Apple Indians & Anthropology

Popping in from the cold to post up ‘Boners for Beringia’, a reworked, updated version of my essay ‘Apple Indians & Anthropology.’  Boners for Beringia will perhaps (at first blush) disappoint those readers of ronaldthomaswest.com who’re fans of my past work in geopolitical analysis. But this essay should be read by those very people for a simple, straightforward reason; it is a social analysis of self-deceit and denial endemic to contemporary western civilization, both of which happen to be root characteristics in geopolitics. Intelligence agencies both; exploit and suffer from these very same blind spots. In science, these social phenomena are demonstrated as a sort of crude narcissism:

September 2021 update: human footprints dated to 23,000 years ago found in New Mexico… and so the boners for Beringia must someday become flaccid. Moving forward, we see evidence that resembles the black comedian’s joke who’d once stated “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt” when it comes to the Western ‘science’ of anthropology:

“Here we present results of recent excavations at Chiquihuite Cave—a high-altitude site in central-northern Mexico—that corroborate previous findings in the Americas10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17of cultural evidence that dates to the Last Glacial Maximum (26,500–19,000 years ago)18, and which push back dates for human dispersal to the region possibly as early as 33,000–31,000 years ago. The site yielded about 1,900 stone artefacts within a 3-m-deep stratified sequence, revealing a previously unknown lithic industry that underwent only minor changes over millennia”

Pre-Bering land bridge hypothesis (17,000 year old) DNA has been identified in a Blackfoot man in Montana:

“Crawford’s DNA story suggests his ancestors came from the Pacific, traveled to the coast of South America and traveled north”

19,000 year old stone tools have been found at precisely the wrong end of the Americas (southern Chile), so yeah, where were those ‘land bridge’ North Americans prior to 14,500 years ago? As well, several Amazon tribes have been discovered to be the most closely related (of all modern peoples) to the Austral-Asian peoples of Papua and Australia; with no comparable (or even remote) intermediate genetic relationships to the north of their Amazon location until you get to the Aleutian Islands and a population of late arrivals from Siberia. The most common sense explanation is the ancestral Austral-Asian type found in the Amazon tribes’ genetics journeyed to South America about the same period as Papua and Australia were initially peopled (40,000 to 60,000 years ago.) But, all those anthropologists with ‘Boners for Beringia’ have stretched logic (and inflated their credulity) by insisting these Amazon tribes genetics could only have arrived via Siberia within the last 15,000 years; while ignoring “New Evidence Puts Man in North America 50,000 Years Ago.”  There are numerous problems with the 15,000 years ‘mainstream’ postulate; it ignores evidence from linguistics, it ignores other cultural evidence, it ignores physical evidence, and most of all, it ignores the primitive and nativistic nature of western empiricism’s roots.

What began this rant is, an example of White on White denial. God forbid a handful of White people might have been in North America 12,000 years ago … because this would put a big dent in the ego of the White people who were concerned a mere 500+ years ago they might sail off the edge of the flat Earth. Never mind Copernicus and Galileo had some idea things like our planet might be round and rotating around the Sun a hundred or two hundred years before that. If White people had made it from Europe to North America in the ancient past, before earliest rise of so-called ‘Western Civilization’, what does that say about the White people whose science was killing their patients with blood-letting doctors as recently as 200 years ago? So, what is the example of recent hysterical denial of anthropology in relation to this? An 18 month old boy, found in Montana, who’d buried more than 12,000 years ago. Oh, and the fact he wasn’t White. This find, as posed by science, doesn’t square with Native Oral History and in the same moment, if you look at some facts conveniently ignored, suddenly it does square with Blackfoot Oral history but the anthropologists will flush this down the commode (like a junkie with the police at his door) at every opportunity. More on this, but first:

There is completely ignored (by physical & cultural anthropologists) linguistics study from the 1990s, pointing to Native American migration beginning in South America some 40,000 years ago indicating migration from south to north:

“When North America was an ice-age tundra, the first Americans were “cooking” their cultures in the tropical south, moving northward and settling as the glaciers retreated, according to new linguistic evidence from indigenous languages throughout the New World.

