Red Earth, White Lies

A book by Vine Deloria Jr.

A book, written by an American Indian about the prejudices we accept as science today. He questions many things including human evolution in a manner that makes you really wonder.

He starts the book by outlining the most grievous crimes of science. When the white man discovered that what was written in the Bible was not entirely true, he decided that any ancient knowledge that anybody possessed was just superstition. Since the Europeans were superstitious, everyone else had to be as well.

But he argues that Indian knowledge has survived through oral tradition. Somebody at some time in the past saw something and passed it down. If it was a meteor strike, they may not have had the words to explain it but that does not imply that the event never occurred. Making this assumption about oral traditions across the world is the starting point for anthropology and geology today.

He quotes the works of Immanuel Velikovsky who showed that stories from across the world actually align. If there is a massive flood in everybody’s oral tradition might it be that there could have been a meteor strike that caused tsunamis across the globe? Modern science would not even admit these stories as evidence let alone ponder the correlation.

The Book by Immanuel Velikovsky caused such a stir that they had to set up a separate publishing company called Paradigma to publish his books!

The Europeans needed to prove that the American natives were fresh to the land and could not stake claim to it. After the enlightenment, there was no other way to justify their reprehensible appropriation of the Americas. Hence the entire story of the Beringia land bridge. He argues that if the Pacific Ocean had frozen over from modern Russia to Alaska, what in the world would have motivated some people to weather -60C temperatures and cross over.

The only explanation is that it is convenient for science.

After crossing this land, those people go on a murderous spree of killing every large creature that walked the land from Alaska to California in less than 100 years. There is not a shred of evidence to back this except for the fact that it has now become a part of Science today. The more likely explanation is that humans sailed across the pacific and reached the Americas from what is Indonesia today. Just because the Europeans deemed such a voyage impossible, they completely discarded this possibility.

Almost all of anthropology is built on the flimsiest of evidence and none of it would stand up to adequate scrutinising. The only thing holding it up is the fact that many of these theories were proposed hundreds of years ago and have become so entrenched in academia and have such a huge body of work standing atop it that it would be devastating for almost the entire field to have the proverbial rug pulled from under their feet.

How much resistance can one find to ideas that threaten the current understanding of history?

I found the book to not only be provocative but also to pose questions that are pertinent and which have not been answered by mainstream science. Every time a person poses these questions, they are deemed pseudohistorians.

This book was written when Bill Clinton was President and few would have heard of it!