Tonight I caught part of a documentary on PBS about Native Americans (Delawares) in Indiana, entitled Long Journey Home. It was interesting in its own right, but given my own particular research interests, it was useful to hear how things that are often assumed to be “unchanging tradition” in Native American cultures are in fact anything but. Certainly there is preservation of stories, songs and customs from the past. But each generation, in the process of recreating the past, changes it and turns it into something at least slightly new.
The same happens with all cultures, and with all religions. Whether we are interested in oral tradition in earliest Christianity, or modern expressions of Christianity, it is always good to have reminders from other comparable yet distinct instances that there is no pure, unadulterated, static preservation of the past. Even when things are written or carved in stone, our cultures and perceptions change around the texts and artifacts, and so even when they don’t change, we do, and thus our understanding of those elements of cultural and religious heritage change.
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