All literature is subject to the bias you seem to think invalidates these peoples' right to determination. "All lost knowledge is invalid, or else it would have persisted" is, essentially, an imperialist perspective. Knowledge lost because of invasion isn't made less valuable to those who perpetuated it before they were wiped out by colonialists.
> All literature is subject to the bias you seem to think invalidates these peoples' right to determination.
You're clearly very passionate on this subject, though you appear to be arguing against claims that aren't being made.
First, your claim that oral tradition seems inefficient compared to writing is extremely hard to defend. The accuracy, scope, density, longevity, and reproducibility of written information has clear advantages over speech-based transmission.
Second, I don't see that sigstoat was claiming Australian aborigines have no right to determination. I read the observation at face value -- if you have two groups of people, both relying on oral tradition to pass on information necessary for survival, and only one group is around today -- this does not indicate that all oral tradition was effective, only that some subset / subgroup was. (Naturally this ignores OCP's.)
> "All lost knowledge is invalid, or else it would have persisted" is, essentially, an imperialist perspective.
Quoting something that wasn't actually said by the person you're responding is misleading.
In any case, no one is claiming this.
There's a regrettable abundance of 'knowledge' (literature, oral traditions, customs, etc) that have persisted across every society or culture, that by all rights should not have.
> 37,000 years of oral tradition versus .. 5,000 years (?) of written? The jury is still out.
Recency of invention is not synonymous with inefficiency.
Consider that you're trying to assert oral tradition is more efficient than writing systems ... in a written format on a construct accessed by hundreds of thousands of people around the world over many years rather than demonstrating the validity of your claim to a half dozen people around a fire.
I don't disagree with your position on the strengths of written media - I'm after all a major user of the media - but I do think that there is great value in recognising that 37,000 years ago, someone told a story - and here we are, still discussing it. That's not something that we in the West can predict will happen, or not, too soon - especially given the immense amount of material that has been lost, even in our lifetimes, because it was written and forgotten.
