Category Archives: civilization

European Savages

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, civilization, Colonialism, History, Indigenous People After Contact, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy

On our trip across eastern Canada I had many opportunities to consider Canadian history.

The Indigenous people encountered by Europeans were definitely not savages.  They were members of sophisticated societies that all too often the Europeans did not well understand. Many of the Europeans were blinded by prejudice thinking that they could bring civilization and God to the barbarians and heathens. This was nonsense that the Europeans believed and passed on to their descendants and was largely responsible for the creation of white male supremacy favoured by their clans, but clearly absurd.  The indigenous people were civilized people and had a lot to teach the European newcomers while they were prepared to learn a lot from them as well. That is a wise attitude isn’t it?

It certainly was not true, as many Europeans thought, that this new land was empty of people. England, for example adopted the concept of terra nullius, a Latin phrase meaning “nobody’s land,” to justify their bloody claims. According to this theory, terra nullius included territory without a European recognized sovereign, where no one who counted lived.  Again, this was nonsense.

Contrary to such barbaric unfounded prejudices there were people all over the entire western hemisphere when Europeans arrived and these people mattered just as much as the visitors. The Europeans had no monopoly on civilization. In fact, often they revealed a startling lack of civilization. As Barbara Huck said in her book,

“Parts of North and Central America were among the most densely populated places on Earth. Some anthropologists have estimated the total population of the continent 500 years ago, including Mexico and Central America, at between 112 and 140 million. Mexico, the spectacular Aztec capital, was one of the three largest cities in the world when the Spaniards first laid eyes on it.

Much of Canada and the United States was considerably less populated than that—estimates put the total population of both between nine and 12 million—but North America was not, as some have imagined it, terra nullius, a land without people. And many societies, such as the Iroquoians, were healthier, more prosperous and less class-bound than their European counterparts of the same period.”

 

If first contact was indeed a case of civilization meeting barbarity, it is likely that the Europeans were the barbarians!  

It is also noteworthy, the Indigenous people who first encountered these Europeans in many ways did not share European attitudes and values. As Huck said,

“…the Americas were literally a world apart and North American values and beliefs were very different –in some ways almost directly contrary to the perspectives of the strangers who began to arrive on their shores in the early 1500s, the beginning of the contact period.”

 

For example, I have pointed out elsewhere that indigenous people of North American had views that were by no means all the same. They had many diverse views, just like Europeans.  The spiritual beliefs of indigenous people, for example, were very different from the newcomers, and in my view often preferable. We are of course, each entitled to our own views on that and I intend to continue commenting on those differences.

 

They also had very different views about how societies should be organized and how they should be governed and how wealth should be produced and shared. I find the differences profoundly interesting.  Barbara Huck in her book also commented on them:

 

“Indeed, it’s hard to imagine two more conflicting world views. Whether farmers or hunters, the vast majority of the people of what are now Canada and the United States lived communally in groups of varying sizes. The territories they inhabited were not owned, as we recognize land ownership, but rather commonly acknowledged  to be theirs to use. They governed by consensus, valued generosity and self-reliance, and loathed acquisitiveness and coercion. Stinginess and miserly behavior were strongly condemned. Almost everywhere it was considered immoral to allow anyone to go hungry if food was available.”

 

Not a bad way to live. Maybe the Europeans were the savages.

 

North American Farmers: Not What you Think

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, civilization, Colonialism, Indigenous People After Contact, Indigenous People before Contact

 

Speaking about the east coast and central regions of Canada which we visited on this wonderful trip we could try to answer Barbara Huck’s challenge to her challenge  to imagine a land where people just 500 years ago lived in towns and villages that were very different than we previously believed.  The people were not savages, as some of the Europeans erroneously believed. They were members of a thriving civilization.   As Huck explained,

“They tilled the soil and grew a remarkable array of crops—corn, squash, melons, beans, and tobacco. Not far away, the lakes and rivers were full of fish and the forests abounded with game. The women of this land did much of the fishing and farming; the men, for the most part, had other interests. While their wives and sisters and mothers planted and tilled the soil and cared for the children, the men travelled far from home, trading north and south, hunting, and as often as not, fighting. Theirs was a powerful nation, with many allies and intentions of expanding across a great river at the edge of their land.”

 

 

This all reminded me of what our guides taught us on our trip through the Africa;  often the women carry water and other vital goods on their heads, while the men sat around under trees and discussed important matters.

