The Personal is Political
The Personal is Political by Ragen Ashlie Roberts is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
The BERING STRAIT DOCTRINE insists that all indigenous American peoples came across a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, filtering down through Central America into South America. Problem: numerous archaeological sites in the Americas predate any possible Bering Strait migration by many thousands of years. Access from Alaska to the rest of North America was blocked for millennia by two great ice sheets that covered Canada. An narrow opening that might have allowed passage appeared much too late (about 13,500 years ago) to explain the growing evidence that people were living in both North and South America much earlier than these “first” migrations.
By 1997-98, the tide of opinion began to turn: several scientific conclaves declared that a majority of attending scholars rejected the Bering Strait theory as a full explanation of how the Americas were peopled.The long-doctrinal hypothesis of Clovis hunters as the first immigrants is crumbling before the new dating, as hundreds of pre-Clovis sites pile up: Cactus Hill, Virginia (13,500 BP); Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Pennsylvania (14,000 - 17,000 Before Present); Monte Verde (13,500 BP); Pedra-Furada, Brazil (15,000 BP, and possibly as old as 32,000 BP).
Bering Strait diehards discount the oral histories of indigenous Americans. In spite of the huge diversity among the American peoples and differences between most Americans and east Asians, all are declared to be of “Mongoloid racial origin.” After the initial press stampede declaring “Kennewick Man” to be “white,” study of the genetic evidence shows something entirely different. Instead, it appears that there have been several waves of migration: from central China, from the ancient Jomon culture of Japan, from south Asia or the Pacific islands. And “Luzia,” an 11,500-year-old female skeleton in Brazil “appeared to be more Negroid in its cranial features than Mongoloid,” in the stodgy anthropological terminology of the New York Times (Nov 9, 1999). (Actually she most closely resembles aborignal Australians.) But there is also a uniquely North American X-haploid group of mitochondrial DNA, which has yet to be explained.
http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/racism_history.html
This just infuriates me. I have been taught this bullshit ever since grade school up into high school and even most higher education courses, but now that I have some anthropology and a more thorough understanding of world history, I can tell where I was told convenient lies by teachers that probably didn’t even realize they were telling lies. They spoke about this mere Bering Strait “theory” which always did seem a bit too convenient and suspect, as if it were fact. Because everyone knows that there were no people on the American continents before the ice age. Life started in the “fertile crescent” and continued into Western Europe—oh, and not to mention all of those little ethnic civilizations that popped up and migrated to “the new world” (*extreme sarcasm*). The idea that indigenous people in the Americas didn’t “develop” the way Westerners did is just too absurd to be taught academics, eh? Nevermind the diversity of cultures, the oral traditions, the mythos, that has no real connection to Eastern cultures aside from some of the common similarities we see in many world cultures across the board, particularly non- and semi-sedintary cultures. The only reason we trip over accepting that another branch of humans developed on their own without any aid other than some migrating influences from Asia and the Pacific islands is because there is still this ingrained racism and Western superiority complex that more or less spells out that everything originated in the West. Everything that mattered came from the Western continent, even before colonization came along and tried to wipe it all out because it wasn’t “sufficiently advanced” or “civilized” enough. This is disgustingly ethnocentric, racist, and biased in the highest degree, that these myths and speculations are taught to us as “facts.” We are made to believe that the world revolves around the West to the point of spotting similarities that aren’t even there. (As a brief, digressive tangent, I once starting engaging someone about Native American thought and philosophy; they had no idea what I was referring to. So I gave them a book about some of the oral tradition and ideas behind that ancient oral literature and its connection to various North American cultures and they started trying to draw similarities to Eastern philosophy, religion, and thought—when there sincerely are none more than you might observe in any culture. The worldviews of Eastern Asians and North Americans are vastly different in very complex yet concrete, tangible, and ideological ways. I hardly think all Native American thought and culture is a mere derivative of East Asian philosophy and culture.) But this is so deeply a part of our education and our culture that we fail to notice that we’re teaching and being taught lies, that the people of the Eastern continent had and have their own way of life and geneology form and develop of its own accord, without some stream of immigrants having to come to help them along. That they have an origin and the attachment to the land and their way of life was so strong for a reason. It’s backed up in the oral tradition (also ignored by Western scholars who still overlook and undervalue non-written cultures) and science. This is one of the greatest insults and misdeeds done towards Native Americans, and yet most people aren’t even aware of its falsehood. Now, that, drives me insane.
For a more eloquent rendition of what I’m ranting about, there’s also this article: http://www.historyandtheheadlines.abc-clio.com/ContentPages/ContentPage.aspx?entryId=1171632¤tSection=1161468&productid=5
(via lavida-es-cruel)
I feel like part of the impetus for this Bering Strait Bullshit is that if Indigenous Americans are “scientifically proven” to be immigrants themselves then all the colonizing assholes who stole their land and decimated their people can feel less guilty about it all. If the Indigenous Americans are “also” immigrants then they have just as much claim to the land as the conquering imperialists did/do, if the Indigenous Americans are “also” immigrants then the European Douchebags who destroyed everything in their paths didn’t actually do anything wrong because they were just doing “the same thing” the Indigenous Americans did when they originally migrated. Maybe I’m wrong but I think that’s part of it.
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