Sovereigns of Themselves:
A Liberating History of Oregon and Its Coast
Introduction I
Abridged Online Edition
Compiled By Rev. Marilyn A. Riedel
  And M. Constance Guardino III
January 2006 Maracon Productions

Historians M. Constance Guardino III and Rev. Marilyn A. Riedel

I offer thanks to my friends, relatives, and ancestors whose strength of purpose
led me to my own. A special thanks to my co-author,
Rev. Marilyn A. Riedel, for her deep love and dedication to me and this project.
Without her tireless effort and selfless interest,
this liberating history of Oregon would never have been written.

  SAN FRANCISCO, Jan.uary 6, 2002: Female tavern owners in early 20th-century Bolivia. A Polish periodical for Jewish children. A medieval Catalan women's monastery. These were the typical fare at the American Historical Association's annual convention Jan.uary4 to 6. That's no surprise. Over the last few decades, historical research has become more and more specialized. As Gale Stokes, a Rice University historian
who was at the convention, put it, "There's a sense of grinding the nuts into an ever finer powder."
  Also in attendance, however, was David Christian, a 55-year-old history professor at San Diego State
University, who has been bucking the trend and urging his colleagues to do the same by thinking big--very big.
  Mr. Christian announced his campaign 10 years ago with an essay called "The Case for 'Big History'" in The Journal of World History. "Unfortunately," he wrote, "historians have become so absorbed in detailed research that they have tended to neglect the job of building larger-scale maps of the past."
  To understand the last few thousand years of human history, he insisted, scholars need to understand the rest of the past as well, up to and including the Big Bang--in short, the whole 14-billion-year span of time itself.
  Over the last decade, as science has made inroads in the humanities, Mr. Christian's big history approach has gained ma handful of adherents. Half a dozen college courses on big history have cropped up around the world. But most historians had not paid much attention until he pitched the idea at the convention on a panel that also featured Carlo Ginzburg and Jacques Revel, two leading scholars of what is big history's methodological antithesis: microhistory.
  "What we normally define as history doesn't interest me," Mr. Christian told an audience of a couple hundred scholars. "It's a constraint."
  As Mr. Christian described it, big history differs from more conventional approaches in several crucial respects. One is that its practitioners draw on a variety of fields--cosmology, geology, archaeology and evolutionary biology as well as history.
  More important, big history involves what Mr. Christian, referring to the title of a recent book by Mr. Revel, called "the play of scales." Like a photographer armed with a galaxy-size zoom lens, a big historian moves back and forth across several large time scales--the human, the geological and the cosmological. Through these radical shifts in perspective, Mr. Christian predicted, big history will yield "new insights into familiar historical problems, from the nature/nurture debate to environmental history to the fundamental nature of change itself."
  Although most historians haven't reached back to the Big Bang, others have certainly tried elements of Mr. Christian's approach. The French historian Fernand Braudel, for example, combined detailed analyses of daily life with sweeping investigations of large-scale historical forces like geology and climate. More recently, world historians and other scholars have tackled large puzzles--like why world power came to be centered in the West--by examining evidence from several fields, including biology, genetics and the environment. The physiologist Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Guns, Germs and Steel" is one example. Few scholars, however, have ventured into the murky terrain of the prehuman past.
  One of the best illustrations of big history, Mr. Christian said, is "Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 1986) by Alfred W. Crosby, an emeritus professor of American studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
  Why, Mr. Crosby wondered, have people of European descent been so successful at scattering themselves around the world? Unsatisfied with traditional explanations crediting the military superiority of European conquerors, he turned to geological history instead.
  Working back 180 million years to the time when the supercontinent Pangea was beginning to break into smaller land masses, Mr. Crosby concluded that the conditions for European victory were being established even then: the plants, animals and microbes that evolved in Europe gave its human inhabitants a decisive advantage when they spread to the New World, South America, Australia and New Zealand.
  "Europeans came from the biggest chunk of Pangea," Mr. Crosby said in a telephone interview. "And it was the development of life forms there that enabled them to develop a civilization there with many more big
domesticated animals and prominent diseases. The peoples they conquered just didn't have the biological means to cope."
  Then there is Mr. Christian's own work, which contains tantalizing hints of what big history might eventually look like. In "The Case for 'Big History,'" for example, he looks at estimated rates of population increase to challenge the notion that growth is a characteristic feature of human societies. For 250,000 years, he argues, the growth rate was virtually negligible. Only during the last 10,000 years did the human population really take off, exploding from 10 million then to nearly 5 billion today. His conclusion? "Growth, far from being the normal condition of humanity, is an aberration."
  This, Mr. Christian argues, raises important new questions like: is a capacity for spectacular growth something that distinguishes humans from other species?
  But many historians remain skeptical. "I strongly doubt that plate tectonics and the Big Bang might contribute to our understanding of history," Mr. Revel said after listening to Mr. Christian's talk at the convention.
  One reason microhistory became popular in the first place, said Michael Steinberg, a professor of history at Cornell University who was in the audience, was skepticism about older forms of big history, what he called "large national narratives about civilization becoming modern and leaving barbarism behind."
  A cheerful, self-deprecating proselytizer, Mr. Christian is unfazed by such objections. Big history fulfills an
important social need, he says. Just as creation myths provided ancient cultures with an account of the origins of life and their place in a larger story, big history can provide the same service, although more scientifically.
"Today nothing like a modern creation myth is taught," he said. "I think this is dangerous. It means that students never get a sense of reality as a coherent whole."
  Mr. Christian, who said he turned to big history not long after completing "an incredibly obscure and in retrospect pointless" Ph.D. in Russian history, hopes that a book he is writing on big history, to be published next year by the University of California Press - "a nightmare project, as you can imagine" - will convince some of the skeptics.
  "There is an allergy to the general," he said. "But if historians don't tell stories at the scales of creation
myths, someone else will."

In Stone and Bone

 The predominant theory [of] human cultural evolution has been “Man-the-Hunter.” The theory that humanity originated in the club-wielding man-ape, aggressive and masterful, is so widely accepted as scientific fact and so vividly secure in popular culture as to seem self-evident.
   --Professor Ruth Belier, University of Wisconsin

 For man without woman there is no heaven in the sky or on earth. Without woman there would be no sun, no moon, no agriculture, and no fire.
   --Arab Proverb

 The story of the human race begins with the female. Woman carried the original human chromosome as she does to this day; her evolutionary adaptation ensured the survival and success of the species; her work of mothering provided the cerebral spur for human communication and social organization. Yet for generations of historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and biologists, the sole star of the dawn story has been man. Man the hunter, man the tool-maker, man the lord of creation stalks the primeval savannah in solitary splendor through every known version of the origin of our species. In reality, however, woman was quietly getting on with the task of securing a future for humanity—for it was her labor, her skills, her biology that held the key to the destiny of the race.
 For, as scientists acknowledge, "Women are the race itself, the strong primary sex, and man the biological afterthought." In human cell structure, woman's is the basic "X" chromosome; a female baby simply collects another "X" at the moment of conception, while the creation of a male requires the branching off of the divergent "Y" chromosome, seen by some as a genetic error, a "deformed and broken "X." The woman's egg, several hundred times bigger than the sperm that fertilizes it, carries all the genetic messages the child will ever receive. Women therefore are the original, the first sex, the biological norm from which males are only a deviation. Historian Amaury de Riencourt sums it up:

 Far from being an incomplete form of maleness, according to a tradition stretching from the biblical Genesis through Aristotle (384-322 BCE) to Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), femaleness is the norm, the fundamental form of life.

 How are we going to tell father? For Nigel Calder, “the first lords of the universe were globules of colored slime”—they may only have been protoplasmal molecules or start-up bacilli, but they were male. Yet in contradiction to this age-old bias of biology is the startling discovery, debated by the American Anthropological Association in 1987, that every single person on the planet is descended from the same primitive hominid, and that this common ancestor was a woman. Using the latest techniques of gene research into DNA, the molecular structure of gene inheritance, scientists working independently at Oxford, Yale, and University of California at Berkeley, and Emory University in Atlanta have succeeded in isolating one DNA "fingerprint" that is common to the whole of the human race. This has remained constant for millennia despite the divergence of races and populations throughout the world—and it is incontrovertibly female. This research points directly to one woman as the original "gene fount" for the whole of the human race. She lived out of Africa and spread across the face of the globe, giving rise to all the people living today.
 This work on the woman who could have been our grandmother Eve is still in its infancy, and controversial in its implications. Not least of the problems it poses for the sons of Adam is its implicit dismissal of the Christian myth—for the "gene fount mother" necessarily had a mother herself, and the identity or numbers of her sexual partners were irrelevant, since hers was the only cell that counted. Indisputable, however, is the central role of women in the evolution of the species. In terms of the DNA message that a new individual needs in order to become a human being, the essential genetic information is only ever contributed by and transmitted through the female. In that sense, each and every one of us is a child of Eve, carrying within our bodies the living fossil evidence of the first women who roamed the African plain side by side with their men.
 As this suggests, nothing could be further from the truth of the role played by early woman than the "hunter's mate" stereotype of the dim huddled figure beside the fire in the cave. From around 500,000 BCE, when Femina Erecta first stood alongside Homo erectus in some sun-drenched primordial gorge, many changes took place before both together became sapiens. And there is continuous evidence from a number of different sites throughout the Pleistocene age of women's critical involvement in all aspects of the tribe's survival and evolution generally thought of, like hunting, as reserved to men.
 The early woman was in fact intensively occupied from dawn to dusk. Hers was not a long life—like their mates, most hominid females, according to scientific analysis of fossil remains, died before they were 20. Only a handful survived to 30, and it was quite exceptional to reach 40. But in this short span, the first women evolved a huge range of activities and skills. On archaeological evidence, as well as that of existing Stone Age cultures, women were busy with and adept in:

* Food Gathering;
* Child Care;
* Leatherwork;
* Making garments, slings and containers from animal skins;
* Cooking;
* Pottery;
* Weaving grasses, reeds and bark strips for baskets;
* Construction of shelters, temporary or permanent;
* Toolmaking for a variety of uses, not simply agricultural—stone scrapers for skins, and sharp stone blades for cutting out animal sinews for garment making; and
* Medical application of plants and herbs for everything from healing to abortion.

