hegemony rules

After reading one of the postings on Alex Halavais's blog, I had to share my own so-called "teachable moment."

Last weekend, I was visiting A in San Antonio. We'd stopped at one of the area's many missions, specifically, Mission San Jose. After cruising around and reading all of the educational signs about the "Mission Indians" and wryly discussing the heavily pro-development, pro-European, pro-essentializing dialogue, I witnessed the following exchange:

Father: You know, the Indians gave the Spanish syphillis which they took back to Europe.

Daughter: I thought it was small pox!

Father: Oh yeah, that too.

Hmm. While some suggest that syphillis was present in the "New World" before Europeans arrived (see Cecil Adams' Straight Dope column on the subject), it is highly debatable. And, the idea that Europeans got smallpox from the native populations in North America is just dead wrong.

As Jared Diamond writes in Guns, Germs, and Steel, a significant reason for the conquest of Native populations had to do with the germs they carried:

As for the most advanced native societies of North America...their destruction was accomplished largely by germs alone, introduced by early European explorers and advancing ahead of them. As Europeans spread throughout the Americas, many other native societies, such as the Mandans of the Great Plains and the Sadlermiut Eskimos of the Arctic, were also wiped out by disease, without need for military action (374).

So, how did I respond to this clearly inaccurate statement? I fumed privately to A, which did nothing but make me more frustrated. I mean, this is exactly why I try not to eavesdrop - it just makes it too easy to hear something that's misguided, ethnocentric (or worse) or just plain wrong. And it's not like I can just march up to this person and explain that they're being a jerky ignoramus. (At the time, I did secretly wish I had access to a park ranger uniform so I could legitimately correct his mistake without looking like an ass myself.)