Hi Tweets,

Tom Foote writes:


> I witnessed a particularly contentitious class room debate
> one day sparked by a presenation made by a young male student
> who identified as Native American, and who claimed
> the Land Bridge theory was "white Eurocentric racism"...but, was
> not prepared to bring any level of sophistry to the argument.
> As these things usually do in a case where there is little
> data and lots of angst, it went nowhere and left the Native
> kids and the nonNative kids perplexed and in some cases, angry
> and upset.
>
> Puzzled by this, I sought the counsel of a Makah friend who
> was on our teaching team at the time and asked him what the
> heck was going on here. He patiently explained to me that
> it's politically inexpedient for "Native" peoples to believe
> they came over the land bridge as that makes them immigrants
> in this land the same as the rest of us...I asked him about
> the anthropological/archeological data that might support
> this theory and he said it doesn't matter...it will always
> be dismissed as speculation because the politics of First
> People require that they believe they were here first and
> from the very beginning...
>
> the young man who began that argument also postulated
> that not only were "Native" peoples here first, but they
> peopled the rest of the world as well..i.e., THEY went
> over the land brdige headed in the opposite direction..
>
> and so it goes.

And has not among the First People arisen yet a Galileo who (according to an
equally enduring myth of independent scientific inquiry encountering
conservative religious orthodoxy) said, It [the Earth] Moves Anyway....?

Michael Price
Vancouver BC Canada
mprice at mindlink.net

"She's psychic....we've decided to find it charming."
--Frasier