Indulging The Left's Historical Revisionism Has Consequences
By: Casey Chalk (The Federalist)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
A controversial Oct. 5 article in Science Magazine claims to confirm a 2021 study of human footprints in White Sands National Park in New Mexico that suggested humans were in North America about 23,000 to 21,000 years ago, and thus several thousand years earlier than archaeologists have typically believed. Among the many responses to this news, the most bizarre take from the research must surely go to Kim Pasqual-Charlie, a member of the Pueblo of Acoma.
"For many Indigenous people, the study is simply a confirmation of things they already knew from knowledge passed down over generations" reports The Washington Post. "These are our ancestral footprints," Pasqual-Charlie explained.
It's certainly possible that the footprints are those of local indigenous peoples' ancient ancestors — whose else would they be, given they were fossilized in New Mexico? But her claim that the research confirms the oral history of her indigenous tribe is remarkable, apparently indicating her belief that the Pueblo have retained an oral tradition that their ancestors have been traversing the Southwest for some time earlier than the typical historical assessments, which put the number at about 16,000 years ago.
Indeed, later in the same WaPo article, she demands: "How much more evidence do you need to say: We did exist back then. We've been in the Southwest region for a very long time." Pasqual-Charlie's evidenceless assertion is as absurd as it is entirely unverifiable. But that a major U.S. newspaper would even approvingly cite it demonstrates how willingly our elite cultural institutions indulge the most ridiculous claims in the name of "woke" ideology.
Patronizing People's Delusions
To put the Pasqual-Charlie claim in perspective, consider the fact that humans have only had written language for about 5,500 years. Alternatively, cultures that lack written languages, instead relying on oral traditions to communicate their folklore, mythology, and socio-cultural rites, are capable of verbally passing down information for many generations. Perhaps, some historians and anthropologists have surmised, these oral traditions may be related to real ancient events that happened thousands of years ago. However, these arguments are usually based on the most specious of speculation, given the obvious difficulty in effectively verifying some folk tale with a specific event like, say, a natural disaster or a human migration.
In other words, the likelihood that a particular culture, even one with strong oral traditions, would maintain stories that could reasonably date how long they have lived in a particular place, or how they got there in the first place, is about as likely as you and your mother simultaneously winning the lottery.
To wit, it was not any oral tradition in Middle Eastern, European, or Asian culture that led the majority of scientists to assess the human species originated out of Africa, but via human fossils and archaeological remains. With all due respect to Ms. Pasqual-Charlie, assertions — even innocent, well-intentioned ones — about ancient oral traditions regarding the duration of human existence in the Americas are simply balderdash.
And yet, really, who is most to blame for this woman's quotation appearing in national media but The Washington Post itself? It is WaPo that is cynically patronizing Pascqual-Charlie and her entirely unconfirmable claims for the purported sake of foregrounding the voices of marginalized peoples, as they'd likely put it. But this example is just the tip of the iceberg.
Media, Hollywood, and Academia Rewrite History
Consider our northern neighbor Canada, which for the last few years has been embroiled in a controversy over alleged mass graves of indigenous children at government-funded and church-run residential schools from the late 19th century to the late 20th century. In response to the supposed "discovery" of these graves, enraged activists, egged on by leftist media and academia, burned down dozens of Canadian churches, many of which served indigenous communities.
Then earlier this year a series of excavations at suspected sites found no human remains. Perhaps this is not surprising for a society whose elites have become obsessed with virtue signaling about the historical oppression of indigenous peoples, manifested in the widespread normalization of ludicrous land acknowledgments at public events. Yet even these recent findings have not stopped filmmakers from perpetuating these lies: The new film "Bones of Crows" presents the residential schools as part of a state-sponsored program of genocide.
Or consider the 2022 Hollywood release of "The Woman King," a "historical action epic" about the West African kingdom of Dahomey (present-day Benin), a supposedly noble and peaceful society guarded by the elite all-female Agojie army that resisted the brutal, dehumanizing slave trade. The film hit all the right notes on contemporary racial and gender narratives and was thus widely celebrated by corporate media and academics.
Except the king of this allegedly utopian kingdom rose to power via a coup supported by slave traders. In fact, Dahomey was the one aggressively attacking and enslaving its neighbors. And the Agojie were at the forefront of this cruelty, capturing sex slaves for their king, who was also a practitioner of human sacrifice.
Indulging Falsities Does Nobody Favors
By promoting these false histories, we undermine the study of history, transforming it from a careful attempt to impartially understand our flawed collective past into a politicized weapon with which to beat ideological opponents. We also vitiate what little remains of our civic unity, exploiting the past to further racial and gender narratives — e.g. white people are venal oppressors, and racial and sexual minorities are innocent, noble heroes — that are themselves facile and divisive, when they aren't blatantly false and slanderous (ahem, 1619 Project). And we encourage a suspicious, conceited view of the past, cynically reinterpreting our civilization's achievements as little more than contemptible, corrupt power plays.
Historical revisionism also harms those it aims to help. Racial minorities and indigenous peoples certainly need their own unique histories told and celebrated. But falsely valorizing and whitewashing their past for the sake of "foregrounding" them treats them not as equals able to know the entirety of their history, but as fragile snowflakes incapable of confronting the truth.
