Jane Tompkins

I feel like Charlie Brown…Good Grief. I don’t think anyone will ever truly understand the topic of White-Indian relations. It is of course the most least understood, and the most complex of human cultural relationships, but for gods sake just open your eyes and let the truth fill them. Now let me explain myself for a moment. I know that Tompkins is only trying to illustrate the difficulty in trying to illuminate the truth in a history. I know that she has done monumental amounts of research, as have the authors/ historians she had read and referred to. However the unfortunate side effect to all that research is the knots you will undoubtedly tie in the sequence of events. There are just too many sides of the story to tell. There is a different account of events for every person who either lived it, recorded, heard, sought, or pondered upon it.
There is a way to untie those knots and to weed out some semblance of truth. It is to divert attention from individual accounts and to focus upon human character. It is a known fact that a story will change most every time it is told and retold over and over. Things will be added or cut our, embellished or diminished, and this is all done in order to make the person hearing/reading it, believe a certain perspective to be more credible than another. It is a known fact that humans are capable of deception and manipulation. Taking these things into account, one can reasonably infer only from the facts, and not by the suppositions of another human being.
Looking back to Limerick we see that the lives of Whites and Indians are so vastly intertwined that in reality it was never a conquest but a symbiosis in which one side gained more than the other. Remember how terribly ironic it was to read how an Indian killed a white man with a manufactured firearm? That’s what I’m trying to say, that is what Pratt was saying in Art of the Contact Zones. Whenever a human person comes in contact with another, they will always impact one another. They will share in their victories and their defeats and they will argue and fight like any other human being would. Ultimately both sides are human and in the ebb and flow of time things changed in the way of the white man…that’ll last only until the next “White Man”