American Indian Culture and Research Journal

It is difficult if not impossible at the present time to speak coherently about myth because the term has become 50 polluted by misuse. Yet no discussion of Native American literature can proceed without a meaningful concept of what myth is, how it works, and the part that mythopoeic vision plays in both literature and life.

Much of the literature of North American Indians is devoted to detailing the differences that exist in cultural orientations between the native peoples and the primarily white majority. Attention has been focused on differing approaches to and perceptions of time, property, child rearing, family organization, work, religion, sexual conduct, nature, and a host of other less prominent cultural and social variables. Little consideration, however, has been given to the fact that whites, as a heavy industrialized technological society, have relied primarily, if not exclusively, upon science and scientific interpretations to bring us into relationship with and control over the natural environment. In contrast to this, Indian groups of North America have traditionally related to their natural environments through the use of magic and ritual and have not shared in a detached, objective, analytical view of what nature is or what purposes it might serve.

"Is man a salvage at heart, skinned o'er with Manners? Or is salvagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?" The question posed so delicately by Mary Mungummory," the traveling whore a ' Dorset " in John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor, reflected an increasingly serious concern of generations of English colonists in America. In a culture that saw itself as the apotheosis and vanguard of "civilization," contact with the Indian cultures of the New World produced an unexpected and uncharacteristic uncertainty about its own identity. The Indian was important for the English mind " for what he showed civilized men they were not and must not be " -a negative force in the cosmic duel between Darkness and Light. But he also exerted a positive force, for "what he was in and of himself," what his culture actually was, posed a threat and a challenge to English culture that struck at the very heart of its existence, its identity , and perhaps most of all, its integrity.

Until recently, it has been difficult to present a logically consecutive account of the Keres idea of a godhead. In varying degrees Keres worship of its deities has been rationalized as positivist or mystic by theologians and behavioral scientists as well as by other tribal Americans. It has never been certain whether Keres worship is positivist-pagan overly involved with the reality of existence or mystically pagan with uncommon concern with the supernatural. Astronomers conducting searches for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) have long been interested in the history of “first contact” between foreign civilizations as a proxy for extraterrestrial contact and have often employed frontier metaphors and colonial analogies in their pursuit of extraterrestrials. This article shows this language was more than mere rhetoric; drawing from the history of Orientalism and the US frontier, this article investigates SETI’s physical and disciplinary homes, ultimately arguing that, even when attempting to convey universality, SETI scientist’s pursuit of the alien was shaped by cultural power structures such as gender and colonialism.