“The evidence suggests that humans have been in the Americas for a very long time, perhaps 40,000 years. It also suggests that most native American languages derived from Ice Age inhabitants who were isolated in the Western Hemisphere for many millennia.

“Only along the west coast do languages appear to come from immigrants who arrived after the Ice Age 14,000 years ago, a Berkeley linguist reports”

The linguistics study is consistent with Blackfoot Oral History.

But when advances in DNA supported this preceding study, physical and cultural anthropology couldn’t bring themselves to admit to the possibility, and so they invented ‘trapped in Beringia’ for 20,000 years:

“UF [University of Florida] scientists analyzed DNA sequences from Native American, New World and Asian populations with the understanding that modern DNA is forged by an accumulation of events in the distant past, and merged their findings with data from existing archaeological, geological and paleoecological studies.

“The result is a unified, interdisciplinary theory of the “peopling” of the New World, which shows a gradual migration and expansion of people from Asia through Siberia and into Beringia starting about 40,000 years ago; a long waiting period in Beringia where the population size remained relatively stable; and finally a rapid expansion into North America through Alaska or Canada about 15,000 years ago”

The problem with the preceding is, it does not take into account the languages requiring diffusion over a vast area and the evidence the languages provide pointing to a migration from the south with only the most recent languages making the Siberia connection, and in a limited West coast geography. Unfortunately, the UF “interdisciplinary theory” seems to lack inclusiveness with any study pointing to credible alternatives.

Then we have the Solutrean points of Western Europe:

Compared to the Clovis points of North America:

The proposal the Native American Clovis is derived from the Western Europe’s Solutrean… is also consistent with Blackfoot Oral History…

…but has been dismissed by anthropologists claiming the DNA Native Americans hold in common with Paleolithic Western Europeans of roughly the same era cannot have come via the Atlantic route because of another, 24,000 year old, boy found in Southern Siberia (a LONG ways from Beringia) with European genes also has DNA markers common to modern Native Americans:

“Genetically, this individual had no east Asian resemblance but looked like Europeans and people from west Asia. But the thing that was really mind-blowing was that there were signatures you only see in today’s Native Americans”

But the boy can’t be Native American according to land bridge worshiping anthropologists with this far-fetched logic:

“Willerslev’s team suggests that after the ancestors of Native Americans split off from those of east Asians, they moved north. Somewhere in Siberia, they met another group of people coming east from western Eurasia — the people to whom the Mal’ta boy belonged. The two groups mingled, and their descendants eventually travelled east into North America”

The automatic assumption is the South Siberian boy is the ancestral type which did not appear in North America until 10,000 years later, demanding the unique Native American DNA markers arrived via the Bering land bridge only 15,000  years ago. This stretch of the imagination presumes the boy from 24,000 years ago has a bloodline which had come from very far away from where would be expected (Western Europe) and yet absolutely no thought is given to the idea the modern, exclusively Native American DNA match also found in the boy could have originated with a population already in the Americas for 16,000 years prior to the Siberian boys death some 24,000 years ago. In effect, it is demanded by science that if you put a 24,000 year old uniquely Native American bloodline with shared DNA of Western Europe’s Paleolithic people, in southern Siberia, as far from its Western European Paleolithic roots as it is from uniquely Native American matched DNA, it has to be European/Asian precursor of people who later migrated to the Americans and cannot be Native American. The Bering land bridge is demanded to be a one way street and no one is allowed to live on the American side of the bridge prior to 15,000 years past. It never occurs to the anthropologists the Siberian boy might have Native American ancestry which had migrated from the Americas to Siberia within the past 25,000 or so years, no matter how much more sense this might make. It is (direct line) 4,000 miles from Portugal, where you would expect to find the Western European Paleolithic genetic makers (and from where a sea crossing might be made) to Florida and by far more distance overland (via Siberia) west to east than the direct (west to east) 10,000 miles from Portugal to near where the genetically related (to the Siberian) Montana boy was found. The anthropological assumption automatically denies people might have known how to make sea crossings between 12,000 and 40,000 years ago. This specific denial can only be founded on the ethno-centric bias of scientists whose own history indicates a belief in a flat Earth a mere 500+ years past (ok, so this last was a Washington Irving joke but it’s not far off the mark.)

