Posted by: chupacabra
Posted by: syncro
For them, the connection to the people from thousands of years ago is about far more than just geography, it is about identity, culture, spirituality and family.
I get that Syncro, but that is part of their religious belief system and is not designed to answer the question of who these people from the deep past really were (ie - archeology). Our cultural identity is always changing and often completely upended and if we are not seeking to use all available evidence to write that story we are not doing real science. I can understand what their beliefs are and how they might differ from mine, but I am not going to accept them as my own. We can speculate all we want but we know from DNA that almost all of the genetic makeup of the indigenous populations in both N and S America is from Beringia and we also know that this group split from other Asians about 20K years ago. There is nothing wrong with this story and it aligns with a lot of oral history as well.
I think you need to understand that I am more than capable of understanding who they say they are, but I don't indulge in superstition over proof regardless of where it comes from. I am an atheist. Accept my worldview goddamit! :)
I want to know how humans got to the Americas and what their stories are. If indigenous archeologists are not interested in this story and prefer to just say that they are simply a part of the land they are welcome to it, but that is not science. I have a hard time listening to someone that disparages the entire field as hobbled by racism and then uses her own cultural bias as the antidote.
What would you have me do? I think I understand all of this clearly, but I am not going to blow smoke up anyone's ass out of "respect".
We need to understand who they are as a people, not just as people that have take up a specific place we have set for them in our history.
I would argue that it is the First Nations themselves that have defined themselves by the land they live on. I see them as people that formed over generations to become who they are.
There's a couple different things going on in the article which takes a look at Steeves' book. One is about the history of Indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere (the Americas) and the other is about bias, or racism as the article puts it, in the way the West has looked at the history of Indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere. From the article:
"Anthropologists and archeologists began the scientific study of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas in the 19th century. They started from the premise that those peoples were literally moribund, doomed to disappear as European settlers overwhelmed them. Science could record the death pangs of Indigenous cultures, but little more. And those cultures certainly couldn’t provide anything that might enrich settler cultures. Of course it was a European science, asking European questions and demanding European standards of evidence. And consciously or not, its purpose was to assert European superiority over the benighted peoples it studied."
Both of those two things are strongly interconnected, and also connected to my comment on understanding who Indigenous persons are as a people - which includes taking into account their spirituality. You used the word religion, but the word spirituality is a much better fit, as that system of beliefs is integrated with the way they live their lives at every level. It's about the idea of Relationality I've talked about before, being in relation with the universe. From a science perspective you could compare Relationality to Quantum physics - something Jung did, but from a perspective of spirituality and not Indigenous relationality. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4217602/
So this isn't about indulging in superstition, it's about meeting people where they are at, not where you think they are at or think where you think they should be at. I can't speak for what Indigenous archeologists want, but part of their understanding includes that spirituality which is linked to science in a way. Just because Indigenous peoples didn't have a written history ii doesn't mean they didn't practice science. It may not have been in the white lab coat tradition of the West, but it included the basics of observation, experimentation, induction, repetition and testing. Things such as reef net fishing, clam gardens, ocean going canoes and controlled burning are all great examples of Indigenous science at work. And their spirituality is tied to all of those things. Great link to info on Indigenous science in the PNW: https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/knowinghome/chapter/chapter-7/
When it comes to the archeology, neither I, nor the article nor Steeves make the claim that for sure this is how things happened. The articles author says so when he says Steeves "doesn’t argue that they make an open-and-shut case for very early humans in the Western Hemisphere. But given the implications of those dates, they certainly deserve more research". For myself I am less concerned with the actual archeological history - although it does interest me - and more concerned with the other part of the conversation that involves recognizing who Indigenous people are on their own terms. I think we need to do that first and then we can walk together with them in not only discovering the past but creating a future where we can learn from each other and create a better future to live in together.
Last edited by: syncro on Jan. 17, 2023, 7:26 a.m., edited 3 times in total.
Reason: couples edits for grammar