Thursday, August 11, 2011

Cognitive Dissonance

Here's a story that begs a few questions:

Ancient settlement may have been discovered on B.C. coast
"Oral traditions of the Heiltsuk people tell of the ancient village of Luxvbalis, abandoned after a small pox epidemic in the late 1800s and lost because so few were left to tell the tale.

The village may just have been discovered on a site on Calvert Island, in Hakai Luxvbalis Conservancy, located off British Columbia's central coast and its history could date back to as much as 10,000 years.

"People lost information about the exact location after they were decimated during the epidemics in the 1800s."
What else was lost during epidemics? And what's so special about 10,000 years? That's well within the usual estimates of the arrival of humans in North America.

We're always treated to tall tales about how traditional knowledge and tribal histories have been passed down for eons, "proving" that "the creator" "put us here" and blah, blah, blah, while at the same time there's smallpox epidemics introduced by Europeans via blankets to exaggerate, whine and complain about - genocide, biological warfare, etc., etc., etc., blah, blah, blah.

But you don't often hear - nah - you never hear that smallpox epidemics or other diseases might have wiped out oral histories "because so few were left to tell the tale". That'll never do. Contradictory narratives, although very abundant, must remain unnoticed.

Ever wonder why seemingly every square inch of this country is a sacred burial ground? But only sometimes.

And another thing. Using 33 years as the definition of a "generation", a thousand years is about thirty, maybe 35 generations. Each generation, one would suppose, has new stories and knowledge of contemporary events to pass on to up and coming generations.

How can knowledge be passed along from generation to generation for 10,000 years? It would be hard enough to keep things going for 10,000 years if only the first generation's stories were passed down. Three hundred generations worth of oral history would take a long,long time to commit to memory, let alone pass on to the younguns, never mind adding the current generation's knowledge to the storehouse of tribal lore.

And then there are those who reject the 10,000 year theory and believe, instead, that the American continents were peopled perhaps 60,000 years ago, not to mention the fundamentalist's notion that the Aboriginal peoples of the Americas were "created" here.

I don't buy it. The only way this Indian Industry meme hangs together is via the mechanism of intimidation and political correctness. Cognitive dissonance be damned.


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