About oral history
On my recent trip to Owen Sound I heard from a local fellow who works for the Ministry of Natural Resources that tree stumps had been found deep, deep below the surface of Georgian Bay, just off Fathom Five provincial park.
I did a little reading and discovered that Georgian Bay might actually once have been separated from Lake Huron by a promontory of the Bruce Penninsula. I also found out that Native oral history had always held that there had been a land bridge between Manitoulin and the Bruce.
In a similar vein, when settlers first came to North America, there were also always Native legends of beasts like mammoths having been around in relatively recent memories.
Europeans concluded two things on this basis: (a) the mammoths must just have left, since the Native oral histories remembered them; or (b) the Native oral histories were bunk, because the mammoths had been gone for so darned long there's no way they could have been remembered by the oral histories.
Yet if you set a generation at 25 years, a tale only needs to be told from father to son 40 times to span a thousand years, 160 times to go back to the time mammoths lived in the Spengel Islands off Siberia, and only 400 times to go back to the time of the last Ice Age here in North America. Incidentally, this is about the time Georgian Bay is alleged to have joined Lake Huron, according to the articles I discovered.
My point is this: once a tale has receded past "grandfather," it simply gets attributed to an ancestor. So a Native guy could easily say "my ancestors used to hunt mammoth" which would still have a sense of immediacy. Likewise, "my ancestors used to walk from Manitoulin to the Bruce." In both cases, it's almost a sure thing that EVERY father would tell EVERY son such a momentous tale, so that it might easily survive for 400 generations more or less intact, and still in fact retain the quality of proximity.
I just think this is neat.
I did a little reading and discovered that Georgian Bay might actually once have been separated from Lake Huron by a promontory of the Bruce Penninsula. I also found out that Native oral history had always held that there had been a land bridge between Manitoulin and the Bruce.
In a similar vein, when settlers first came to North America, there were also always Native legends of beasts like mammoths having been around in relatively recent memories.
Europeans concluded two things on this basis: (a) the mammoths must just have left, since the Native oral histories remembered them; or (b) the Native oral histories were bunk, because the mammoths had been gone for so darned long there's no way they could have been remembered by the oral histories.
Yet if you set a generation at 25 years, a tale only needs to be told from father to son 40 times to span a thousand years, 160 times to go back to the time mammoths lived in the Spengel Islands off Siberia, and only 400 times to go back to the time of the last Ice Age here in North America. Incidentally, this is about the time Georgian Bay is alleged to have joined Lake Huron, according to the articles I discovered.
My point is this: once a tale has receded past "grandfather," it simply gets attributed to an ancestor. So a Native guy could easily say "my ancestors used to hunt mammoth" which would still have a sense of immediacy. Likewise, "my ancestors used to walk from Manitoulin to the Bruce." In both cases, it's almost a sure thing that EVERY father would tell EVERY son such a momentous tale, so that it might easily survive for 400 generations more or less intact, and still in fact retain the quality of proximity.
I just think this is neat.
Labels: anthropology, Georgian Bay, legend, mammoth, myth, Native, oral history
posted by David Newland at 8.3.04
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