But who were these farmers Huck described in her book?  They were not Europeans as we might have thought. They were wholly indigenous. This is how she described them:

“The farmers were Iroquoian—the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk—who by 1500 occupied a large territory south of the St. Lawrence River and would soon unite to become the Five Nations Iroquois. To the north were Innu and their Algonquian speaking allies, from the Mi’Kmaq of the Atlantic Shores to eh Anishinabe of the Upper Great Lakes.

These cultures differed from one another as much as Scots differ from Spaniards today, or Finns from French. Some North American societies were settled and agrarian, others were seasonably mobile; some turned to the sea for their livelihood, others lived off the bounty of the inland plains.

As in Europe today, the societies of 15th century and 16th century North America spoke dozens of different languages. And like their modern counterparts most of these languages could be traced to a handful of common language groups.”

These Iroquois nations got together and created a democratic system of government that the framers of the American constitution were inspired by when they created what is often called the world’s first constitutional democracy. These Indigenous People y were certainly not savages.

A Fundamental Misunderstanding

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, civilization, Indigenous People After Contact, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy

 

When Europeans arrived in what they called, wrongly, “The New World,” they quickly encountered the people who already lived here. In fact, they had lived here for thousands of years and had done rather well at that.

The  indigenous people were shocked at how these newcomers from Europe were not as healthy as the people who lived here. The Europeans were shorter than the North Americans and much less healthy lives.  Added to that, the Indigenous People were shocked at the great inequality between the different newcomers. There were classes of people that did extremely  poorly while the elite lived extravagantly well.  The Indigenous people did not understand this. They thought this meant the newcomers were not really civilized. I think they were right.

The Indigenous People realized the newcomers had some good ideas. They had amazing technologies.  Guns, big ships, and horses to name a few. But the Europeans also had a lot to learn from the inhabitants.  They were not able to survive here without help from the native North Americans. At first, they learned quickly and well. In time the Europeans forgot how they needed help.

The indigenous people of North America knew how to live well in North America. Even though the continent had incredibly variable environments and circumstances, from freezing northern terrains, to lush forests, great plains, amazing deserts, and everything in between, the inhabitants new how to thrive. Not just survive. But thrive!

Barbara Huck in her wonderful book, Exploring the Fur Trade Routes of North America, which I have been reading on this trip described it this way:

“Europeans adopted a number of North American technologies such as snowshoes…toboggans, birchbark canoes, and pemmican, but largely misunderstood the continent’s cultures.”

 

And that misunderstanding has made all the difference. It has wreaked havoc. It has destroyed lives, including the lives of many young and vulnerable children. But, in my view at least, it is not too late to do better. We can do better. We must do better.

Indigenous People are talking a lot about land-based education. I like that idea. The land can teach us a lot. But only if we listen and learn. We must pay attention.

To know the future you must know the past

civilization, Freedom to Read, Truth Seeking

 

Both libraries and archives have an inevitable leaning towards the future. They preserve the past for the benefit of the future. As Richard Ovenden said,

“Every collection, every library is actually about the future. Every archival institution is about the future. How can we know where we are going unless we know where we are from. How can we chart a path to the future without thinking of where we are from?”

 

We need the knowledge of the past in order to look at the past societies with fresh eyes and new ideas and to inspire the future and protect the path to the best future.

As John Stuart Mill so wisely told us, we cannot hold a valid opinion unless we allow it to be challenged. We must permit all ideas to be challenged. Even our most sacred beliefs must be challenged or those beliefs will wither. This is for our benefit and for the benefit of the future. We must consider  and reflect on opposing views. We must not hide them in closets. We do our children no favours if we protect them from contrary views. Their own views will become stunted and weak without challenge. Coddling them from uncomfortable views as so many conservatives, like those in Florida, now want to do, is doing a great disservice to the next generation. Few things help us challenge our own views better than reading the strongest of the challenges to those views.

Where better to go for that than a library?

 

A Champion for Freedom

civilization, Freedom to Read, Truth Seeking

 

John Stuart Mill was the author of On Liberty and a champion, perhaps the greatest champion, of freedom of thought and expression. Richard Ovenden in his lecture at the Toronto Library took note of one of his famous ideas: namely John Stuart Mill’s insistence in On Liberty, that only through the diversity of opinion is there in the existing state of human intellect the chance of fair play to all sides of the truth.”  Often this seems hopelessly optimistic in this day of increasing polarization and decreasing tolerance for a diversity of ideas, but it is still the main hope for lovers of freedom of thought and expression.  Frankly, I have found no better idea.

