[MD] Plains Talk and Pragmatism

[Dan Glover]

Hello everyone

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 8:09 PM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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?

Hi Matt

Perhaps we move forward by moving backwards. Benjamin Lee Whorf (I
don't know for sure but maybe you mentioned him before?) wrote an
article in 1940 called Science and Linguistics in which he claimed
language shapes how we perceive the world:

http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/whorf.scienceandlinguistics.pdf

Over the years, many of Whorf's claims were rejected as contrary to
common sense, and most of his ideas were considered fringe science at
best and outright fraud and hoax by most of the scientific community.
But lately, there has been some renewed interest in Whorf's work, and
it seems related to Robert Pirsig's work as well:

http://www.kumeyaay.com/kumeyaay-news/2030-does-your-language-shape-how-you-think.html

What is interesting (and may or may not relate to the move from oral
traditions to written) is the relationship between egocentric
positions (right and left) to geographic positions (cardinal points...
north, south, east, west) and how this influences the way we learn to
navigate the world.

Thank you for the book recommendations. I found McNickle's The
Surrounded as well as parts of Radical Hope are available on google
books and I added them to my reading list. Very illuminating, yes.

Thanks again,

Dan