[MD] Plains Talk and Pragmatism

[Matt Kundert]

Hey Dan,

Dan said:
I'd have to say that theism is also particular to Europeans when it 
pertains to the Native Americans.

Matt:
Uh, yes, sorry, that too.

I've been reading in and around D'Arcy McNickle's 1936 novel, The 
Surrounded, about a Salish tribe in Montana for the past month or 
two.  One of the few examples of published American Indian work 
before the explosion in the 70s after Momaday's House Made of 
Dawn, McNickle's book is an excellent primer to the moral and 
conceptual issues that American Indians are still dealing with.  The 
encounter with Christianity is particularly interesting and nuanced 
(and difficult to summarize here).  I have found, in attempting to 
get a handle on the ground surrounding the encounter between the 
two cultures, a lot of enlightenment in reading the work of 
philosophers like Bernard Williams and Martha Nussbaum on the 
moral and conceptual role of Greek tragedy.  And the reason is 
simple to see: the Greeks were shifting between an oral to a 
literate society, and so were many American Indian cultures.  
Though in a radically different context (both technological and 
political), what is similar is highly illuminating.  Tragedy was a 
way of articulating a dilemma, the death of one era (the Homeric 
hero) in the face of another (the rising legal and political traditions 
of the 5th C. Greek polis).  Some American Indian critics lamented 
McNickle's tragic ending (vaguely spoiling it), but that tragic 
moment is a necessary condition to move into a realistic future.  
Jonathan Lear has written a book, Radical Hope, about some of 
the Crow chief Plenty Coups's remarks about their situation at the 
end of the 19th century and it rests heavily on the notion that 
nostalgia for the past will kill a culture faster than anything, and 
that the struggle has been how to face the future while holding to 
the past.

Even if Christianity is not the future, or theism or anti-theism, one 
can neither say that the old Salish myths are either.  Those myths 
were linked indelibly with the buffalo.  They are gone.  So, how 
do we move forward?

Matt