Participated in a weekend degree planning session to explore our goals and see if our degree plans match those goals. Gruesome and great all at the same time. The greatest thing that emerged for me was the creation of my diagram entitled: Diagram of the transmission of historical and cultural information of the Ho Chunk Nation.
You see in my mind the first hand knowledge or Rankean hierarchal order of evidence doesn't rest with the historians or explorers or missionaries of GOM's day, it rests with the Ho Chunk people. Can I have an Ah-ho! The next layer of cultural history of GOM or any tribal history extends from GOM to the families or clans of Ho Chunk people. This is tribal or cultural history that is passed on from generation to generation and from family to family. This information then extends to the next layer which comprises historians (primarily through interpreters), explorers, or missionaries who penned their own individual accounts of what they experienced through their own cultural biases colorized by their own individual pursuits. These pursuits include furs, discovery of the NW passage, lead mining rights and of course land. Can I have another Ah-ho! The next layer represents our day. This information has found its way to our day through the careful and thoughtful preservation by numerous sources both native and non-native. However, for native or Ho Chunk people (such as myself as a descendant of GOM) the cultural history has been free flowing for generations. I first heard the story of GOM from my grandfather born in 1899 in a wigwam in a Ho Chunk village along the Turkey River. A researcher such as myself has the benefit of utilizing both carefully preserved written documents by earlier explorers, historians and missionaries, but more importantly I have historical and cultural information that has been free flowing throughout generations from the Ho Chunk people since GOM's time.
It has been a banner weekend!
No comments:
Post a Comment