the white's "bad choice"

Abstract

The objective of this essay is to rethink the theme of the “bad choice” in the Amerindians myths of the “fateful sentence”, reconsidering what they seem to point out as relevant. If the choice for the bow and arrow and for the traditional ornaments – in the mythological ground – shows itself as unfavorable to the indigenous and the white’s choice for the metallic objects denote his technical advancement; what happens, in these myths, is an inversion of the sense of the consequences that each of these choices produces. On the contrary of the apparent disadvantage of the indigenous people, the non-indigenous and his metallic objects were the ones that generated a process of destruction of the world, which seems to be the “bad choice”. Although this situation appears clearly in the mythology – as seen above -, there are other instantiations of these differences, like the different ways of living or in the end of the world for the whites – for example, the atomic bomb, itself product of various transformations of metallic objects chosen by the Whites.