyfour different features that characterize human teeth, and in the case of Native Americans many of these characteristics are shared with people from Asia. For example, while the molars of Europeans and Africans have two roots, those of Asians and Native Americans have three. In a study of 200,000 prehistoric teeth from the Americas, researchers found a strong re-semblance to what is called the Sinodont pattern of the Chinese. These include the molars with three roots and singlerooted lower canine teeth. Results like these seemed to confirm the hypothesis that Indigenous Americans and Asians share a common ancestry.
But as the new results started to come in it became clear that the experts could not agree on a hypothesis of a single early migration. For example, Douglas C. Wallace of Emory University, who had been carrying out a genetic analysis, postulated that the peoples of Turtle Island are descendants of four Asian women who lived some thirty thousand years ago (give or take ten thousand years). This certainly puts the date of genetic separation back way before the Clovis migration theory. Could it be that these women were part of a huntergatherer group that first ventured into the New World at an even earlier period?
Richard H. Ward of the University of Utah and Svante Paabo of the University of Munich hypothesized that the entire Indigenous population came from a single ancestor who lived sixty thousand years ago!
The basis for arguments like these is that genetic material changes over time. By measuring the extent to which the genes of two races differ it should be possible to determine how long ago they separated. Scientists have used similar analyses to determine the genetic distance between human beings and the apes and in this way have estimated the date at which human beings first appeared on earth. But these arguments are all based upon fairly controversial assumptions because the question of how fast DNA changes is still a matter of debate.
In addition to conflict over dates, some experts doubted that migration of a single hunter-gatherer group could explain the way in which languages and populations were spread throughout the Americas. An alternative hypothesis was that long ago a very early wave of migration entered Alaska, spreading across North America and into the South American continent. The present inhabitants of South America, as well as the majority of groups that now live in North America, are supposed to be the descendants of this first migration. Several thousands of years later a second group appeared on the continent whose descendants became the Apaches, Navahos, and the peoples of the Alaskan interior and regions of British Columbia. Finally, a third wave arrived and occupied coastal areas as well as becoming some of the earliest Inuit and Aleuts.
Support for this scenario comes in part from arguments based upon language differences and evolution. For example, certain North American languages seem to be related to those spoken in South America while others are more remote. However, Johanna B. Nichols of the University of California argues that the present richness of the different languages spoken in the Americas can be explained either by hypothesizing a single hunter-gatherer group that arrived sixty thousand years ago or by many different waves of immigration over the last thirty thousand to forty thousand years.
Among the greatest controversies over the hypothetical arrival of the first humans to the Americas is the presence of human settlements, tools, and animal kills that appear to predate not only the Clovis-Beringia migration hypothesis but also some of the alternatives that were suggested in the section above. The result is a number of conflicting schools of thought, each one claiming that it is correct and accusing its rivals of sloppy research and unwarranted extrapolations.
This book has already questioned the dubious claim that Western science is involved in the dispassionate and objective search for “truth.” A more realistic statement would be that much of what Western scientists do flows from their particular paradigms, worldviews, and belief systems. Indeed, this is clearly shown in a statement quoted by Thomas E Lynch of Cornell University in Scientific American (February 1992). Lynch accuses the proponents of a rival migration-dating of being guilty of sloppy standards and wishful thinking. “People want to believe in this, just like they want to believe in cancer cures”.
As far is Lynch is concerned his opponents are being blinded by their belief systems. It is not that they are dishonest, but simply that they see what they expect to see and make the hypotheses and inferences that confirm their deeper beliefs and the way of being that gives meaning to their lives. But surely what applies to one side of an argument must also apply to the other. Is not Lynch himself also motivated by his unconsciously held values and beliefs?
Those who take sides in such a controversy are generally defending their position because it touches on something much deeper than a particular scientific point. It may have to do with their reputations and self-esteem, with their belief in the progress of science or in the power of human reason; it may have to do with who they think they are, or with their own myths of origin. For example, the early theories about who the Mound Builders could have been were all based upon a belief that there was an unbridgeable difference between Western science with its mythic cultural origins in the golden ages of Greece, Rome, and Egypt, and the Indigenous people it had discovered in the area. From within the perceptions of those nineteenth-century archaeologists Indigenous people could not have constructed such impressive monuments—the only explanation was that the Mounds were built by the same people who had created European civilization.
