500 Years Dwelling Among Savages, Foreward

It was at the home of Ramsey Bone Blake, in the late summer of 1984 at Fall River Mills, that I listened as Babe was explaining to Grampa Ramsey our plans for a great gathering at San Wolfin Springs, during the full moon of October that year. He had already explained how, as a U. S. Marine, he had been taught to assemble an Atom Bomb and then discussed the principle of the “implosion” that initiated the nuclear reaction. “When we gather all of the nations together during the full moon of October we will create a great implosion that will echo around the world, Babe told his Grampa. I noticed that Ramsey was growing alarmed as Babe stepped further and further into the metaphors he was creating to make us understand his ambition to absolutely honor the spirit of Native sovereignty. I intervened, “Grampa Ramsey, Darryl is only speaking figuratively.” Ramsey looked puzzled for a moment, but his face softened and then he asked, “Oh you mean he is speaking in parables?” When we answered him “yes” his wonderful smile returned. “My goodness, I thought you meant that you were going to blow all those people up!”

Always the truth is at issue as it was at Grampa Ramsey’s that day. Or perhaps more accurately, “meaning” is at issue. The genocide of 95% of California’s indigenous population between 1850 and 1870 certainly “means” something radically different to the survivors and their offspring than it does to the millions of immigrants, the wanderers, who have streaned into this western paradise since the killing began. I encourage the readers of 500 Years Dwelling Among Savages to focus carefully on this issue. It is not that “truth” is relative (one thing to an Igorot and another to an Irishman), but that we may either honor or dishonor “truth” by the measure of the disposition of our free wills. If I say, “You speak the truth,” I acknowledge my belief that your words are well intended. Those victims of the second great killing (after the Arawaks and the Caribs), the Tenochas (Aztecs) and other Nawa speaking people of the Valley of Meshiko, understood this perfectly. Deeply embedded in their language was the conviction that poetry itself was the only truth on earth. The Nauhatl trope, in xochitl in cuicatl (flower and song = poetry), suspends the concept of poetry (by extension of the concept of”truth”) between two metaphors from which meaning pulses, allowing us a fleeting experience of naming something as ambiguous as truth without fixing the terms of its existence in language.

This quincentenary year the great divide which polarizes the Native and Euroamerican populations of America over the myth of Columbus again spells out the ambiguity of truth. A purely historical approach to the problem of Columbus, with which, admittedly, many native people have engaged, can only reduce to the polarity of Columbus as oppressor versus Columbus as civilizer. Such an argument can only be met with protest –protesting the eulogizing of a historic scoundrel or the defaming of a historical hero. In either case the speaking subject utters the protest from within the paradigm, according to the rules of the “discourse of Columbus” as this functions within contemporary culture. Two “histories” are thus written, both serving, as all histories do, the interests of the present by a measured program of emphasis and de-emphasis, evaluation and devaluation. It is a methodology which can only provide an empty position at either end of a discursive formation that is over determined from the moment of its inception. The threat of the historical argument to Native people is exactly that it will do nothing to dis-empower the myth of Columbus – and that myth continues as the rationale to further destroy the remaining pockets of Native culture in the Western Hemisphere. Tragically, the Native person who can only protest the historical object “Columbus,” unwittingly empowers the myth which already operates as a worm which devours Native culture

Erik A. Mattila