4-6-01 (Shoshone-Bannock Museum, southeast Idaho)

Sep 10, 2001

I asked the lady at the museum for examples of Shoshone writing and she said they didn’t have any. She proceeded to explain why.

“Writing is about preservation, speaking is about what is happening right now. The Shoshone didn’t worry about the past or the future. They were focused on the very immediate problems of the day.”

The fascinating ramification has been that they could not prove legal claims. When the Shoshone told the US Government that they had been on the land for hundreds of years they had no way to legally prove this. They had no documentation to back it up. The woman I spoke with was still bitter about this. I think this incident, and hundreds like it, typify the power of “Manifest Destiny.” It’s amazing what you can do if you know you are right.

Another point she made later was about honesty.

“One of the worst things you could do in Shoshone culture is lie. People were banished for lying.”

It didn’t dawn on me till later that it had to be that way because they didn’t record things, except orally. They would never have been able to grow and thrive if everyone lied because lies isolate people. Lies are anti-social. This makes me wonder what purpose honesty serves. It must be preserving a more important social or human characteristic.

Now take this discussion I had with the Shoshone woman a step further and you might begin to think that writing is what allowed civilized human beings to make the jump into lying. Writing liberated people of responsibility for what they said. They no longer had to be as careful about remembering the proper farming techniques. As long as they had the honest truth about farming techniques written somewhere they were safe. Imagine the changes to people’s minds as they were no longer required to be as rigorous in remembering. If you don’t exercise those memory muscles as thoroughly they start to atrophy over the millenia and you find people today who can genuinely believe that their lies are the truth.

Don’t even get me started on how we introduce falsehoods into written records with the ambiguity of our words.

It seems like no matter how hard we try entropy always wins and we proceed towards chaos. We just figure out clever ways to slow it down.