Today our myths are more complex, but just as compelling. They are tied to such ideas as progress, technology, and evolution; to the big bang origin of the universe and Darwin's Ascent of Man, to the powers of reason and the scientific method; to the objectivity of approaches such as genetic analysis, radiocarbon dating, and linguistic comparison. And so, if a person begins to question today's theories of migration and human settlement in the Americas he or she is really attacking the current underlying beliefs, worldviews, and paradigms about the meaning of Western science and culture.
What exactly are these opposing theoretical camps? The Late Arrivalists stick to the original Clovis date of between 12,000 and 11,600 years ago. Thc Middle Arrivalists suggest a migration between 30,000 and 12,000 years ago. And, finally, the Early Arrivalists place the first human beings in the Americas at between 30,000 years to as long ago as 250,000 years ago.
Early Arrivals.
Monte Verde, Chile—stone fragments tentatively identified as 33,000 years old.
Meadowcroft, Philadelphia—stone tools and animal bones 15,000 and 19,000 years old.
Pedra Furada rock shelter in Brazil—stone tools that are 48,000 years old. Charcoal from the hearth at Pedra Furada in eastern Brazil has been dated at 40,000 yrs old.
Bluefish Caves, Yukon—tools 25,000 years old
Taima-taima, Venezuela—butchered animal bones 13,000 years old
The Pikimacny Cave in Peru dated between 14,000 and 25,000 years old.
In the Orogrande Cave, New Mexico, a palm print found on a clay hearth dated from 28,000 years ago, alongside tools 38,000 years old.
Santa Rosa Island, California—a hearth over 40,000 years old.
Rock shelters in northeastern Brazil appear to have been continuously occupied for thousands of years and contain rock paintings far older than any in Europe.
The Valesequillo sites in Mexico have been dated as being older than 22,000 years, but some people see them as being old as a quarter of a million years.
The Calico Hills site in the Mojave desert is seen by some experts as indicating human occupation 200,000 years ago. The famous anthropologist Louis Leakey, who had carried out some of the important excavations on the first hominids to appear in Africa, was struck by the similarities between worked stones in the Calico Hills site and those he uncovered in equally ancient settlements in Africa. If Leakey's interpretation is correct, then the tables would be turned between the Old and New worlds, for the Americas would contain some of the most ancient human habitations in the world.
Some of the evidence for Early and Middle Arrivalists comes from rock shelters, camps, and settlements that contain artifacts that can be dated as being many tens of thousands of years old. Several of these are listed in the chart below. If these dates are correct, then it means that the Americas were occupied long before that first hypothetical hunter-gatherer group could have marched across the Bering Strait. Theoretical opponents, however, systematically take exception to each of these claims. What some anthropologists consider tools, others view as naturally worn rocks. What some define as accurate radiocarbon dated artifacts are seen by their opponents as contaminated samples.
Up to now the assumption has been that even if migrations took place long before eleven thousand years ago, they must still have involved a landbridge that connected Siberia to Alaska during one of the ice ages. Not everyone supports this hypothesis. An alternative hypothesis suggests that people did not walk across on land, following game, but arrived in boats and worked their way down the west coast of North America. This is by no means improbable, for, after all, Australia was populated between 100,000 to 40,000 years ago and, even allowing for changes in sea level, many anthropologists believe that part of the journey to Australia must have been made in boats.
Another suggestion is that the first people came not to Alaska but to South America, traveling from Australia either via Antarctica, during one of the periods of southern warming, or using boats and a process of island hopping. Suggestions have also been made that peoples could have arrived long ago by boat from the east coast of Africa.
