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2. Plotting History: The Function of History in Native North American Literature
- University of Nebraska Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
bernadette rigal-cellard Plotting History The Function of History in Native North American Literature Trying to understand the function of History in Native American and Canadian literature is a rather challenging process for Europeans. We live indeed on the continent supposed to have invented “History” as opposed to “Myth,” the continent that furthermore brought History to America and imposed it upon the Natives through the violence of the Conquest. History and Myth have always collided in myriad directions that have found their way into contemporary literature, and in a particularly forceful way in the writings of many Native North American authors . History can be briefly defined as a narration about the past based on the records of specific events, records that have to be verifiable, available for consultation in order to be constantly tested against other narrations . As a science, History relies on writing, for written documents guarantee permanency. If these records are originally oral, they must at some point be frozen forever (on tapes or written on paper) for future use. On the contrary, in oral societies events are reinterpreted constantly in the telling; they vary considerably from generation to generation, for details are deleted and others added, without allowing for the possibility to go back to initial events and check their authenticity. To comfort its seriousness, History is associated with chronology, the precise counting of passing time irremediably viewed as a vector oriented from one point, the past, to another point, the future. Yet this view is deceptively simple: meditating on the birth of History, François Châtelet explains that as historical beings we in the West believe that our actions and words are elements of a dynamic reality, both irreversible 2 bernadette rigal-cellard 25 and significant, and that our individual fate cannot be detached from the future of mankind. Historic time governs man, who ceases to consider himself as depending on God or gods or on mythology (for the mythology he keeps fabricating belongs to the profane realm) and feels engaged in the long evolution of humanity. To the question “what is man?” the answer rests in the closed and dark universe of the collective past (that only the science of history can read) and in the yet undecipherable gap of the present that we call “future” (La Naissance de l’histoire 7–13). We know that History appeared in Greece first as a means to perpetuate properly the oral stories, the myths, and then as a means to record actual events. In the process myths became synonymous with fantasy, imagination, and possibly lies. The term is often understood in everyday language as fabricated fiction, not worthy of attention, but it is not so for many societies for whom myths produce meaning. This form of high Myth, like History, rests on the transmission of stories to give meaning to the present, but it does not depend on records or archives; it is constant reinvention. Mythic time is understood as permanent present and ignores evolution from an imperfect past to a better future. Yet, in spite of their opposite bases, History and Myth are not necessarily at variance. Indeed, if we accept History as a subjective (individual or collective) interpretation of events, we can contend that the historical discourse can veer itself into the mythic, in the sense of an interpretation of the past that cannot be rationally proved. Archives are deposited once and forever , but historians interpreting them forever reinvent the past. It is thus extremely difficult to separate History from Myth radically. The rift between the two stems in fact from the power exerted at any given time by their specific proponents. This is particularly explicit in a colonial situation in which the conqueror “makes History” and forcibly imposes his version of it, dismissing as myth what the conquered believe in. Now, in a postcolonial situation, History can be used as an effective weapon against its inventors, for one of the specificities of Western colonization was to open schools that taught reading and writing in order to give the same interpretative keys to everyone. These schools fostered both obedience through the acceptance of the “his- [3.83.87.94] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:15 GMT) 26 Plotting History torical proofs” of Conquest and eventually its exact opposite, Rebellion, because they offered the very tools that would permit the individual’s intimate understanding of these historical facts. The colonized subject in turn could (and has...