 In earliest times, women's gathering served not only to keep the tribe alive—it helped propel the race afterward in its faltering passage towards civilization. For successful gathering demanded and developed skills of discrimination, evaluation and memory, and a range of seeds, nutshells and grasses discovered at primitive sites in Africa indicate that careful and knowledgeable selection, rather than random gleaning, dictated the choice. This work also provided the impetus for the first human experiments with technology. Anthropologists' fixation on man and hunter has designated the first tools as weapons of the hunt. But since hunting was a much later development, earlier still would have been the bones, stones or lengths of wood used as aids to gathering for scratching up roots and tubers, or for pulverizing wood vegetation for ease of chewing. All these were women's tools, and the discovery of digging sticks with fire-hardened points at primitive sites indicates the problem-solving creativity of these female dawn foragers, who had worked out that putting pointed sticks into a low fire to dry and harden would provide them with far more efficient tools for the work they had to do.
 Unlike the worked flint heads of axes, spears and arrows, however, very few of the earlier tools have survived to tell the tale of women's ingenuity and resourcefulness. Sticks also lacked the grisly glamour of the the killing-tools in the eyes of archaeologists, and had no part to play in the unfolding drama of Man the Hunter. Archaeology is likewise silent on the subject of another female invention, the early woman gatherer's "swag bag," the container she must have devised to carry back to the camp all she had found, foraged, caught or dug up in the course of her day's hunting.
 Woman's work of gathering would inevitably take on a wider and more urgent dimension when she had infants to feed as well as herself.
 The prime centrality of this work of mothering in the story of evolution has yet to be acknowledged. A man plank in the importance of Man the Hunter in the history of the human race has always been the undisputed claim that cooperative hunting among males called for more skill in communication and social organization, and hence provided the evolutionary spur to more complex development, even the origins of human society. The counter argument is briskly set out by Sally Slocum:

 The need to organize for feeding after weaning, learning to hand the more complex socioemotional bonds that were developing, the new skills and cultural inventions surrounding more extensive gathering—all would demand larger brains. Too much attention has been given to skills required by hunting, and too little to the skills required for gathering and the raising of dependent young.

 But once up and running through the great open spaces of popular belief, Man the Hunter has proved a hard quarry to bring down, and few seem to have noticed that for millennia he has traveled on through the generations entirely alone. For woman is nowhere in this story. Aside from her burgeoning sexual apparatus, early woman is taken to have missed out completely on the evolutionary bonanza. "The evolving male increased in body size, muscular strength and speed, as well as in intelligence, imagination and knowledge," pronounced a leading French authority, "in all of which the female hardly shared." Countless other historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and biologists worldwide all make the same claim in different ways. Man, it seems, single-handedly performed all the evolving for the rest of the human race. Meanwhile early woman, idle and dependent, lounged about the home base, the Primordial Airhead and Fully Evolved Bimbo.
 Hunting did not mean fighting. On the contrary, the whole purpose of group organization was to ensure that primitive man did not have to face and do battle with his prey. The first humans, as Myra Shackley shows, worked together to avoid this, "driving animals over cliffs to their deaths (as certainly happened at the Upper Paleolithic site of Solutre) or using fire to stampede them into boggy ground (the method used at Torralba and Ambrona)."
 Men and women relied on each others' skills, before, during and after the hunt. The anthropologist  Constable cites the Stone Age Yukaghir of Siberia, whose men formed an advance party to check out the traps for prey, while the women came up behind to take charge of dismembering the carcass and transporting it to the home site. Since carcasses were used as food, clothes, shelter, bone tools and bead ornaments, most of which the women would be producing, they had a vested interest in the dismemberment. As Myra Shackley reminds us:

 Apart from their use as food, animals were hunted for their hides, bones and sinews, useful in the manufacture of clothing, tents, traps, and the numerous odds and ends of life. Suitable skins would have been dried and cured and softened with animal fats. Clothes could be tailored by cutting the hides with stone tools and assembling the garment by lacing with sinews through holes bored with a stone tool or bone awl... There is no reason to suppose that Neanderthal clothes were as primitive as many illustrators have made them out to be... The remains of a ostrich shells on Mousterian sites in the Neger desert suggest the Neanderthal was using them as water containers, as Bushmen do today... what use was made of the exotic feathers? There is no need to suppose that because there is a lack of archaeological evidence for personal adornment no attention was paid to it.

Hunting man, then, was not a fearless solitary aggressor, hero of a thousand fatal encounters. The only regular, unavoidable call on man’s aggression was as protector: infant caring and group protection are the only sexual divisions of labor that invariably obtain in primate or primitive groups. When the first men fought or killed, then, they did so not for sport, thrill or pleasure, but in mortal fear, under life-threatening attack, and fighting for survival.
 Because group protection was so important a part of man's work, it is essential to question the accepted division by sex of emotional labor, in which all tender and caring feelings are attributed to women, leaving men outside the circle of the campfire as great hairy brutes existing only to fight or fornicate. In reality the first men, like the first women, only became human when they learned how to care for others.
 This is not to say that women of prehistory were not subjected to violence, even death. A female victim of a cannibalistic murder which took place between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago was discovered at Ehringsdorf in Germany. She was an early Neanderthaler who had been clubbed to death with a stone axe. After death her head was separated from her body, and the base of her skull opened to extract the brains. Near her lay the remains of a ten-year-old child who had died at the same time.
 Nor was prehistory any stranger to sexual violence. An extraordinary bone carving in the shape of a knife from Isturitz in the Basses-Pyrénées shows a harpooned bison graphically vomiting blood as it wallows in its death throes. On the other side of the blade a woman similarly harpooned crawls forward on her hands and knees while a male figure crouches lecherously behind her, clearly intent on sexual penetration from the rear, although the droop of her breasts and the swelling of her belly show that she is pregnant. In a bizarre definition of primitive man's idea of foreplay, the French anthropologist G. H. Luquet interprets this gruesome object as a "love charm."
 But interestingly, women of primitive societies are often less subjugated than a modern, particularly a Western, observer might expect. Far from being broken-down slaves to their men's drives and needs, women in early societies often had a better chance of freedom, dignity and significance than many of their female descendants in more "advanced" societies. The key lies in the nature of the tribe's relation to its surroundings. Where sheer subsistence is a struggle and survival is the order of the day, women's equality is very marked. Women in these cultures play too vital a role to be kept down or out of action, and their knowledge and experience are a cherished tribal resource. As the major food providers, holding the secret of survival, women have, and know they have, freedom, power and status.
 And there was more. Evidence from existing Stone Age cultures conclusively shows that women can take on the roles of counselors, wise women, leaders, storytellers, doctors, magicians and lawgivers. Additionally, they never forfeit their own unique power based on woman's special magic of fertility and birth, with all the manna attendant upon that. All the prehistoric evidence confirms women's special status as women within the tribe. Among numerous representations of women performing religious rituals, a rock painting from Tanzoumaitak, Tassili N'Ajjer, shows two women dancing ceremoniously among a flock of goats, richly ornamented with necklaces, bracelets and bead headdresses, while in one of the most famous of prehistoric paintings, the so-called "White Lady" of the Drakenberg Mountain caves of South Africa leads men and women in a ritual tribal dance.
 From the very beginning then, the role of the first women was wider, their contribution to human evolution immeasurably more significant, than has ever been accepted. Dawn Woman, with her mother and grandmother, her sisters and her aunts, and even with a little help from her hunting man, managed to accomplish almost everything that subsequently made Homo think himself sapiens. There is every sign that man himself recognized this. In universal images ranging from the very awakening of European consciousness to the aboriginal "dreamtime" myths on the other side of the world, woman commands the sacred rituals and is party to the most secret mysteries of tribal life.

Gondwanaland and the Peopling of Africa

  W. E. B. Du Bois (1866-1963) is a black American scholar and educator whose stature as an historian is internationally acclaimed.
 Following is a selection from his book, The World and Africa on the African Environment, Mildred Bain and Erwin Lewis, editors, From Freedom to Freedom; African Roots in American Soil; Selected Readings based on Roots: The Saga of an American Family, Forward by Alex Haley (Random House, New York, 1977):

 Seers say that for... Two thousand million years this world out of fiery mist has whirled about the sun in [a] molten metal and viscous crusted ball. That crust congealed and separated the solids from the liquids, rose and fell in bulging ridges above the boiling sea. Five times the mass of land called Africa emerged and disappeared beneath the oceans. At last, at least a thousand million years ago, a mass of rigid rock lifted its crystal back above the waters and remained.
 About three hundred million years ago, Primal Africa was connected with South American, India, and Australia. As the ocean basins dropped, the eastern half of Africa slowly raised into a broad, flat arch.
 The eastern side of this arch gave way, forming the Indian Ocean; and the roof of the arch fell in where the great Rift Valley appeared. This enormous crack extends six thousand miles...all the great East African lakes lie in the main rift, and doubtless the Red Sea and the Sea of Galilee...
 Whither does humanity first show itself on the earths crust, on what continent are the oldest hominid fossils? In Africa. But Africa wasn't always just Africa; it formed along with South America and Asia an ancient united continent, or Gondwanaland.
One can see from the map how Africa broke from South America and Europe from North America.
 Africa, including Madagascar is three times the size of Europe, four times the size of the US, and the whole of Europe, India, China and the US. could be held in its borders.
 The story of the earth [including the first humans who walked upright can be read like leaves in a giant book of ancient layered rock, where petrified bone, shell, and plant life reveal historical insights to the early life of the first human beings.
 Human life originated on the continent of Africa 3.5 million years ago, as best as science can determine. Many theories may agree about the land of Pangia being the first land mass out of the water splitting above molten lava, drifting apart of giant continental plates shaped to the present day and bounded by water, crushed mountain plates, whose dynamos and engine of heat bubble up into spewing volcanoes. But as to how human beings became indigenous and diffused throughout the world continents is more undecided, ranging from lower sea levels from the ice age that exposed bridges for migration to another land mass, to migration by ocean going vessel and trade.

African Presence in America

 There has been a change in scholarly attitudes on recognizing black people and their very early presence in America. The phenomenal 11 colossal heads of black Africans in La Benta, San Lorenzo and Tres Zapotes in Mexico enjoy decreasing skepticism. The 1964 Barcelona meeting of the International Congress of Americanists agreed that African skeletons have been substantially reported in pre-Christian and medieval layers of diggings in America.
 Peter Martyr d'Anghera, the first historian on America, tells of a meeting between Balboa (1475-1519) and his Spanish explorers and the blacks of Darien (Panama). This was in 1513. The blacks lived a day's march up into the mountains from Quarequa. They had been shipwrecked and had made their own settlement in the mountains. They had become a fierce people. They were at war constantly with the Indians at Quarequa. They were captured in battle by the Indians, and they also took Indians captive. There has been no general revelation of these facts; however, these blacks were the first to have been seen in the Indes. Among the Spanish shipwrecks of African vessels on the American coast were nothing new.
 Some solid examples of pre-Columbian black African presence in America are clay, gold and stone portraiture showing black African strain. These were unearthed in Central and South America. Some of the unmistakable African resemblance has been dated from 800 to 700 BCE.
 It has been confirmed that Abubakari II, Emperor of the Kingdom of Mali did reach America with some of his 2,000 vessels in 1310. The last of the pre-Columbian potters, the Mixtecs, have left behind clay sculptures of African faces which include the flared nostrils, the bone formation of the cheeks and the darkened grain of the skin. Some include the Gambian earrings which can be definitely tied to the sub-community of early Ghana and later Mali. Cadamosto (1432-1488) saw the earrings on warrior boatmen in Africa. Clothing, jewelry and various artifacts attest the black presence in Mexico. Among these have been found the caduceus, and upright design of entwined serpents. This was a religious symbol in ancient Kush and was adopted by the Egyptians. Physicians in America associate this symbol with their profession.
 Peruvian records and tradition tell of black men coming from the east and conquering the Andes Mountains. Terracottas with negroid faces, denoting varying pre-Columbian periods, are scattered throughout South and Central America.
 There is evidence of black Africans appearing in Mexico just before and after Christ and of the Olmecs and the Aztecs venerating blacks as deities.
 A priest of the Dominican order, Gregoria Garcia, spent nine years in Peru in the 1500s. He mentioned an island off Cartagena, Columbia, as the first point of encounter between blacks and the Spanish explorers in the New World.
 Both Darien (Panama) and Columbia lie within the end currents which moved swiftly and forcefully from Africa to America. This can well account for early purposeful and unplanned landings of Africans.
 Alphonze de Quatrefages, anthropologist at the Museum of National History in Paris, identified in his book The Human Species (1905) that black inhabitants were found in small numbers and isolated areas in America. Some examples were the Jamassi of Florida, the Charus of Brazil, the black Caribs of Saint Vincent on the Gulf of Mexico and the black Zuni of present-day Arizona and Mexico.
 In Columbus' Journal of the Third Voyage he said he wanted to find out about the black people the Indians had told him about. Indians were found farming yams and taro, an African food, while the Portuguese explorers in Africa saw natives cultivating maize, an American Indian product.

