Culture or "tradition" or something else?

 This (below) appeared on the feed on X this morning and, given the subject of yesterday's post, it is worth repeating here.

 Yes, that painting you paid so much for is not from a thousands of year old tradition belonging to "the oldest continuous traditional culture." It really is a 1971 style taught by a "white" man.

The claim about "culture" is also wrong. There is no single culture among indigenous people in this country. There is no one language. The country is vast. People travelled on foot. After more than a few days journey they would not have understood each other. 

There were no "welcomes" or "acknowledgments". There were exchanges between closer tribes with similar languages - designed to find out if there was a friendly relationship in the past.

There were no "smoking" ceremonies. The fire to produce it had entirely different functions.

When there are claims that "culture" and "tradition" and "language" need to be "preserved" we need to ask what is really being done. The reality is that indigenous life before white settlement was very, very harsh. It was brutal. It was violent. It was short. The stories they told have changed in the way that those Grimm or Perrault collected have changed to be suitable for retelling to children.

There is money behind all this. There are billions of dollars spent every year on attempting to preserve something which did not exist - and which we are told we need to feel guilty about. It does not mean there is no heartfelt connection between the environment and the person or that some remnants of language and culture should not be maintained. We cannot discard thousands of years of culture "just like that" but we have to know what it really is we are trying to keep - and it may not be what we think it is.