And the insistence there could not have been an Atlantic crossing to explain the European genetic markers is hammered on:

“This new origin story helps to resolve several peculiarities in New World archaeology. For example, ancient skulls found in both North and South America have features that do not resemble those of East Asians. They also carry the mitochondrial haplogroup X, which is related to western Eurasian lineages but not to east Asian ones.

“On the basis of these features, some scientists have suggested that Native Americans descended from Europeans who sailed west across the Atlantic. However, says Willerslev, “you don’t need a hypothesis that extreme””

A simple but undesirable “hypothesis that extreme” of a 4,000 mile sea voyage has been replaced with a hyper-convoluted and much less likely hypothesis a more than the (direct west to east line) 10,000 mile overland trek requiring 20,000 years ‘trapped in Beringia’ to protect the land bridge theory.

Now let’s return to the boy from 12,000+ years ago found in Montana and identified with Clovis culture and the sweeping assumptions surrounding his discovery:

“another theory, supported only by archaeological evidence, was that ancient Native Americans came from people who migrated across the Atlantic Ocean from Western Europe before the last Ice Age—the so-called Solutrean hypothesis. “This genetic study provides unequivocal evidence that this did not happen,” said coauthor Michael Waters, a geoarcheologist at the Texas A&M University

“[the] genome also suggests that modern Native Americans are direct descendants of the Clovis population. The ancient genome is similar to those of peoples from both North and South America, suggesting that a single founding population migrated into the Americas close to the time of the last Ice Age” [in effect, 15,000 years ago]

More hammering by the anthros on killing the Atlantic crossing, they never tire of it but here’s a bit more:

A new DNA study has found sudden explosion of particular male Y chromosomes in the Americas about 15,000 years ago. This would fit nicely with the arrival of Solutrean (i.e. Clovis) technology from Europe…

“The best explanation is that they may have resulted from advances in technology that could be controlled by small groups of men. Wheeled transport, metal working and organised warfare are all candidate explanations that can now be investigated further”

…but the study avoids any mention of the possibility of a Solutrean source of this event in the Americas as though it were plague. But in fact the timeline bears investigating in this regard; if there were a single, small, incursion of Solutrean technology into the Americas around the end of that culture in Europe 16,000 years ago, a 15,000 years ago genetics impact in the Americas is not implausible; as it would take some time for the seed or understanding of the new technology to take hold in a demonstrated way. By 13,500 years ago Clovis has been established. This is not an unreasonable timeline to mesh 3 events; 1) arrival of Solutrean technology 2) associated Y chromosome explosion by those adopting the technology and 3) establishment of Clovis technology.

Going to the western science endemic denial and omission of possibilities, just for a laugh, let’s try this:

In the year 14016, precisely 12,000 years into our post-nuclear world’s future, archaeologists dig up a Native American in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion, in Africa. The automatic assumption could easily be ‘His genetic markers proves the French were Native Americans.’ Or, ‘Black Africans colonized the Central African Republic and exterminated the aboriginal [Native American] inhabitants’ based on a 10,000 years old previous [genetically Black African] find. These scenarios are no more far-fetched than the land bridge worshipers proposals.

The actual problem I’m pointing to here is, culture (and associated tools) are not necessarily race/genetic specific. A sweeping claim based on a single example, the Montana burial, is like determining a French speaking Black African cannot trace his cultural origin to Alsace or Normandy. Culture is not DNA, one cannot be categorically tied to the other. Widely divergent peoples borrow or swap ideas. Now, to a related controversy:

The Clovis culture was proposed to have been wiped out (together with the mega-fauna) by a comet impact, causing the so-called ‘Younger Dryas’ period in archaeology.