Africans Discover Europe 45,000 BCE

 It was 45,000 years ago when a black people called the Grimaldi discovered the continent now known as Europe. In an unbroken stream of migrations over many centuries they marched North from the Cape in South Africa. On their way, some stopped to settle and develop tribes and nations. Most moved on to settle in Chad, the Sub-Sahara and North Africa.
 At that time there was no Straits of Gibraltar and so they walked on dry land into Spain and France. Others walked on land from Africa into Italy, moving northward into Lombardy.
 Along the thousands of miles to Europe, the Grimaldi left evidence of their culture such as pendants for ornaments, stone implements for working in the environment and symbols of communication. They also left musical instruments and the first bow and arrow. After they reached Europe, they dispersed into Bulgaria, Switzerland, Illyria and Southern Europe on the Adriatic Sea and in Brittany. The last, Brittany, is today's England, Wales and Scotland.
 How did these black Grimaldi look? Their noses were very large and flat at the base. Their facial and head characteristics resembled the Koramus people of South Africa and the bushmen who were to come many thousands of years later. The have been compared in appearance to modern blacks. Some wore their hair in styles that resemble today's cornrows, that is plaits arranged in parallel lines across the head. Others wore a style similar to today's peppercorns, when the hair is put into little black rolls or heads. In another style, they fastened their hair into short, close-growing clusters.
 These blacks were accomplished and cultured, bringing with them arts and survival skills that gave new life to the stale and stagnant Neanderthal period of Europe. During the later Paleolithic period, the Grimaldi were the most powerful and influential force on the continent.
 The Grimaldi contributed greatly to the early or first arts of Europe. Their statuettes uncovered by archaeologists reveal extraordinary workmanship. They are definitely the oldest sculpture created by man. The statue of the "Venus of Willendorf"  found in Austria, has been called by Graham Clarke, writing in the Dawn of Civilization, "the first signs of art on earth." These meaningful discoveries also show the extent of their migration. Pieces of Grimaldi sculpture have been found in Southern Siberia and Russia.
 However, touring exhibits of "Ice Age Art" from Europe do not make any mention of the art of the Grimaldi. No explanation for this has been offered, most likely on account of racism.
 The Grimaldi disappeared! Where did they go? The authorities on prehistoric Europe and prehistoric peoples have no sound answers. It may be that some historians vigorously tried to promote the non-black Cro-Magnon over the Grimaldi; even though the Cro-Magnons came much later and could be descendants of the Grimaldi.
 The Grimaldi disappeared around 12,000 BCE. There are several theories offered as to why this occurred. One claims that the Cro-Magnons exterminated them. Another suggests intermarriage, or race mixing causing the Grimaldi to lose their black color. Still another infers that the Grimaldi moved to other parts of the world, mixed with other peoples, and became other nations.
 Nevertheless, diggings on the European continent are evidence the Grimaldi were its earliest inhabitants. The opening of Grimaldi graves and other excavations have revealed skeletons and artifacts in layers below those of the Cro-Magnons.
 The Grimaldi left the bow and arrow and other useful tools. These artifacts enabled thousands of generations of barbaric people of Europe to survive through prehistory until the coming of the Romans.

Before the Dawn of History

 During recent history blacks have identified only with Africa. The knowledge that blacks made extensive migrations to far away parts of the world for many centuries have been hidden, de-emphasized or diverted. Actually there is evidence even before written history that blacks were world travelers.
 Scholars in this century have been able to find concrete and abundant evidence for numerous black colonies outside Africa. There were blacks on the Australian continent when it was first sighted by the Spanish in 1604—Australia is 8,000 miles from Africa. American WWII service men were greeted by blacks on the Solomon Islands off New Guinea—again thousands of miles from Africa. The Nakis, a colony of blacks, were discovered in 1923 in Southern China by Dr. Joseph Rock, a representative of the US Department of Agriculture. On the Adamese Islands, a part of the Republic of India, descendants of negrito people have been found. Though few are aware of it, blacks have inhabited the Phillipines for hundreds of years.
 Movements of blacks in prehistory provides new insights into their contributions to the Old World and the New World.
 It is well that blacks were the first human beings on earth and it is possible that during their migrations throughout the unknown world, they helped lay the framework of civilization. In the Western Hemisphere, Indians, or Native Americans, followed black Asians across the Bering Straits. They found the blacks prospering in a society more viable than their own. As happened in the other hemisphere and on other prehistoric continents, there were killings, warfare and intermarriage for thousands of years until the blacks were finally extinct. Skeletal remains of blacks unearthed in Central America, South America and in Arizona predate the Zuni Indians.
 The African earth has surrendered to archaeologists and anthropologists the earliest remains of man and his ancestors. Man originated in Africa. Scholars have dug up skeletons in Africa as old as 175,000 years, while sites in Europe including Italy, England, Russia and Scandinavia have yielded bones no more than 20,000 years old.
 Proof of black habitation has been uncovered in Western Asia. Discoveries dating back 6,000 years before Christ show black settlers called Natufians in Palestine. Gerald Massey, a French anthropologist, claims that "the sole race that can be traced among the aborigines all over the earth, or below it, is the dark race of negrito type." Prehistoric India was occupied by blacks who were followed by the pre-Dravidians and later the Dravidians. Blacks were indigenous peoples of prehistoric China, Japan, Australia and the Islands of the Pacific 50,000 years ago. The fossil remains, artifacts uncovered and the art left to scholars strongly suggest that prehistoric black families perfected the first foundation of civilization.
 There is no question today about black involvement in prehistoric and ancient Egypt, first known as Kemit meaning "land of the blacks." The blacks in Kush (Ethiopia) and Egypt developed and planted and nurtured the seeds of the world's greatest civilization.
 Babylon was founded and maintained by blacks. The ancient people of Sumeria have been referred to as Assyric-Babylonian and have been described as people with shaven heads and black faces.
 Ancient Chinese text suggests that blacks laid the foundation of civilization there. J. A. Rogers in his Sex and Race, said "Blacks penetrated into the Far North of China and showed themselves in the face of Tarter." black civilizations were found in India, in the valleys of the Indus River and the Ganges River. The Ganges River was named after an Ethiopian general who carried his conquest of India to that point.
 The black Grimaldis were the major inhabitants and the rulers of Europe for tens of thousands of years. They produced the first known art and invented the technique for sculpture. The statue of the Venus of Willendorf was made by the Grimaldis.
 Irish folklore mentions small black people, called the Firbolg. Gerald Massey (1828-1907), Gedfrey Higgins and David MacRitchie, all British writers, have written about ancient blacks in England and Ireland. Ancient Welsh folk tales also mention black people. England and Spain were included in the migrations of blacks. After these thousands of years of surviving and being extinguished, of creating and inventing, blacks came into the dawn of history with more to offer than any other group of people on earth.

Scientists and Builders

 It has been very unfortunate that many European and American researchers have strongly implied that Africans invented nothing and explored nothing. These implications have blended naturally with the standard and historical stereotypes, prejudices and misleading writings. Even liberal writers have given the Africans credit for having only a limited and simple technology.
 However, the reliable techniques of carbon-dating, along with recent discoveries, may discredit some of the incorrect statements on the African technology by biased, archaeologists and anthropologists. The often-used words such as primitive and sub-social may have to be retracted.
 Recent discoveries have proved that African cultures achieved levels of technical development comparable with, or superior to, European cultures.
 The embalming or mummification technique did not originate with the Egyptians. It began with the black Nubians. (Even though the Egyptians were black, too). This closely guarded technique, which still remains a mystery, followed other Kushite contributions which flowed up the Nile to Egypt. During an expedition, a Professor F. Mori found the remains of an African child in Southwest Libya. The remains could be dated back to 3,500 BCE, two centuries before the first Egyptian kingdom. The child's body was preserved and bound in the same manner as those of the pharaohs found later in Egypt.
 The first Babylonians were black, without question. Ancient literature has made dramatic references to Babylonian ships. As they sailed through the night, their masts were illuminated with cold lights. The phrase rules out fire light of any kind. Cold light would be more closely associated with battery-powered light.
 Recently, Peter Schmidt, an anthropologist, and his companion, metallurgist Donald Avery, were among the Haya people of Tanzania. They found proof that Africans were producing medium carbon steel in preheated, forced draft furnaces over 2,000 years ago. When Africans were forced by social, civil and natural circumstances to stop this advanced process, it was not rediscovered and practiced for 1,900 years until German-born metallurgist Karl Wilhelm Siemens (1823-1883) produced the same high-grade carbon steel.
 To further support the existence of this highly advanced process, scholars have studied natives in the Lake Victoria region of Tanzania whose oral tradition describes the existence of prehistoric iron smelting. Some of the Africans accompanied the researchers to the sites of ancient furnaces and showed them how the heat was built up and maintained, a process far superior to the technique Europeans had accomplished.
 Medieval West Africans devised metal implements so delicately refined they could be used by surgeons to perform surgery on the eyes, especially for the removal of cataracts.
 One of the marvels Greek historian Herodotus mentioned during his tour of Egypt was the practice of medicine. No doctor was allowed a general practice. Each had to specialize. There were specialists for eyes, nose, ears, throat, intestines, stomach, teeth, and head. There were stringent sanitary laws which regulated the diagnosis and treatment of ailments. The method of capping teeth was a general procedure. In the first of this book, Imhotep, black physician to Zoser, king of Egypt, was discussed. He treated 200 known ailments.
 In Northwestern Kenya, as early as 300 BCE, black Africans built an astronomical site at Namoratuntga. An accurate, complex, prehistoric calendar was devised. It was based on perfect astronomical alignments. When researchers recently climbed the eastern edge of Losidak Range at the Lake Turkana basin, they found 19 basalt pillars arrange in patterns which related to the position of certain stars and constellations.
 It is a remarkable coincidence that they relate to the ancient Eastern Kushite calendar. This calendar was based on the rising of seven stars and constellations in conjunction with various phases of the moon. The calendar was calculated on a 364-day year of 12 months.
 There is no question as to the professionalism of African builders. Recent discoveries in the Lake Chad region of West Africa have revealed deserted towns and cities. These areas were inhabited by hundreds, even thousands of people, probably thousands of years ago. There were temples, public buildings, palaces and memorials. All evidence shows these were built by people of great skill.
 The miraculous stone towers of Zimbabwe show the artistry of their brick masons. The bricks were uniquely crafted with 12-corners of 12-sides and were laid symmetrically in triangular geometric forms, without mortar in a single joint or in a single layer. This is similar to the slab fitting of the old Egyptian pyramids. There were openings for ventilation in these Zimbabwean structures. Today towers stand in that country as physical testimony to the genius of its architects, builders and engineers and the scientific knowledge among them. Their superior techniques of architecture and building were enhanced by their ability to solve problems. They considered the weight of a building they constructed, along with the water levels below it, so that the water could support the structure. This knowledge of hydrographies further illustrates the skills of Zimbabwe.
 Ancient Ghana was known for the extensive weaving of cloth. It was a skill handed down for hundreds of years from father to son. As late as the 18th Century, Kente cloth, which was to become famous, was first woven by Nana Tolh. The cloth became a symbol of royalty during the Dekyria Dynasty in 1741. During this time, the Ashanti were the dominant West African nation.
 An ancient Nubian incense burner has been found on the Nile between Egypt and the Sudan. It has been carbon-dated at 3,500 BCE which precedes any organized Egyptian kingdom. Inscriptions on the burner indicate direct Sudanese influences on ancient Egypt. The crowned insignia and royal insignia, which later appeared in Egypt, were found on the incense burner.
 When count Christian Volney of France saw the Egyptians in 1785, he said that the black people being enslaved in Europe and American were the same color and characteristics of the Egyptians tilling the fields of Egypt, and that these were the people who had passed great civilization and culture down to the present through the Greeks, Romans and Europeans. Clearly blacks contributed to Egyptian culture.
 Therefore, some of the scientific accomplishments of the Egyptians might be added to the list. These included a method of hatching eggs without the hen, a process of dyeing cloth, staining materials, and using metallic oxides to change hues and produce colors which they applied to glass and porcelain.
 Africans were not minor technologists.

