Looking back on the thirty-five years that I've been working in the field, and then looking back [over] the three, four, five hundred years in the Americas, longer elsewhere, there is a common dynamic and that is the issue of land, the issue of sovereignty, the issue of dislocation, dispossession of aboriginal peoples, and it arises out of an old, ancient encounter between hunter-gatherer and agricultural peoples. It goes back tens of thousands of years to the big moves of agricultural settlers across Asia, the moves across India, through Europe, and down into Africa--moves by people of all races with agricultural ambitions overtaking the land of hunter-gatherer peoples. It is an encounter that goes very deep into human history, and also into the psyche and sociology of settler societies. Right there you have a profound contradiction, because there's nothing settled about settler societies. The whole point about settler societies is they are always on the move, settling on someone else's land. Yet, when they get there, they always imagine the aboriginal people as the wanderers, as the nomads, as the people who could be moved around because they do move around.
And so you have these settlers, the agricultural people who come thousands of miles to start farming in a new land, seeing people who've been there for tens of thousands of years as idle people with no home. It is so bizarre--so counter-intuitive--and it is bound into the language we use about [the aboriginal peoples] being the hunters and gatherers, and settlers being the settled peoples. And yet all of the stories that arise out of both cultural communities, the settlers and the aboriginal people, go the other way.
The Garden of Eden
The great stories of the Judeo-Christian tradition, for example, tell us to go out and farm on someone else's land because we've been thrown out of the place that we started in--the Garden of Eden. And you make it fruitful and you make it multiply--so [there is] always a need to send children out to some other place. And that other place is a place where other people live. And those other people are typically the aboriginal peoples.
We still are bound into a single notion of what it is to live in a "civilized" way--a progressive way--in the world. And that's to live as farmers, or to live as factory workers, to live in an agricultural-industrial society, to live in the kinds of ways that our stories support and reinforce--our ancient stories, as well as our modern stories. We don't have a sense of other ways as being other than primitive holdovers, as things that you grow out of as you get more civilized.
So I start from that story, and then move to a need for all of us on the settler side to re-imagine what it is that has been going on. We have to find ways of understanding the complexity, the sophistication, the strategic values of aboriginal traditions--not in order to try to reestablish them, but to acknowledge that way of being in the world, that way of knowing in the world as one that was here first, and also as one that is part of a distinguished tradition of human adaptation to, and collaboration with, the natural world and with each other. I do not say that so that we despise what we have been doing because what we have been doing is an old and ancient story of making land productive so that it feeds large numbers of people, especially people who congregate in cities. But I say that [so that we] re-imagine a way that takes into account the predicaments and the devastation that that [settling and making land productive] creates for aboriginal people and the brutalities that often go along with it, as there is typically a ferocious kind of ethnic cleansing that takes place.
Ethnic Cleansing
Ethnic cleansing is the oldest story in the Americas. It is what happened when settlers removed the Cherokee from Georgia--they wanted to "clean up" Georgia for farming and get these other peoples out somewhere else. And it is the story of the reservation systems--the kind of fencing in or out of aboriginal peoples. It is also the story of the schooling system, especially the residential schools established either in set places only for Indians and aboriginal kids or as part of the general scheme to make them into farmers or to make them into Christians or to make them into folks like the rest of us.
The blunt fact is, just as settlers aren't going to go away, aboriginal people aren't going to go away--and God knows we have tried. The settler societies have tried every means at their disposal, from murder, to various educational strategies, to forms of institutional bribery, to all kinds of complicated statutory and legislative strategies. None of these strategies--running down and shooting Indians or passing out smallpox infested blankets or rounding them up like cattle onto reserves--has eliminated aboriginal people from the Americas. And it's not going to. That's clear as crystal.
The Loss of Language
Usually the strategies have been deliberate strategies to wipe out the language, and in that there's a real kind of pernicious wisdom--the knowledge that language is deeply important to a people's sense of who they are and where they belong and how they name the places they live in and how they know the world. So if you wipe out the language, then you will wipe out the people's Indian-ness or aboriginality or difference. And then you replace it with a language that is the language of currency among the settler society. In doing that you completely fracture a community's sense of itself, and you open up an opportunity by the settler society to change aboriginal people into non-aboriginal people, to create a kind of homogeneity.
We've lost a lot of aboriginal languages in the Americas over the last century--probably a thousand. And we're losing more each year. There are languages all across the Americas, North and South, that are in jeopardy. And if we could find a way of reversing that, then I think it would do a great deal to help us think through how to accommodate aboriginal sovereignty, self-determination within the Americas, North and South.
The Importance of Oral Traditions
My field, literary studies, is one that, for all of its fashionable enthusiasm for the post-colonial, still is bound into a sense that when you are really a serious society you get reading and writing and all of those kinds of things, and if you're still out there drumming and dancing and singing songs, you've got a ways to go. There's evidence all over the world that that's not the case, and our society is deeply committed to oral traditions. All of our main institutions--churches, courts, schools, parliaments, congresses--are all institutions of oral tradition. And yet we still seem to find it difficult to see the oral traditions of aboriginal peoples as similar to those, or as sophisticated and as civilized as those. Historians--a whole range of our disciplines--are bound into ways of looking at the world that continually place aboriginal people at an early stage in human development, or in a primitive phase of human society. And that's got to change because it's dead wrong. [It's] like saying "Columbus discovered America." [It] isn't politically incorrect, it's just ignorant and stupid. This isn't a move to New Age fashion or to post-colonial enthusiasm, this is a move to some straightforward understanding of the world we live in and how folks have lived in it.
