Anna. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not down on oral traditions or aboriginal peoples. I also don’t know much about the situation in the US - I don’t live in the US (well, I did live for 2 years but that’s not the point). You’ll also get no argument from me that that written histories are always accurate - they too are often fraught with inaccuracies and lies. Oral traditions do often reveal interesting and useful information about our world. But oral traditions also tend to become distorted and biased - sometimes its intential and sometimes it isn’t. For example, much of the oral traditions of Canadian aboriginals no longer mention that slavery was a part of many aboriginal cultures. It is an undisputed and highly documented fact yet many aboriginals don’t know it or want to dicuss it because their cultures won’t look as much like “Utopia wrecked by Europeans”
About twenty years ago I was fishing on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River about 80 miles downstream of a rather large reservoir called Diefenbaker Lake which was formed when a pair of dams built in 1967. This particular river (which is quite big) sits in a valley that was actually a huge glacial outwash channel that was created at the end of the Pleistoscene (sp?) glaciation 10-13,000 years ago. Consequently, the level of the river is typically 40-60 metres below valley ridges and has been since the glaciers melted.
Anyway, as I fished, an old aboriginal man (he said was at least 80 years but didn’t exactly know ehen he was born) came along and he struck up a lovely conversation. As it turned out he was an Elder form one of the local Cree indian reserves. We discussed many things and he shared with me stories of his life. After a while he began talking about all the destruction White Man has caused - much of it was true and, to be honest, I can’t imagine living through some of the things he did. Then he said something that struck me as most interesting, “Before the dam was built the water in the river was close to the edge of the valley (pinting to the ridge 50 metres above us)”. Of course, this was total nonsense because the water hadn’t been that high for 10,000 years. So much for reliabilty of oral traditions. I don’t doubt much of what he said but there is physical evidence that refutes some of it.
This doesn’t mean that science (which is not perfect either) and oral traditons have to conflict. I just read an article about global warming from some scientists studying evidence in Canada’s north. For the first time ever some Inuit people saw a Robin on their remote Northern island. It was spotted by some school children who didn’t know what kind of bird it was until it was positively ID’d by a non-Inuit school teacher (who was originally from Southern Canada where they are as common as sparrows). The children and the teacher described the bird to an old village Elder to find out what they should call it in their language - the elder said their language has no name for this bird because it doesn’t belong there. Last year the same thing happened with a beetle that had never been seen there before. Additionally, there are no other recorded instances of Robins (or the beetle) that far north in either the scientific literature or in the oral tradition of aboriginals. The conclusion is that becuse the North is getting warmer it is now a more hospitable climate for “Southern species”.
[ This Message was edited by: garycrosby on 2002-06-21 14:15 ]
