Chapter 2

Rediscovery

You’re a sacred seed, plant yourself on fertile ground,

Then make your stand.

Whether flower or reed, dig your roots where life can be found,

It could be water or sand.

 

There was Wanchese, there was Manteo, and there was Skyco too,

They lived as brothers although they came from three different nations.

They came of age when the English invaded the Outer Banks.

 

They had three different reactions,

They went three different directions,

They took three different paths,

Paths to find peace, inner peace.

 

Wanchese, he was angry,

Wanchese was willing to fight,

He put up a forceful resistance,

He fought for what he knew was right.

 

Manteo felt no boundaries,

He clung to his hope for the good of humankind,

But they showed him a different way

When he gave his power away.

 

Skyco could see both sides,

So them he unified.

He decided to provide

Leadership for all three tribes.

 

Their differences came between them and friends became enemies,

But Skyco reminded them of their brotherhood.

Only together could they be free.

 

America is truly a place of great mystery. Historians are still piecing together pre-European history. The richness of the land has served the invaders and subsequent immigrants well, but the willingness to decimate the indigenous populations and to harness slaves from Africa will certainly always haunt the achievements of the ruling class. Many questions remain regarding America’s voracious slave-trading relationship with Africa, and on the subject of continuing relations, Haile Selassie said:

 

The American people can make a significant contribution to guaranteeing that a deep and abiding friendship exists between Africa and the United States of America. Learn more about us; learn to understand our backgrounds, our culture and traditions, our strengths and weaknesses. Learn to appreciate our desires and hopes, our problems, our fears. If we truly know one another, a solid and firm basis will exist for the maintenance of the friendly relations between the African and the American peoples, which—we are convinced—both so ardently desire. You may be assured that there will be no failure in the warm and brotherly response from our side.[38]

 

At a young age, I was exposed to an alternate history of my homeland by a few prominent thinkers. In my undergraduate education I took a course with Howard Zinn; at another school in Boston I attended Noam Chomsky lectures. Both Zinn and Chomsky’s shake-ups of the indoctrinated collegiate psyche was desperately needed in the eighties. While Chomsky focused more on current events and America’s foreign policy, Zinn pointed to the past. Zinn’s book A People’s History of the United States was widely disseminated among academic institutions and progressive bookstores. It was translated into numerous languages and forced students to reconsider conventionally taught history.

While in college I also listened to and met with Bobby Seale, Angela Davis, Abbie Hoffman, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Chuck D, and Alice Walker. When I saw Chuck D speak at Harvard, I couldn’t help but think of Malcolm X’s historic speeches there in the early sixties. These voices of contemporary social history counterbalance mainstream dogma, and they are essential for figuring out where we are, where we were, and where we are going. Real students of history always need to dig deeper.

 

Transatlantic Travel Before Columbus

Why is it so hard for some to believe that there was American contact before Columbus? After all, ancient Egyptian culture was rife with sailing motifs. Even in remote caves in the Sahara Desert there are ancient paintings of boats.[39] Some archeologists and other experts have interpreted such nautical art as Egyptian symbols for the afterlife, suggesting that Egyptians formed death cults in which people sailed to their version of heaven. But have these experts not considered that Egyptians may have been sailing around the world, trading in goods and culture, long before Columbus stumbled across North America? As John Malam pointed out in Exploring Ancient Egypt, “Travel by boat [there] was part of everyday life.”[40]

The Cherokee Nation, before their removal, inhabited large sections of the Southeastern US. This area is in close proximity to where a ship following the ocean’s natural current from East Africa might land. Many Cherokee people wore turbans like North Africans, who were Muslim and known for their telescopes and sea travel. And as it turns out, the navigator on Columbus’s first voyage was a North African.

It is certain that Columbus’s travel route was hatched from a plan carried out in the past. “The Portuguese knew of land to the west even before Columbus sailed. They learnt this from Africans and there are documents to prove it,” says historian Ivan Van Sertima in Early America Revisited.[41] During his second voyage, Columbus wrote that indigenous people in Haiti told him that “black-skinned people had come from the south-east trading gold-tipped spears.”[42] These spears were allegedly identical to spears being used in African Guinea; even the words used for “spears” in both languages were the same.

