Primal Religions 2022

 When we had our guest speaker in class we learned about the natives located in Toas, New Mexico. We started with learning about the different landscapes located around the city and within the reservation. This area is mostly desert and is inhabited by the Pueblo natives. We started going over how much water influences these people and their way of life. We talked about how different locations affects how people can get their water. For the Pueblo and the people of Toas, they get their water from the mountains surrounding their city. Most of the city and reservation are build with this in mind and build only in areas where getting water is not a hard task. We also went over the Kiva and how natives use them for sacred rituals. 

 Walter Ong explores several fascinating concepts in Orality and Literacy , but his concept that the shift from oral culture to literate culture provided a parallel shift from communal conceptions of the self to an individualized one is particularly intriguing. Ong states  "The evolution of consciousness through human history is marked by growth in articulate attention to the interior of the individual person as distanced—though not necessarily separated—from the communal structures in which each person is necessarily enveloped." He creates the conceptual framework that literacy bring the focus of the individual from the external which surrounds them as it does those co-constituting the environment with them into an individual experience that is not inherently communal. This is because the written word allows for an individual perception in a way that an oral experience does not. Furthermore, this is because the written word allows for conceptions of the abstract in a way tha...

 In both the Star Trek Episode "Darmok" and The Black Robe, there is a disconnect in communication between two groups at different levels of sedimentation. In Darmok, The Enterprise crew cannot discern the meaning of the mythic Tamarians until Picard faces camping on another planet and a battle with the Captain of the Tamarian ship. In The Black Robe, Father Laforgue is separated from connecting with the Native American because of his prioritization of evangelization and his preoccupation with the written word. He often is reading or contemplating religious doctrine rather than interacting with the landscape or the Native Americans, which leads to his condemnation as a demon and his abandonment. Both of these instances illustrates the importance of shared tangible experiences to communication. It isn't until Picard and the Tamarian Captain are united by their conflict with the beast, and their shared stories around a fire that their communication ensues. This is a stark c...

  The Enterprise goes to a place where they heard the Children of Tama. The Tamarians are on screen and seem to be saying a jumble of words. The translator is working they are speaking English. Just a bunch of meaningless words. “Shaka. When the walls fell. Darmok? Darmok. Rai and Jiri at Lungha.” This miscommunication with the Tarmarians begins to get intense when Captian Picard is transported with the captain of the alien ship, down to the planet. They can’t go and get him because the atmosphere of the planet is too thick. They send Worf with an away team to go and get him with the shuttle, but the Tamarians fire on the shuttlecraft and injure it just enough to make them turn back. It seems the Children of Tama want the two captains to remain there. Picard is trying to figure out what the Tamairan is saying, but in the meantime, there is a creature that puzzles Data, that they need to kill. Picard figures out that Darmok is a metaphor for a person that relates to the situation. T...

 For class we had to watch the film The Black Robe . In this movie we see the interactions between the native people of Canada and the French colonist. The priest in the movie goes on a trip to spread the word of God to native tribes in efforts to convert them so they can go to heaven. This movie does a good job showing the interaction between oral and literate cultures. We see how the natives use the earth in everything they do and this plays a big part in their religion. While the Catholics are only worried about showing the natives how good their lives could be after accepting God. The natives think of the priest as being a devil since he has a more advanced way of spreading information, religious or not. With the work of writing, we can easily pull up information and is a convenience to us but to native cultures they do not understand this concept. The see putting words into writing as a foreign concept because you cannot make something oral into something you can read. They al...