“Working at multiple sites across the continent, researchers found nanodiamonds – microscopic particles thought to be found on comets – in a 13,000-year-old layer of rich sedimentary soil called a “black mat.” Beneath the layer with the nanodiamonds, fossils of the animals are abundant. After that layer, they disappear

“It’s extraordinary that tens of millions of animals disappeared synchronously at exactly the time when the diamonds and carbon layer are laid down across the continent”

“Arrowheads and other artifacts from the Clovis culture of humans – an early hunter-gatherer society – also vanish after the black mat was laid down 13,000 years ago”

This is consistent with Blackfoot Oral History but the Bering land bridge worshipers scream ‘Fantasy!‘ …

“The theory has reached zombie status,” said Professor Andrew Scott from the Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway. “Whenever we are able to show flaws and think it is dead, it reappears with new, equally unsatisfactory, arguments. Hopefully new versions of the theory will be more carefully examined before they are published”

… concerning the comet theory, claiming, among other things, contaminated samples compromised the North American study but required ignoring this multiple continents study:

“We present detailed geochemical and morphological analyses of nearly 700 spherules from 18 sites in support of a major cosmic impact at the onset of the Younger Dryas episode (12.8 ka). The impact distributed ∼10 million tonnes of melted spherules over 50 million square kilometers on four continents. Origins of the spherules by volcanism, anthropogenesis, authigenesis, lightning, and meteoritic ablation are rejected on geochemical and morphological grounds. The spherules closely resemble known impact materials derived from surficial sediments melted at temperatures >2,200 °C. The spherules correlate with abundances of associated melt-glass, nanodiamonds, carbon spherules, aciniform carbon, charcoal, and iridium

“Airbursts/impacts by a fragmented comet or asteroid have been proposed at the Younger Dryas onset (12.80 ± 0.15 ka) based on identification of an assemblage of impact-related proxies, including microspherules, nanodiamonds, and iridium. Distributed across four continents at the Younger Dryas boundary (YDB), spherule peaks have been independently confirmed in eight studies, but unconfirmed in two others, resulting in continued dispute about their occurrence, distribution, and origin. To further address this dispute and better identify YDB spherules, we present results from one of the largest spherule investigations ever undertaken regarding spherule geochemistry, morphologies, origins, and processes of formation. We investigated 18 sites across North America, Europe, and the Middle East, performing nearly 700 analyses on spherules using energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy for geochemical analyses and scanning electron microscopy for surface microstructural characterization. Twelve locations rank among the world’s premier end-Pleistocene archaeological sites, where the YDB marks a hiatus in human occupation or major changes in site use. Our results are consistent with melting of sediments to temperatures >2,200 °C by the thermal radiation and air shocks produced by passage of an extraterrestrial object through the atmosphere; they are inconsistent with volcanic, cosmic, anthropogenic, lightning, or authigenic sources. We also produced spherules from wood in the laboratory at >1,730 °C, indicating that impact-related incineration of biomass may have contributed to spherule production. At 12.8 ka, an estimated 10 million tonnes of spherules were distributed across ∼50 million square kilometers, similar to well-known impact strewnfields and consistent with a major cosmic impact event”

This is also consistent with Blackfoot Oral History as explained to myself by Floyd Heavyrunner in a close association that spanned 37 years:

