View from the Shore vs. View from the Ship: Redthought Reality
The paradigm choice for understanding American history
America’s claim to a right of domination over Native nations and peoples dominates the way American history is studied.
A subscriber to my Substack recently highlighted this domination in an email he sent me:
Your positions have challenged me. I almost wrote something about "indigenous people in American history." Then, mid sentence, I realized that I have the cart and horse reversed: "American history" is properly an episode among the history of this land's indigenous people.
He elaborated in a comment on my interview with John Kane:
I realize that I have been trained to consider American history as a top-level category: other genres of histories (political history, women’s history, Civil War history, etc) derive from the source called American history. After listening to [your] interview [with John Kane], I am thinking anew, considering how American history is the subgenre.
These remarks highlight the necessity of a proper starting point to study American “civilization” — how it was constructed and is still maintained as a claim of a right of domination over Native nations and peoples.
I invite you to take the journey that sees colonization not as a beginning point, a “top-level category”, but as an interruption of the original free and independent existence of Native peoples on Turtle Island….
My friend Steve Newcomb coined a pithy phrase to contrast these two approaches:
“The view from the shore versus the view from the ship”
The view from the shore looks with Native eyes at the colonial invasion and subsequent building of “American civilization”.
The view from the ship looks with colonial eyes at “discovery” and “conquest” of the “new world”.
The following three books are must-read to get the cart and horse arranged properly:
Steven Newcomb's book, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, reveals and challenges the presumption that Native nations and peoples are legitimately subject to United States domination.
My book, Federal Anti-Indian Law: The Legal Entrapment of Indigenous Peoples, builds on Steve’s challenge and provides a comprehensive critique of how the US legal system maintains a claim of a right of domination into the present day.
Arguments over Genocide: The War of Words in the Congress and the Supreme Court over Cherokee Removal, by another friend, Steven Schwartzberg, builds on these two books with a detailed empirical study of the intentions of the framers of the US Constitution as they debated the claim of a right of domination leading to “Indian removal” and the “Trail of Tears”.
JoDe Goudy, organizer of Redthought.org, expands the historical analysis into “a journey of identity and how we relate to the World”.
JoDe says the Redthought Journey begins with six important questions about identity, presented in this short video:
When you have established a point of reference from which you view the World, you can take a look at reality, as presented in the next short video:
When you have reflected on the six questions of identity and thought about right relations and wrong relations, you are ready to look deeper into yourself and the world around you:
I invite you to take the journey that sees colonization not as a beginning point, but as an interruption of the original free and independent existence of Native peoples on Turtle Island….
As a helpful reminder of what came first, Liz Walker shared this essay about the Winter Solstice:
Many thousands of years before the Christian Christmas or the Jewish Hanukkah were created, indigenous people celebrated the Winter Solstice. The seasons, the sun, the moon, the earth, Nature—these have been honored and worshipped since humans were human, since the most ancient times.
This is very helpful. It opens a path to thinking about the possibilities for our history (the history of the eurochristians and their secular successors) entering into thousands of years of ongoing Indigenous history and culture rather than absorbing the Native Nations into our culture by force and violence—it opens a path to a different way of looking at the past and the future which might help to improve the present
I'm so ready to manifest a new reality and have been attempting to for a long time but so very difficult because then I'm ostracized by all colonizers around me and my child as well and there's not many like-mInded people!