Ten thousand years doesn't but scratch the surface

 

We knew we were someplace special… We felt again the touch of deep time, of the humans who came before. These mountains are haunted, they were emptied by a genocide. We walk on sacred ground. And listen: that is true wherever you read this, if you are anywhere in the United States, or anywhere in the Americas. Don’t think otherwise. Remember.

Ten thousand years.

That's the science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, from his book about the High Sierras and his own experiences there from a few years back. It's called, appropriately, The High Sierras, A Love Story. (The photo is the view outside his tent flap near Palisade Creek one morning.)

I'm a ways into it and it's really quite good, both as a read and as a way of spreading the love.

He writes the quoted passage after he and his friends stumble on a sparkling expanse of obsidian while resting some ways off trail. Amazing enough if it were a natural phenomenon.

But it isn't. Obsidian isn't found in the High Sierra. This field of glassy rock was brought here by generations of indigenous people going back hundreds of years at least, making arrowheads and spearheads by hammering and flaking the obsidian, leaving flat-surfaced pieces behind that now caught the sun to bedazzle Robinson and his fellow backpackers.

The scene and its mountain setting are both awe-inspiring and cause for reflection. The indigenous folk had come to this spot to work, Robinson surmises, for the same reason he returns so often to these places: they're beautiful. He and his fellows feel validated by sharing this recognition with the historic inhabitants of the area. They feel connected to these people.

But, unfortunately, we have no way of knowing if that feeling of connection might be reciprocated, because those historic people are long dead, and the indigenous way of life they followed has been quite intentionally eradicated.

So far, both those sorts of loss--loss of youth and beloved individuals to plain mortality; and loss of forests, glaciers, and entire cultures through greed and shortsightedness--seem to lurking pretty ominously close to the surface of Robinson's Love Story.

As Robinson points out, the losses that have taken place at our culture's hands ought to subjects for solemn reflection.

What strikes me about the passage was his suggestion that genocide is something specific to the Americas.

And I don't want to be a finger-wagger here: what Robinson writes is absolutely correct insofar as it goes: we do need to face up to how our culture came to dominate and what was lost, destroyed, killed, and wiped out arriving at that domination. What's no longer here is a big part of the legacy we received. What's soon to go will be a big part of ours.

And we should think about that.

But not so much in the sense that this is a Westerner vs. Native American phenomenon. Because it isn't. Indigenous groups in the vastness of the Russian wilderness and in Australia have been similarly treated. Those are obvious examples. But the whole of human history is littered with one people subsuming another and erasing their culture. Entire species of human kind have disappeared. (The Neanderthals you think you know aren't.) Neolithic Europe was populated by a whole culture--with farming and large villages--stemming out of what is now Turkey. But they succumbed to a disease brought from the East, an early version of the plague which wiped out as much as 90% of their population, after which they were displaced and subsumed by migrants from the East. Sound familiar?

And those neolithic farmers had themselves displaced and absorbed a previous wave of hunter-gatherer settlers who abruptly disappear from history.

And these are far from the only examples: Displacement--one culture/people/way of life just pushing out another--was universal. Sometimes the old natives were absorbed into the new way of life, sometimes they just disappear. Aggressors seeking to stamp out entire nations, languages, cultures or peoples is a recurring theme throughout human history, across geographic venues.

But this doesn't mean we are all off the hook for what has happened. It means we all have to realize that humans have an old and well-established capacity for genocide, however defined. Westerns like myself and Robinson do indeed have a particular, specific and relatively recent genocides to reflect on. As well as the fact that the use our forebears put their knowledge was to make our barbarity more powerful and efficient.

It isn't being of European extraction that is the essential things here. It isn't even religion or capitalism, though those technologies were used quite a bit to advanced the cause of genocide. It is something much more generally human that drives all this. While the Europeans in America may be the peak expression of this something, it is far from the only expression of it.

That, I think, puts things in something more like their proper context. But it should not make you feel less implicated.