Native Peoples. Pre-Contact, Contact, Post-Contact Theology

How the Wabanaki Algonquian First Nations, the Miꞌkmaq, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy and Penobscot.were corrupted by commercial contact with the English Weymouth and kidnapped is a cautionary tale for black science and the present to get on board the English ship to see the queen. If you can have a new kidney and new genes and a vax, to get aboard the English ship means of course someone must lose theirs. Cultural contact-conflict brought wave on wave of epidemics and liquor intoxication. The factionalism and division that destroyed their culture from this were cannibal viruses, so to speak, caught from the English. 

When the Abanaki of "broad and grim visage, of a black swart complexion, their eyebrows painted white" (John Brereton, 1602, Morrison, 22).subsequently finished off the English Popham colony, the second colony that eventually would become New England, the internal pressures of their accommodation myth weakened them substantially (128).  They believed that cannibal giants as shapeshifters and reptiles could metamorph negatively, and that they pretend to be kin until killing and eating people with their irrepressible cannibal perfidy.  People themselves could also became cannibals if they hardened their hearts toward their kin. In grasping for power and control Europeans were like the cannibal giants, indeed could teach them. In post contact history Gluskap's teaching becomes more urgent. Europeans were identified with sinful Adam and rebaptized, etc.

To utterly oppose the English was against Abenaki religion and its constructive myth of the world. Read for yourself (124) the catalog of cannibal giant English traits. Cannibal giants were vicious, envious, selfish in nature, refused to share, pretended to be kin in order to eat human flesh, thus violating the paramount order of kinship. They were perfect psycho reptilo-paths. Humans could become cannibals but could cannibals be human? Gluskap said yes, but the people found out no. That was their undoing. Since humans became cannibals when they hardened their hearts, cannibals could be human if softened in healing. This dialectic annihilated the people.

By addressing the cannibal as father or grandfather, appealing like Dr. King to its putative higher nature, the Wabanaki thought to restore social relation, heal the rifts. The strategy of their goal of transformation was to give kindness and acceptance to the giant. Truly a primitive naivete seen over and over again when native peoples met the European. Their myths defeated them. To continue the analogy the  modern Algonquin-European embraced Iphones, computers, nano parts and digital DNA, it invited the cannibal in.  On different levels These myths the native and  alien keep recurring, digital- human, Algonquin-European, giant-Glosknap. These conflicts are the Cannibal forces, that exist for a scholar in the past after the conflict is resolved, but exist in the present too. When the conflict is not resolved and the viewer is the native and the war is the natural vs. the digital and the conflict is global, giants and cannibals and "forces" are the same. English treachery and the greed of European morality dislocated by the occasional good English altruist skewed the native just enough to ensure total extinction. Weymouth kidnapped five Wabanakis back to England to display. Abduction and technology are also the two salient seductions of the native and the alien among the ET kidnapped. Does it make you think of the 21st century at all?

Myth and history combine in apocalypse. "Myth is central to the study of cultural encounter precisely because it provides the template shaping people's ongoing production of identity" (120). This identity, or destiny shares public values. But Contact decenters people from their values. However it came, Algonquian beliefs of the conflict of summer and winter, relatives and strangers, center vs. periphery, women in camp vs. men hunting in the forest, made for adaptation to nature.  Life is always positive against negative, the hero Gluskap against the windigo, Kiwakwe, chenoo, cannibal giants. There is no solution of good and evil, only opposition, the positive sharing power of Gluskap vs the negative antisocial giants of greed. The Abenaki people proposed to transform the world, meaning absorb and redeem evil, make evil human in other tribal members. Gluskap learns the good one struggle at a time until he releases the captive animals and forbears revenge. It is a perfect tale for society to surrender itself when confronted with the outside. Only the Hopi view survives, implacable war with the other. Every effort Gluskap made to transform the world, to bring the natural and animal into harmony and kinship with the people, to survive the drought by taking to the water as a fish or to the forest as game led to this attempt to reconcile evil, "my relative of a strange race, my spouse's parents" (123).

