The Native Boomerang :: Essays Papers

The Native Boomerang Imagine the typical colonial or imperial exploration party as white, rational, glorious civilized male believers encountering dark, irrational, ignoble, savage androgynous heathen. Imagine the currently popular (in policy, not theory) admiration of the native as a centered, serious, balanced, healthy, sane, and enlightened idealized form of the explorer. The first is a mirror in speckled and faded photographic negatives – the other is all that is bad about the subject. In the second the mirror is in 32 Bit True Color Photoshopped splendor – the native is all the subject could aspire to be. In the text of Columbus’ first voyage the boomerang effect of the assumed subject perceiving others’ perceptions of his/her self takes form as a rather unsubtle direct photocopy. While the ‘native’ other usually exists as a foil to define the non-‘native’ ‘subject’, in the case of the first voyage in the â€Å"Digest of Columb us’ Log Book†, the newly encountered native, as a collective and individual, functions as someone radically similar to the subject. In this text, the ‘native’, filtered through a complex circuitry of â€Å"authors† and â€Å"translators†, gives its[1] perceptions and reactions in several varieties: in its self-interest, intrigued by Columbus’ cohort as merchants; in its religious/social nature, awed by the â€Å"men who have come from the skies† (58); and in its â€Å"very simple †¦ not savage† (59) state, reluctant and irrationally attached to native lands and the earth. Columbus’ boomerang vision of his ‘natives’ perception of his expedition explains them as rationally, in both its then-present forms, eager about his presence and held back only by irrational impulse. I call Columbus’ perceptions boomerang vision because they emphasize/generate so much likeness between his expedition and the natives that the text understands the parties not as different people marked by similarities, but as the same sort of folks marked by occasional differences. The explicit justifications[2] used at home for his exploration are what he now ‘witnesses’ abroad as the natives’ response: reasoned excitement for wealth and religious ends balanced against unreasoned hesitancy. Columbus’ seven-year solicitation at the court of Spain included â€Å"repeatedly holding out great prospects of wealth and riches for the crown of Castile† (34), culminating in a â€Å"project for the exaltation of His Church† (103). That, thousands of miles away, he happen to ‘discover’ the precise same appreciation for his project, mitigated only by â€Å"their timidity† (77) is not coincidence, but the circular input and output of images through one filtering lens[3].