Don't Try To Understand Me, Bird Woman
Sacagawea, Sacajawea, Bird Woman
COGNITIVE HEARTH
"For up here where we live, our life is one continuous fight
for food and for clothing and a struggle against bad hunting and
snowstorms and sickness. That is all I can tell you about the
world, both the one I know and the one I do not know." A
statement collected by Knud Rasmussen from an Eskimo Woman 1923.
Dependence on a subsistence based economy is a continual, and very tenuous life and death struggle for survival. People living in this kind of economic environment include both Eskimo and nomadic people to the south. Cunning exploitation of the environment is the crucial bottom line in successfully maintaining livelihood in the subsistence-based landscape.
Beyond the struggle of living in the natural environment, the initial and on going contact with European technology and culture has also presented a dilemma for these people. With the coming of European cultures the native groups were exposed to a scenario that required additional choices which, in some cases, threaten traditional values within their established cultures.
Although the podcast discusses a specific era
in American history, it presents a conceptual parallel with what
both the people of the plains, the Rocky Mountains, and the Eskimo
of the north were dealing with as the advent of European cultural
artifacts, mentifacts, and sociofacts influenced their native
subsistence-based ways of life. Can we really understand the conflicts
that emerge with these initial contacts? When hunting and gathering
societies are introduced to new technologies do these cultures
have a choice as to whether to adopt these new technologies, methods
or ideas or is it a given that they will adopt them by default
or face their demise? In 1965, anthropologist Norman Chance observed
that the Inupiat culture was very "selective" as to
which infiltrated social changes they would adopt for their culture.
Culture changes slowly. However, some anthropologists and cultural
geographers suggest that the moment these contacts are made with
subsistence-based people the immediate result is a cultural integration
toward a more complex society. But then one could also ask what
is complex?
CONDITIONS
Also check: Water
Boxes I Have Known
