I was watching a science fiction show the other day where the writers had interjected an apocryphal account of Columbus’s first contact with Native Americans. The story goes that when the Pinta, The Nina, and the Santa Maria appeared off the coast of what is now the island of San Salvador in the Bahamas, they were so far beyond of the understanding of the native Lucayan people that they simply could not see the arriving ships. Like, that the ships were invisible to them.
Even some historians retell this story because it expresses an interesting concept and patronizes ‘primitive’ peoples at the same time. In this telling these folks were so backwards that they couldn’t physically see a thing that they didn’t know how to see. It opens the possibility that we are all blind to totally and completely new concepts and objects that might appear before us. It would be an interesting phenomenon if this story was true. But it isn’t.
How do you know, were you there? What makes you such an expert?
Like everyone else on the internet I’m an expert because I say I am. But also because I’ve seen lots of stuff I’ve never seen before, despite never having seen it before. Somewhat of a newsflash, but we all have, having been born with almost zero inherited knowledge. I’ve also tried to talk to people who I don’t share a language with and come to all sorts of wrong conclusions because of it. After almost fifty years of being a human being living in this world I’m sort of an expert on being a human being living in this world, which leads me to call BS on this dumb story.
While researching this subject it turns out that Columbus himself makes no mention of this supposed blindness in his journals, which are the only accounts of the first contact. It also might come as a surprise that the native people who were on the receiving end of ‘first contact’ were the first people contacted and thus spoke no Spanish or Italian. It would have been a little difficult to be like, “Whoa! We totally didn’t even see you guys roll up! Like, we literally could not see you!”
This story might have actually originated from accounts of British explorers reaching not the Americas, but Australia for the first time. Apparently native people there didn’t look up at or acknowledge their ships when they approached. There are any number of cultural reasons for this lack of interest or response, if it happened at all, but I’m going to guess the people could see the boats just fine. It’s very much within the realm of human nature that this event was so uncomfortable that they tried to will it away by ignoring it. Because what is true is that we humans have a very hard time un-learning things, or admitting that our reality is a fallacy, even when presented with evidence.
I got an email from fellow expert Stacy the other day, in response to my last post about the Eurasian Invasion, in which she mentioned that during a job interview, her interviewer wondered out loud why Canada was letting smoke from its fires drift into the US, as if the US/Canadian border was a physical, not political barrier. As if environmental disasters were political and respected the limits of political entities. She pointed out this fallacy and was met with stony silence. She didn’t get the job.
This sounds crazy, but we all hold on to certain misconceptions. We have a keystone ‘truth’ which supports the framework for the way we’ve learned the world works; in this case the idea that borders are barriers against political, cultural, and environmental forces. But if that truth is based on a fallacy, it could seriously damage the way we perceive the world if it were challenged.
As European colonists began to understand the extent and complexity of indigenous America’s civilizations their keystone truth that these were primitive thinking savages, who were clearly in need of physical and spiritual assistance, became a fallacy. But despite what was there in front of their eyes—expertly engineered cities wrought by master architects and artisans, comprehensive knowledge about the solar system and even advanced surgery techniques—they weren’t able to see past their preconceptions. To this day, there are thousands of people, including scholars, who say they have an explanation for the advanced technological know-how of the indigenous peoples of the Americas;
It was aliens.
It’s not very hard to find this out there. I won’t include any links. There are scholars, today, who insist that the engineering skill involved in creating wonders like the Nazca lines in Peru was so far beyond the native people, that it had to have been aliens who created the vast desert drawings, the temples of the Inca, or the vast cities of the Maya and the Aztecs. There’s even a show on TV called Ancient Aliens that reinforces all these insane, frankly racist, ideas.
Just a couple of days ago, an “expert” presented what he described as alien corpses found in Peru to the Mexican Congress. No DNA tests have been done on them, and similar figures have turned out to be made of llama bones and natural fibers, but this hasn’t stopped someone from getting an audience with the highest legislative body in Mexico. Mexico is very diverse, but it should really be noted that the vast majority of those in power also happen to be those with the highest percentage of European genetics.
How far out of our way will we walk to avoid deconstructing our keystone truths? Pretty far it seems. Some of us would rather give credit to an alien species than admit the obvious, which is that all extant people in the world are capable of wondrous things. One unspoken reason behind this may just be that if the First People of the Americas were as advanced, or more so, than their European conquerers, colonists would be directly responsible for the wanton destruction of an incalculable number of some of the world’s most important cultural and scientific achievements.
Which would be awkward.
I once saw a friend, who is a conservative, and who also majored in history in college, belittling the native people of North America online. He said something the effect of, “these were people living in the bushes, wearing skunk pelts.” He was roundly dunked on in response, which of course made him dig in to further defend his keystone fallacy. I helpfully pointed out that like the South Americans and the Meso-Americans, the First People of what is now the United States also built vast cities, pyramids and ritual sites. Some of them were the Mississippian people. They built with earth rather than stone, so their monuments have eroded more than their southern neighbors, but archeologists have extensively and exhaustively mapped their remains. A lot can be known about the Mississipian culture if one chooses to know it.
It’s all available for anyone to see, but first they have to want to see it.
fig.1: Cahokia, the largest Mississippian culture site (from Wikipedia) Cahokia is estimated to have supported, at its peak in 1100 CE, about 40,000 inhabitants. That would be larger than London or Paris at the time.