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Content: On the other hand, the European (and academic) bias toward paper
documentation, coupled with the fact that Aboriginal cultures
have been oral and/or used other media (e.g., wampum belts) to
transmit information from generation to generation, have left
aboriginal peoples among those peoples who, from the European
perspective, have no history (cf., Wolf, 1982). As Stanley (1983)
stated: "Because the Indian had no written records when the first
white man reached this continent, he was dismissed by the white
man as having no past." ( p.1)
Stanley's observation is itself ahistorical, however, since European
histories of North America, and depictions of aboriginals within
it, have themselves changed considerably as the relationship between
whites and aboriginals has varied over the last 500 years. In
that sense, "North American history", and "aboriginal
history" within it, are better seen, as Fisher & Coates
(1988) have argued, as social constructions. In this regard, they
approvingly cite another historian (K.R. Howe) who
"...pointed out that, because history is what we choose to
see, 'the past has no independent existence'. Indeed, it might
well be argued that history has some of the same functions in
western cultures as mythology does in Indian cultures: it validates
the past in terms that are meaningful for the present." ( p.3)
The changing depictions of aboriginal peoples who do appear in
Canadian histories seem to offer a classic example of those dominating
the present constructing the past in the service of their own
interests.