Native American as a metaphor of American past

Native American, also called American Indian, Amerindian, Amerind, Indian, aboriginal American, or First Nation person, member of any of the aboriginal peoples of the Western Hemisphere, although the term often connotes only those groups whose original territories were in present-day Canada and the United States.

The thoughts and perspectives of indigenous individuals, especially those who lived during the 15th through 19th centuries, have survived in written form less often than is optimal for the historian. Because such documents are extremely rare, those interested in the Native American past also draw information from traditional arts, folk literature, folklore, archaeology, and other sources.

Indian cultural characteristics – a view from within

1. Non-verbal communication through body language, sign language, facial expressions, use of personal space, and silence.

2. Time is now and ever flowing, there is no need to hurry.

3. Respect for elders and other adults (teachers), is not to look away into their eyes, rather, glance away.

4. A unique relationship with nature as part of the circle of life, and entwined with the creator, mother earth, self and family (as a people). The Indian way is to respect nature, given to them to use-not abuse, by the great spirit.

5. Lack of belief in ownership, so things such as the mother earth, nature and its natural resources, possessions, or individual skills are to be shared among each other, not owned or fenced in, or kept from those in need, because all was given by the creator.

As a result of extensive mythologization, a dual metaphor of the new world was born in the bowels of the colonial period: the image of a garden of Eden, where unseen, wonderful gifts of nature, the natives are peaceful and hospitable, nature is soft and affectionate, and life is a blessing of God. Almost no less often there is the opposite series of images: a thicket, a “desert” without banks, full of danger, wild animals and people, treacherous and threatening – a real corner of hell on Earth. Such ideas, of course, were based on the pan-European religious and literary tradition; however, it was in the new world that they participated in the formation of cultural complexes of the future nation. For example, the famous episode from " history Virginia” by John Smith, which tells about the rescue of the author by the chief's daughter Povhatana, Pocahontas, has a mythological and folklore character... In fact, most likely, there was a ritual ceremony of admission to the tribe.

Scientific and mythical justifications of slavery in American public opinion

• Infantalization, they are as children who need white people`s guardian . They are part of the family, but submissive, immature, unfit for independence and freedom

• Dehumanization and bestialization (0they are dangerous animals or domesticated animals)

• Uneducated- unhuman. Literacy was a justified for that time tool to enslave other races.

• Lack of legacy was a sign of inferiority.

• the relationship between skin color and intelligence

Jefferson's conclusion about the mental abilities of Negroes is based not so much on examples of their “unreasonable” or “reckless” behavior in everyday life (which would obviously occur with about the same frequency as representatives of other races), and on their inability, in his opinion, to abstract thinking, to the “process of sober reasoning” (reasoning) and especially to “poetry”, that is, literary creativity. He pays a lot of attention to this issue, making his negative judgment about the works of the poets Phyllis Wheatley and Ignatius Sancho as a simple “parrot” imitation of white poetry, devoid of originality. Thus, an equal sign is placed between the lack of a worthy written tradition among blacks (signs of a high degree of civilization in the European coordinate system) and their low level of development.

This trend dates back to the late Renaissance. One of the three Jefferson idols (which also included I. Newton and J. Locke), Francis Bacon, as early as 1623 identified “illiteracy” with “savagery” – a certain people described in the New Atlantis “being ignorant and savages. .. I couldn't leave writing, art, or civilization to my descendants...”. In the following centuries, granting privileged status to writing served as a tool in European colonial (and American slave-owning) practice to establish and maintain power over other peoples. Not only the degree of development of non-Europeans, but also their belonging to the human race were directly deduced from the ability to create written monuments. It was perfectly logical from the raciocentric position of the Enlightenment – after all, without written sources it was impossible to witness the activity of reason; without such evidence, there was no history, and without it there could be no question of “humanity” in the Western sense. So, D. Hume accompanies the essay "on national characters" (publ. 1748 p.) with a note, where he makes his assumption about the natural lowness of blacks and other races in relation to whites. He motivates this idea by the inability to name among non-whites at least “the only person who would be known for his actions and thoughts (highlighted by me. - N. V.)", as well as their lack of “complex works, Arts and Sciences”. Obviously, the mention of” reflections " should be understood as a statement of their absence in the written form available to the European, since it would hardly have occurred to him to seek a wise word of mouth in Africa.

Based on these observations of Hume, Kant, in turn, in 1764 notes that “the difference between these two races of people is so fundamental that it seems as significant in the field of mental abilities as in the field of color, " and then finally naturalizes the assumption about the relationship between skin color and intelligence in his rude and categorical commentary

to the opinion expressed by blacks: "this man was completely black, from head to toe – a clear proof that what he said was nonsense." Finally, G. V. F. Hegel, summing up the views that had become dominant at that time, declares Africa from the perspective of his philosophy of history “a child's country located outside of self-conscious history and shrouded in the dark darkness of night.” Usually this narrowness of vision on the part of the greatest thinkers of the old and New World occurred not only from the lack of positive information about the racial "other", but also from the inability/unwillingness to assume the existence of multiple systems of accumulation, storage and transfer of knowledge in different cultures, as well as to imagine, that knowledge itself can have a different nature.