BLACK MOUNTAIN COMPLEX PETROGLYPHS

variations in context and syntax between languages ... generational changes in language not-with-standing. Even if the interpreters were Mojave, their interpretations might have been influenced by clan or personal prejudices and experiences such as Kroeber proposed when he coined the term 'reelaborated' in suggesting the history was merely an elaborate fantasy...likewise, Kroeber’s interpreters may have 'reelaborated' their interpretations.

 

For example:  Kroeber uses the term 'dream' in various contexts, but we do not know if the term used was interpreted 'literally' or 'figuratively by the informants, interpreters, Kroeber or cumulatively by all three.  We do not know for a fact that the informants understood the term 'dream', in the white man’s terms, to mean imaginary thought. To the informants, the physical act of closing one’s eyes to focus upon studied events may have been interpreted as 'recalling from memory', learned or experienced, or may have meant something else entirely, including ancestral spirit(s), dead or to die. There is, however, a modern axiom that may come into play:  Those who will not study history are destined to repeat it...modern children don’t like world or American history any better than the Mojave children of the 1900's may have appreciated the history lessons being taught by their own tribal historians.  This modern propensity for historical ignorance is punctuated by Kroeber when he goes into detail about how the Indians working in the railroad facilities of the 1900's may have found the long history of their tribe 'irrelevant and pointless', but his speculation is simply that...speculation...not fact.

 

Kroeber’s focus on the various contexts of dreaming and fantasy compared with the historically factual nature of the information provided by the informants/interpreters brings up the question of repetition ... one of the hallmarks of subliminal suggestion. The following is an analysis of Kroeber’s introduction to A MOHAVE HISTORICAL EPIC, entitled CIRCUMSTANCES AND NATURE OF THE TALE; it is about three pages in length:

 

Dream:  The concept of imaginative dreaming is used a total of 8 times in four (4) separate contexts.

 

Fantasy:  The concept of fantasy is used a total of 27 times in 11 different contexts.

 

Non-Historically oriented Editorial Comments:  Kroeber editorializes on the dream/fantasy context of the Mojave history a total of 10 times, suggesting the “Hard Sell” tactics of a used car salesman:

 

• “To men who had worked, however intermittently, on the railway maintenance way, in the locomotive roundhouse or in the ice plant, a legend about ancient migrations of bands that lived off the land must have seemed irrelevant and fairly pointless...”

• “The versions differ too much through being after all individually "refantasied..."

• “It has “historical” [in quotation marks] appearance in that it might have actually happened almost as told.”

• “At the same time there is nothing to show that any of the events did happen...”