Myths

I have been thinking this whole week about myths. For Greek thinkers as Plato and Aristotle, there were two ways of approaching knowledge in the world: mythos and logos. Logos was the rational explanation, the knowledge gained by observation and the use of reason; mythos, on the other hand, was what belonged to stories, that which was not necessarily true and was gained by intuition. Logos was the philosopher’s way; mythos was the way of the poets. Plato’s ideal society, as we learn in The Republic, would have no dealings with poets, and hence, no myths. Myths, even back then, where considered dangerous things, simple stories that would spread like a plague and would fill people’s heads with nonsense. 

I wonder now, thousands of years later, can this be true? Is it really possible that a myth is nothing more than a dangerous story, a huge sack of nonsense that people will believe easily and without making questions? I must say I believe it sometimes is.

Before this continent was colonized by Europe, the Aztecs, living in the central plains of Mexico, had their own system of beliefs. They believed in Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and many other gods. They had stories about them, too. They built temples and statues, and they had priests who offered sacrifices to them. For the Aztec people, their gods were very real. When the Spanish came to their land, they were horrified. Their gods were no gods, they said, but demons. Their religion was no true religion… it was nothing but a bunch of dangerous myths. 

The Spanish degraded the Aztec’s religion to myths (now equivalent to lies), imposed a new religion and created a whole new different set of myths about the culture they were colonizing and partially destroying: the natives adored Satan, the natives were like children, the natives had no soul… the natives were not people. And the whole of Europe believed it easily and without asking to many questions for a good number of centuries. The same happened with many, if not all of the Native American cultures. 

So, the way I see it, there are two kinds of myths involved in the American Indian world: the myths that surround the American Indians, and the ones that come from within the different Native American cultures. They are both powerful and dangerous, but their nature is completely different.

Here, I would like to explore a few myths that surround American Indians.

Geographical myth – America is a continent, not a country. I understand that this class will deal with the literature of the Indian cultures in the U.S. and that’s great, but we should keep in mind that Indian cultures are all over the continent; and during the pre-colonial times, there were no countries.  A Maya or a Mapuche is no less an American Indian than a Cherokee is. And, then again, that does not mean they are the same.

Linguistic myth – Because most native languages did not have a written form before the colonial age, there is a belief that native languages are primitive, or inferior in quality of those with a written form. This myth was encouraged by some European and American linguists of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. 

Also, in America surged the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which stated that language shaped or conditioned our view of the world. Sapir and Whorf studied many Native American languages and proposed that the interpretation of the world changed according to the language a certain tribe used. According to this theory, an apache had a different way of regarding snow than an english-speaker. This was discovered to be false. Even though language does reveal a lot about a culture, it does not limit our perception of the world. Besides, every natural language has the same value and complexity.  There are no superior or inferior languages, just as there are no superior or inferior races.

Identity myth – I will not get into the discussion of the “proper” way of naming the “Indians”. I will just say that we usually group various things and then believe they are the same. It’s like asking a Nigerian about Congo because he or she is African. The identity of the American Indians has been defined as one thing mostly by colonizers of different kinds.

First, by the Spanish, English and French people coming to the continent in the 16^th century.  They treated all the natives as “Indians”, and rarely gave them a name or made a distinction between them. If they ever did, it was merely due to scientific curiosity or for religious purposes. Then, in the 19^th century, the governments perpetrated the identity myth. There’s no better proof for that than the Indian Reservations, where many tribes were forced to coexist in the same piece of land. Lastly, as we saw in Reel Injun, there’s Hollywood as one of the most dangerous colonizers. By depicting the Indian as one thing, and only one thing, it robed the true identities of many tribes and kept the world ignorant about the real situation of American Indians.

Extermination myth – I grew up thinking the Indians were truly mythological creatures. Like ancient Greeks and Romans, all we had left from them was words. Aztecs, Mayas and Cherokees…  they were all long gone. In Mexico’s case, I thought they had blended in Mexican society; we are all mestizos, half-breeds. As for the Indians living in the U.S, I was convinced they had been exterminated.  I now realize that cannot be true. Not for Mexico, not for the U.S. In both countries the Indians faced the threat of extermination, in both they blended to become mestizos, and in both they remain, marginal but very much alive. 

After all those myths… they are still alive.