JJ is tired: White culture is being surprised that stories would be continued to be told about whole villages being wiped out by a tsunami just a few hundred years ago. This viewpoint treats Indigenous Peoples of unreliable narrators of their own histories. It treats white amnesia as the norm for memory

The way stories like this are framed reinforces a hierarchy of knowledge that marginalizes Indigenous peoples Western, white “evidence” is treated as more definitive than the living tradition passed on by knowledge keepers for tens of thousands of years

Fascinating!

12,000-year-old ritual passed down 500 generations may be world’s oldest | CNNwww.cnn.com Deep in an Australian cave, archaeologists have uncovered evidence that an Aboriginal ritual may have been passed down 500 generations and survived 12,000 years.

There are countless rituals as old or older than this that are being practiced today. But because a white person hasn’t gone and used carbon dating on a stick in a cave, we act like there is no evidence that practitioners have any knowledge of where and when their tradition came about

We’ve seen it time and time again that Indigenous knowledge keepers have real knowledge For example - the “lost” Franklin shipwreck was exactly where Inuit said it was. And yet we still insist that until the white person goes and digs something up We can’t know if the story is true

After 165 years, Inuit knowledge leads to Franklin’s wrecksnunatsiaq.com The discoveries—in 2014 and 2016—of the lost ships of Sir John Franklin’s 1845 Arctic expedition were among the most significant archaeological finds of their kind.

White culture is being surprised that stories would be continued to be told about whole villages being wiped out by a tsunami just a few hundred years ago. This viewpoint treats Indigenous Peoples of unreliable narrators of their own histories. It treats white amnesia as the norm for memory

Oral tradition keeps legend of 1700 tsunami alivebc.ctvnews.ca With news of the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan, B.C.'s First Nations people are recounting 300-year-old stories about the last giant wave to hit this side of the Pacific.

Oral history is, in many ways, more reliable than written history. It isn’t produced and reproduced as a single viewpoint, the shared responsibility of transmission means that the history that is known is a communal history that has been spoken as true not just by a single person but a community.

white culture’s belief that written history is more valid (as seen in the story about the tsunami where “meticulous” written records from Japan are seen to validate the story passed on orally) is connected to white belief in authority and individualism.

For a story to be passed down orally, it has to be believed and seen as important by a community. A story passed down in the written word may just be (and often is) nothing more than the twisted viewpoint of a single bigot.

It’s no accident that a culture where history is only validated by the written word is a culture that primarily produces the histories of a few powerful men who overwrite and overpower the collective.

There are ways that oral history and written history can intersect and interact that are not in opposition. Both forms of knowledge are valuable But the specific white cultural insistence on a sing “authoritative” history is part of the authoritarianism that is embedded in white culture

Thank you!

I can't get over the last sentence of your linked article. "We know this because the Japanese kept meticulous records of this earthquake."

It’s so invalidating.

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