Histoires de Kanatha - Histories of Kanatha: Vues et contées - Seen and Told

LA SIGNIFICATION INTERCULTURELLE DE L’AMÉRICITÉ

Living History 25 trying to find an alternative to the French, Dutch and English ‘Indian policies’ that were reducing and engulfing the Amerindians.This is no slight conceptual turnabout. It presents the possibility of untangling one of the most masterful historiographical manipulations effected by the original historians of the invading Europeans. This rereading of Wendat-Hodenosaunee history of contact offers hope for a cure for the old ‘Iroquois-destroyed-Huron’ paradigm, which has been an important part of the moral and spiritual burden felt and carried by all Amerindians in relation to their history. Once again, Alfonso Ortiz gives his perception of this as an Amerindian and a professional historian: To be concrete: in the many histories written of Indian-White relations in the Eastern Woodlands, I have rarely read about Indians who are believable as Indians or even, sometimes, as human beings. They are not presented as fully sentient and multidimensional beings.6 By contrast, their white counterparts are usually fully fleshed out, and one can understand their values, their motivations and their self-interests. I mention the Eastern Woodlands because they represent the arena of longest encounters between Indians and whites in the English-speaking ‘New World’. Hence, if we cannot present plausible Indian actors there, where can we? 7 The Missing Dimension of History about Amerindians: Morality The writing of Amerindian history is too inseparable from the process of invasion and destruction to be denied a fundamental moral dimension. History, in the case of Amerindians, has a responsibility to go beyond its normal exercise of recreating and interpreting the past.‘Good’(apologetic) Amerindian history, as it is now fashionable to write, too seldom enriches our understanding of the  Bruce G.Trigger has keenly perceived this and has done much, in his works on the Wendat and their Eastern Woodlands neighbours,to correct the mutual and self-perceptions of peoples of both cultures.  Ortiz, . 1992: The Discovery of Americity 26 profound spiritual vision of America conveyed by its Native thought systems. In reality, the America we live in draws an irresistible spiritual strength from this source. But this white America, still little more than an old Europe, was cured, through its contact with red America, of its social, biological, spiritual and other infections.The cure was supposed to preserve the European philosophical heritage and launch it on a genial, glorious adventure that was to last at least five millennia or so. How is it, then, that only five centuries later the glorious age of ‘Americanism’ seems to be near its end? Five centuries instead of five millennia. What has happened? Once theories of white superiority were consolidated, the vastness and wealth of the continent allowed the believers in that civilization to forget about the socio-ecological consequences of a new Euro-American way of life. In five centuries, the limit of America’s material strength, thought without possible limits not so long ago, has been reached. America itself is now sick from diseases shamefully similar to the ones that the first Euro-Americans had fled by coming here. New epidemic diseases defy conventional medicine; economic oppression of the poor whose ranks are inexorably growing is an apparently insoluble problem; the natural world is threatened with extinction because of the aggressive political and financial interests of leading elites; justice systems are subject to the dictatorship of organized crime: there are many negative points of similarity between Euroamerica and ancient, ‘pre-American’ Europe. If, however, the pain is felt at the physical level, the remedy has to be searched for at the spiritual level. While material America may well have been sacked, plundered, robbed and in every way abused, the America of the spirit remains very little known and explored. As our world stands on the eve of this second half-millennium of the post-Columbian era, I firmly believe that it is on the verge of making the real Discovery of America. The next five centuries will see the resurrection of red America and the consequent enactment of the integral spiritual universalization of our world. In order to find its cure, America needs to deeply rethink its vision of its history.The most difficult problem now is to determine exactly what the world has lost through the invasion and the destruction of America. Society must Living History 27 salvage and resuscitate what it can of the essential nature and the spiritual meaning of...