Indigenous Anthropology - Perspectives

Indigenous Anthropology ANTH 2301 Perspectives Native Americans have experienced colonisation for around 500 years. In this period, nonIndigenous peoples—generally speaking, White people—have been given a greater voice in colonial state society institutions. Written histories have been used by White people to further their interests, defend their colonising traditions, and provide them legitimacy for annexing large areas of Indigenous lands. Indigenous and other minority viewpoints have not received enough attention and have occasionally even been purposefully suppressed. Indigenous peoples have faced disempowerment in court cases pertaining to their sovereign rights as well as in their sovereign relationships with state institutions. Even now, a lot of Indigenous peoples still have difficulty establishing their nationality. Tribal traditions and languages have changed and been lost as a result of state-sponsored erasure of Native American history and culture. Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers have observed that history has been presented in a way that is biassed towards a White perspective since the later 20th century. Systemic racism has been criticised as a manifestation of this prejudice. Until recently, most academic teachers at most universities were White, if not entirely so. Indigenous people had limited possibilities to take positions of power over how Indigenous history and culture were presented and studied. In the 1970s, there was a push for more chances for Indigenous researchers to undertake study on their own peoples, which led to the development of native studies programmes in US colleges. Presently, Indigenous people are making a concerted effort to create their own history and include Indigenous viewpoints when describing their cultures and ideologies. Although there has been significant progress in Indigenous research, academics remain reluctant to give Indigenous people leadership roles or to adopt Indigenous perspectives. Anthropology, more than other academic fields, has made significant strides in acknowledging the worth and legitimacy of Indigenous viewpoints. The continuing discussion over oral histories is an intriguing illustration of how attitudes towards Indigenous viewpoints have changed recently. Anthropologists, linguists, and folklorists gathered Indigenous "myth texts" from tribes and analysed them for a large portion of the 19th and 20th centuries. This content has usually been studied within a linguistic or philosophical context. Similar to Greek mythology, the writings were interpreted as mystical tales with a focus on the godlike animals—like Coyote, Raven, and Blue Jay—that made appearances. Early academics who studied these writings were also drawn to its performance elements and the metaphorical commentary they provided on human existence. There was a disagreement among academics regarding the texts' value. Dell Hymes pointed out that the texts were most valuable when they were "original texts" or direct ethnographic translations; Claude Levi-Strauss concluded that there was no original text and that all versions were copied verbatim from earlier storytellers. The writings were regarded as literary works in this authenticity discussion, with little regard for the historical events that were depicted in some of the stories (Hegeman 1989). This blind spot for the historical significance of these writings is a reflection of a prejudice against oral tradition and in favour of recorded information. In the last 70 years, a lot of these presumptions regarding myth texts have evolved. Geologists studying Crater Lake in Oregon in the 1940s discovered that the lake was built on the site of Mount Mazama, a massive volcano that the local Indigenous people called Moy Yaina. When the volcano erupted, the mountain's summit dropped into the cone, creating a crater that eventually filled with water to form Crater Lake. This was around seven thousand years ago. Indigenous oral tales mirror this documented geological occurrence. An oral narrative of the Klamath tribe describes a struggle between two mountains, Moy Yaina and Mlaiksi (California's Mount Shasta). The oral history of the Klamath people firmly describes a twin volcanic event, in which Mlaiksi and Moy Yaina both erupted simultaneously, but Moy Yaina prevailed because of its bigger explosion. The explosion mentioned in this myth is supported by geological data, proving that Klamath oral tradition accurately depicts historical events. Thousands of Indigenous peoples have similar oral histories that are now recognised to represent numerous environmental occurrences, particularly those that altered the world dramatically. Many peoples now admit that their oral histories include accounts of tsunamis, Ice Age floods, volcanic eruptions, catastrophic fires, and other disasters. Research into many facets of Indigenous knowledge systems is growing as a result of growing recognition of the validity of Indigenous oral histories.