Were Egyptians "Hamites?"

 Aided by faith, Moses led the Hebrew people out of Egypt. If the Egyptians persecuted the Israelites as the Bible said, and if the Egyptians were negroes, sons of Ham ("Hamites"), as the Bible said, we can no longer ignore the historical causes of the curse upon Ham. The curse entered Jewish literature much later than the period of persecution, when Moses, in the Book of Genesis, said that God addressed Abraham in a dream: "Know for certain that your posterity will be strangers in a land not their own; they shall be subjected to slavery and shall be oppressed four hundred years."
 Here we have reached the historical background of the curse upon Ham. It is not by chance that this curse on the father of Mesraim, Phut, Kush, and Canaan, fell only on Canaan, who dwelt in a land that the Jews have coveted throughout their history.
 Whence came this name Ham (Cham, Kam)? Where could Moses have found it? Right in Egypt where Moses was born, grew up and lived until the Exodus. In fact, we know that the Egyptians called their country Kemit, which means “black” in their language. The interpretation according to which Kemit designates the black soil of Egypt, rather than the black man and, by extension, the black race of the country of the blacks, stems from a gratuitous distortion by minds aware of what an exact interpretation of this word would imply. Hence, it is natural to find Kam in Hebrew, meaning heat, black, burned.
 That being so, all apparent contradictions disappear and the logic of facts appears in all it's nudity. The inhabitants of Egypt, symbolized by their black color, Kemit or Ham of the Bible, would be accursed in the literature of the people they had oppressed. We can see that this biblical curse on Ham's offspring had an origin quite different from that generally given it today without the slightest historical foundation. What we can not understand however, is how it has been possible to make a white race of Kemit: Hamite, black, ebony, etc. (even in Egyptian). Obviously, according to the needs of the cause, Ham is cursed, blackened, and made into the ancestors of the negroes. This is what happens whenever one refers to contemporary social relations.
 On the other hand, she is whitened whenever one seeks the origin of civilization, because there she is inhabiting the first civilized country in the world. So, the idea of Eastern and Western Hamites is conceived—nothing more than to deprive blacks of the moral advantage of Egyptian civilization and of other African civilizations like the Mandingo of Mali. The "handsome East African Hamitic type," the "official" interpretation becomes the "handsome type of the paleo-Mediterranean white race to which we owe all black civilization, including that of Egypt!"
 It is impossible to link the notion of Hamite, as we labor to understand it in official textbooks, with the slightest historical, geographical, linguistic, or ethnic reality. No specialist is able to pinpoint the birthplace of the Hamites (scientifically speaking), the language they spoke, the migratory route they followed, the counties they settled, or the form of civilization they may have left. On the contrary, all the experts agree that this term has no serious content, and yet not one of them fails to use it as a kind of master-key to explain the slightest evidence of civilization in black Africa.

Kingdom of Mandingos

 In the book, Mandingo, the writer perpetuates the very same specious paleo-European or white/non-negro stereotype of the "Hamite" Kingdom of Mandingos, the kingdom of Mali. From the first century after Christ until the Portuguese entered Africa in the 1500s as explorers, traders and enslavers, black kingdoms grew and prospered in Western Sudan and in the region of the Niger. Their civilizations flourished as magnificently as any in Europe. Their governments showed remarkable political and administrative sophistication, especially with trade and development. Mali's territory included the gold mine center and largest source of gold for Europe. Original trade with the Moroccans to the north was enhanced. Mali rule stretched from the Niger westward, then northward to the Sahara Desert and to the south to the Senegal River. The empire of the Mandingos of Mali added to their territory the Valley of the Niger, the Gambia and the Senegal. It developed into a seafaring nation, adding new trade routes to the old and dealing with cities north of the Mediterranean. Mali reached its peak during the reign of ambitious Mansa Musa, 1307 to 1332. Agriculture and the arts were encouraged, and the kingdom was well known in Europe and in Cairo for its building programs, its expertly governed kingdom and the sharpest armies in the world. The ships of Mali reached the Canary Islands off the Northwestern African Coast. In 1310, Abubakari II, headed 2,000 ships out of the Senegal River to the Atlantic Ocean and to the New World almost 200 years before Columbus. The Mandingos of Mali were the ancestors of fictional Kunta Kinte, who four centuries later, was enslaved and taken to America in chains.

Blacks in the New World

 There are numerous documents which tell of the presence of blacks with Spanish explorers who came to the New World after and with Columbus (1451-1506). Pedro Nino (1468-1505) was said to have piloted the ship Capitania Hispania on the third voyage.
 Blacks were with Pedro de Aviles Menéndez when he founded Saint Augustine, Florida, the oldest city in America. Vasco Nunez Balboa, who had blacks with him speaks of finding a colony of blacks in Panama in 1513. He marched across the bottom of the present US and reached the Pacific Ocean, where blacks built the first ships in America and planted and harvested the first wheat.
 The Conquistadores found blacks dispersed in small tribes and villages throughout the New World. There were colonies of blacks in Northern Brazil called the Chares. There were others at Saint Vincent on the Gulf of Mexico, where black Caribs clustered around the mouth of the Orinoco River in present-day venezuela. There were blacks among the Yamassee Indians of Florida. In 1775, at the break of the American revolution, Francisco Garces said he found a race of black men living side by side with the Zuni Indians of New Mexico. It was his contention that the blacks had inhabited there first. La Perouse (1741-1788), a French explorer, found blacks in today's California. He called them Ethiopians.
 American Indian legends are numerous about black men who came from faraway places. According to Peruvian tradition, black men came and penetrated the Andes Mountains. Also in Peru, blacks were with Francisco Pizarro (1475-1541), who defeated the Incas of Peru and later destroyed them. In his report on The Third Voyage, Columbus mentioned he wanted to see the blacks the Indians told him about.
 Seven years before Bartolome de Las Casas (1474-1566) had persuaded the Spanish Crown to allow each settler to bring 12 slaves to America, Balboa claims there were blacks in the Antilles. This was before any Spanish colony was organized.
 Records show there were blacks with Ponce de Leon (1460-1521) and Hernando Cortez (1485-1547). To date, the story of Estevanico, or Little Seven, is the most popular.
 Estevanico (1503-1539) was among the first Spanish explorers to see Texas, and he was alone when he discovered present day New Mexico and Arizona. He did this 45 years after Columbus touched the shores of the New World. First shipwrecked at Tampa Bay in Florida, Estevanico and his party took eight years to walk along the Gulf and across the northern half of the Mexican Territory, almost to the Pacific Ocean. Along with four other men, Estevanico was found almost starved in 1536 in Northwestern Mexico. He was then included in an expedition led by Franciscan friar Marcos de Niza (1495-1558). The black man pushed forward, leading 300 Indian bearers in search of the mythical Seven Cities of Cibola.
 Estevanico was so impatient that his plans went awry. He mistook a pueblo for a sought-after fabled city and ignored the fatal warning of an angry Zuni Indian chief. He and most of his 300 Indian followers were killed on the spot. The few who escaped took the word back to the friar.
 The story of Estevanico is still part of Zuni folklore.

Legacy of Fort Mose

 For more than 175 years the remains of the first free black town in the North American colonies lay forgotten in a salt marsh north of St. Augustine, Florida. Known as Fort Mose, after an Indian name for the area, it was in 1738 the northernmost outpost protecting the capital of Spanish Florida, a vast territory stretching west of the Gulf of Mexico and north into what are today Georgia and South Carolina. The fort's origins derived from a Spanish effort to destabilize the slave-based economy of English settlers in the Carolinas, particularly those in Charleston, established in 1670. The Spanish encouraged enslaved Africans to flee south, promising them sanctuary if they converted to Catholicism. King Charles II of Spain sanctioned the policy of granting runaways religious sanctuary in 1693 with a royal proclamation "giving liberty to all...the men as well as the women...so that by their example and by my liberality others will do the same." The effort reflected Spain's customary inclusion of Africans at many levels of society, an outgrowth of 700 years of Moorish occupation of the Iberian Peninsula.
 The first group of runaways—eight men, two women, and a nursing child—arrived in St. Augustine (354-430 CE) in 1687. By the early 1730s more than 100 fugitives arrived. In 1738 Governor Manuel de Montiano formed them into a military company and stationed men with their families at a frontier post two miles north of St. Augustine. Established on St. Teresa's (1515-1582) feast day, the post was named Garcia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose.
 Fort Mose was abandoned in 1763 when Spain ceded its colony to Britainain, and St. Augustine's colonists and the residents of the fort moved to Cuba. Forty-nine years later the abandoned fort was used by a group of American adventurers, known as the Florida Patriots, in a battle with Spanish forces that had returned to Florida in 1784 as part of a settlement ending the American Revolution. The patriots were defeated and the fort was destroyed.
 There were actually two forts named Mose. The site of the first lies under a foot of water in a tidal marsh created by rising sea levels and the blocking of drainage creeks by road construction. No excavations have been conducted, but thermal images of the area have revealed the outline of a ground disturbance that conforms to the shape and dimensions of the fort as described in maps and documents.
 British general James Oglethorpe (1696-1785), who founded Georgia in 1739 and raided the first Fort Mose in 1740 left this description:

Fort Mose...being about 20 miles from Fort Diego within two miles distance and in full sight of St. Augustine (lying near the creek which runs up between that and Point Cartell up to Fort Diego) was made in the middle of a plantation for safety of negroes against Indians. It was four square with a flanker at each corner, banked round with earth, having a ditch without on all sides lined round with prickly palmetto royal and had a well and house within, and a lookout.

