The Western Commoditization of the American Aboriginal People through Governmental Use of Education

A person’s identity is based upon several factors. Geographic location, physical attributes, customs, foods, etc., but arguably, the most important is language. Through the use of a particular culture’s lingual ideologies, thoughts, mind sets, there is a culturally relevant terminology that is passed between those of / within that culture to create a commonality through language. If language is a mode for people to share ideas, then the difference between languages is the ability to have certain attributes stay within a particular linguistic group. By exploring the relationships and ultimately the languages of the aboriginal people in what is now the United States and the European descendants that came to this in the name of capitalism, exploration, and religious freedom, bringing western ideology and languages, with English becoming the eventual dominant language, it is evident that the encounters with the races here have made tremendous and devastating impacts on the aboriginal peoples of this continent. By looking at the ontological way that the aboriginal people have been changes, used, abused, and even eradicated, I will show how education, literature and, mainly, language has been a manipulative tool used by the government to do the worst possible; to strip away identity and culture in attempt at total and complete assimilation.

It will be beneficial to start with some historical context. When Europeans arrived at the “New World”, they encountered a race of people in which they had no understanding, in fact, the act of calling them Indians showed the ignorance of understanding that they indeed did not go around the world and landed in India, but had come to a country that was (is) inhabited by the aboriginal people of the land masses we call the Americas. Oren R. Lyons writes the following, which is interesting in light of the Christian nature of the Europeans that crossed the ocean:

Columbus believed he had reached Asia in 1492. He designated the native peoples he found “Indians,” and for years the Spanish continued to believe they were in Asia. This was a mistake that may have been grounded in biblical scriptures, which made no mention of a Western Hemisphere or of the peoples and nations that existed there. These were the times of Inquisition, and it was imprudent to challenge the infallibility of the Holy Scriptures. This posed a problem, for, if the Bible was the complete word of God to mankind, why were these continents and peoples absent from its pages? (Lyons 16)

With this first encounter with the “Other”, the European did not understand anything about their customs, language, or social structure, so through their inability to comprehend what they encountered, the aboriginal people were classified as barbaric, savage, and even prehistoric. “Prehistoric is a term that has been used to describe the peoples of the Western Hemisphere prior to Columbus. The inference is that there was no human history until the white man arrived” (Lyons 16). For the white man, this was the only way to bring the Native American into the European consciousness. And, as inferred through Lyons statement, it was the European’s right to name and subjugate that which was not within the Bible as that of being evil.

Now that the European mind set had labeled this race of people as savage, the question for the European is what to do with them; this is where there are two different roads that take shape with the history that ensues. The first way of dealing with the unknown is to eliminate it. History has shown that the European has come to the task quite affectively. From about sixty million Native Americans in the 1500’s, they were reduced to about 237,000 by the beginning of the 1900’s, and with so many eradicated, entire tribes and civilizations are no longer in existence. This was done by the European by continually proving that the aboriginal person did not have any ties to the “New World,” as illustrated by Peter Hulme:

The strategies of colonial discourse were directed in the first place by demonstrating a separation between the desired land and its native inhabitants. Baffled at the complex but effective native system of food production, the English seemed to have latched on to the one (minor) facet of behavior that they thought they recognized - mobility, and argued on that basis an absence of proper connection between the land and its first inhabitants. (Hulme 156-157)

By constantly looking at what they could not understand by trying to make parallels to their own culture, they could easily say that there was not a culture evident and that the “savages” were not tied to the ground, that they were separate from it, creating a separate problem from that of being able to capitalize the land and “make it tame”.

The second way for the European mind to deal with the Other, which I will explore ontologically until arriving at the ontic conclusion of today, is the commoditization of the Other by changing the Native American to be more like the European. (I use the word “more” here because if the European changed them totally like themselves, they would no longer have the distinction of difference to subjugate the aboriginal people into servitude, marginalized, etc.) This was done by educating the Native American, from childhood, systematically teaching the Native person English, through all aspects of learning, European culture through its literature and approved literary cannon, and educating the child to become “useful citizens” or subjects. Said’s sentiments of Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), “We Westerners will decide who is a good native or bad, because all natives have sufficient existence by virtue of our recognition. We created them, we taught them to speak and think, and when they rebel they simply confirm our views of them as silly children, duped by some of their Western masters: (Said xviii). It is through this concept that language and the teaching of language is used as a weapon to vanquish the unknown. Said further takes this sentiment of Western rule; it is these same sentiments in which Said brings forth concerning how the government of power, which is a colonial representation of European thought is brought forth in effort to capitalize and commoditize that which is outside the realm of the European model of education and civilization.

