[As I’ve detailed at
length here and elsewhere,
to my mind Columbus Day is by far the most troubling of our national holidays. So I’m
proposing Cross-Cultural Day, which would be an occasion to remember and
celebrate some of the most inspiring relationships between Native and
Non-Native Americans in our history (and which could of course co-exist with Indigenous
Peoples Day celebrations). This week I’ll be highlighting such inspiring
individuals and interactions in my posts. Your thoughts, nominations, and other
perspectives appreciated for the weekend’s crowd-sourced post!]
On a different and more inspiring vision of
the era of European arrival.
If you’ve been well trained by a
literary analyzer like this AmericanStudier, one of your main responses to the
new definition of cross-cultural American diversity I first advanced in this
2011 post (and many others throughout my writing here) might be “So what?”
I tried to address some of the broadest national narratives that could be
transformed by my ideas back in this “What
would
change”
series
of posts (published the same week that the book in which
I make this argument was released), and certainly I would still emphasize such
broad topics (language, mixture, the melting pot, and a phrase like
“All-American”) in response to your hypothetical analytical query, fair reader.
But within that book, each main chapter focused on a particular century in
American post-contact history and culture, and along those lines I would also
argue that a definition of American identity and diversity focused on
cross-cultural transformation would allow—in fact require—us to rethink some of
our dominant images (both positive and negative) of different time periods.
When it comes to the arrival and
contact period, for example, for a long time our national narratives of the
first (well, first
post-Viking) European arrivals to the Americas have focused on two
distinct, in many ways opposed, but each in their own way oversimplifying
stories. Some of the most defining national narratives have of course focused
on the Puritans, and most especially on the Mayflower Pilgrims; those
narratives have tended to be largely positive and celebratory, as exemplified
by the recurring “city on a hill” imagery which leaders like John F. Kennedy
and Ronald Reagan have
used both to describe the Pilgrims and to carry forward their idealizing
visions of their mission and community. In the dominant Pilgrim narrative,
Native Americans tend to figure mostly just as friendly helpers (a la Squanto/Tisquantum)
who help the Pilgrims survive and then, well, more or less vanish from the
story. On the other hand, another defining national narrative emphasizes Christopher
Columbus and 1492 as key origin points; for at least the last few decades,
driven by multicultural historical revisions and the rise of disciplines like
ethnic and Native American studies, that narrative has tended to be largely
negative and critical, as illustrated by the many protests
that met the 1992 Columbus quincentenary and sought to turn the conversations
both to the many cultures that constituted the Pre-Columbian Americas and to
the often horrifically violent and destructive aftermaths of Columbus’s
“discovery” for those cultures.
There’s certainly both historical
accuracy and contemporary relevance to the positive and the negative narratives
of European arrival, but my definition requires a different vision: one that
emphasizes not arrival itself, not the cultures doing the arriving, and not
those already here and affected by the arrivals, but instead the relationships
and interconnections between and ultimately mutual transformations of all of
those cultures. And to that end, I can’t recommend highly enough Cynthia Van
Zandt’s Brothers Among Nations: The Pursuit of
Intercultural Alliances in Early America,1580-1660. Van Zandt’s book is
exemplary as historical scholarship, utilizing archival primary sources in
consistently clear and complex ways, and refusing to settle for anything less
than a fully rounded analysis of the multiple cultures and moments and
encounters on which she focuses. But it’s just as exemplary, to my mind, in its
fundamental purpose, in Van Zandt’s desire to examine aspects of the arrival
era that are centrally defined neither by European success nor by cultural
oppression or violence; instead, she argues convincingly throughout, many of
this period’s central interactions were hesitant, tentative, partial, and most
significantly cross-cultural in every sense. If they did not always extend into
the remainder of the 17th and 18th centuries, that does
not mean that they are not crucially defining American interactions, both
because future cultures and communities would likely not have existed without
them and because, through a more 21st century lens, they provide
inspiring evidence that separation, hierarchy, and violence were far from the
only options available to early American cultures.
Next Cross-Cultural Day nomination
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts,
responses, or other Cross-Cultural Day nominations for the weekend post?
I like your website. Immensely.
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