The first fort was badly damaged and abandoned after a battle between British and Spanish forces in 1740. The soldiers and their families lived in St. Augustine for 12 years before establishing a second Fort Mose, built on high ground along a tidal creek one quart mile from the original compound.
 The second fort had three 195-foot-long walls, probably about 10 feet tall, made of packed earth faced with clay and sod and panted with prickly pear cactus to discourage intruders. The fourth side faced a creek. Franciscan priest Father Juan Joseph de Solana described it in 1759 during an inspection tour of Spanish Florida:

The fort at Mose is situated on the banks of the river which runs to the north, and at a distance of three quarters of a league from the presidio, the path that faces the river has no protection of defense whatsoever and is formed by two small bastions which look landward on which are mounted two four-pound cannons and six swivel guns divided among them...The earthwork embankment is covered with thorns...the housing which it includes are some huts of thatch...

 During the excavation, historian Jane Landers of Vanderbilt University dug into Spanish and Floridan archives for maps. Census records, treasury accounts, militia lists, baptism and marriage records, death registers, official correspondence, and judicial records. Her research yielded evidence of a diverse community made up of people from widely varied backgrounds: Mandingos, Congos, Carabalis, Minas, Gambas, Lucumis, Sambas, Gangas, Araras, and Guineans. Most residents probably spoke some English, Spanish, and Indian languages in addition to their own. The common experiences of life in the Americas must have helped them bridge cultural and linguistic differences. The captain of the Fort Mose garrison was Francisco Menéndez, a West African Mandingo by birth. He had escaped from the Carolinas with the aid of the Yamassee Indians, and in 1726, prior to the establishment of Fort Mose, was captain of the black company at the St. Augustine garrisons. Menéndez was acknowledged by the Spaniards as the Cassique, or chief, of the community.
 No identifiable African artifacts have been found at Fort Mose. The many fragments of green glass bottles suggest that the people at Fort Mose also drank wine or rum, and clay pipe fragments attest tobacco smoking, a practice with roots in American Indian traditions. Buttons, buckles, pins, and thimbles indicate that clothes were probably European in style, although by no means elegant. Buttons, for example, were stamped out at the fort from animal bone. Musketballs and gunflints were also found.
 Documentary evidence shows that a wood and thatch Catholic chapel was located in the fort, and was administered by a Franciscan missionary. Father Solana described it as

...ten varas long and six wide [approximately 25 feet by 15 feet], the walls which are under construction are made of wood and the sacristy, which is furnished, and in which the priest lives, is a very small room and serves as the chapel for the fort.

 Lander's research revealed that many men from Fort Mose served as sailors and crewmen on Spanish ships during their 12-year stay in St. Augustine.
 Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1994, Fort Mose is now the premier site on the Florida Black Heritage Trail, a tangible reminder of the people who risked and often lost their lives in their struggle to attain freedom.

Mutiny on the Amistad

 Let me take you back to 1839—just a couple of years before Gilbert Knapp set foot on the banks of the Root River and said this place was now his.
 That sounds not quite right—to say a place belongs to you. It may be impossible for us to understand what the world felt like back then. It's hard to contemplate the feeling of incredible confidence that seemed so natural (looking at them from this great distance) to successful white men of the time.
 I don’t think they were arrogant, at least not in the boastful way we think of that word these days. My guess is that they saw the world as a big, unbounded and unfinished wilderness, a place that was given to them by God. And their job was to turn this earth into some vision of an endless, cultivated, European countryside.
 That vision so dominated their imagination that the way they treated non-Europeans must have seemed peripheral. To them, Native Americans and slaves were tools to help them complete their work.
 What we don't take seriously can become our greatest evil.
 In January of 1839, 53 Mendi people were kidnapped from their homeland near modern day Sierra Leone, West Africa. Those people made the Middle Passage, the horrific journey across the Atlantic stacked like cargo into a Spanish slave ship.
 When they arrived in Havana, the slave traders said they were native Cuban slaves, a legal slight precipitated by recent laws against importing slaves. It was a time when people were having second thoughts about slavery—it was still legal to own another human being, but kidnapping Africans from their homeland was illegal.
 So, through this trick, the shipload of Mendis were sold at auction and then loaded back into another ship to said around the island of Cuba to a plantation. Ironically, the name of this second ship was La Amistad—Spanish for "friendship."
 Inside the ship there was confusion and despair...and then hope. One of them, Sengbe Pieh, discovered a loose spike and used it to unshackle himself and his companions. He was to become known as Cinque; he and the others revolted and mutinied. They killed the ship's captain and cook.
 The Africans forced the two Cuban men who had purchased them in Havana to sail the ship back toward Africa. This they did every day. At night the Cuban men secretly changed the ship's course toward the north.
 As a result, 63 days later they were still at sea when they were spotted off Montauk Point, Long Island by the navy. A federal brig towed them into harbor at New London, Connecticut.
 The legal battles that ensued were dramatic. Charges of murder and piracy were brought against the Africans and they were thrown into jail as "salvage" property. President Martin Van Buren (1784-1862) pulled off political moves that make contemporary presidents seem as innocent as kittens. He overturned their first acquittal in order to win the votes of Southerners in the election of 1840.
 Up to that moment in history the abolitionist movement was quite unorganized. This incident became their catalyst. They formed the Amistad Committee. First, they found decent food for the imprisoned Africans. Ten they found a translator who could let those in prison tell their own harrow story. Finally, they rallied John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) former president, to their aid. Adams, 74 and nearly blind, came out of retirement to argue this case all the way to the supreme court.
 In March of 1841, the court said the Africans were free people and should be repatriated back to their homeland.
 Within a year, the Mendi people were on an Africa-bound boat in the company of five missionaries. In Sierra Leone these missionaries established a colony which became the basis of Sierra Leone’s independence from England. The education the abolitionists had provided to the Mendi African people while they were in jail evolved, over time, into the foundation of many American black colleges.
 I first hear this story two months ago and it captured my imagination at several levels.
 First of all, why haven’t I heart it before? Why is ist that every grammar school kid can lisp the name of Columbus's three ships, but this pivotal story of slavery and injustice, abolition and the passionately human pursuit of freedom has been relegated to the attic of American history?

...segregation, race violence and economic oppression of African Americans generally got short shift [in school text books]. According to James W. Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, few textbooks made the connection between the federal government’s decision to abandon reconstruction in 1877 and the civil rights crisis of the 1960s—although they involve the same issues, voting rights and black political power.
 Not any more. New texts like The Americans, forthcoming from McDougal Littell, discuss the historical links between slavery, Jim Crow and the civil-rights movement. The book also presents disturbing facts about race violence in America. Here are two that every American should know. Between 1885 and 1900, at least 2,500 blacks were lynched or murdered as the KKK consolidated its hold on the post-Reconstruction South. In 1741, 14 slaves were burned at the stake and 18 others were hanged because of fears of slave revolt—in New York City.

 That "vision" of America, the one that many Europeans had, is like blinders that block out more than it lets us see. We forget that there were two sides to the first Thanksgiving table. That the land Gilbert Knapp called "his" was actually inhabited by Native Americans. And that slavery, an inescapable part of America's early years, was unspeakably cruel.
 What Amistad shows us is that we can look squarely at slavery and still see those qualities we call essentially "American." There was bravery, cleverness, love of freedom. There was a yearning for home. There was nobility in the Africans and also in the white Americans who organized themselves into the powerful abolition movement.
 Stories like the Amistad story demand that we look honestly at our past. It’s not always easy to take off the blinders. But how will we know how to put together a decent future until we face up to and try to understand our troubled past?

Clovis Point Cultures

 The land bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska was exposed when sufficient water was trapped in glaciers and ice caps to lower the sea level by about 155 feet. By 25,000 BCE This 900-mile-wide expanse, known as Beringia, was above water, and it remained so until about 11,000 BCE. A recent study of pollen, plant fragments, and insect remains from core samples by Scott Elias of the University of Colorado and his colleagues concluded that Beringia was not a treeless tundra, as had been thought, but was covered with birch, heath, and shrub willow. The plants and insects indicate that the summer was warmer than today.
 Once across the land bridge, one could travel south either between the coastal mountains and the Rockies or along the eastern edge of the Rockies. But the Laurentide ice sheet, covering much of Northern North America, and the Cordilleran ice sheet, straddling the Rockies, blocked the eastern route from 30,000 BCE. And the coastal route from at least 20,000 BCE. Only after the ice retreated, about 13,000 BCE, was the way south clear. Could the first Americans have skirted the ice by following the coast in boats? Some pockets along the shore may have been free of ice, affording landing places, but the Cordilleran ice sheet covered some 2,000 miles of coast, making such a journey virtually impossible.
 Scholars have tried to link particular archaeological cultures, identified by types of stone tools, with various groups arriving in the Americas. But the picture is unclear. The familiar Paleoindian tradition, generally dated between 11,200 and 8,500 BCE, begins with fluted points called Clovis after their original findspot in New Mexico. Beyond Clovis are several sites claimed to be earlier in date, including Meadowcroft (Pennsylvania), Monte Verde (Chile), and Pedra Furada (Brazil). Various sites in Alaska are contemporary with or even somewhat earlier than Clovis but lack fluted points.
 Do Clovis points mark the entry of the first Americans, or were they developed later? Clovis and other fluted points have been found throughout the Americans, but Alaskan Clovis points are not among the oldest, as one might expect if they arrived with the first Americans. South American sites with fluted “fish-tailed” points are as early as the first Clovis sites, although most appear to date after 11,000 BCE. Were fluted points first made to the south later spreading to Alaska? A fluted point found at Uptar in Siberia, 1,200 miles from Beringia, is provocative, but it is not well dated; we know only that it was made sometimes before 8,300 BCE. It could be a Clovis predecessor or descendant, or a coincidental use of fluting.
 Is there solid evidence for a pre-Clovis occupation of the Americas? A lower level in Meadowcroft, excavated by James Adovasio, has been dated between 11,300 and 19,600 BCE, but some dispute the dates, saying that coal particles in groundwater contaminated the samples, making them appear older than they are. Critics also note that the small sample of plant and animal remains suggest a temperate rather than a cold climate, which is what one would expect if the dates are correct. Monte Verde, a waterlogged site with excellent preservation, is the strongest pre-Clovis candidate. The remains include stone tools (but no fluted points), bones of extinct animals, remains of rectangular huts, and even a human footprint preserved in the damp clay. Archaeologists await final publication of the site by excavator Tom Dillehay. The dates from the site’s main level range from 13,565 to about 12,000 BCE, but another level many be even older. At Pedra Furada the debate centers on whether flanked stones from levels dated to 50,000 BCE. Are artifacts or were created naturally when quartz and quartzite cobbles eroded and fell from a layer in the 330-foot cliff above the site. The site's excavators, Niede Guidon and Fabio Parenti, say some are artifacts; others, such as Adovasio Dillehay, and Paleoindian specialist David Meltzer, are doubtful. The two groups argued the matter in recent issues of the journal Antiquity, but the exchange resolved nothing.
 In Alaska several distinct stone tool assemblages are known from different sites, but their relationships to one another are unclear. The so-called Nenana Complex (11,300-8,500 BCE), known from sites in central Alaska, is marked by bifacial triangular or tear-shaped points. The Paleoindian (10,600-6,500 BCE), extending from Alaska to the Pacific Northwest, has characteristic wedge-shaped microcores and microblades. Fluted points appear to be slightly later (10,000 BCE). Complicating the picture are hunting camps—Broken Mammoth, Mead, Swan Point—in the Tanana Valley near Fairbanks, dated circa 11,700, that have microblade assemblages. The contemporary Mesa site, on the North Slope, has lanceolate points with carefully ground bases. For it now may be best to call these the Northern Paleoindians tradition, as the University of Alaska's Charles Holmes and David Yesner have done; a "very early, but highly varied, cultural tradition, perhaps the earliest to arrive in the Americas" according to Brian Fagan (Archaeology, July/August 1993). Paleoindian cultures in South America may also be more complex than previously thought. Excavations by Anna Roosevelt at Pedra Pintada in Northern Brazil, dated 11,000 BCE, have yielded artifacts and remains showing an early adaptation to a tropical climate (Archaeology, July/August 1996).
 While recent excavations and discoveries have made it clear that Paleoindian cultures are far more diverse than once thought, they offer no conclusive evidence concerning the arrival of the first Americans.

