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ORAL TRADITION: ANCIENT WORDS; ORAL TRADITION AND THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE. OF THE AMERICAS
The oral tradition of the indigenous people of the Americas has not been recognized as a source of history for the past five hundred years. Instead, the Western world has reduced it to the category of folklore or the study of superstitions, in which the oral tradition of indigenous people has been seen as a remnant of the past, and the expressed ignorance of the people who created them.(1) The denial of indigenous creativity, knowledge, and histories during the process of Western capitalist expansion has created what Eric Wolf has called "a continent of people without history."(2) It is then assumed that indigenous peoples have nothing valuable to offer Western civilization other than their supposedly distorted or erroneous observations of nature expressed in their oral traditions.
This ethnocentric view of "otherness" was the milieu in which early scholars intended to explain the modes of life in traditional non-Western societies. During the same time there were several attempts to prove the opposite, but the aggressiveness of the explorers and the false explanation of the natives' "exotic" cultures by early evolutionists stereotyped the natives as having a prelogical mind -- an assumption that cemented the denigrating and unequal treatment of indigenous people.(3) For indigenous people, however, the oral tradition is essential to the maintenance of each group's cultural identity, and serves as a reflection of how societies dynamically shape their destiny, adapting their oral tradition to different historical circumstances in time and space.(4) I emphasize the importance of the oral tradition as a historical method used by indigenous people to document and link the past with the present, while projecting into the future. In this process, which Victoria Bricker has called the "telescoping of time,"(5) memory is of vital importance in order to maintain such a connection. For this reason, it is important to recognize that oral traditions persist among indigenous people despite the impact of Western technology (mass media communication), literacy, and print capitalism.(6)
THE ORAL TRADITION AND INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES The oral tradition is an important mechanism for ensuring a culture's continued existence. The elders are usually the ones who tell their experiences to the young, and in the process they create or...