The Blackfoot precursor people arrived by sea in the very far south during the period of the mega-fauna. They migrated north where they encountered a race of Whites they had inter-married with, and these Whites taught them survival in their new land. Specifically, clearly, they were taught how to make stone points. There also was a celestial impact that destroyed their world together with the mega-fauna and left few survivors. These are the stories of two separate peoples who mingled into one people. What is not clear is whether they met and mingled pre or post impact. The White race they mingled with seems to have been a scarce minority or remnant people, and this fact tends me to believe it was post impact, but we actually do not know. What is clear, from the Blackfoot Oral historical view is, there had been inter-racial and inter-cultural mixing in the Americas. There was an impact event. And it follows, after the impact, there would be large areas of North America vacated of previous life and culture, opening these areas wide to migrants from the south, consistent with the linguistics study cited towards the beginning of this article and Blackfoot Oral History. And a stone point cannot be specific to DNA, no different to French language cannot be specific to the DNA of Northern Europe, millions of Black Africans speak French. Entire Native American tribes now only speak English, pointing to culture (language IS a cultural marker) cannot necessarily be definitively tied to any one populations bloodlines.

Thought provoking, but tangential and yet to be fully explored is the fact of Polynesian DNA found in South America:

“”Everything was both surprising and exciting from the very start,” Pena says. “The first thought that came to my mind was that we had the rule out the possibility of some contamination, although it would be difficult exactly of that kind, since there were no Polynesian individuals in the chain of custody.” Another lab ultimately independently confirmed these findings”

And Native American blood found in Polynesia:

“the ancient Polynesian people who populated Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, were not as isolated as long believed. Scientists who conducted a genetic study, published on Thursday in the journal Current Biology, found these ancient people had significant contact with Native American populations hundreds of years before the first Westerners reached the island in 1722…

“…Genetic data on 27 Easter Island natives indicated that interbreeding between the Rapa Nui and native people in South America occurred roughly between 1300 and 1500.

“We found evidence of gene flow between this population and Native American populations, suggesting an ancient ocean migration route between Polynesia and the Americas,” said geneticist Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas of the Center for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, who led the study”

And then you have pre-Columbian, American sweet potato migration from Ecuador and Peru to Polynesia:

“Using complementary sets of markers (chloroplast and nuclear microsatellites) and both modern and herbarium samples, we test the tripartite hypothesis. Our results provide strong support for prehistoric transfer(s) of sweet potato from South America (Peru-Ecuador region) into Polynesia”

And then, the bottle gourd is particularly interesting, cultivated in Mexico for 10,000 years:

“Domesticated bottle gourds have been identified in the Americas at sites such as Guila Naquitz in Mexico by ~10,000 years ago. DNA sequences of rinds discovered in precontact America are of the Asian sub-variety” *

Now, the problem with this (for the land bridge worshipers) is Asian bottle gourds are not likely going to drift across the Pacific to Mexico, the currents between subtropical Asia and Subtropical America are predominately the opposite direction:

And what are the chances a sub-tropical plant is going to find its way on foot from south Asia via Siberian climate, across the land bridge and down to Mexico? Pretty far-fetched. The most likely scenario is the bottle gourd came across the Pacific in the possession of a sea-faring people previous to 10,000 years ago. In fact these gourds are found across Polynesia.

And then, the pre-Columbian Polynesian chicken introduction to South America also suggests prevailing currents point away from the gourd floating to sub-tropical regions of the Americas:

“Computer simulations suggest that voyaging eastward from Polynesia in the southern hemisphere where the mid-latitude westerlies are more accessible, is a more likely prospect than a northern route to the Americas. These southern hemisphere voyages would have brought landfalls in the central and southern regions of Chile and could have introduced the Polynesian chicken to South America”

What is interesting in the preceding is, pre-Colombian peoples are acknowledged to have been all over the Pacific, from Polynesia to South America, beginning from the Asian side, up to 4,000 years or farther in the past. So, why not the Atlantic 12,000 years ago? Or the Pacific 40,000 years previous to present? The answer is as simple as looking at your hand in front of your face, it is the ego of a recently primitive culture, represented in Western Anthropology, demands no Native Americans, the peoples whose lives they had destroyed, got anything right, before Copernicus, Galileo and Western culture’s adoption of Plato. But don’t forget, these people’s ‘civilization’ were still burning witches when Columbus landed in the Americas. Solutrean isn’t dead, it merely isn’t proven. But then, neither is much of what is taken as gospel by science proven. I have a good laugh, time to time, when it occurs the people and culture who were burning heretics a mere 500 years ago, hold to anything considered to be a definitive or empirically proven or dis-proven ‘truth.’