Clues from Paint Pigments

 In a new study, Texas A&M University chemists Ronnie Reese, Marian Hyman, and Marvin Rowe and biologists James Derr and Scott Davis applied DNA analysis to the paints used on rock art in the Lower Pecos region, at the confluences of the Pecos, Devils, and Rio Grande rivers in Southwestern Texas. Rock art was an essential component of many ancient symbolic, religious, and artistic systems, and the materials used for preparing paints may have had special significance. In the Lower Pecos area a variety of minerals were used in pictographs. Dark and light red, black, yellow, and orange pigments are common, prepared from iron and manganese oxides and hydroxides. White is rare. Until now, however, virtually nothing was known about the organic substances that served as binders for the pigments. Many readily available materials may have been used—blood, urine, milk, eggs, vegetable juices, or animal fats—but no chemical or biological analysis had been attempted. The Texas A & M researchers used samples from two Pecos River-style pictographs in Seminole Canyon that had been directly dated to circa 2,950 to 4,200 years ago. The site was chosen because the pictographs there have undergone severe exfoliation for more than 50 percent have spalled from the limestone wall. The pigment layer, sandwiched between the limestone and later calcite and gypsum deposits, was intact. Nuclear DNA recovered from it proved to be closely related to that of deer and bison. The binder may have been bone morrow, which would be a good source for DNA; blood is questionable since mammalian red blood cells lack nuclei (only scarcer white blood cells have them). Now that the general identity of the organic component has been established, part of the sequence that is more susecptible to diagnosis will be examined to determine which animal was used.

Tuberculosis in the New World

 Study of ancient microbial DNA may clarify the origins of disease causing organisms and how they spread. One of the first recoveries of DNA from an ancient disease-causing organism was made by Wilmar Salo and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine at Duluth. They identified DNA from the tuberculosis bacterium (Mycobacterium tuberculosis) in a 1,000-year-old mummy excavated in 1990 from a tomb in the Chiribaya cemeteries of Southern Peru. Lesions similar to those caused by tuberculosis had been well documented on ancient Indian skeletal remains since the 1940s, but there was still debate about whether the pathogen was actually M. Tuberculosis or something similar but unique to the New World. The body, of a woman of 40 to 50 year sold, had tubercular lesions in the right lung and lymph node. The researchers found M. Tuberculosis DNA in tissue from one of the lung's lymph nodes, proving that the disease was in North America before the arrival of Europeans.

Redating Serpent Mound 1000 BCE

 New radiocarbon dates suggest that Serpent Mound, a one-quarter-mile-long earthen effigy of a snake in South-Central Ohio, was built as many as 2,000 years later than previously thought. The effigy has been attributed to the Adena culture (1,000-100 BCE) based on the presence of Adena burials nearby. The Adena people, who lived in an area stretching from the Midwest to the Atlantic Coast, collected and began domesticating plants, improved methods of food storage, and buried their dead in mounds. Two samples of wood charcoal were obtained from undisturbed parts of Serpent Mound. Both yielded a date of circa 1070 CE, suggesting that the effigy was actually built by people of the Fort Ancient culture (900-1600 CE), a Mississippian group that lived in the central Ohio Valley. Mississippian people inhabited the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Mississippi river valleys, built huge earthworks, cultivated maize, and were governed by powerful chiefs, ruling families, or both. The Mississippian's centralized authority would have made possible organizing a large building project such as the construction of Serpent Mound. Additional evidence for the later date includes the remains of a Fort Ancient village 100 yards south of the mound and rattlesnake motifs on Mississippian gorgets (ornaments worn on the chest) made from marine shell.
 The new dates are the result of work by University of Pittsburgh archaeology student Robert V. Fletcher, who noticed that maps of the mound were out of date. He and a friend, Terry L. Cameron, began to remap the site on weekends. Serpent Mound had not been scientifically investigated since the late 1800s, when Frederick W. Putnam (1839-1915) of Harvard's Peabody Museum mapped the mound and excavated sections of the serpent's sinuous body and oval "head" which has also been described as an egg or an enlarged eye. Putnam attributed the creation of Serpent Mound to the Adena culture even though he found no Adena artifacts within the serpent itself. Fletcher and Cameron wanted more solid evidence with which to date the effigy, so they contacted archaeologists Bradley Lepper, a curator at the Ohio Historical Society, and Dee Anne Wymer of Bloomburg University, who took core samples and conducted the limited excavations that yielded the samples for dating.
 Other studies indicate that features of Serpent Mound are aligned with both the summer solstice sunset and, less clearly, the winter solstice sunrise. A pile of burned stones once located inside the oval head area was several feet Northwest of its center, possibly to make a more precise alignment with the point of the "V" in the serpent’s "neck" and the summer solstice sunset. The 1070 CE date coincides roughly with two extraordinary astronomical events. Light from the supernova that produced the Crab Nebula first reached Earth in 1054 and remained visible, even during the day, for two weeks. The brightest appearance ever of Halley's Comet was recorded by Chinese astronomers in 1066. Could Serpent Mound have been a Indian response to such celestial events? "It is impossible to test whether or not the effigy mound represents a fiery serpent slithering across the sky," says Lepper, "but it is fun to speculate."

Paleolithic Americans

 The existence of native peoples on the American continent can actually be traced back to Paleolithic times. For many years the peopling of North America was dated by means of the stone tools that appeared so widely some twelve or fifteen thousand years ago, the so-called Clovis points, which were associated with the hunting of now-extinct mammals. Presumably these were used by hunters who had crossed the land bridge that once joined Alaska to Siberia. More recently it has been argued that although a human presence in the landscape is hard to detect before the invention of stone artifacts, people might have been living in America for many years before the Clovis epoch. A growing body of evidence suggests much earlier human activity, certainly about 25,000 years ago, and more controversial claims give dates of forty or fifty thousand years. Nor need the first settlers have been confined to entering via the land bridge, as they may have navigated their way along the coasts in small vessels. Some of the oldest confirmed occupation sites are to be found in South America, suggesting that the families migrating from Siberia must have expanded rapidly over their huge new domain, presumably following herds of game. By the time that civilizations were beginning to emerge in the Old World, Native American communities were often living in settled groups, at least for parts of the year, and there were far-flung trading routes.
 By the 12th or 13th centuries, easterners were living in a series of complex and prosperous societies. The abundant forests provided wood for impressive long-houses, and some settlements grew into major fortified towns with imposing temples. These people left their mark on the landscape in the form of tombs with elaborate grave goods, and public ritual structures that would have been quite familiar to the ancient Europeans who built Stonehenge and megalithic monuments. The most impressive are the extensive mound sites, which can be seen as humbler versions of the pyramid temples of Central America, and some great earthwork complexes and geometric enclosures. The Moundsville Complex of West Virginia and the Serpent Mound of Ohio are among the finest surviving remnants of this cultural flowering.
 The Hopewell culture flourished in the first few centuries of the Christian era, and mound building was revived in the Mississippian Age (800-1500 CE). By the 12th Century the largest mound settlements probably had several thousand residents at any given time, quite comparable to the middling towns of contemporary Europe. There is some debate about the exact correspondence between the archaeological perceptions of the mound builders and the historical tribes encountered by the early white settlers. However some of the tribal groups constituted powerful and long-enduring political realities, especially the Iroquois League of the Five Nations (later Six) based in the area of New York state. Formed in the 16th Century, this Federation remained a formidable military presence until the early years of the US. In the Southeast were complex tribes such as the Creek and the Cherokees.
 Centralized settlements and even urban development were also found in the desert of the Southwest. This was a very difficult environment, critically dependent on climatic cycles and rainfall, and placing a high premium on the collection and saving of water. From about 1,000 CE, large village communities developed there and made resourceful use of natural features to create well-defined settlements or pueblos, at the center of which were kivas, round, partly underground chambers used for religious rituals. The Pueblo communities, which often lasted for several centuries, maintained links with the more celebrated cultures of Mexico. Today this area contains by far the largest and most heavily populated reservations in the US. The Navajo community in New Mexico and Utah today numbers almost 150,000, more than the next twenty biggest reservations combined.
 Barry Fell in Saga America, identifies areas of settlements and points of entry via the river systems of the earliest, pre-Colombian, colonists from Europe, North Africa, and Eastern Asia. Some of the Amerindian tribes with whom the visitors are believed to have come in contact are also indicated. The Southeastern tribes are believed to have descended in part from the Mediterranean colonists of the Iberian, Cretan, and Phoenician and Philistine, Palestine and Israel; and by traders via the continental river systems and as coming from Italy, and the Southern Mediterranean (Carthage, Libya). The Iroquois are believed to have reached North America after most of these settlements had been made, possibly from South America around 1200 CE, and pressed up the Mississippi River into the Dakota and Algonquin nations. Libyans and Celts also settled the West coastal area among the Ute and Shoshone nations; and the Han and Taxila-Arab cultures sailed to California, and Mexico coasts for trade among the Aztec and Maya. The Greeks, Libyans, and Norse traded along the Mississippi River, with the latter trading and intermingling with Eskimo and Athapascan nations as well.
 Fell bases this conclusion on findings of extensive ancient North American alphabets introduced by the maritime peoples of the Old World, prior to the universal Latin distributed during Roman times. These alphabets include Hieroglyphs, Nabatean, Kufic, Sabean, Greek, Libyan, Punic, Tiffing, Iberic, Ogam, Hebrew, and Punic.

