One of the things that grabbed my attention in the microlecture was the star map. I've noticed that cultures around the world, from the Americas to India to Southeast Asia to Africa, all seem to be noted to have charted the constellations and paths of the stars during the calendar year. Of course, the modern, 12 month calendar year was created in Rome, hence why some of the months are named after emperors, but people have been using the stars to create 365-day calendars a couple millennia before Rome rose. It's just a quick note that I thought was enjoyable.
Now I would like to touch upon the methods of communication, storytelling, and general culture discussed in the microlecture. They were interesting no doubt, but they were also somewhat bizarre, even taking into account how easy international communication is today. It's to the extent that if you were to place one of the pelts or quipus in front of a random person today, they'd just assume it to be some sort of textile; even if you were to tell them that it was for communication, they still wouldn't know where to start. With that in mind, I can see the logical through-line of how the colonizers thought that the Natives were inferior: the Natives were taking actions for which the colonizers could not attribute a meaning, thus leading them to believe that they were savages who simply did meaningless tasks. That by no means comes justifies their actions to even a miniscule extent, but in a world as unknown and xenophobic as it was then, it wasn't surprising that massacre was in the works.
To be frank, the microlecture didn't really change my views on how I saw There There. It was certainly interesting to see different cultural aspects of Native society, but overall it simply adds a bit of background knowledge, as I think Tommy Orange was incredibly successful in portraying contemporary Natives' cultural and societal struggles for the general populace.
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