Most anthropologists believe that somehow, by one route or another, human beings arrived on the American continent from elsewhere. But there is one highly speculative hypothesis that human beings may have evolved in the Americas. Until recently it was believed that the Americas were like an empty continent waiting to be filled by all the higher mammals that arrived in the New World by a process of migration. However, fossil evidence now suggests that a small (primate) mammal was present long ago in the Americas. Its discovery has caused some scientists to wonder if evolutionary processes could also have occurred in the Americas, leading to more complex mammals, monkeys, apes, and even human beings.
Clearly no definitive story about the inhabitation of the Americas is about to emerge. The best that can be said is that the old school history books can no longer be spoken of with confidence. In their place are a variety of conflicting stories—that groups arrived in a series of waves; that they traveled by boat from Asia, across the southern Pacific; that they came from Africa; or even that human beings have occupied the New World for as long as they have the Old.
In addition, there is mounting evidence that over an extended period cultural exchanges took place between the peoples of the Americas and those of Scandinavia, Western Europe, the African Coast, and those of the Pacific.
Some of this evidence is based upon the perceived similarity between different forms of art and architecture. Commentators have postulated connections between the myths and rituals of Egypt and Central America and have proposed that reed boats could long ago have been sailed to the Americas from Egypt by Phoenician sailors.
The great stone heads left by the Olmecs have been connected to similar statuary in both Africa and on Easter Island. Others see similarities between certain Mayan statues and the Buddhas of the East sitting in the lotus position. Pottery found in Ecuador that dates back 5,000 years seems out of context to the other pottery of that area, yet strikingly similar to the Jomon ceramics of Japan. This has led to the idea that Japanese fishing boats may have arrived on the South American coast and a small settlement established.
From ancient China come legends of a great sea voyage eastward to visit a new world. There are also noted similarities between the arts and cultures of China and Central America. Coming closer to our own times, the establishment of Viking settlements in eastern Canada and in the United States has been well documented.
Vikings had established themselves in Greenland and Baffin Island toward the end of the first millennium. By 1000 A.D. they had begun to build settlements in Newfoundland. Some of the Norse explorers even penetrated into the Great Lakes basin. Viking weapons have been discovered at Lake Nipigon in Ontario and a rune stone was found at Kensington, Minnesota. In this connection, I recall a story told to me by the Mohawk Elder Ernie Benedict. As a small boy his mother used to use a curious expostulation in Mohawk to express disaster. She explained to her son that it referred to a man covered in stone. Ernie Benedict speculated that his people may have preserved a distant memory of armed invaders from overseas.
The controversial theories of the linguist Barry Fell should also be mentioned. Fell has discovered a number of rocks in the eastern United States that bear a series of particular markings. To his critics these marks have a purely natural origin, but to Fell they are examples of ancient forms of writing, Celtic Ogam, dating from 800 to 1000 B.C. Other rocks, he argues, contain Egyptian hieroglyphics and Iberian punic.
We should always be cautious when Western scientists project their own worldview upon Indigenous peoples. Their general assumption is that cultural exchange always came in one direction, from Europe or possibly Asia into the New World. But why should journeys not have been undertaken by the coastal peoples across the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean? The Haida and other groups on the West Coast were well able to undertake long journeys in their oceangoing canoes. While on the East Coast it is possible to make journeys from the Labrador coast to Greenland, Iceland, and Scandinavia by a process of island hopping.
The academics argue their theories in conferences and scholarly journals, and as they do so The People's sense of continuity and value is denied, their stories are transformed into “legends,” and their land claims said to be based upon “folk stories.” The encounter between two worlds is the story of a clash between profoundly different ways of seeing and being. What is particularly tragic is that in so many cases this has resulted in the near-destruction of a culture.
For Native people the land is their body and their flesh, and its landscape can be found with the map in the head. To deny a people's origins is to cut them off not simply from the land they physically occupy but also internally—from the very sense of their own bodies.
I believe that this deep connection to landscape and origin is present within all of us. Let the reader try this simple experiment. Close your eyes and remember the bedroom you had as a small child. In your mind move around the room, go to the door and walk about the house. Now go out of the house and look around you. Think of the school you went to, or a nearby friend or relative. Leave your house and take a journey to that other location, remembering when to turn left or right, when to cross a street. As you go you will remember familiar sights, a corner store, a park, a neighbor's dog.
