Book Review
Historians can be just as myopic and exclusionary as
everybody else, and not just in the subjects they choose to study. The rules of
good history demand linear thinking, not to mention a coherent view of the
universe that can be conveyed with written language. But because scholars tend
to ignore non-linear ways of understanding the past, historical analyses have
traditionally dismissed indigenous perspectives. Most historians, even those
who study Native Americans specifically, tend to ignore the way these cultures
conceptualize their own histories, and the methods they employ to record the
past.
In his well-organized and original book, Peter Nabokov
beseeches historians (and anthropologists, sociologists, etc.) for more
inclusion and openness. Nabokov views Indian historicity not only as worthy of
study, but as a valuable source of data that is “empirically accurate.” Whether
coded in trickster tales or origin myths, in the notches on an axe handle or the
movement of wildlife across the landscape, Native American “history,” though
rarely written down, provides immeasurable material to better understand the
past. Before one can understand the message of Indian history, however, one
must re-tune one’s ear. To that end, Nabokov’s book is aimed at providing the
basic tools.
The author here does not argue for a central, unified
version of Native American history. For Nabokov, the history of North America is best represented as a “forest of time,” in which
the stories of each separate tribe (as well as the histories of the European
interlopers) are each contained within a tree that branches and grows
organically and unpredictably. The “arboreal symbol for American Indian
cultural diversity,” Nabokov writes, receives support from a root system that,
if studied, sheds remarkable new light upon tribal evolution.
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