I finished reading "Buffalo People - Prehistoric Archeology on the Canadian Plains" by Liz Bryan which I first mentioned in an earlier post where I suggested that the book had some worrisome tendencies around its attitude towards the bodies of ancestors. The final section took those tendencies and nurtured them into full blown colonization. The paragraph below just killed me with the combination of cultural superiority and the presumed naivety of modern indigenous peoples.
"For a while, it seemed the ancient cultures were indeed dead and buried. But much can be reconstructed through the work of archaeologists and other scientist; they dig up the shattered shards of culture and rebuild it, piece by piece, if incompletely. And todays Plains Indians, the Blackfoot, Blood, Peigan, Sarcee, Assiniboin (Stoney), Cree and Dakota Sioux, living on reservations allotted them by the government, are also keeping alive the traditions of their ancestors: languages, songs and legends, arts and crafts, dances and religions have all been revived, often with the help of early ethnographic accounts. But again, the revivals reflect the short-lived heyday of the equestrian Plains Indian..." Thanks to the colonizer for "helping" with science. I would not recommend this book.
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