How about a ‘litmus test’ of self-veracity for western science? The human appendix was faithfully described by science as a ‘vestigial organ’ for what seemed like a very long time (how many decades? Centuries?) and then an ‘Eureka!’ moment came along within the last decade; the human appendix is a perfectly modern, functional organ whose purpose is restarting the gut flora, following a case of dysentery. It follows, it is immaterial whether Solutrean people were White or Black, whether they possibly walked over ice via Greenland or possibly arrived by sea, or didn’t arrive at all. What is material is, the culture that produced western science, that is to say science itself, in a sense, is still burning heretics.

Meanwhile, the ‘anthros’ discover Australasian blood in Brazil and the Aleutian islands, and (grudgingly) push the ‘first’ Americans arrival back to a possible 23,000 years (whilst ignoring the 50,000 years find), recalling:

19,000 year old stone tools have been found at precisely the wrong end of the Americas (southern Chile), so yeah, where were those ‘land bridge’ North Americans prior to 14,500 years ago? As well, several Amazon tribes have been discovered to be the most closely related (of all modern peoples) to the Austral-Asian peoples of Papua and Australia; with no comparable (or even remote) intermediate genetic relationships to the north of their Amazon location until you get to the Aleutian Islands and a population of late arrivals from Siberia. The most common sense explanation is the ancestral Austral-Asian type found in the Amazon tribes’ genetics journeyed to South America about the same period as Papua and Australia were initially peopled (40,000 to 60,000 years ago.) But, all those anthropologists with ‘Boners for Beringia’ have stretched logic (and inflated their credulity) by insisting these Amazon tribes genetics could only have arrived via Siberia within the last 15,000 years; while ignoring “New Evidence Puts Man in North America 50,000 Years Ago.”  There are numerous problems with this ‘mainstream’ postulate; it ignores evidence from linguistics, it ignores other cultural evidence, it ignores physical evidence, and most of all, it ignores the primitive and nativistic nature of western empiricism’s roots.

Relevant to this immediate preceding, it is clear from a BBC article the anthros with Boners for Beringia will never allow for a European (Solutrean) presence as they continue to deny, equivocate, stretch the imagination (in most close minded ways) and otherwise stick to the land bridge ‘scientific’ orthodoxy:

“[So] the fanciful ideas that somehow the Americas were populated by people coming from Europe and all kinds of other places are wrong”

But now that we have Australasian commonality (recalling culture transits populations entirely independent of genetics), close your eyes and have a listen to the music of the Malind tribe of West Papua; it is little different to something you would hear at a Blackfoot celebration on America’s Northern Plains:

* Since I’d published an initial version of this analysis as “Apple Indians & Anthropology” (February 2014), the linked article on the bottle-gourd story has been amended to omit the “Asian sub-variety” (dna) quote and changed to emphasize a larger study that essentially buried the result of the study finding pre-Columbian rinds with dna pointing to the Asian variety. What appears to have happened is, by adding in study of modern gourds found in the Americas, the people who insist the bottle gourd floated from Africa to the Americas, essentially are inferring the ancient rinds found with Asian dna are somehow irrelevant because they could not recover some of the genetic information the previous study had identified (one gets the impression there was little motivation to accomplish this), as well the new study shows other problems (an analogy would be to be bury the odd facts that don’t fit the new study as an anomaly within the numbers.)

In the new study, there are several glaring stretches of possibilities on top of the fact the ancient dispersal model does not even consider the possibility of human transport of the gourds by sea; the largest stretch postulates the rare African wild gourd varieties made multiple ancient crossings of the Atlantic on their own in a 10,000 years past window of time that does not appear to have been repeated before or since. Also overlooked is the ‘coincidence’ these gourds had been domesticated in Asia and the Americas for 10,000 years plus but only in Africa much later.

