Damn strait

Now and then the mainstream media reports on scientific findings about the “arrival” of indigenous people to the Americas. It goes something like this “Indigenous groups are immigrants too, so it wasn’t their land in the first place, blah blah blah,” let’s just forget all that nonsense Vine Deloria Jr. called “academic folklore”.

Vine, seen by some as a native activist, also wrote that the North American scientific community held narrow views of the world, did not respect indigenous perspectives, and created a cult of superiority of European immigrants over and above naturally born people of this continent. He defended his position not as anti-science but rather anti-scientist — the political scientist. This is a sentiment many indigenous people can relate to.

CBC News, the official media of the state reported yesterday that findings from a cave in the Yukon date the first “residents” of North America at 24,000 years. Other headlines are saying “Humans in North America 10,000 earlier than thought.” LOL! Thought by who?!

Some of us have known all along.

Canada Reads 2017 should go to real indigenous authors such as the late Vine Deloria Jr. and his book Red Earth, White Lies or Arthur Manuel’s recently released book Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call. Sadly, Manuel just passed away earlier this month January 11, 2017 at the age of 66.

Six Nations is still grappling with the loss of knowledge keeper and activist Bill Squire who suffered a fatal heart attack last week.

As our champions are dying, imitators and pretenders such as Boyden and his kind are being celebrated by Canada as national heroes. Isn’t that totally messed up?

Someone needs to step up and fix the politically charged science behind each new finding with proper reporting to show the rarely spoken and often forgotten indigenous side. Especially if Canada is serious about reconciliation with its more than 500 hostage nations.

Listen up CBC, when you are writing stories about migration theories please add a few non-patronizing, sincere paragraphs boldly reminding Canadians and Americans that our creation stories say we’ve been here forever and since the beginning. Some oral tradition says we did migrate, but from the south. Justice Gethin Edwards read the Haudenosaunee creation story aloud in court during his decision regarding Makayla Sault and validated it using the authority we have granted Canada. As he should.

If that is unacceptable to the fair and unbiased Canadian media, then why not allow a scientific counter-point such as that proposed by linguists who say it would take at least 30,000 years for indigenous languages to become so vastly different from Asian tongues.

As a matter of fact, only two languages (Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dené) have similarities with asian languages but there is an academic paper that says this is because of a back-migration (maybe we went the other way).

We need more indigenous scientists to start pushing back across the Bering Strait.

Related Posts