![]() ![]() ![]() Something new could appear.Īs many scholars have noted, American myth, in a sense, retained the wider possibilities that historians have denied American history. Contact was not a battle of primal forces in which only one could survive. The meeting of sea and continent, like the meeting of whites and Indians, creates as well as destroys. But the tellers of such stories miss a larger process and a larger truth. Some Indian groups did disappear others did persist. The first outcome produces stories of conquest and assimilation the second produces stories of cultural persistence. There have been but two outcomes: The sea wears down and dissolves the rock or the sea erodes the rock but cannot finally absorb its battered remnant, which endures. ![]() Indians are the rock, European peoples are the sea, and history seems a constant storm. The history of Indian-white relations has not usually produced complex stories. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture. Yet what if identity is conceived not as boundary to be maintained but as a nexus of relations and transactions actively engaging a subject? The story or stories of interaction must then be more complex, less linear and teleological. A fear of lost identity, a Puritan taboo on mixing beliefs and bodies, hangs over the process. Stories of cultural contact and change have been structured by a pervasive dichotomy: absorption by the other or resistance to the other. Richard White, "The Middle Ground, Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815", Pages ix-xv ![]()
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