The entire history of nineteenth-century European thought is filled with such discrimination as these, made between what is fitting for us and what is fitting for them, the former designated as inside, common, belonging, in a word above, the latter, who are designated as outside, excluded, aberrant, inferior, in a  word below. From these distinctions, which were given their hegemony by the culture, no one could be free…. The large culture-nation designation of European culture as the privileged norm carried with is a formidable battery of other distinctions between ours and theirs, between proper and improper, European and non-European, higher and lower: they are to be found everywhere in the such subjects and quasi-subjects as linguistics, history, race theory, philosophy, anthropology, and even biology. But my main reason for mentioning them is to suggest how in the transmission and persistence of a culture there is a continual process of reinforcement, by which the hegemonic culture will add to itself as an implement, ally, or branch of the state, its righteousness, its exterior forms and assertions of itself: and most importantly, by its vindicated power as a victor over everything not itself. (Said 14)

To Be Continued….

Adrienne Rich – Socio-political Poet Criticizing the New World Order in the 90’s and into the New Millennium

Adrienne Rich, a self professed lesbian, Jewish - American, feminist, mother, and poet has added to her repertoire of adjectives and accolades by becoming a socio-political critic in the period of the later nineties and into the new millennium. Within her newest works Rich has shown a new focus and stile within her craft, and an interesting yet alarmingly accurate depiction of the present contextual state of world affairs, regarding socio-political criticism within her poetry. It is this new drive to show the reader the dangers and pitfalls of the socio-political machine that fuel this new style of poetics that give Rich a newness and vitality that is compelling, yet questions the very nature of the vicissitudes of life.

 

During the first part of Adrienne Rich’s career as a poet, Rich wrote in the accepted style that was established by the predominance of the white male in the literary field. To establish her credibility, and in hopes of being read by her peers, Rich had to conform to these pre-establishmentarian rules and write as if she were a male. She wrote using such pronouns as “you” and “they”, hiding her identity as a female. After becoming further established in the literary and feminist realm, Rich started to write from the perspective of “I”. This was a markedly important shift in her work as she started to openly identify herself as a lesbian and continued to openly struggle on the page with her identity of a being a half Jew in post World War II America. The latest shift that Rich took is one where she has now become comfortable with who she is and what she is; at peace within her inner being. Rich now turns to look at the politics that are shaping society and policy around her; limiting, constraining, unchanging, and hegemonic in nature. This new poetics has a different tonality and resonance for the reader coming to Rich and creates for her a new identity as a critical poet.

 

Since the 1990’s Rich’s poetry has begun to deal with what is happening all around her in the socio-political realms of the American society in which she lives. Her poetry has an assertive, yet nebulous quality about it that is very much reflective about the ideals that have come out of the political and capitalist realm within this time period. Comfortable with herself and who she is and what she stands for, Rich now can comment on these binding ideologies around her using herself has a counter weight in which to question how these things come into existence. These ideas are presented in an ambiguous manner, almost nebulous in nature, where the reader has to decipher the coded message that she is transmitting. This style of writing is contradictory to earlier statements she made that poetics should be clear and not left to the interpretation of the reader so the message sent is the message received. However, by looking at this period in Rich’s work, a parallel can be made to the work done in the publication entitled Constellations within her craft which, used like a telescope, makes a lot of the ideas she frames come into focus.

 

Constellations is a publication written by a team of professionals with the following scope and aims: “More than a decade after the end of the Cold War, we face a new set of political contradictions: an historic wave of democratization is accompanied by a surge of uncontrolled economic globalization that threatens the democratic project; expanded possibilities of wealth coexist with new forms exclusion and impoverishments; new information technologies enable a global communications community, yet science and technology are co-opted for sectarian and destructive purposes; and nascent cosmopolitan solidarities coexist with the preemptive unilateralism of a solitary superpower and surge of chauvinisms of every stripe” (Constellations). It is in this context that Constellations rethinks these long standing ideologies and methods, much in the same light that Rich does in the form of poetry.

 

By close examination of Rich’s works in the most recent time period, it is evident that there are definite questions about the socio-political implications and mandates placed on society at large. Rather than nonchalantly dismissing the current condition to the vicissitudes of life, Rich addresses these issues head on with aplomb and assuredness. Even the language used by capitalism and politics create a system of hegemony in which the government can create a commodity of the citizens in which it is their rights they are to uphold. It is this same system and these same rights in which Rich addresses within her craft. One such example is within her work “Alternating Current” where the fifth section, “A deluxe blending machine”, is commentary about the government’s ability to bend, or rather, blend the truth. It is a commentary about the political right, the power and strange extravagances of the wealthy, and the fight of environmentalists that can not win against a politico-capitalistic system that insists that if there is “A breakdown of the blending machine” then there is “A rush to put it in order” (Rich 69). It is this notion of being in the right that allows a far reaching law and political order to change the world as put by Hauke Brunkhorst within “The Right to War: Hegemonial Geopolitics or Civic Constitutionalism?” in which he states:

 

A dramatic transformation in the international law and human rights policies of the United States now seems to be taking place, from the national-interest Real- politik that marked most of its foreign policy during the postwar period up to 1989 to an ethically-inspired world domestic policy. True, the two opinions still exist side by side in the present policies of the Bush administration. Pragmatic imperial power politics remains the fall back option of a globally encompassing, apocalyptically-charged interventionism of liberalism, human rights, and democratization. Beyond this, the constraints of international law and multilateral agreements on the only global superpower are much stronger in the economic than in the political realm. But this does nothing to change the fact that the trend to replacing the formal constraints of international law whenever they contradict not only US power-political or economic interests but also moral-ethical goals has been clearly discernible since the Kosovo War at the latest. (Brunkhorst 512)

 

 

The afore mentioned example clearly demonstrates the need for the US political system to put ‘the machine in order’ as Rich expresses it, and also shows how far reaching this problem is – to the point of creating a global ideology through ethnical-political dominance.

