Thursday, July 12, 2018


Definitions are crucial to many laws and theories.  What are we really talking about?  Is what I call a tree the same as what you call a tree?  Is what I call conservative what you call conservative?  Are the Bering Straits not a land bridge at all but a country that is low enough in the water that it was marshy before inundation, but only submerged, not gone.

Here's the size of the area that was once "Bering Straits" and how it overlaps both Asia and America.  It's clear that it is the land that was not quite torn apart when the two continents drifted away from each other due to tectonic forces powered by volcanic action under the Pacific Ocean.

Beringia, a country engulfed.
Of course, it was never a country, but it was once a wide land mass.

This is what Beringia would have looked like before it was submerged.  
Pretty much grassy prairie or muskeg.

What ARE "straits" anyway?  There are lots of them.

The formal definition is:  "a narrow passage of water connecting two seas or two large areas of water."  Or "strait is a naturally formed, narrow, typically navigable waterway that connects two larger bodies of water. Most commonly it is a channel of water that lies between two land masses." Like the Straits of Gibraltar or (north of Seattle) Deception Pass.

"Strait" is a geological term that assumes one is traveling on water between land, not that there is a bridge over water.  It was ridiculous from the beginning to call this shallow land a "strait".  The term is wrong-side out, implying narrow land between two big bodies of water.   Better to call it "Atlantis North".  Probably it was settled by hunter-gatherers and animated by herds of browsers like mastodons and their predators.  

It's not that everyone decided to march over a "bridge" in a line, like that schematic of animal evolution that everyone likes so much -- from flopping fish to proud Harvard grad (who drew the idea that put him at the lead) -- but that people kept settling farther and farther east until they were in North America before it had a name or mental image.  Probably before there were glaciers, since it was their melting that made the waters rise, just as the melting of the poles is making waters rise now.  Manhattan and Florida are the next drowned "country."  They are not and never will be "land bridges."

Lately there begins to be curiosity about what the people were like who slowly pushed east to North American and who were then extinguished by the glaciers or just moved away.  They may have come from Europe as well, but no one pretended there was a land bridge on that side.  Islands persist.  I don't know how deep the water around them might be.  That area has been habitable in the historical recorded past.

But it also very clear to my mind that the people of SE Asia got to South America much earlier than the melting of the continental glaciers.  Where there is water, there is food, so they would not have starved.  They were a water-living people with small but sea-going vessels.

Obviously the white "deciders" developed the vocabulary of land according to their concepts -- what they knew -- and then imposed that on the reality they met.   But also, the indigenous people in their effort to become accepted, to be correct, have fought the result ("there was no bridge!") instead of the cause, have used their legitimate resentment as a forced resistance instead of going to the underlying re-framing that is persuasive.  The latter takes longer but also lasts longer. 

In the summers of 2001 through 2006, Piegan Institute sponsored Summer Seminars organized by Roslyn LaPier, an enrolled Blackfeeet then working on a degree at the University of Montana in Missoula, where she was eventually employed as an associate professor.  The first seminar was "Blackfeet history and places along Apaatohs-ohsokoi.  (The Old North Trail)".  

First thought of this seminar was responding to 1801-1802 maps made public from the Hudson's Bay archives in Winnipeg.  Ted Binnema provided copies.  This is what I wrote in notes:  "They are indeed along the east slope of the Rockies, which is where the braided trail ran north and south for millenia, a mixture of game trails and travois paths that can still be seen if you know where to look.  Using the descriptions on the map (which are in terms of landmarks, mostly peaks and valleys that run into the mountains) and reasoning about how far a group could move in a day and what sort of place they would choose to camp, the approximate location of points on the map could be found.  Binnema presented slides he had taken from each of those locations."  His doctoral thesis had been developed into a book called “Common and Contested Ground: a human and environmental study of the northwestern plains.”

Bouncing off of that was the work of Narcisse Blood and Ryan HeavyHead.  (Narcisse was killed in a car accident a few years later, a terrible loss.)  "Narcisse and Ryan arrived a little late, lean and sunburned in straw hats, carrying well-worn backpacks.  The presentation was about the GPS locating of three old dog trails and one horse trail that run roughly north/south along the Rockies.  He and his co-workers had been walking those trails all summer."

It turns out something like the joke about cowgirls being merely transportation of beer from the place of chugging to the place of peeing.  The early people ate chokecherries and carried the seeds to new camps.  With this clue, big clusters of chokecherries and sarvisberries, and also by figuring how far dogs could go in a day, as well as how far a horse could travel without water and grass, they used GPS instruments to  give camp spots specific crosshairs.  Back at Red Crow College, a table-sized map-drawing computer made these points into a traditional map.  Thus modern technology was used to push aside European assumptions (though the trading post factors (managers) had carefully preserved the maps) and bring it all together into new info and insights.  The coordinates could be used to focus satellite attention, another way to look at terrain.

Thus terms and assumptions from Europe and Western technology are explored by feet and eyes on the ground, until the eyes in the sky add input, and new maps emerge for a new people.

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