Sasquatch, Science, & History

I was thinking back to when we went through Alexie's "The Sasquatch Poems" in class and the lines that continually stick out to me are "Even now, we like to think science replaced religion / when, in fact, religion became science" (106). This is about how we trust everything science says now instead of trusting everything our religion says, because our religion is our science or vice versa, depending on how you look at it. Either way, it's all about the facts.

There's irony in the truth Alexie presents. On the one hand, we have our science, our experiments, our hard FACTS, but on the other hand we have our colonial mind when it comes to history, which is sort of like the "colonial superstition" Alexie refers to (108). In Lies My Teacher Told Me, Loewen's whole agenda is to strip away the lies of the colonial mind. It seems like such hypocrisy for our society to religiously exact facts and hard evidence from one discipline (science) while blatantly and unashamedly lying about and softening another (history). It seems backwards to me. Isn't science where you're supposed to propose theories to find truth and history where you're supposed to just tell the truth of the past not necessarily the other way around?

I agree with Loewen as he cites the historian, Christopher Vecsey, "We must temper our national pride with critical self-knowledge" (134). I want what Alexie's wants in the final poem of his book, The Summer of Black Widows; I want to "...know finally / somebody will take care of this place / even if just in memory" (139).