The real conclusion supported throughout is, when it comes to protecting one’s turf, science is as dirty as politics.

I saw in this land an Indian woman and a child who would not stand out among white blonds. These people [of the upper class] say that they were the children of the idols” [gods] – Pedro Pizarro, chronicler of the Spanish conquest of Peru

“The remarks made by Pizarro as to the skin- colour of the Peruvians are very important and, probably, truthful. Today one finds people who claim to be pure Indian in blood who are very light in colour, but it is not possible to be sure that they have not some white blood”  Note 139, page 528, The Discovery and Conquest of The Kingdoms of Peru by Pedro Pizarro in Two Volumes, Volume II, translated into English and annotated by
 Philip Ainsworth Means, The Cortes Society, New York (1921)

12 March 2017 update: Platinum deposits matching the iridium deposits reinforce a possibility of the Solutrian  hypothesis…

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-03/uosc-udo030917.php

…indicating possibility of relief for the pathological Beringia priapism –

*

‘Apple Indians’ is a wonderful terminology for the not-so-politically-correct. It is a great term when applied to to the politically correct Western anthropology programs disguised with the euphemism ‘Native Studies.’ And here is why:

The term for a Black man translates from Blackfoot language as “Black White Man” and the thought behind this is completely alien to modern western ideation. The Blackfoot “Black White Man” derives from interaction with the Black cavalry regiment stationed north of Browning during the military occupation of the Blackfeet reservation (into the 1930s.) “Black” is descriptive solely in a superficial sense and when coupled to “White”, points directly to European mentality or state of mind and is not primarily concerned with skin color. This is reinforced with the Cree translation for White Man (from ‘moon-e-yas’) being essentially identical concept: “Not like us” in a sense of thought process. This again loops back in identical sense in the proper Blackfoot term for a White Man per se: ‘Napi Kwan’ or “White Man” refers to someone who is crazy from a cultural perspective and figures in the Blackfoot proverb “Everyone knows the White Man is crazy.” All of the translations taken with the proverb point to color as superficial or descriptive only, with the emphasis on state of mind or thought process. Old Man the fool, Napi to the Blackfeet, and the ‘Napi’ in the Blackfoot expression ‘Napi Kwan’ that translate as White Man, are one and the same. In the present times, when we see modern academics discuss Race in relation to Native America, particularly when those academics skins are Red, we are witnessing European mentality co-opting original Native thought, because in the old native way of thinking, there is no concept of race. Humanity is expressed solely through thought process and resultant behaviors. And for this reason, I think the term ‘Apple Indians’ is absolutely apropos in relation to the oxymoron of ‘native studies’ in the Western education. No different to ‘Black White Man’ accurately portrays Spike Lee from an ancient Native point of view.

Now, the western culture, having taken over our native peoples, will never admit they have created a politically correct academic program as another step in the cultural assimilation of native peoples, employing Western anthropology to accomplish what amounts to utilizing people with so-called ‘Red skins’ in ongoing ethnocide, and certified it as ‘academic science.’ Why? Because they are too busy self-inflating over their superiority to the so-called ‘primitives’ with investigation into man’s origins in the Americas. Forget Oral History, forget Native applied, practical philosophy, forget any thought that might be a threat to the Western sciences’ ethno-centric bias and Plato. Platonic-Cartesian thought (Western science) is a self-worshipping god with a narrow rut of inquiry and a dogma. Essentially a self-perpetrating lie.

My question to my Native sisters and brothers in academia is, what do you think you could ever accomplish learning from these people? Forget it, toss your degrees in the trash, go home and preserve the language and stories, there really is nothing better out there.

Related:

Life in Indian Country

Collected stories, folklore and anecdotes concerning my many years life with Blackfeet Indians and traversing Native American territories