Ferdinand Columbus, Christopher’s son, once said, “My father told me he saw Negroes north of Honduras.”[43] Van Sertima states that there are dozens of Europeans who reported seeing or hearing from Africans in the Americas. Ferdinand was right: the Charruas of Brazil, the Jamassi of Florida, and the Caribs of St. Vincent were all pre-Columbian black settlements.[44] As he remarks, “The Africans appeared exactly where the ocean current from Africa takes you.”[45]

There is also evidence supporting human contact with ancient South America before there was a Bering Strait. According to scholar Lizzie Wade, “Archaeologists used to think that people walked from Siberia through an ice-free passage down Alaska and Canada, reaching the interior of the United States about 13,000 years ago.” The reason this isn’t making sense anymore is because in Peru, “radiocarbon dates from charcoal place the earliest human occupation at nearly 15,000 years ago.”[46]

My theory is as follows: after the first wave of humanity left Africa and moved through India, people migrated from Australia by sea to the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Samoa, Tahiti, Easter Island, and then to the coast of South America. Van Sertima shows evidence of African contact with America during three different time periods—two by Egypt and one by Mali.

 

Ancient Egypt’s Contact with What Became South America

The Congo Dance of Panama is a lasting cultural expression established by escaped slaves, the Cimarrons, and a surviving indicator of Congo’s slavery-era influence on South America. South America’s relationship to Africa, however, apparently dates back much further. In fact, the earliest African contact with South America is believed to be in the period of Ramesses II, as suggested by the existence of cocaine in the belly of his mummified remains. This plant, only grown in the Americas, apparently enjoyed widespread usage among Egyptian royalty. Ramesses II reigned from 1301–1234 BCE, according to some sources.

The second period of contact with Africa points to the Olmecs of South America around 1200 BCE. There are significant cultural similarities between the Olmecs and certain African cultures, such as carved stone heads with African features discovered in La Venta, in the present Mexican state of Tabasco. (A rather humungous Olmec stone in Tres Zapotes was dubbed “Joe Louis” by the National Geographic Society and the Smithsonian Institute.)

The Olmec culture predated the Aztecs and Mayas and existed hundreds of years before Moses. According to many historians, it’s not clear where the Olmecs originated, but some evidence suggests that Olmec culture was a result of Egyptian influence. In 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Charles Mann says their creation as a people was caused by “some spark or incitement, a cultural quickening.” From being a people similar to their fellow Mesoamericans, they suddenly “had built and occupied San Lorenzo, the first large-scale settlement in North America—it covered 2.7 square miles.”[47]

Van Sertima pioneered the research of an African connection and reported the following: “It has been shown that ‘the vertical frame-loom with two warp beams used by the Incas was the same as that used in Egypt in the New Kingdom’ (1400–1100 BC) . . . Spindle whorls, also used in weaving, were so identical in Egypt, the Mexican capital of Tula, and in Peru, that ‘laid side by side, even an expert can scarcely tell them apart.’”[48]

Van Sertima also discovered “a dozen and more unique and complex Egypto-Nubian rituals with clear antecedence in the Old World, duplicated in startling detail in areas where ‘amazingly Negroid’ stone heads, terra cotta figurines, Negroid skulls and skeletons, have been found.”[49] The artwork of the two cultures have significant similarities, and some complex religious ceremonies are literally duplicated. Perhaps most tellingly, “The double crown in the Egypt-Nubian world grew out of special circumstances. It signified the joining of the two lands, the north and south, Egypt and Nubia.”[50] This crown had the bird-and-serpent motif; the bird represented the upper world and the serpent the lower. The crown was worn by Tutankhamen, the eighteenth-century Egyptian pharaoh, among others.