 

Another recent work in which she criticizes the political and social system is “Veteran’s Day”. In this work Rich criticizes the effects of war and destruction caused by our government and the history of such destruction and atrocity that is swept under the rugs of wealth and political power. She criticizes the right to change anything that we [America] want to, to make anything a commodity by selling something as basic as water and making it chic to selling the world on our form of democracy and ethics. In the article “Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention and the Work of Foresight” by Fuyuki Kursasawa, there is a similar message of the right to change, albeit not all for the better, to the point of being in the state of constantly being in the “culture of prevention”, to keep events like 9/11 from happening again. This is a state of alertness on a global level, a daily test of what is to come, which is similar to Rich’s work in “Veteran’s Day” in the last half of stanza three where she writes:

 

I think: We’ve been dying slowly

Now we’ll be blown to bits

 

I think you’re testing me

“how vitally we desired disaster”

 

You say, there can be no poetry

without the demolition

 

of language, no end to everything you hate

lies upon lies

 

I think: you’re testing me

Testing us both

 

but isn’t this what it means to live –

pushing further the conditions in which we breathe? (Fox 29

 

 

In comparison to the ideas presented in Kurasawa’s work, there are striking similarities of thought and criticism in which Kurasawa states:

 

 

 

In the twenty-first century, the lines of political cleavage are being drawn along those of competing dystopian visions. Indeed, one of the notable features of the recent public discourse and the socio-political struggle is their negationist hue, for they are devoted as much to the prevention of disaster as to the realization of the good, less to what ought to be than what could but must not be. The debates that preceded the war in Iraq provide a vivid illustration of this tendency, as both camps rhetorically invoked incommensurable catastrophic scenarios to make their perspective cases. And as many analysts have noted, the multinational anti-war protests culminating on February 15, 2003 marked the first time that a mass movement was able to mobilize substantial numbers of people dedicated to averting war before it had actually broken out. More generally, given the past experiences and awareness of what might occur in the future, given the cries of ‘never again’ (the Second World War, the Holocaust, Bhopal, Rwanda, etc.) and ‘not ever’ (e.g., nuclear or ecological apocalypse, human cloning) that are emanating from different parts of the world, the avoidance of crises is seemingly on everyone’s lips – and everyone’s conscience. From the United Nations and regional multilateral organizations to states, from non-governmental organizations to transnational social movements, the determination to prevent the actualization of potential cataclysms has become a new imperative in world affairs. Allowing past disasters to reoccur and unprecedented calamities to unfold is now widely seen as unbearable when, in the process, the suffering of future generations is callously tolerated and our survival is being irresponsibly jeopardized. Hence, we need to pay attention to what a widely circulated report by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty identifies as a burgeoning “culture of prevention,” a dynamic that carries major, albeit still poorly understood, normative and political implications. (Kurasawa 454)

It is the same political implications in which Kurasawa brings up that Rich is addressing within her work when she questions “the conditions in which we breathe”. It is such political, social, and economic dangers of preventive foresight that has the capacity of blinding us from the reality of today. Through Rich’s exploratory poems of the conditions or state of the union, she brings to light a history of wrongs that need to be addressed in the context of the problems that exist today.

Rich’s dynamic for questioning that which is pressuring and moving the socio-political constructs in the American society have made her a critical poet in this new millennium. Poems such as the two previously quoted, “Alternating Current” and “Veteran’s Day” along with many others within her newest collection, such as “This Evening Let’s,” “If Your Name Is on the List,” and “The School Among the Ruins” along with many more, capture the histories of the socio-political past and collide them the present day context of the ‘culture of prevention’ to create powerful writing that is contemporary and contextual. Rich’s work has a new depth and meaning to it that does not subtract from her earlier work, but shows a sense of growth and personal transformation that helps the reader engage her works on multiple levels and yet question the current state of affairs through her most recent works.

Works Cited
Brunkhorst, Hauke. “The Right to War: Hegemonial Geopolitics or Civic Constitutionalism?” Constellations Vol. 11, No. 4 (2004): 512-26.

Kurasawa, Fuyuki. “Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention and the Work of Foresight.” Constellations Vol.11, No.4 (2004): 453-75.

Rich, Adrienne. The Fact of a Doorframe. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002.

Rich, Adrienne. The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My New Adventure

This is the first of what I hope to be an exploration of the world condition through the lens of print and other media. Maybe this exploration will only benefit myself, however, if I can spark thought, create social consciousness, or just a good discussion about what is right and wrong in the world today from a critical, educational standpoint I might just feel that I have accomplished something!