Growing up in suburban Northern Virginia, I attended public school with many classmates whose families had accomplished great things, or who had illustrious, well-documented lineages. I remember asking my parents about our own family history and learning that both my Anglo-Irish and Polish heritage included nothing especially noteworthy. I was, I learned, of mostly working-class immigrant extraction, and as far as my parents and grandparents knew, my old-country ancestors, whose names faded in the distant past, were largely the same.
I was embarrassed about my humble origins. There were no great historical figures, no remarkable family feats recorded in the history books. Yet as I got older, I learned to appreciate those qualities of my family that were indeed admirable: a grandfather who courageously started his own business as a middle-aged father, and great-grandfathers who served as enlisted men in the trenches during World War I. In an age in which everyone needs to be a celebrity and descendant of celebrities, I've come to gratefully accept that even if my ancestors were not necessarily wealthy or powerful or brilliant, they labored, suffered, and prayed in order to give the next generation a fighting chance to flourish.
We should be encouraging all Americans, be they members of indigenous tribes, descendants of the earliest colonists, or the recent arrivals to our shores, to cultivate that same humble mentality. Not only because it fosters virtue, but because the truth is always better than our delusions, no matter how well-intentioned.
Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor's in history and master's in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master's in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.
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As long as it fits their narrative, the American left pushes it.
The entire Bible came from ancient oral history...
And it's accuracy has been in question for quite some time.
Yes, the world is again drawn into a violent conflagration in the "Holy Land" where three faiths who worship one god fight over conflicting interpretations of a practically prehistoric oral tradition which chronicles a near mythical Jewish nation in ancient Canaan which requires we ignore all the archeological evidence from that time which proves ancient Canaan was not monotheistic. That, in fact, almost all of their homes had shrines to multiple gods...
That is not quite what they are fighting about. It is called anti-Semitic genocide.
And all based on what Buzz described in 3 below. In his experiment it only took a few minutes and the statement changed. In the world of religion, this goes on for centuries. For all we know, the original "statement" is a recipe for chitins.
In the context of this article, Pasqual-Charlie is putting something forth that is unproven. Right now, there is no way of knowing if these footprints were made by an indigenous person from the Americas, a European, Asian or African or anybody from anywhere else in the world. She's spit-balling and many are lapping it up as if it is absolute fact.
My question is - How accurate can oral history be? In one of my teaching English classes I did this experiment. The students formed a circle. I made up a statement and whispered it into the ear of the student closest to me, and that statement was to be whispered from student to student around the circle. The last student in the circle then wrote what he heard on the blackboard. I then wrote over it what I had originally whispered. As you can imagine, the two statements were somewhat different. Apply that experiment to generations, and I ask again: How accurate can oral history be?
If the goal is mythologising, as accurate as it needs to be.
...or not to be. That is the question.
You experiment only took, I'm guessing, a few minutes. The statement changes, albeit slightly. That same situation carried out over centuries, the final statement will be completely lost.
I think you mean the original statement will be completely lost.
Did you ask that during Passover? Because the Haggadah is an oral history. In fact, there is no proof that the Israelites were ever slaves in Egypt. Do you doubt the validity of the story, because I don't.
Maybe it is and maybe it isn't and maybe it's anywhere in between.
I'm sure it was embellished along the way, but oral history can be very strong. We often find that after the fact, there is proof.
Well, at least history is now recorded more accurately with the many facilities to do so than ever before. But at the same time, misinformation, disinformation and bias will probably screw that up as well.
For 2 or 3 hundred years the history of America was a history of the achievements of white people. It was only in the second half of the 20th century that American Indians and blacks began to get any sort of representative treatment in popular history. Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee was a literary sensation in 1970, as it was the first widely promoted and widely read book that presented the history of America from the Indians perspective. Black Like Me is a book I remember from that era that presented racial prejudice in a revelatory way. But for hundreds of years such accounts were hidden . American history was whitewashed.
Its sad but unsurprising that now right wingers bemoan the lack of unity and complain that history that incorporates racial diversity is bad for America, and so we see articles like this one from a far right website.
Take it with a huge grain of salt.
I remember it well. We had to read it in grade school. If John Howard Griffin were alive today, I'd want him to take that same journey and I am quite sure we would have a far different story. The nation tried to get it right, but the left has reintroduced tribalism of the worst kind.
Rachel Dolezal??? LOL
She's an oddity and alas a plagiarist when it comes to some of her artworks.
That is a mentally ill person.
Your whole argument here is if there is validity of Indians being here, is "woke" because some tribes have an oral history, but totally ignoring that the science has been pointing to this for a very long time. These facts (and I do mean facts), have been researched for years, and are not being presented as some liberal cabal.
Look at the actual science:
(2012)
(2020)
(2014/ genetics)
I could keep going but I think this is good enough. The science is there to show that the true indigenous people were here literally over 15,000 years before anyone else got here.
The only good revisionism is my revisionism.
Relax, He was just using the NA community (though the use of just one member) to bash the left. A standard political ploy.
Accurate history is important, but so are oral traditions.
Bullshit
Good to see this article is dying a natural death.
Both the author and seeder fail to realize that all history is revisionist. The winners do it, the losers do it and even the disinterested are hostage to their beliefs. Since his death 15,000 books have been published about Abraham Lincoln, some 100 per year and all have their critics!
All this whining by the winners cast them as losers.