Artwork shows the Olmec kings with the same bird-and-serpent motif. Like the Egyptians, Olmec royalty also sported royal crooks and flails. In ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the four Sons of Heru (Horus in Greek) represented the four directions—Amest, Hapi, Tuamufef, and Gebhsennuf—with each direction corresponding to a color. The Mayans also had gods representing the four directions, each with a distinctive color.

The Olmecs were undoubtedly a very advanced culture, with three different calendar systems that synced up. Like the Egyptians, they also understood the concept of “0” in math, while Europeans did not understand “0” until the Renaissance three centuries later.

Probably the most befuddling evidence of contact between South America and Africa is the ancient Egyptian map of the western outlines of Africa and the eastern seaboard of the Americas. The Piri Re’is Map, named for the Ottoman Turkish admiral, “was redrawn around 300 BC but belongs to an even earlier period.”[51] This map includes the correct latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates between Africa and the Americas. These details were completely unknown to Europeans until the 1700s CE.

 

Abu Bakari II’s Visit from Mali

The third period of African contact—the Mandingo voyages from Mali, West Africa—occurred between 1310–1312 CE. Many geographical points in Panama are named for these African voyages. There is also a map from 1448 CE tracing the Brazilian coast and its relation to West Africa. It is inscribed with the correct distance between the two landmasses.

These expeditions were part of the history of Mali, which suggests that Abu Bakari II sent two separate fleets of boats across the Atlantic. This is corroborated in the Arabic documents Al-Qalqashandi and Masalik el Absar fir Mamelik el Amsar.[52] “When Mansa Musa, the most famous of the Mandinga emperors of Mali, stopped in Cairo on his way to Mecca in 1324, he reported that his brother, Abu Bakari II, who had preceded him, had launched two expeditions to discover the limits of the Atlantic.”[53]

Mali, in its heyday, was known for cities like Timbuktu and Djenne, centers of commerce and learning, celebrated for the peacefulness of their streets at night. The entire area at that time was able to build on the centuries of development by a great social and economic regime. By the time of Mansa Musa and Abu Bakari II in the early 1300s, urban advancement and international trade were booming.

This was after the time of the great Sundiata, king of old Mali, whose history has been primarily parlayed through oral traditions. The name Mali means free. The establishment of his Mandinka state began in 1230 and lasted until around 1600. Ghana, its predecessor, had split apart, so the Mandinkas were free to establish their independence. They were economically powerful because they had strong trading ties. With this economic opportunity to establish their global power, Mali expanded its influence greatly by managing terminals for the various caravans sweeping across North Africa. The caravans came down below the Sahara to Timbuktu, Djenne, and Gao, along the Niger River. These routes continued through Sokoto to Benin and the Gulf of Guinea. They later became the routes for the European slave trade, where rum was imported and humans were exported.

Africa had longstanding outlets on the Atlantic seaboard, especially in the period of Mansa Musa. Basil Davidson wrote in Lost Cities of Africa that “Edrisi, an Arab nobleman of Andalusia [Islamic Spain from 750–1492], who wrote for the Norman King of Sicily in the middle of the twelfth century, has a reference to Atlantic voyages which seem to have reached the Canaries; while Abulfeda (1273–1332) speaks of voyages round the world, which he describes as a sphere,”[54] likely referring to the voyages of Abu Bakari II. With an incredible home base to launch from, Mansa Musa and his brother had the potential to accomplish greatness in many fields, including world exploration: “With Timbuktu or Djenne as their intellectual centers, they had wide contacts with the outside world.”[55]

The trading center next to Lake Chad, Kuka, gave birth to the Songhai tribe, which is where present-day Chad, Niger, Nigeria, and Cameroon all meet. The Songhai tribe established a dynasty around 300 CE, and their capital was later moved to Gao. Za el Yemeni, who established the long line of Songhai kings, was a Hebrew originally from Yemen. This was the time of ancient Ethiopia’s conversion to Christianity,[56] when Constantine and the Roman Empire took control of the religion in Europe.