Thomas Jefferson

 He cites Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) who today, Fell believes, would be classified as a

decided radical with respect to his views on archeology and the ancient history of the Americas. During his term as president of the American Philosophical Society, he disclosed that earlier in his life, before he assumed the burdens of public office, he had personally excavated an ancient Indian mound in Virginia. More than that, he cultivated the acquaintance of leading Native Americans and had formed the opinion that their ancestors had come to America from overseas. He believed that a study of the Indian languages of America would disclose the places of origin. These views neither shocked his contemporaries, nor those of several later generations. Only after about 1860 did the dogma develop that all Amerindians descend from Asiatics who crossed Bering Strait, and that no visitors from Europe or Africa came to these shores before Columbus...Any who dispute the ivy-league infallibility on these matters are castigated in a manner reminiscent of old-time politics. Historians and archeologists are peculiarly prone to mistake dispassion for logic. Thus an opponent not only is mistaken, but in addition is deluded and has Neanderthal proclivities into the bargain. This makes for lively—though not always informative—public discussion.

 President Jefferson is said to have been acquainted with nine languages, three of them Amerindian tongues. He was impatient with academic conservatism, although he had respect for the universities, one of which he founded. Jefferson was intensely interested in the American Indians and in the philosophical problems of how these people had come to America. He realized that in their language there might be found important clues to the matter, and during his presidency he instructed Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809) and William Clark (1770-1838) to make careful lists of words used in the languages of the various tribes through whose territory the explorers would pass.
 Jefferson himself, when on a visit to Vermont, was fascinated to observe that the Abenaki people wrote on pieces of smooth inner bark of the birch trees, and himself wrote several letters to his daughter on birch bark during his journey. His interest in the American Indian, he wrote to John Adams (1767-1848),

...began in boyhood when I was very familiar and acquired impressions of attachment for them which have never been obliterated. Before the revolution I was very much with them. I knew much the great Outacity, warrior and orator of the Cherokees. He was always the guest of my father on his journeys to and from Williamsburg. I was in his camp when he made his great farewell oration to his people, the evening before his departure for England. The moon was in full splendor, and to her he seemed to address himself in his prayers for his own safety on the voyage, and that of his people during his absence. His sounding voice, distinct articulation, animated action, and the solemn silence of his people at their several fires, filled me with awe and veneration, although I did not understand a word he uttered.

 During the 1805 war against Barbary pirates, consular offices were established in Tripoli and Algiers by the State Department with diplomatic officials who were selected on the basis of their linguistic ability. Jefferson further encouraged the collection of vocabularies by these counsels. As late as 1823, consul William Shalar in Algiers, was submitting a learned series of reports on the Burbur language for publication in the American Philosophical Society, of which Jefferson had been president, and now in old age, was still a member of its council. The vocabularies Shaler supplied resembled those that Jefferson had asked Lewis and Clark to prepare.
 His 50 years of carefully gathered linguistic notes and observations included native languages and dialects in preparation for a great intellectual work he planned to write during his retirement. These papers, stored in a trunk, were, tragically destroyed when a scoundrel stole the trunk aboard ship and realizing he couldn’t sell its contents threw it overboard into the James River. Thus, the comprehensive work which would have traced Indian origins by comparing their basic linguistic patterns to those of other cultures, would not be done since Jefferson died in 1826.
 As time went by more explorers collected copies of the strange inscriptions. Scholars began to realize that at least two kinds of alphabet were evolved. One, commonly called Tiffing, is used by some of the Berber tribes to this day, and is relatively younger than a similar, but somewhat divergent, alphabet used in ancient times, and commonly called Libyan or Numidian. This ancient Libyan script was a mystery for 150 years. Later explorations disclosed that the Libyan alphabet had at one time been in use across the whole of North Africa, from Sudan in the east, westward to Morocco. Then examples of Libyan script were found engraved on megalithic dolmens in Spain, and on cliff faces in the Canary Islands, and then in recent times from the Americas and some Pacific islands. This was found to be Arabic, an earlier form of Punic, which can be easily read as it is similar to ancient Hebrew. Punic, spoken by the ancient Carthaginians, is a dialect of Phoenician (Lebanon and Canaan). The Arabic language was present in North Africa 800 years before the Islamic invasion of the 7th Century CE. The ancient Arabs were thus allies by language with the Phoenicians. The Arabic could be easily read in its Libyan alphabetic letters both in North Africa, and among other parts in the West and Southwest areas of the US.
 Barry Fell began decipherment of the Libyan inscriptions recognized in America. Some texts were short graffiti left by explorers on cliff faces, and could be read as a dialect of Egyptian. But others, both in America and in North Africa, had no connection with ancient Egyptian, and were undeciphered until 1976. His success came through close consultation of his manuscripts with scholars at both universities in Libya and other parts of the Arab world for advice and comments. The collaborations verified Fell's work which has thrown a whole new light on the history of Southern Mediterranean lands, and their relationship to the Arab world and to the Americas.
 Fell asks the question, "why have we in America been so slow to recognize the strong and widespread Iberian and Arab influence in the languages and cultures of the Americas?" He response is although Thomas Jefferson was far ahead of his time in his thoughts on North Africa and the Arabs and Berbers of the Barbary Coast, Jefferson was forced there by the attacks on American ships in that part of the world. This buccaneering was also practiced not only by the Greeks and Turks, and other Mediterranean peoples, but as an age old tradition, reaches back to the times of the Iliad. Homer makes frequent references to Phoenician slave women in the households of Greek chieftains in raids of peaceful communities.
 The stereotype of Arabs being mainly wandering nomads, kept in some order by the Ottoman Empire; the lack of any translated literature from the Arabic into English until Edward Lane's 1840 rendition of the Arabian Nights; and until the young archeologist and military leader, Thomas Edward Lawrence ("of Arabia") wrote The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), a romantic view of the Arab revolt from the Turks (1917-18) which he lead, there were no Arab materials to read in the US. Even the WWII invasions by Euro-Americans into North Africa did little to inform the world of the gifts and intelligence the Arabs and Berber peoples bring to the world, their history and culture bring and "are still dismissed by too many people without adequate understanding of the matters they spurn," says Fell.
 He draws stunning comparisons of Berber and Arab life and culture with North American native peoples. The modern day agriculturalist Berbers are the forebears of the Pueblos whose pueblo structures and features are those built in the Southwest Pueblos. The nomadic pastoralists, the Arabs, who live in large family tents, and the women have tattooed chins are equivalent to the tipis of the Plains Indians and the tattooing of women's chins.

Manifest Destiny

 This 1880s piece catches the tragic ethnocentric invasion and annihilation by white land grabbers, through the trusting eyes and beguiled ears of the Indians, as the covered wagon moves through their treatied fields, squatting, encroaching onto ancient American's "free land."
 Trusting native peoples listened to the singing of "mystic mother tongue" speaking "alien names" from the east. No one "owned" the Mother Earth; they lived and moved freely in communities and among nations. Empire building sovereigns’ and the popes' treasuries, land, and natural resources were more treasured than life or freedom, itself.
 The thunderous government-military war supporting land grabbers and special interests over Native American life struck down and eliminated their food supply—the buffalo; their game and mighty bear disappeared, their woodlands clearcut. The holocaust of buffalo shot from trains for sport, maybe hides, but rarely for food, were left by railroad companies and their construction crews to rot on the spot where they fell, miles and miles of stinking, rotting carcasses wasted for "sport," and not food.
 Alienated from their land, their families, their culture and their religion and life itself, native peoples were ineluctably and deliberately exterminated in the millions by mass murder, European sexual contagion and disease, destroying their world and therefore degrading all of us implicitly in this deed! Denying like Cain our murdering deed, barely a remnant of Nations remain but the sparkling brook and blooming woods that overshadow white-faced graves!
 Through the romanticizing glorifying of the Old West, white people remain in denial, ignorant of those Nations, the nature of their present day existence, successes, and remaining political and social barriers and problems, and ignorant of the hopes of Native American people living on and the 60 percent who live off the reservation!
 We citizens don’t hear when, and see how political and civil constitutional rights of these sovereign nations are constantly challenged and continually eroded by vast state, regional, and national governmental bureaucracy, mining, corporate-business, gaming, and other special interest groups; and exacerbated by our uneducated, making money off stereotypical, insensitive naming of sports teams and mascots, and politically corrupting, unregulated campaign financing, of greedy legislators and wealthy congressional representatives who had personal wealth sufficient to buy and spend their way into office.
 Seemingly, rather, we see only the romance of the artist's versions of the West: of braves, horses, landscapes, and yesteryears chiefs, in solemn dress and countenance, all speaking the same things in the same way, merrily gracing our book shelves or coffee tables!
 We "WASPS" would not tolerate for one day these same economic and political forces maintaining and continuing the drain of taxes from urban ghettos and blight, and flight to rich suburbia, sucking away city, state and federal tax dollars for new schools, subdivisions, and roads, for corporate welfare, and deferred tax paid flight, like swooshes of giant vacuum cleaners, that sucks away money, taking wing and the jobs fly away with them, out of public transportation reach. No losing tax and job based starving community budget district can fill the potholes, enforce housing and rental codes, and provide or even upgrade education and school district facilities, or community outreach and services. We are all affected by the absence of quality of life concerns of our neighbors and neighborhoods.
 These same economic and political forces are internationally at work exporting the pernicious "free trade" rush to the "bottom line," "economic development," "objective-management" mentality with seemingly no off setting balance for the "human line" of community well being, rewarding good community faith with good will investments. A fair trade agreement would prevent exporting American jobs and decreasing wages, and increasing environmental deforestation, development, and destruction to those countries facing economic inflation and destabilization of populations and resources. Pandering to conglomerates and well financed development-entrepreneurs with unrestrained economic, labor, government, and environmental access, low or no taxes (there or in the US!) exports the same cynicism we citizens experience of our own indigenous, disenfranchised, and all people in the minority, the underemployed and the working poor world—wide, we will recall these heartbreaking stories to our posterity—how we overcame the poverty of the body and of the spirit found in this liberating and healing history for the whole person, both spiritually personal, and socially political.! The following will more adequately describe some of the contemporary issues native peoples are faced with in the USA.

Deloria Challenges White World View

 I’m intentionally reading again my professional Christian books with new eyes, of a new spirituality that has taken and challenged not only my cultural imagination, but challenged me to my very emotional and intellectual depths. My mentor is none other than Vine Deloria, Jr., Junior, a prodigiously educated philosopher, theologian, prolific educator and activist of the first American nations. I have learned so much about myth, metaphor, religion, science, space, time, and history from this Native American perspective and honesty that without “easing up” on myself from this virtually unheralded, untouted, comprehensive evaluation, I would have no new ground on which to frame my writing, my critiques of our Western European selves and world view.  Although these Western European characteristics will be spelled out more completely in the narrative below, suffice it to say, the critique centers on our particularly Western world view that is called scientific, rational, linear, historical and religious concepts, etc. The contemporary paradigm of ancient-traditional nations for freedom, whose councils, government, and communities were so democratic and remarkably freeing and just to its people's needs and wishes, our founders Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin structured these valued principles into our Constitution as a model! Of course, once these are reduced to concepts and put on to paper, like treaties, they can be easily burned, broken, ignored, or illegally abrogated for the value of paper is cheap.
 Deloria’s many books go very deeply into my conscious and unconscious dreams. His most famous book and treatise, God is Red, basically lays out the general social systems and cultural philosophies and viewpoints of indigenous nations and compares them with the evolution and useful, instructive critique of how they clash with the deadly Western European masculinist, classist, and heterosexist ideology, its history and world view.

