OT OT OT "arbiters of Truth" and Westernization:
You said: <That anyone in this millennium asserts that the scientific principles our understanding of the world around us is based on is "Just like the Bible" exhibits an almost stupefying lack of scientific culture. The fact that one cannot "see" an atom in no way calls into question their physical reality.>
I came to my conclusions (that Belief in atoms and genes is mostly a matter of Faith in Science), after spending a lot of time doing things like trying to convince middle-aged Inupiats (Eskimos) to take their blood pressure medications.
A patient, who felt healthy, would come to clinic, and I would tell him he had an inner defect (high blood pressure), and needed to take pills daily, or he might get sick (stroke or heart attack years from now). He would often then go to a Native traditional healer, who would tell him "his liver was folded in half", and the treatment was a form of accupuncture, or deep massage. What the patient did then, was mostly a matter of who he had more faith in. He had no direct evidence, he didn't feel sick (although he often would start having symptoms, after being told repeatedly by both Native doctors and me that he had an illness). I would be tempted to tell him that his psychosomatic symptoms were caused by the high blood pressure, and would be cured if he took the pills. I suspect this approach would have been successful, both to increase patient compliance with (my) treatment, and to cure the symptoms.
Whether the patient took the pills I gave, depended largely on his degree of trust in Western Culture, his degree of assimilation. I came to see that I, personally, had little to do with it. The size and shape of his Faith (in me, as the representative of the West, or in the native healers), was mostly decided before he had any contact with me. And, when I tried to talk about things like atoms and genes, or things I had read in medical journals, the response depended entirely on whether I was accepted as an Arbiter Of Truth.
It depended on history, the legacy of past interactions, which built either trust or distrust, anger or assimilation, mutual respect or cultural genocide.
The formative historical event in these Native's opinion of the West, was the Missionary era in Alaska:
..beginning in the 1850s, but with particular force in the 1880s, the ecological foundations of the traditional social systems in Arctic Alaska were largely destroyed. The bowhead whale and walrus populations were drastically reduced by American whalers, the caribou population was all but exterminated by the Inupiat themselves, and epidemic diseases were introduced for the first time. The result was the decimation of the human population. Population loss, in turn, destroyed the political basis of the traditional social system because the several societies that comprised it no longer had enough members for collective self-defense. Because of these developments, which were particularly acute in the early 1880s, the first missionaries arrived among people "in extremis", people whose traditional beliefs and practices had failed them.
...Alaska was broken into exclusive districts and a state-wide missionary effort was launched to bring Natives into the Christian fold. Native languages were suppressed and cultural traditions forbidden in an effort to assimilate Natives into Western culture.
pec.jun.alaska.edu
In 1885 Sheldon Jackson, formerly a missionary in the western continental United States and southeast Alaska, was appointed General Agent of Education for Alaska. Jackson epitomized the view, widespread at [the] time, that teachers and missionaries were charged with "the general uplifting of the whole [Native] population out of barbarism into civilization." Civilization meant, as a minimum, literacy (in English), cleanliness, industry and Christianity. As VanStone put it, "true conversion meant nothing less than a virtually total transformation of native existence."
1886 - Jackson writes of the Eskimos: "They are savages ... who) have not had civilizing, educational or religious advances. ... Among those best known, their highest ambition is to build American homes, possess American furniture, dress in American clothes, adopt the American style of living and be American citizens."
wfn.org
...Dr. and Mrs. Horatio Marsh, newlyweds. Marsh is a recent medical school graduate. For the next several decades, many missionaries in Barrow will combine medical and spiritual expertise. (They also will serve as fire chief, mortician, orphanage and judge.)...
The Congregational mission and school at Wales were opened in 1890 by William Thomas Lopp and Harrison Robertson Thornton. From the first, the then-bachelor missionaries were harassed by Natives, who regarded them as "too poor to trade, too stingy to marry, and too effeminate to hunt". Trouble was worst when the Natives were inebriated, as they often were. Shamans, of whom there were eight in the community at the time, also fulminated against the missionaries from time to time....the decisive event of this period was Thornton’s assassination, on August 19, 1893
...urged the California Yearly Meeting of Friends (Quaker) Church to establish a mission at Kotzebue... ...Robert and Carrie Samms, and Anna Hunnicutt, were commissioned for service on May 17, 1897. Two days later, Robert, age 32, and Carrie, age 19, were married. By the end of July they were in northwestern Alaska... ...the Friends were not universally welcomed. Like their counterparts at the other mission stations, they were frequently harassed by drunks and harangued by shamans. Several families opposed to Christianity established a new settlement at Napaaqtuqtuq, across the head of Kotzebue Sound. Nevertheless, the missionaries plunged right in, preaching the gospel, challenging the shamans, persuading people to abandon ancient burial customs, attacking polygamy, promoting Christian marriage, and fulminating against drinking, gambling, smoking and dancing... ...Robert Samms kept a list of converts, and was very strict about who was on it. Individuals who broke their pledge not to drink or smoke were stricken from the list, as were those who engaged in sexual liaisons out of Christian wedlock.
In 1890, when the first missions were established in Alaska north of Bering Strait, not a single Native in the region was a Christian. By 1910 Christianity was nearly universal.
alaskool.org |