Rudolph Windsor, in his book From Babylon to Timbuktu, pieces together the history of these ancient African Hebrews, flaunting their significance: “The Arabs, Moors, and the Sudanese writers attribute to the ancient black African Hebrews the establishment of the first empires, ‘the erection of the first public buildings in the country, the construction of the first canals and irrigation systems, and the institution of a social economic regime which still survives in all Saharan communities.’”[57] The Jewish ruler of Mali had extensive knowledge of this kind of development. Jewish tribes had been driven westward into North Africa and then down below the Sahara by many different conquerors throughout history. The Jews in Africa even spoke the ancient Canaanite language, which eventually morphed into the Hebrew language of the ancient biblical scriptures.

By the time Ghana ascended as a power, the region was rife with highly skilled professionals. The population possessed a vast storehouse of knowledge and ability.[58] The region that became Ghana had twenty-two different kings by 622 CE. The name of the region at the time was Aoukar. It became Ghana to celebrate this longer line of kings. Ghana was their title, literally meaning War Chief.

The fifteenth Za prince took Gao in 1009 CE. During his reign he converted to Islam, although many of the nation’s inhabitants remained Jewish. Abu Bakari was the leader of the Almaravides, who invaded Ghana from the northwest in the early 1000s CE. By 1076, Abu Bakari took over in Gao, allowing the king to stay in power. Ghana eventually split apart due to various invasions, and Mali and Songhai filled the power vacuum. Then, of course, came the Europeans.

Today, the Dogon tribe in Mali demonstrates the direct link to the scientific achievements of the early Mali and Songhay empires. Their diagrams of the Sirius star system show more than the naked eye can see. In Ages of Gold and Silver, John G. Jackson details how the Dogon knew about the rings of Saturn and the four principle moons of Jupiter, in addition to realizing that the planets revolve around the sun, that the earth is round, and that the Milky Way galaxy has a spiral structure.[59]

 

The European Invasion of North Carolina’s Outer Banks

Rastafari culture, which encourages an active and open path to learning, strengthens one’s capacity for self-realization by propagating a well-rounded historical perspective. It also incites a deep repulsion to colonialism, power-dominance over others, and ecological destruction. Colonial mentality, which supports these aforementioned dynamics, is chalked up as wickedness. In Rasta culture, the idea of “Babylon,” by way of the Psalms, refers to these counterproductive tendencies.

With mystical elements like “Word, Sound, and Power,” and the “Do-Good” beat on Nyahbinghi drums, Rastafari people work to heal the planet. Connections are made with others around the globe through the power of language and the universalizing force of music. Gone are the barriers if we can dance and sing together, even when we have opposing viewpoints. The Rastafari movement’s vibrant cultivation of a Living Truth (carrying the past and future into the present) compelled me to inquire into Europe’s initial invasion of what we now know as America. I especially wanted to learn more about what it was like before the Europeans came.

When the British arrived on the east coast of what the indigenous people called Turtle Island, they came upon three allied Algonquian nations—Chowanocs, Weapemeocs, and Secotans. According to most historians, the nations along North America’s Atlantic seaboard, from present-day southern Maine to North Carolina, shared a similar cultural heritage and spoke a common “Algonquian” language. The Secotans split time between mainland North Carolina and the Outer Banks. The Chowanocs and Weapemeocs dwelled permanently in mainland towns along the rivers. In 500 Nations, Alvin M. Josephy Jr. provides a window into what it looked like from a European perspective: “It was a world of beauty and plenty. Carefully tended gardens surrounded each town, providing bounteous harvest of squash, two varieties of beans, pumpkins, sunflowers, amaranthus, tobacco, and three strains of corn that sometimes produced two crops a year.”[60]

The first reported European contact with North America was in July 1584. Two small British ships, financed by Sir Walter Raleigh, landed at Hatarask Island in what is now North Carolina. Raleigh, called “the greatest Lucifer that hath ever lived in our age” by his contemporaries,[61] was well known for promoting tobacco in England. Granganimeo, the head chief of the Secotans, happily allowed his people to trade with the English: “The trade was conducted with enthusiasm and goodwill on both sides, and Granganimeo in a show of friendship delivered a vast supply of food to the ships.”[62]

Granganimeo also received interlopers at Roanoke Island, his hometown just north of Hatarask. Wanchese and his friend Manteo (referred to in the song at the beginning of this chapter), a relative of the chief, accompanied the ship as it explored the barrier islands to explain the Secotan language and culture to the British. Wanchese and Manteo got along so well with the British that they eventually returned to England with the colonizers. But when they came back to their country a year later, they found a different kind of relationship emerging between the two cultures.