Societies have a hard time achieving this goal. How can libraries then do it too? Richard Ovenden thought they could be up to that task. He pointed out that it is a fundamental aspect of their role. Libraries work in collaboration with each other and work within networks with each other. They have allies in their momentous task. They can do it! Often if you need to read something they don’t have in their own collection they are quite willing to help you to find it elsewhere and bring it to you.

Libraries take very seriously their job of serving their communities, Ovenden said. And I know this from my own decade of serving on a local library board. The people their love to serve the needs of their reading public. And they are darn good at it.

As Ovenden said,

“What gives us pleasure at the end of the day is thinking that they have helped someone solve a problem or better understanding of some issue. That task is entirely possible and we need to support those institutions and the individuals who work in them and give them the freedom to do that job.”

And they are darn good at it. They can do it if we just give them a chance. And it is one of the most important jobs there is.

 

 

Are Libraries asked to do too much?

civilization, Freedom to Read

 

Around the world libraries are being asked to do things or provide services in many new and interesting ways. In some places they act as shelters for the homeless. In places they act as food banks. In some they dispense health services and professional advice. They act as knowledge resources, community spaces. In Indigenous terms they are like knowledge keepers.  They are expected to reflect the diversity of opinion and to be welcoming of one and all. We also expect them to be, as Nahlah Ayed said, “bastions of free expression.” And then, as if that is not enough, we ask them to uphold democracy for us. All of this leads to the important question: are we asking too much of libraries?

Richard Ovenden had a good answer to this question.  He said, “Society is asking too much of libraries if we don’t resource them adequately to do all of those tasks.”

Libraries that were able to help many a person to make life choices are increasingly under pressure to do less, or even disappear entirely. That is most unfortunate. Particularly when libraries are faced with immense challenges of dealing with an analogue past and digital present such libraries may be unable to do all that is demanded of them. Ovenden said,

“Libraries have become aware of their role as social infrastructure. The have been incredibly adaptive. They’ve been innovative. They have seen how they can make a difference for their communities. We should entrust them to do those things their communities need the most and resource them properly.”

Yet we always ask them to do more. And therefore we must do our part too.

 

Libraries as temples

civilization, Freedom to Read, Truth Seeking

 

 

Richard Ovenden talked about excavations in ancient communities in Iraq and Syria of which I was not aware. He said that in ancient places, librarians often worked in temples!  5,000 years ago, librarians catalogued books. They had clay tablets of course rather than paper bound books, but they worked  in temples. He said “the librarians and archivists were priests!”

 In the France during the Middle Ages, the French national archives, the Trésor des Chartre,  were located in Sainte Chapelle. Only sacred chapels or cathedrals were good enough for libraries. That is how important they were considered. The archives were considered so precious they had sacred connotations.  We have lost some of that reverence  for libraries, for sure since then. Perhaps this is a sign of the decay of civilization in fact.

In the digital age we are surrounded by facts or false facts but libraries are hardly considered precious or sacred. Those days are largely gone. What a shame.

Nowadays, knowledge is abundant but still, we must never forget, fragile and can be easily disrupted disturbed or even maligned. We see that all around us.

It wasn’t long ago that the idea of librarians spending time on going through long lists of books for potential banning or “correction,” as happened in Florida, would have been considered ludicrous. Today it is rather a sad reality. Sometimes, I think, we live in the age of barbarians, or at best, the age of fools.

We have taken ancient liberties—such as the freedom to read or the freedom to think—for granted. To see them besmirched as they have been is deeply disturbing. Is there any chance that there can be galvanizing forces to buck up our resistance to tyranny? Or are these incidents or premonitions of our civilizational decline?

Libraries are truly treasures whether national, regional or local. We must learn again to understand that.

Freedom to learn 

civilization, Freedom to Read

 

Libraries were always part of the centres of learning in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic worlds according to Richard Ovenden. As he said, they were “tools for education passing down knowledge from one generation to inform the next.”

 

The idea of public libraries began to emerge in the 17th century with the creation of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It has been “a library of legal deposit for 400 years,” according to its own website. It has more than 13 million printed items. It was one of the first such libraries as it was opened to non-members of Oxford University. It was a public library. In the 18th century the idea that libraries could be tools of self-improvement arose.

