Indigenous universal histories
Surveys of history making typically begin with ancient Greece, but there are strong grounds for giving consideration to the narratives constructed by Indigenous communities around the world to make sense of the past, present and future.
Far from being fanciful constructions, they are better described in the sense coined by Mircea Eliade, as ‘sacred history'.[6] Eliade used this terminology to capture the idea of the past as being the source of rules ormores that not only explain the present, but also help people living in the present to create a better future. This is akin to universal histories of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but the format of these works can be a challenge to anyone who assumes that histories are chronologically ordered written accounts. Indigenous universal histories are painted, sung, danced and traced across landscapes. Deborah Bird Rose's work on Australian Indigenous histories, for example, highlights the importance of events taking place rather than being in time.[7] Geography is the primary organising principle of meaning in Australian Indigenous histories, meaning that it is quite possible for figures from different times to connect with one another as if they were contemporaries. The moral import of these stories also becomes clear when we consider the common figure of the ‘trickster' in Native American tales. As Richard Erdoes has shown, bodily transformations and transgressive actions by figures such as the Raven of the Northwest peoples remind audiences about the permeability of boundaries between the human and the other, and between proper and improper action.[8] The continuation of these traditions today highlights the deep history of world history making.