The goodwill between the Native Americans and the Brits quickly deteriorated. A British commander stationed on the Outer Banks ordered his soldiers to burn Native American villages and crops for the alleged crime of a stolen cup. The inhabitants tried to explain to the commander their philosophies regarding common property, but when the British did not listen, the Native Americans faced the wrath of their visitors. Their worst nightmares were now coming true.

 

“Gone to Croatan”

England’s first settlement in the Americas was on Roanoke Island in 1587; Manteo from the Croatan tribe was a member of it. The settlement became known as the “Lost Colony” because of its mysterious disappearance. Ten days after its colonization, the ship that brought the Brits to the North American coast traveled back to England to gather supplies. But because of the war with Spain, the British were not able to return to Roanoke Island until three years later. John White, the governor of the Roanoke settlement, was on the supply ship that left for England, and when he and the others finally returned, the group of 117 colonists had vanished: the only trace they left were the words Gone to Croatan carved into a tree.[63] The Croatan was a Native American tribe near Roanoke Island and had likely assimilated the colonists. Reports from the early 1700s confirmed European genetic traits were present in the tribe.

This was a surprising start to what became a very different colonization trend in the immediate future. King James’s Virginia Company had its sights on the whole East Coast, depositing pilgrims at Plymouth and Jamestown. I assume their goal was not to assimilate with the indigenous nations. King James was the first king of both England and Scotland, and he authorized and financed the English translation of the Bible from Greek and Hebrew. “Monarchy,” he is quoted as saying, “is the greatest thing on Earth. Kings are rightly called gods since just like God they have power of life and death over all their subjects in all things. They are accountable to God only, so it is a crime for anyone to argue about what a king can do.”[64]

Ironically, the Christians who sought to force their religion and culture on Native Americans eventually modeled the US government after the Iroquois Confederacy. The Iroquois at this time were a six-nation federation comprising the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora. They were located in what is now New England, but over time they expanded south and west. The Iroquois Confederacy lasted until the American Revolution, when the British ceded their land to the colonists.

 

Pyramids in the Mississippi River Valley

The Spanish were the first Europeans to carry out expeditions into North America during their conquest of South America in the 1500s. Reportedly somewhere between fifteen and nineteen million inhabitants were slaughtered in the Spanish’s quest for gold. Various European conquests led to countless exterminations of indigenous communities, not only from senseless violence but also from illnesses and viruses that wiped out entire tribes.

The first European to make a North American cross-country trek was Cabeza de Vaca. Tony Horwitz writes that de Vaca’s journey “made Lewis and Clark’s expedition, three centuries later, look like a Cub Scout outing by comparison.”[65] By de Vaca’s account, many of the native peoples took pity on him and his team for their hardship. He recalls them weeping for his group when they were found in a desperate state after being shipwrecked. Native Americans also enslaved de Vaca and his people for more than a year.

They had set sail on an expedition headed by Panfilo de Narvaez and their fleet reached the coast of Florida near Tampa Bay in 1528. They crossed the mouth of the Mississippi fourteen years before de Soto did. In 1534, de Vaca found himself deep in west Texas. His search for the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola, with the promise of gold and intrigue, was a symbol for the potential for wealth and power promised in North America. The first member of de Vaca’s expedition team to see the Seven Cities was Estevanico, a North African.

