The American Indian and the Problem of History
by Calvin Martin
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The problem of history for North American Indians is that historical consciousness has traditionally been irrelevant to them, perhaps even dangerous. Time, with its attendant experiences, realities, and knowledge, was not linear, progressive, and novel. Their vision of themselves in relationto the cosmos was very different from the anthropocentric perspective that came to dominate Western thinking. Each of the eighteen authors herein wrestles with the phenomenon that in writing about Indians show more and whites in concert scholars are perforce trying to mesh two very different structures andsystems of reality and knowledge--two fundamentally different cosmologies--which in fact do not really fit together. In essays written especially for this volume, each scholar confronts the problem from his or her distinct experience as historian, anthropologist, professional writer, Native ornon-Native American. This in not a book about methodology; it probes far deeper than that. It questions whether formal Western history has the philosophical power and imagination to enable scholars to write about life and world societies who were conceived in history, who did not willingly launchthemselves out onto an historical trajectory, and who performed in the Western vision and errand of history only through coercion. Here, then, is a study of the "metaphysics" of writing Indian-white history. show lessTags
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Calvin Luther Martin is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University.
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