Landscapes Lost and Found - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 25

rocks of the Yildirim block underlying the catchment are 2.5 billion years
old, needs thorough redesigning. Can these farmers, with their changed
ways of thinking, now construct a new story?
Of course, what Cook saw, and later Muir in the Sierra Nevada, was
conditioned by what they knew. If you believe in wildernesses, then you
will see one and name it so. If you know a meadow as part of a pastoral
scene, so you will see one more readily. If you see native vegetation simply
taking up space where fields could be, then you remove it. However, it is
a mistake to believe that the effect of rewriting the landscape is only a one-
way process. As Bernard Smith indicates with regard to the 'discovery' of
Pacific peoples during the 18th century, their impact on Europe was
perhaps as great as the impact of European culture and diseases on the
Pacific. 53 When the Tahitian, Omani, arrived in England in 1774 with
Captain Furneaux, according to Smith he 'created a sensation. . . He mingled in
fashionable circles with a natural grace and became a lion of London society' . More
importantly, his presence provoked new domestic criticism of Empire and
its 'pilfered wealth', and even of the shortcomings of English society. A
decade later, the son of the chief of one the Palau Islands accompanied
Henry Wilson back to England, again to much public acclaim and self-
criticism.
Nonetheless, there persisted a subtle misrepresentation of the story
through landscape painting that, according to Smith, sought to 'evoke in
new settlers an emotional engagement with the land that they had alienated from its aboriginal
occupants' . The noble Pacific islander, in traditional dress, or engaged in
traditional ceremony or dance, or the boat full of arriving heroes sensit-
ively stepping onto the beach, hides the real story. Landings were more
often accompanied by guns and violence, and long-term damage to
societies and nature. Such systematic disenfranchisement has clearly been
more common than sensitive interaction. George Miles similarly draws
attention to the lack of voice given to Native Americans by incomers. Even
though they had told their stories for centuries, suddenly they were silent,
nobly silent to some, but more often - sadly even to the likes of Mark
Twain - they were 'silent, sneaking, treacherous looking' . 54
Part of the problem was that most Native Americans had a predomin-
antly verbal culture, without alphabets. The Cherokee alphabet, for
example, was only constructed by a young Cherokee, Sequoyah, in the early
19th century. It led to the printing of the first Native American newspaper
in 1828, which was so successful in telling its story that the authorities
of Georgia arrested its editors and confiscated the press six years later. It
then reappeared as the Cherokee Advocate in 1843, from the Cherokee
national capital of Talhequah, lasted until 1854, was closed down again,
reappeared again in the mid 1870s, and then endured until 1906, when