Restless Natives

Grainy black and white.  Black and white.  Old movies.  Old lies.  And I wonder...   Take away the presumptions of history, turn the world upside down, the flat earth seen in the mirror.  The ships come, for they will surely come.  But the ships come from the south, crowded not with slaves but colonists, who crash like waves upon the shores and multiplying over decades, an increasing storm.  The centuries, with their eventuality, will justify the sins of the invader, the crimes that time cannot efface, the emptied land.  And someday, when technology allows, a dark-skinned director with bleached actors (wearing quaint costumes that suggest but do not remember a lost culture) will create a celluloid reality that will rewrite these first encounters, that called from the comfortable distance of history "contact".  And how might such a fanciful depiction of the days of exploration, invasion, conversion look to the novice audience--white faces huddled in the second balcony--in the flickering insistence of the Bijou's lights?  Most specifically (recalling the dismissive hiss of this world's vision of "witch doctors" and "cannibals"), how would that black and white movie describe the actual cannibalistic theology of the local faith?  How might it mock the fat bishop in his silly miter, the bizarre tone scape of the Gregorian chant, the rites and rituals of birth and marriage and the incoherent spell mumbled over the dying and again over the grave?  Perhaps this picture would be naive and "not malicious", based on the distortions that had formed in the pages of books and newspaper accounts designed to fire the imagination of the folks that were left at home.  Or perhaps the robes and rosaries would be utilized in a wise-cracking, Busby Berkeley number, in which the restless natives would spin and swoon, the sinfully delicious licorice ingenue at the center of it all like the sun in an alien (and dangerous?) landscape inhabited by pallid monsters who pray to a corpse.