Estevanico, originally from Morocco, served as de Vaca’s translator and scout, and he ended up developing a strong rapport with the native people. In a later trip to the continent, Estevanico “gathered an entourage of some three hundred natives and began carrying a gourd hung with bells and feathers.”[66] Previously, “an entourage of several thousand Indians began trailing the [group], reverently asking them to blow on and bless food and drink.”[67]

North America had many distinguished cultures by the time de Vaca arrived. Pyramid-shaped ruins ran along the banks of the Mississippi River and up to the Great Lakes, snaking east of the Ohio River and West Virginia’s northern panhandle. The largest pyramid was found at Cahokia, in present-day Collinsville, Illinois. The pyramid is oriented to the sun on the spring and fall equinoxes and the Serpent Mound in Ohio is aligned with the sun on the summer solstice. According to Charles Mann, “Native Americans may have been in the Americas for twenty thousand or even thirty thousand years.”[68] At the site of Cahokia, “a group of Indians coalesced sometime before 800 AD.”[69] In their heyday, “from about 950 to about 1250 AD,”[70] in addition to building pyramids, they worked with textiles, copper ornaments, and dyed cloth. They also fashioned sheets of mica, which came from the southern Appalachians, into silhouettes of hands, bird claws, and other animals. At least twenty thousand people lived in the immediate vicinity of Cahokia. The dynasty started to grow in the 700s AD. Their temple complex covered fourteen acres, including 120 mounds.

The biggest pyramid at Cahokia is over one hundred feet high, and the similarities with Egypt are astounding. And this is “a four-level earthen mound bigger than the Great Pyramid of Giza.”[71] Despite the significant difference in building materials, the precision between the two cultures’ architecture is unbelievably exact in its directional orientation. Unfortunately, the mounds built by the Hopewell in Newark, Ohio, became a golf course. Only the Great Circle, over a thousand feet in diameter, has been preserved, with the Eagle Mound at its center.

The Adena were a woodland culture in current Ohio, whose coalescence “lasted from about 800 BC to about 100 BC.”[72] It is believed that they were the first to establish agriculture, and their mounds were primarily burial mounds. This distinguishes them from other native cultures in South America who built only temple mounds. A pipe in the form of a human figure, unearthed in Ohio in 1901, is one of the more striking finds. In all, 136 pipes were found there.

The successor society to the Adena is now called the Hopewell culture and first appeared in Illinois. Throughout their history they relocated to Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri. These highly advanced cultures came to an end not very long before the first Europeans ventured into the north. The great period of the temple builders was past, but parts of their legacy were preserved among the tribes that followed them.

In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, author Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reports that Cahokia had a larger population than London at the time, as well as technology capable of building impressive architectural monuments “in the shape of gigantic birds, lizards, bears, alligators, and even a 1,330-foot-long serpent.” Citing Charles Mann’s book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Dunbar-Ortiz also highlights the fact that “their influence had spread throughout the eastern half of the North American continent through cultural influence and trade,”[73] impacting the societies of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Muskogee Creek, Seminole, and Natchez nations.

 

Native American Rastas

Today in the United States, most major cities have a visible and sizable Rasta presence. Reggae music populates many radio stations, podcasts, and music stores; one can even hear Rastas reasoning on a bustling street or observe dreadlocks and Rasta colors on people of all shapes and sizes. Surprisingly, many Native American people have also adopted Rastafari culture. Why would people with such strong indigenous traditions absorb a foreign culture? In Arise Ye Mightly People, Terisa Turner frames this phenomenon: “Rastafari has, in its globalization, been taken up by some groups of indigenous people in their struggle to take back alienated land and to protect nature and natural resources. It is also one nexus through which some indigenous peoples link up with intellectuals who recognize that global survival has, as its prerequisite, the enforcement of an end to ecological destruction.”[74]

Josh LittleJohn, a colleague of mine, once recounted an experience he had with the Havasupai (or Supai) tribe who live in a reservation in the Grand Canyon. His description of the place was vivid—a clear blue river juxtaposed against the harsh brown desert. As he descended into the remote reservation, he heard reggae music in the distance. He was surprised to find these people, with such a rich and original culture, embracing reggae’s symbols and pulsating soundtrack. As Josh told me: “I had not heard about the affinity for Rasta culture before going there . . . We would be walking through the canyon and hear reggae music in the trees somewhere and smell ganja. I definitely wanted to go find the source of both at the time but caution kept me from being invasive.”