My Work in Canada
My own work in this field goes back to the early 1970s in Canada at a time when the federal government was saying, quite straightforwardly, that there was no such thing as aboriginal rights in Canadian law and that we could not establish the future on what might have been.
Then several things happened. One was a court in the Northwest Territories granted an injunction to a small group of aboriginal people, who said--in the face of a proposal to build a pipeline down the Mackenzie Valley to bring gas and eventually oil down to markets in the south--"You can't do this until you settle our land claim." Now the judge, in defiance of current wisdom, said, "Well, I don't know what the land claim is. I'm not even sure there is a land claim. But it seems to me as a responsible judge that at the very least there is what lawyers call a cloud on the title. There's a big question mark. So I'm going to grant the injunction until you get this settled." Well, the good thing about big question marks like that is they scare the hell out of bankers. This project was going to cost about ten billion dollars, and the bankers said to the big pipeline companies, "Hold it, boys! We got trouble here. We can't give you a mortgage on this because someone says the title isn't clear."
At the same time, a big case involving the Nisga'a People of the Nass River Valley that had been in the courts for about ten years ended up in the Supreme Court. They [the Nisga'a People] were arguing that their aboriginal title hadn't been extinguished by treaty or any other way. The court ruled against them. It ruled that it had been extinguished, but what it also did--and this made an enormous difference--was say there was such a thing as aboriginal rights in Canadian law, which went against what the politicians had been saying.
So all of the sudden the world looked different, and the government, to its credit, said, "Well, well, well. I guess there is such a thing as aboriginal rights. We better take seriously some of the land claims." And they started a process that I was involved in at the beginning and still am.
An African Story, Part I
My recent work has been in southern Africa with a group of Bushmen in the southern Kalahari who were survivors of brutalities of several hundred years. Many of the Bushmen were murdered or died by various circumstances. There were still some living a traditional way of life into the middle of the century [1950s], when in South Africa they cleared the last of them out of their remaining homeland area in what is now the Gemsbok Kalahari National Park. Some went to live in townships. Some went to work on farms.
Over the last fifteen years or so, they've been recreating a sense of community under formidable odds. But some remarkable leaders emerged, and they made their situation known to the (then) new ANC government. The group, with help from some non-aboriginal people, put forward a claim, which was accepted by the ANC government this March, along with plans to reestablish the community up by the National Park.
One of the wonderful things that happened during this process was one of the lawyers (who was helping them put forward the claim) said in dismay, "It's too bad no one still speaks the language." The language had been (for about thirty years) said by the leading linguists to be extinct. But the political leader of the Bushmen said to the lawyer, "Well, Mum does." And the lawyer said, "Are you serious?" And he said, "Of course." Mum--ninety-seven at the time, she's now ninety-nine--lives in a small town right on the Namibian border. So I went across there with the leading linguist of Bushman languages, and Mum did a tape in which she spoke out to anyone who could hear. She didn't think there were any other speakers, so she was speaking out to a world that she didn't know still existed. [It was] a really remarkable moment. Just listening to it is like nothing else because you're hearing a woman who may be--who thinks she probably is--the last speaker of a language in the world, so she's completely in her own world as she speaks that language.
And we took the tape around, going to places by word of mouth. People would say, "Well, I heard this rumor that so and so still spoke the language." And I found fifteen other speakers, many of them hadn't spoken the language--hadn't heard the language--for thirty, forty years.
An African Story, Part II
The Bushman language that I'm talking about has five click sounds and eight tones. It's a very, very complex language. Linguists say that human beings can make about a hundred and fifty vocal sounds. Languages don't use anywhere near the full range, most languages don't. English, which is a complex language and rich in sounds, uses somewhere around forty. Other languages, including some Asian languages, use fewer, interestingly. French uses about twenty five. Norwegian uses about fifty-five. This Bushman language and the range of Bushman languages in Botswana use upwards of a hundred and twenty five. So that gives a sense of how complex, how rich, how important a part of the human tradition this language is. It's the language of a people who know the desert, and in that language is that knowledge--not just the names, but the way of being in the desert--because for them the desert is a rich place, it's not an impoverished place, not a place without water. It's a place with things.
The linguists who have been working there over this last year brought in a linguist from Namibia with experience in one of the Bushman languages in Namibia. He is working to set up programs with the young kids. The good thing is they're very keen to learn it, the youngsters are. That's not always the case. But these are kids who are going back to their homeland, to reestablish their sense of home and sense of stability, and to do so in a way that fits into a sense of what, in this case, South Africa can be, and with that a sense of what we all can be. God knows, if South Africans can be moving in some ways in this direction, there are sure no excuses for the rest of us not doing it. We've got resources and experience that we should be able to put in place to provide models--models of how we can find ways of building aboriginal presence, and to put aboriginal people into the center of our sense of who the rest of us are and where we all belong.
