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One of the largest avenues of discourse opened by prophecy so far has been an analysis of the past and the present. In performance, the narrator moves back in time to perform prophecy from the vantage point of ¤rst hearing it. Drawing connections and noting changes between past and present allows the narrator to interpret the prophecy and create meaning. But prophecy is nonetheless the promise of things to come. Despite the parallels found in past and contemporary life, it is the future that people are explicitly depicting. But what does this future look like? Is the future something eagerly awaited? A promise of new technology? Wealth? Happiness? Is it something dreaded, creeping toward us bearing war, disease, and sorrow? Is either scenario inevitable? Or is the future more ambiguous, the view more ambivalent? Also, can people work to ensure or avoid the promise of prophecy or is it set in stone? And what exactly does prophecy describe? What stories does it narrate ? What are its themes and characters and plots? To answer these questions, we must examine the cultural concept of “the future” both within the context of prophetic discourse and outside it, and then move to an interpretation of the content of prophecy and its dominant themes. This is no easy task. Philosophers have struggled with the concept of the future for millennia, breaking it into smaller parts to help identify differing cultural perspectives. Summarizing the dominant aspects that feed into a group’s perspective of the future, Nicholas Rescher identi¤es three: predictability (the ability to foresee the future), tractability (the ability to change the future), and welcomability (the degree to which the future is anticipated) (1991:197–219). Tractability and welcomability both presuppose predictability. If the future cannot be known, what is there to change or welcome? Tractability also presupposes welcomability. Implicit in the notion of whether the future can be changed is whether people would want to change it. That they would suggests that the future is not welcomed. It is impossible to completely divorce one of these categories from the other, but it is useful initially to ad5 The Future in Prophecy dress each individually in order to address more clearly how the people within the Choctaw community understand and construct the future. PREDICTABILITY AND THE NEGOTIATION OF BELIEF The question of predictability can be formulated as “Can we know it?” The existence of a prophetic tradition argues that the Choctaw believe that we can. But of course the issue is not quite so simple. A number of hurdles emerge when attempting to understand the nature and extent of the belief that the future can be known. The Choctaw are of course not the only ones to have struggled with this issue. For some scientists, the laws of physics make the future knowable. Like the mathematician who can diagram a progression of numbers based only on the ¤rst few in the list, so too can biologists predict the effect of a parasite on a tree, meteorologists predict tropical storms, and chemists predict reactions of certain chemicals based on electron count. Historians and philosophers have also attempted to validate human ability to know the future, but here based on social and behavioral rather than physical theories.1 For the Choctaw as a community, these questions of the predictability of the future are addressed not in science or social theory, but in prophecy. At the core of all of these epistemologies—scienti¤c, social, and prophetic —lies the notion of belief. “Can we know it?” can be as accurately phrased as “Do we believe we can know it?” At some level, there is always an element of faith demanded for any acceptance of fact or truth. Each person, each culture, favors different systems, imbuing them with variously wide leaps of faith. But belief is not something that you either invest in totally or withhold totally. Belief is constantly negotiated and, further, may be only nominally held. Doyle Tubby notes just how nuanced, vague, and ultimately important such belief systems can be: Sometimes——snake is a good example. I think you have to respect it, sometimes, when it gets close to your house. Sometimes it’s just a regular snake just wandering in that area. Or it could be some medicine man or somebody who’s playing the part of a snake because of the ability to transform from that, from human form to snake form. Then they can turn back into that. We’ve all been...

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