EXTINCT Indians...

[Mike Cleven]

Kinda rambling, but just some thoughts related to the current topic.....

At 05:48 PM 12/10/99 -0700, phil cash cash wrote:

>
>so here, in the northwest, we are all "being and becoming" a people yet, and
>the world of injustice continues to surrounds us despite all the spilled ink
>of the well-wishers.

This "being and becoming" concept is interesting, and very valid (as you
know yourself by personal experience).  I regularly chafe at the "museum
culture" thing, which tries to put things and people in historical boxes,
tucked away for formalized viewing but removed from context; or declared
"relics of a dead culture".  Being at the Northwest Gallery in the American
Museum of Natural History in New York was kind of like that; at least they
had each section organized by regional culture, but it WAS presented as
though this was "a people who have passed from history".  The gallery is
stupdendous, and has a chock-a-block profusion that is much more like a
showing of "potlatch wealth" than the austere and sere, almost church-like,
presentations at the UBC Museum of Anthropology or the Royal British
Columbia Museum.  Even a local native-run centre like the ones at Duncan or
Umista can't have quite as much profusion of goods, I think; NB - much of
it BOUGHT rather than looted, or so the accounts given by the Museum
describe (I know, I know...).  Anyway, despite the lavishness of the room
(a rather dark place where you line up to see the animatronic dinosaurs, if
I recall what I lined up for when I was there) it still bespeaks a "world
that has gone", rather than one that is actually still alive and very, very
dynamic.

It is a nostrum by now that such manipulation of cultural archives and
cultural lore - in a sever, formal manner without its original context - is
a way of subjugating a culture, rather than subjugating it.  The Northwest
cultures are not alone in this treatment of course, nor is it exclusive to
non-European cultures.  The sanitization of such ancient European/Western
holy places as Stonehenge, Drogheda, Delphi, Olympia, Karnak and elsewhere
is representative of this; a past to be pointed to, but not to be lived.

My Greek friend when I was in Greece last time drove me out to Olympia
(about five hours from Athens over the mountains of Arcadia, which live up
to the name) and we explored the mostly-empty site (it being November).  He
persuaded me to cross the ropes (you archaeologists out there might
complain) and stand on the spot where the great idol of Zeus had stood as
well as in other sacred precincts (as I had dared at Delphi, although the
Great Altar was not off-limits; the Great Temple was, but it was too
visible to dare entering).  From the spot where Phidias' great
ivory-and-gold statue of the God of Being (one of the meanings of "Zeus")
you could feel a "flow" from the ground, something very powerful, reaching
into the sky.  Trippy.  I'd felt similar things at Delphi and Delos, and in
some of the sacred groves in England and bits of what's left of pagan
Norway.  Although - I touched the cold, mossy stone of a two-millenium year
old stone cross (non-Christian) in a stavkirk churchyard in Bergen and
humbled by the growing dusk in a dragon-festooned interior of another
Stavkirk in the Folk Museum in Oslo; even removed from their original
settings they "spoke", and not softly; as did the mere _copy_ of the Great
Omphalos that stands in the foyer of the Delphi Museum, or the site of the
Great Idol of Zeus I first mentioned.  Sometimes the object or the
experience or the place defies the efforts of "museum administration" to
strip it of its power.....

Nick said that the reason the precinct of the Great Temple of Zeus was
roped off was to keep people from feeling that, the archaeology having been
completed years before and every extractable artifact already removed (I'll
scan some pictures and post them on the Web for anyone who wants to have a
look sometime over the holidays).  The whole point was not to protect the
shrine, but to prevent people from experiencing it; it's a little different
at Delphi because they haven't located the crypt of the sibyl yet, which is
believed to be hidden under the temple somehow (the broken remnant of the
Great Tripod now standing in the Hippodrome in Constantinople/Istanbul,
divested of its ancient meaning and removed from its air of holiness since
its plunder from Delphi after the Conversion).  Nick contended that such
places were holy for a reason, and that the reason so many people had come
there over the centuries lay long before the founding and building of the
Great Temples; that they were organic in some way and defied the attempts
of archaeology, church and government to rob them of their spirit; hence
the ropes and rules.  I mean, imagine if you will, the banning of music in
the sacred precincts of the God of Music (Apollo at Delphi or Delos,
although I was usually exempt from that rule), or forbidding the practice
of Athletics at Olympia!!   Some of the ancient cults apparently have
survived centuries of persecution, some even daring to practice openly (the
ancient Mysteries rumoured to still be celebrated annually in the mountains
near Athens).  But not at the famous "great sites", which are off-limits to
celebrants and believers, at least in their visible, proper capacity.....

And I gotta say I wasn't too happy with the sight of quarries and ski lifts
on the higher slopes of Parnassos (the once-forbidden mountain seat of
Apollo, comparable to Olympus itself in significance)......

Anyway, I didn't mean to get so far from the Northwest or too
mumbo-jumbo-y; it's a constant frustration to me in my travels or here at
home that the non-"modern" conceptualization/experience often "takes over"
from the human-natural response that so many non-mainstream
cultures/experiences are about.  The "lost history" of the planet is
everywhere, in every culture.....and more's the pity.  Science and reason
lay their hands on the so-called "ancient", and remove it from its meaning
while claiming to explore it......



Mik