Time and Space

 When the world views of the Native Americans are contrasted with the imported assumptions of the immigrants who have been unable to find roots in this land, a great philosophical fundamental difference emerges. American Indians hold their lands—places—as having the highest possible meaning, and all their statements are made with this reference in mind. immigrants view the movement of their ancestors across the contingent as a steady progression of basically good events and experiences, thereby placing history as marks in a linear time in the highest value, as the best perspective or world view of reality. The tick tock of a clock or digital watch, paces our frantic lives into a melt down of activity, with no other perspective to change our spirits into the special realty of the here a now awarenesses of being present and possible light.
 When one group is concerned with the philosophical problem of space and the other with the philosophical problem of time, then the statements of either group do not make sense when transferred from one context to the other without the proper consideration of what is happening.
 Western European peoples have never learned to consider the nature of the world from a spatial point of view. And a singular difficulty faces peoples of Western European heritage in making a transition from thinking in terms of time to thinking in terms of space. The very essence of Western European identity involves the assumption that time proceeds in a linear fashion; further it assumes that at a particular point of the unraveling of this sequence, the peoples of Western Europe became guardians of mankind. The same ideology that sparked the Crusades, the Age of Exploration, the Age of Imperialism, and the recent crusade against Communist all involve the affirmation that time is peculiarly related to the destiny of the peoples of Western Europe. And later of course, the US.
 It is particularly revealing that the first major doctrine enunciated as an anti-communist foreign policy was that of containment. In containment it was believed the spread of Communism would be restricted to certain geographical areas from which no further intrusions of Communist ideologies could emanate. The anachronistic nature of this theory should be apparent. Western political ideas came to depend on spatial restrictions of what was essentially non-spatial ideas. The inherent contradiction of opposing dissimilar definitions within a single theory proved fruitless to the colonial powers in Southeast Asia, Africa, and India. The determination of two American Presidents not to be the "first to lose a war," when winning that war in any final sense would have meant total destruction of a land and a people, would seem to indicate the extent to which Western European peoples—and particularly Americans—have taken the dimension of time as an absolute value. Our withdrawal from Southeast Asia would seem to show that in some collisions, history is clearly abrogated by geography... Napoleon and Hitler's attempts to conquer the vast interior of Russia subdued...the crest of historical change.

The Disclaimer of Colonialism

 The disclaimer of colonialism in recent years has presented Western Europeans with a major dilemma. Deprived of their traditional source of wealth from the undeveloped and formal colonial nations, they now have little choice but to seek ways of channeling their present wealth through the various forms of social organization already present domestically. A certain stasis has been achieved, perhaps unwittingly, which means a major shift in political thinking among Western peoples. The creation of wealth today is more dependent on new technology than on the exploitation of untapped resources. This is not to say that exploitation of mineral and other resources will not continue. As undeveloped nations continue their own growth, severe modifications of exploitation must occur as well as more sophisticated form of colonialism, if Western European countries are not to suffer economic collapse.
 It is doubtful if very many Americans understand the fundamental nature of this shift from the colonialist attitude. At best it means a humanization of peoples who for centuries were considered merely producers of raw materials and consumers of those producers of those products they were allowed to share. At worst the end of one form of colonialism means the beginning of a movement to feudalize political systems around the globe so as to stabilize the economic conditions of the more affluent nations. Either approach means that the ecological problem is not dealt with, the problem of technological dehumanization is not reduced, and the breakdown of individual and community identity is not reversed.
 There can be little doubt that a major part of the Western European world is now suffering etc.
 ...The disappearance of time itself is a limiting factor of our experience. In a world in which communications are nearly instantaneous and simultaneous experiences are possible, it must be space that in a fundamental way distinguishes us from one another, not time.

Not a Global Village

 The world, therefore, is not a global villager so much as a series of non-homogeneous pockets of identity that must be thrust into eventual conflict, because they represent different arrangements of emotional energy. What these pockets of energy will produce, how they will understand themselves, and what mini-movements will emerge from them are among the unanswered questions of our time. If we believe that religion has a presence in human societies in any fundamental sense, then we can no longer speak of universal religions in the customary manner. Rather we must be prepared to confront religion and religious activities in new and novel ways. The absence of a homogeneous sense of time, a universal history, must certainly make its appearance if it has not already done so.

Religion and Geographic Location

 Beneath the mini-movements on the local level, we will most certainly find the emergence of religious movements that appear out of time, movements that have been somehow triggered either by the influences of the places in which they have originated or movements of restoration that seek to invoke some type of authentic religious experience to validate the identity of the emotional pocket. Already we are finding a fascination with the satanic in Southern California, long a hotbed of Fundamental Christianity, coupled with a determined drive to return to the comforting and reasonably debilitating religion of yesteryear.
 What may be particularly unnerving will be the apparent contradiction in social issues as triggered by the various currents of emotion moving in particular locations. In the last election the presence of a marijuana proposition and a rigid smut proposition on the California ballot may have indicate that the redefinition of religious principles has already begun to manifest itself. The unfortunate factor in both propositions was that both depended for their validity on traditional assumptions of social reality. Neither attempted to effect a fundamental change in conceptions of reality, only to move backward or forward along the traditional time scale of values.

The Impact of Time and Space on Religions

 The needed basic change depends on a realization of the revolutionary reorientation of definitions that must occur when time is negated and space becomes more dominant. Religion has often been seen as an evolutionary process in which mankind evolves a monotheistic conception of divinity by a gradual reduction of a pantheon to a single deity. The reality of religion thus becomes its ability to explain the universe, not to experience it. Creeds and beliefs replace immediate apprehension of whatever relationship may exist with higher powers. As time becomes less important in understanding religion, the whole monotheistic thesis is threatened. Yet our supernatural experiences do not necessarily lead to a monotheistic conclusion.
 So too with the related concepts of monotheism, that of revelation. In traditional terms a revelation occurs at a point in time, and succeeding generations are more dependent on their understanding of the original revelation than upon their immediate experience of deity. Almost all of the world religions are partially dependent on a revelation at some point in history. Contemporary people are more dependent on the validity of the original revelation of the religion in an educational sense than they are on their own immediate experience in a qualitative sense. For many religions this dependence means that belief replaces experience, and proofs of a logical nature are more relevant than additional revelations.
 Revelations must somehow be phrased in the cultural beliefs, languages, and world views of the time in which they occurred. As times change and cultures become more sophisticated, sciences come to present a broader view of the universe, and languages become infused with foreign words and concepts, and the original revelation also takes on a different aspect. Revelation has generally been considered a specific body of truth related to a particular individual at a specific time. This glimpse into the eternal, as it were, is too often taken as universally valid for all times and places. If the universal nature of religions has not been the subject of debate, it should be our immediate concern.
 In shifting from temporal concepts to spatial terms, we find that a revelation is not so much the period of time in which it occurs as the place it may occur. Revelation becomes a particular experience at a particular place, no universal truth emerging but an awareness arising that certain places have a qualitative holiness over and above other places. The universality of truth then becomes the relevance of the experience for a community of people, not its continual adjustment to evolving scientific and philosophical conceptions of the universe.
 Holy places are well known in what have been classified as primitive religions. The vast majority of Indian tribal religions have a center at a particular place, be it river, mountain, plateau, valley, or other natural feature. Many of the smaller non universal religions also depend on as number of holy places for the practice of their religious activities. I part the affirmation of the existence of holy places confirms tribal peoples’ rootedness, which Western European man is peculiarly without. The development of shrines in the religious life of the practitioners of world religions would seem to indicate that this spatial dimension cannot be avoided as men seek religious experiences. Why then must theological reality be defined solely in temporal terms as in Christianity?
 One of the features of Western European religious practice has been the dependence on teaching and preaching techniques. The Christian religion has been singularly involved with proclamations of its "good news." primarily through missionary activity and exhortations to its believers of the efficacy of its ethical system. It places a major reliance on the possibility of individual personality change in seeking followers. It has, however, been notoriously inept at invoking within its adherents a high standard of conduct.
 Changing the conception of religious reality from temporal to spatial terms involves severely downgrading the teaching and preaching aspect of religious activity. Rearrangement of individual behavior patterns is incidental to communal involvement in ceremonies and the continual renewing of community relationships with the holy places of revelation. Ethics flow from the ongoing life of the community and are virtually indistinguishable from tribal or communal customs. There is little dependence, either on an individual or community basis, on the concept of progress. Value judgments involve present community reality and not reliance on past or future golden ages toward which the community is allegedly moving or from which the community has veered.
 In conjunction with this notion, the severance of religious reality from the other aspects of community experience is not as distinct. A religion defined according to temporal considerations is placed continually on the defensive in maintaining its control over historical events. If, like the Hebrews of the Old Testament, political, economic, and cultural events can be interpreted as religious events, the religious time and the secular time can be made to appear to coincide. If, however, the separation becomes more or less permanent, as in Christianity and Western European concepts of history, then religion becomes a function of political interpretations as in the Manifest Destiny theories of American history, or it becomes secularized as an economic determinism as in Communist theories of history. Either way the religion soon becomes helpless to intervene in the events of real life, except in a peripheral and oblique manner.
 The variety of mankind’s religious forms has often been understood as involving various stages of community existence. In a theological interpretation that sees time as predominant, the only relationship that can occur between religions is one of judging according to preconditions cultural values. From this type of attitude, stretching along a historical rime scale, religious reality is judged according to the cultural technology produced by the society. The ultimate nature of religious activity becomes secondary to the material productions demonstrable by the particular group.
 Eliminating temporal considerations from an examination of religious activities, we are left with the question of the function of religion in societies. Do religions differ because they involve different relationships between a community and the lands on which it lives? One would be led to consider this relatively simple question for the first time in a new sense by observing the different religions in relation to the lands on which they live and not to their supposed position along an evolutionary scale. The rain dance of the Southwestern Indians, for example, is probably almost totally dependent upon the nature of the lands on which those Indians live. For example, one cannot imagine the Indians of the Pacific Northwest needing or having a rain dance. Instead, therefore, of attempting to find categories to explain the development of each religion over a period of time, we are led more to an examination of the nature of the lands upon which the community must exist. Religion thus becomes a present examination of community needs and values, not a progression of conceptual advances.
 Time has an unusual limitation. It must begin and end at some real points, or it must be conceived as cyclical in nature, endlessly allowing the repetitions of patterns of possibilities. Judgment inevitably intrudes into the conception of religious reality whenever a temporal definition is used. Almost always the temporal consideration revolves around the problem of good and evil, and the inconsistencies that arise as this basic relationship is defined almost always turn religious beliefs into ineffectual systems of ethics.
 Space has limitations that are primarily geographical and any sense of time arising within the religious experience becomes secondary to present geographical existence. The danger that appears to be lurking in spatial conceptions of religion is their effect of missionary activity on religion. Can it leave the land of its nativity and embark on a program of world or continental conquest without losing its religious essence in favor of purely political or economic considerations? Are ceremonies restricted to particular places, and do they become useless in a foreign land? These questions have never been raised in a fundamental manner within Western European religious circles, because of the preemption of temporal considerations by Christian theology.
 The problem of religious imagery is also confounded wh