 

Ovenden explained that “libraries became part of a movement to broaden education for the benefit of individuals but also society as a whole.  I remember with deep fondness the first library I even encountered. It was called the University of Manitoba Extension library which was designed for people from the sticks, like Steinbach, which did not have a public library. My mother drew it to my attention and I am forever grateful to her for that.

 

As a rural resident, I discovered that I could order books from a catalogue and within a couple of weeks of making an order, I would receive in a brown paper container the books ordered if available and if not a reasonable facsimile in the opinion of the library staff. Most astonishing to me was that I did not have to pay anything for the privilege. I did not even have to pay to send them back by mail. How was that possible? The provincial government which supported libraries in bigger centres around the province justifiably thought it should do something as well for the unwashed masses in the hinterland. What a delight!

 

I will never forget one time I ordered books including a spy novel. I loved spy novels as a lad, as I do as an aged man. To my disappointment I did not get the book I ordered. But the librarian, bless her soul sent an alternative. A book by a writer I had never heard of, Ian Fleming. It was Dr. No. It was the first in a series of James Bond novels that delighted me until he died.

I will never forget the thrill of opening those brown packets.  Life never got better than that. It was my personal introduction to civilization! My life was changed forever.

Librarians rescued Western Civilization in Vilnius

civilization, Truth Seeking

 

At the beginning of the 20th century Vilnius was a profound centre of Jewish life.  It was a city filled with learned rabbis and outstanding libraries and cultural life. Of course, that did not live on.  Like so much else of culture and civilization, it was destroyed, in the case of Vilnius by operation Barbarossa launched by the evil partnership of Stalin and Hitler.

 

As Oxford Librarian Richard Ovenden pointed out, the Jewish intellectual leaders of Vilnius were forced each day to cooperate with the axis leaders in the destruction of Jewish archives and historical records. Yet somehow, they managed to resist the occupation and save some of the historical records at substantial risk to their own lives. Civilization was literally hanging by a thread, if that. Those intellectual giants smuggled out books and records and hid them with friendly people in the ghetto, doing what they could to salvage some civilization.  They called themselves “the paper brigade.” We should call them heroes.

 

These intellectual warriors hoped that someone would come after them to retrieve those records and documents, and miraculously they did. How was that even possible? They literally rescued Jewish civilization from destruction at the hands of the Nazis and Communists.

The Communists discovered what was happening and once more sent the documents to the paper mill, but remarkably, they were rescued a second time by librarians who turned the trucks around and hid them until 1949 when it was again safe to release the.

Sometimes librarians are heroes.

An attack on civilization and knowledge

civilization, Freedom to Read, Truth Seeking

 

An attack on a library is an attack on civilization.

On August 25 1991 the library in Bosnia’s capital city of Sarajevo was shelled by the Serbian forces. No other buildings were attacked that day. Just their magnificent library. It was a deliberate barbarian attack on Bosnian civilization by brutes from Serbia. Serb snipers then picked off people who went to try to save the books in the building. One of them was killed. Few rare books were saved. It was too dangerous. Of course, the Serbian attacked people too.  It was the greatest assault in Europe since the Second World War.

According to Richard Ovenden, “the library was a target because it was both the symbol of a multi-cultural community that Bosnia and Herzegovina had managed to preserve and it contained the written culture and history of Muslims, Christians, and Jews all living together.” This really shows that the attack was an attack on civilization and knowledge. That is why I refer to the Serbs engaged in that attack as “brutes.”  It is a hard word, but I would suggest, not inappropriate in such circumstances.

Such an attack shows how the aggressors thought the Bosnians were not civilized, revealing, as such attacks inevitably do, that it is the aggressor who is uncivilized.

According to Ovenden,

“On the evening of August 25, 1992, shells began to rain down on a building in Bosnia’s capital city of Sarajevo. The shells were incendiaries, designed to raise fire rapidly on impact, especially when surrounded by combustible material. The building they hit was the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina. No other buildings were fired on this day — the library was the sole target for the shells.”

 

The National Library in Sarajevo reopened on May 9, 2014 — 22 years after the landmark building was destroyed during the Bosnian war, along with its nearly two million books and manuscripts.

Civilization and knowledge rose again from the ashes of Sarajevo.