[Aztlan] geronimo/kennewick/peru

Sun May 21 11:26:16 CDT 2006

On 5/21/06 4:50 AM EST (UTC-5 hrs), "huehueteot at aol.com"
<huehueteot at aol.com> wrote:

> Ed:
> 
>   I don't see how you took disparagement out of what I said. I am in
> personal awe of peoples like the Lakota, the Cheyenne (with whom I have
> some personal experience) the Hopi and the Navajo. Other groups in the
> places where they were relegated by the "progressive" culture of the
> Western conquerors have somehow managed to hide the "elders" and their
> successors from the purveyors of Western Cultural Supremacy. Now with
> the return of Cultural Items that have been desperately needed to
> continue cultural growth and continuation of the institutions that make
> up the core of Native societies some of these institutions are allowed
> to continue their growth and evolution.
>   
Sam ‹

We are more in agreement than disagreement.  I was confining my comments to
this one paragraph of yours, not on your arguments as a whole:

>   U.S. Native American Religions were also driven under ground, but
> somehow it was left more intact with less influence from the conquering
> culture in most cases. Where the contact was longer the impact was
> greater and had greater effect.

My direct personal knowledge of Native American societies is confined to
certain North Eastern tribes and reservations, and I can only claim to have
little more than a nodding acquaintance with those, not being a trained
anthropologist, but a writer and former journalist. Though I have visited
several reservations over the years, most of what I've learned is through
reading, not personal experience.  However, I have spent no little amount of
time in Mexico, mostly the Yucatan, and can claim to know at least as much
about the Mesoamerican cultures as I do our own so-called American Indian
cultures. (That, by the way, doesn't mean my knowledge is vast; it is not by
any measure and I don't mean to imply that it is. I am not an academician.)

My point is this: If the Spanish conquerors, and later the mixed-race ruling
hierarchies of what we now call Mesoamerica, did much to obliterate
indigenous cultures (and even the people themselves), we in the United
States (and Canada) weren't exactly slackers in that regard.

Perhaps the Spanish can claim better success, I don't know.  But the fact
is, when I first visited the Yucatan some 40 years ago, the indigenous
peoples still spoke mostly Mayan: few could speak Spanish, let alone
English.  And most lived in small jungle villages much the same way as they
did five hundred years earlier.  Even their domiciles were the same,
fabricated in the same dimensions of the same mud and wattle and thatched
roofs the conquistadores found when they first arrived.  Though many if not
most of the Yucatec Maya then (I'm talking about 40 years ago), as now,
practiced Catholicism, it was not a Catholicism the pope would recognize,
but a mélange of Catholic and Mayan rites with a very definite Mayan flavor.
I make this point to support my argument that the Mayan descendants
throughout the Yucatan and Chiapas, and Guatemala and Belize as well, were
at least granted a degree of benign neglect as opposed to the outright
hostility that was the stated official policy of succeeding United States
governments.

Recent years have seen many changes, both north and south of the border.
U.S. Government policy is certainly more enlightened (if not much less
paternalistic) than it was; and economic development throughout Mexico and
especially on the Yucatan peninsula have brought about significant changes
to the Maya lifestyle.

With the onrush of tourism to what has now been dubbed 'Costa Maya,' those
Mayan Indians who haven't retreated deeper into the jungles of Yucatan and
Quintana Roo (and I have no idea what percentage that is), have been
assimilated, to some degree, into a thriving Mexican tourist industry,
working mostly at menial jobs in the resort hotels and restaurants and in
roadside shops that sell the usual crap to the well-heeled tourists from the
United States and Europe who now visit the area in teeming millions.

Still, there are said to be some 23 or so Mayan dialects still spoken
throughout Mesoamerica.  Except for religion, little overt attempt was made
by the Spanish missionaries over the years to stamp out the Mayan culture.
(yes, Bishop Landa ordered the burning of all Mayan codices, but wasn't that
because they were considered religious in nature and therefore works of the
devil? In any event it was an act that was repudiated by the Church shortly
after.) Rather than seek the wholesale destruction of Mayan culture, it was
deemed wiser and more effective to incorporate Catholicism into existing
Mayan ways (with the ceremony of the mass taking the place of human
sacrifice, of course).  And it all seems to have worked out, from the
church's point of view, very nicely.

Except, of course, when one attends a Mayan religious ceremony, even with
Catholic priests present, one can't help but wonder if he isn't witnessing a
Catholic rite with Mayan overtones, or a Mayan rite with Catholic overtones.
One leaves the ceremony thinking that it indeed all seems to have worked out
very nicely ‹ from the Mayan point of view.
-- 

/Ed

 Edward B. Hanna
 edwbhanna at comcast.net

-- 

/Ed

 Edward B. Hanna
 edwbhanna at comcast.net