Personal Archaeology:Changing One's Point of View

Earthmother said...

I love a book that forces me to reassess my point of view and adjust the knobs accordingly. So it is with David Hurst Thomas's Skull Wars, which has made me examine filters that color views long held but never consciously acquired. We all have some less than pretty notions, which like souvenirs lugged back from happy times prove cheap and inappropriate when examined in the light of home. It wasn’t very long ago that I underwent a paradigm shift in my understanding of colonialism under similar circumstances. I had blithely cruised from political refugee immigrant child to Caribbean traveler and connoisseur of the comparative virtues of ex- British, French, Spanish or Dutch Caribbean islands and their luxurious Colonial flavored post-Colonial resorts. Then I read Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place about Antigua, my favorite island, and its tourist industry viewed from a native’s point of view, and everything changed forever. I realized as I finished the book that I had spent my life until that day seeing everything through the lens of a post Colonial apologist.

Skull Wars required me to evaluate how and why I view Native Americans, and forced me to do some necessary personal archaeology before I could once again move forward. This stratigraphic examination of my thinking led me to understand why I’ve always felt more attuned to the 18th and 19th centuries than to my own. But to examine my viewpoint and find to my immense dismay that I think like a Brit educated at Rugby under Thomas Arnold with a grand tour under my belt is flat-out scary. How did someone with my catholic interests and liberal outlook been so willing to subscribe to the blindered notion of Mediterranean & European supremacy in all things touching the cultural and intellectual history of our species? Examining myself, I saw a clear and direct link to Rousseau, the Romantic movement, and the many dead white European males who have formed my thinking, consciously or not. My own personal and ancestral history cluttered any possible objectivity. When Moses was rounding up the other Jews to head out of Egypt, my great to the nth grandfather was playing cards with Pharaoh, so we stayed. Over the next millennia, my family were subjected to Greek, Ottoman, French and British rulers, culminating in the early 1950s in Egypt when Nasser toppled the sham monarchy of King Farouk, and we “Europeans” sailed to the New World.

Arriving in the US as a child I immediately forced my parents to buy me a set of pearl handled six shooters, a leather holster with conchas and tassels and a cowboy hat. I wore these in our hotel, where I spent a lot of time learning English from the refrigerator sized TV that spewed endless shows about Davey Crockett (I soon obtained a coonskin cap for watching that more authentically), Jim Bowie, Annie Oakley and all the singing cowboys and girls, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. Armed with endless rolls of caps, I played in Central Park with the local children –Manhattan natives, white, Upper East Side private school kids- who were also armed with six shooters. We with guns were the cowboys and those without, the kids we repeatedly killed each afternoon in the playground, were the Indians. I shifted from colonized to colonizer by arming myself with toys and hats, a change that has colored my views about Native Americans and pre-Columbian culture until now.

Hats off, Skull Wars.

Sylvia Calabrese