[MD] Plains Talk and Pragmatism

[MarshaV]

Hi Matt,

I'm half-way through 'Radical Hope' by Jonathan Lear.  Great Book! 
Thanks for mentioning it.


Marsha 




On Nov 12, 2010, at 9:09 PM, Matt Kundert 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?
> 
> 


 
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