INVASION NOT DISCOVERY

I spent most of yesterday at The National Museum of the Native American Indian being inspired and reminded about some of the original reasons why Make Travel Fair was created.

"Native spiritual values live in stories. Passed verbally from generation to generation, the stories preserve Native culture, languages and ways of explaining the universe."

Emil Her Many Horses, 2003

HISTORY
The original contact made by Christopher Columbus with the indigenous people of the Americas did not just deliver livestock and European culture but also a host of deadly microbes that withered the native population. With little immunity to European disease they fell victim to measles, small pox, influenza, mumps and other diseases. From 1492-1650 contagious disease claimed 9 out of 10 lives. This wave of disease that swept the Americas ahead of the Mayflowers Pilgrims arrival emptied entire Indian villages...the colonists settled in one and named it Plymouth. If European farmers had landed in the Bahamas with nothing more than good will, their diseases would have killed just the same. These health problems were unintended and unavoidable, even inevitable; what happened in its wake however was not.

We must support the indigenous communities that live amongst us and help them to retain their identity. The new world was not discovered but invaded.

"Art is a visual language and when contemporary Native artists
use the vocabulary of the tradition, they too, are keeping a language
alive. When they use that vocabulary in a new way, they show that we can
innovate yet remain connected to our Native identity. Embracing change
while holding on to our philosophical center, is survivance."

Jolene Rickard, guest curator, and Gabrielle, NMAI,
2004

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