Member-only story
Once Upon a Time in the Genocide
The Struggle to Tell Our Own Story
Stories rule.
Stories rule in one guise or another in all cultures. Because human beings start out — -contrary to race theory — -with identical hardware, the software, the stories that tell us what to do, come out remarkably similar all over the world. One of my fellow professors without a union card (Ph.D.), Joseph Campbell, published The Hero With a Thousand Faces in 1949, claiming that all human software is not just similar but rather identical.
I am sometimes asked how I can reconcile Cherokee stories with having three college degrees conferred by the dominant culture. The same way, I reply, the settler nations reconcile the scientific method with fealty to monotheistic patriarchal desert cults.
My reply to those who recoil at that description is to ask what part of it is factually incorrect?
A desert culture arises in a context of scarcity; my people come from the woodlands. Our fortunes waxed and waned with the weather, but our stories do not account for complete starvation. When I visited the homelands from which the settlers evicted most of us, I became acquainted with how our diet contained so much fresh water fish. Archaeologists have discovered fish traps constructed with rocks that turn entire rivers into fish farms.