In the analogy, everything said of European conflict with the native mirrors transhuman/digital conflict with the natural. Abenaki acceptance of the English mirrors human acceptance of the alien, however alien is defined, except among the modern natives there is no Glooskap to preserve nature; for evil has been turned to a kind of joke. Evil includes transhuman and alien. There is no maturation through concern for others, but there might be a killing of the giant frog that ate all the world's water.


Abenaki tribes that lived in the river basins of New Hampshire, Maine, and New Brunswick fought many wars against the French and English. In Abenaki and Their Relations and Mapping Otherness https://books.google.com/books?id=QPN... Morrison reverses the ethno-historical dependence on European documents.

Under conditions of fire and flood Algonquian adapted to their world by changing themselves into fish and bear to escape. They became the other by transplantation. This is the central feature of their social adaptation myth and their strategy of the good. Hence in the analogy he man shall turn into the machine. Changing into the animal-other as kin was their strategy to adapt the European. They hoped to change the European into kin themselves by combining with them.  They should have read Franz Fanon.You cannot combine with evil. It will eat you.

Wishful thinking makes the scholar say that "from the beginning of contact the Algonquians had an informed realistic view of the challenges of the cultural encounter" (119). They had just the opposite, an uninformed naive idealist view, just as the human cannot fathom the trans-quark, stranglet alien. Glusknap's (old spelling)  theology of acceptance made them entirely miss the horror myth and folklore documented  in the cultural evidence of their own stories and poems.

 Treating animals as kin they extended this courtesy to the English in another genocide by myth, like the Aztec, whose lesson is not to compassionately stay your hand against the enemy. Execute him. 


 A lot more of post contact history is coming. I take the case  as prophetic of our own, hence design five scenarios of Contact beyond the Abenaki:
Countdown 1: Baptizing Martians http://insightstatutes.blogspot.com/2... A multiple analogy that the Vatican would invite the cannibal giant in the way the Wabanaki did the English, repeat the folly when it baptizes the Alien (Cosmolonglo).
Countdown 2: Oracle AI http://insightstatutes.blogspot.com/2...
Countdown 3: The Conscious Unconscious http://insightstatutes.blogspot.com/2...
Countdown 4: Collective Psychopathic God particles http://insightstatutes.blogspot.com/2...
Countdown 5: Woman and DNA Against the Gods http://insightstatutes.blogspot.com/2...

Consciousness only happens after the fact. These reflections come years after Ken Morrison's death, but last night, 7/13/15, wasn't the first time I had a dream visit with him. I dreamed of taking his class, needed for a doctorate, some such political theory or post modern grammar. He had a radio show. Sitting next to him in the dream before class was convivial. After waking, I searched him out, looking for an authority he used to cite, Sam Gill on native American religions! His biblio is fascinating. Then I found his pdf on baptism! It also reminds of the dream I had of Carroll Abbott that sparked the writing of Native Texans http://encouragementsforsuch.blogspot... as if all these things lay just under the surface waiting to be awakened. I hate to say it, but when we finally get to where we forget ourselves so much that we are not conscious then our best work can emerge.

Ken Morrison. Dissertation 1975: The People of the Dawn: The Abnaki and their relations with New England and New France, 1600-1727, U of Maine.
-Mapping Otherness: Myth and the Study of Cultural Encounter
-The Cosmos as Intersubjective: Native American Other than Human Persons
-Baptism and Alliance 1990
-Towards A History of Intimate Encounters: Algonkian Folklore, Jesuit Missionaries, and Kiwakwe, The Cannibal Giant 1979

Note: This is a shortened version of a review at Goodreads. 

Gluskap wanted technology to be used to socially construct the people, like a Musk ox, for human welfare. You see what happened to him. He enabled their destruction.