Practice doing this for a few hours and you will be amazed to find that the landscape of your childhood is still alive in your body and mind. As you walk in your imagination you can almost feel and taste and smell the world around you; and note how you have been looking at it from a child's height and perspective and not. that of an adult.
In my case, when I do this I am saddened to realize that so much must have changed. But suppose that this land that lives in you has not changed, suppose that it is the same land occupied by your parents and grandparents and back, back for many generations. Suppose also that you have been given responsibility for the land that lives within your body and mind. Would not your actions be tempered by this knowledge? Would you not wish to renew and preserve it over the years? And further suppose that your actions and beliefs are shared and reinforced by all around you. This, I think must be what it is like for Indigenous people. Their sense of connection must be more intense, but it is, I believe, one shared by all human beings.
An Associated Press story, for example, tells how fortytwo-year-old Stephen Curry of Rosemount, Minnesota, was missing for five weeks. Curry had suffered a loss of memory and personal identity, but was finally discovered outside his childhood home some one hundred miles away near Litchfield, Minnesota. Although Mr. Curry's memory had not returned at the time the story went to press he had been able to find his way back to the childhood farm guided, so the article reports, by “a map in his mind.” I was struck as I read the story by the choice of phrase which, I assume was Mr. Curry's, for it sounded so close to that Native American expression a map in the head.
Our inner sense of our origins within the landscape has been powerfully expressed by the biologist Rene Dubois in his 1972 book The God Within. Dubois compares a landscape to a human face, something that is always changing, yet is immediately recognizable. This continuity, Dubois suggests, is the spirit of the landscape, the god within who sustains the land and resides in every rock and tree. For Dubois the spirit of a place can be so powerful that it molds, shapes, influences, and ultimately transforms the people who come to occupy it.
The Greeks had a word for it, entheos—the god within, the divine madness—which survives in our word enthusiasm, for the god can enter into us and possess us. Thus, the god of the landscape enters into and possesses the people. It is Dubois's belief that if a new people entered a particular landscape they would eventually end up being very similar to the previous occupants.
Dubois's intuitions seem very close to those of the Blackfoot teachings in which the land is said to be Napi's body. As one hears the story of Napi and his various actions, one begins to realize that Napi is also The People, and Napi's body is The People's body. The land is the body of The People, and the land is contained within the body of each Blackfoot man, woman, and child.
And thus, in a very deep sense, the origin story of the Blackfoot and of other peoples begins with the land itself for it is from there that the spirit infuses them. The Ojibwaj speak of their great journey, and, thus, some of their origin may lie in a movement and transformation. The Haida say that were found by Raven hiding in a clam shell and have always lived in their present location.
Suppose that, several thousand years ago, a people moved into a particular landscape and came into relationship with the spirit of that place. In a sense those people would become inseparable from that land. They would, in fact, have been created by it. Thus it could be perfectly true when The People say that they have always lived there, for it was the land that created them, gave them form, language, and customs.
While some peoples see themselves as being born out of the land, others understand their origin as being created within movement, transformation, and chance. In all cases, however, The People preserve their strong identity to the land they occupy
* In rereading these pages I again feel uneasy about having set down even a fragmentary account of Ojibwaj origins despite the fact that everything that appears here on this subject has already been written about in many other books—and probably with just as much distortion and misunderstanding. The reason is that what for us in the West is simply a story, a history, an account of the past, has a profoundly different meaning to many Native people. As I have indicated several times before in this book, such teachings are only given at special times and after special ceremonies have created a sacred space in which the energy of the story can be contained. I can only hope that what I have written is taken in the right way to show how disruptive and damaging it can be when one culture comes along and denies the validity of some of the deepest teachings of another.
* The story of Chief Ominayak and his people can be found in John Goddard's Last Stand of the Lubicon Cree, Vancouver, Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, 1991.