Yes, 100%, I don’t at all want to give the idea that no history was ever remembered, and I don’t want to sound like I’m shitting on oral history either. I just… really wish someone had written some stuff down. There’s so much that’s lost to time because of the pandemics that swept the post contact world and all of colonization that followed.
yes a lot of cultures went extinct but not because they didn’t have writing. it’s because there was no one left to pass on the knowledge.
if we think about it from the perspective of contemporary indigenous people, they know how to read and write English but that’s a side effect of boarding schools. and it’s led to more intensive cultural extinction because of forced assimilation.
tldr: some tribes had writing before Columbus, some didn’t. cultural genocide is effective in both oral and written traditions
sigh it’s called oral history and it was working just fine before the settlers showed up
Yes, 100%, I don’t at all want to give the idea that no history was ever remembered, and I don’t want to sound like I’m shitting on oral history either. I just… really wish someone had written some stuff down. There’s so much that’s lost to time because of the pandemics that swept the post contact world and all of colonization that followed.
yes a lot of cultures went extinct but not because they didn’t have writing. it’s because there was no one left to pass on the knowledge.
if we think about it from the perspective of contemporary indigenous people, they know how to read and write English but that’s a side effect of boarding schools. and it’s led to more intensive cultural extinction because of forced assimilation.
tldr: some tribes had writing before Columbus, some didn’t. cultural genocide is effective in both oral and written traditions