Another person to find fascination with these Grand Canyon Rastas was Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, who was making a film about Bob Marley in the early 1980s. He had commissioned long-time reggae chronicler Roger Steffens to take a film crew to the Grand Canyon to interview these Havasupai Rastas. They heard about “tribes people, their hair coiled into dreadlocks and dressed in traditional Rasta colors of red, green and gold, [who] invoke the name of Jah in their conversations.”[75]

Because of the veneration the Havasupai had for Bob Marley, Steffens brought Bob’s mother, Cedella Booker, and the Wailers’ organist, Tyrone Downie, along with the film crew. Unfortunately, the footage never surfaced and there was disdain among the Supai for those who had abandoned the project. In “Transnational Popular Culture and the Global Spread of the Jamaican Rastafarian Movement,” Neil Savishinsky commented on the Havasupai’s relationship with Rastafari:

 

Not only do the Havasupai listen to reggae, but some even play it as well. Many also smoke ganja and strongly identify with the anti-Babylon (anti-Western) sentiments expressed in the lyrics of numerous Jamaican reggae songs.

The Havasupai claim that reggae music was first introduced into their community by three Indians from California who brought with them a large collection of Bob Marley cassettes. Over the years enthusiasm for the music grew among the younger members of the tribe to the point where in the early 1980s reggae and Rasta culture came to play a major role in Havasupai life.[76]

 

As far as Rastafari’s unifying element, Terisa Turner states that “as the oneness of the world market becomes more pronounced, the oneness of the exploited, unwaged and waged, becomes more tangible.”[77] Rastafari’s symbols and principles live as significant commonalities in a varied global movement within popular culture. “In sum, new forces have adapted Rastafari into a different and even more potent world social movement,” says Turner. [78]

Casper Loma-Da-Wa, of Hopi and Navaho descent, has examined the occasional difficulties between Rastafari and Native Americans, especially when it comes to reggae. Some tension has arisen over tales of gun-slinging and Wild West imagery in the music. Loretta Collins Koblah explains this fascination as an “enthusiastic Jamaican consumption of filmic narratives of cinema cowboys, posses, sheriffs and ‘Indians.’” Koblah says that this imagery wrongfully overlooks the devastating impacts of the Manifest Destiny and westward migration. Loma-Da-Wa suggests that the reggae fascination with Euro-Americans moving west disregards and offends many indigenous peoples throughout the world.

Still, Loma-Da-Wa also finds many positive commonalities within his dynamic heritages. Koblah highlights the shared captivation with anciency:

 

The idea of anciency implies purity, righteousness, and a natural state in which human beings are in touch with their full intuitive powers and innate intelligence, where they are in harmony with the natural world . . .

By selecting this centrally important roots ideology from reggae and merging it with Hopi beliefs that the Hopi have been designated as divinely gifted caretakers of the mesas surrounding land from ancient times to the present, Loma-Da-Wa asserts a counterclaim: in the “New World,” in fact, the Hopi is the “original landlord.” This counterclaim is offered as not only a harmonious counterpoint to Rasta claims but also as a defense against encroachments on Hopi land and lifeways by the US government and the Navajo (Dine). However, like the reggae singer who claims spiritual wisdom as an “original man” who is able to convey a sense of truth, justice, the divine, and natural wholeness because of his connection to the earliest moments of creation, Loma-Da-Wa also establishes his authority to accurately and insightfully “chat culture” and history on the microphone.[79]

 

The deep relationship between music and history continues to be fluid. The Internet has spawned a new generation with global proclivities, and their connections to history and social interaction extends beyond the boundaries of nation and continent. Gateways have opened to greater research like never before, and I expect we’ll see many more people’s histories.