As a child sits through history class in the first grade, he or she learns of the relationship between Christopher Columbus and the Indians. This historylesson tells the children of the dependence each group had on each other. But as the children mature, the relations between the two groups began tochange with their age. So the story that the teenagers are told is a gruesomeone of savage killings and lying. When the teenagers learn of this, theythemselves might want to do research on this subject to find out the truth. Butas one searches, one finds the inconsistency between the research books. So the question is, who is telling the truth? Mary Louise Pratt and JaneTompkins probe these difficulties of the reading and writing of history,specifically at the problems of bias and contemplative historical accounts. In“Art of the Contact Zone,” Pratt explores the issue of whose version of historygets favored and whose gets limited by analyzing the circumstancessurrounding Guaman Poma’s and de la Vega’s letter to the King of Spain. In “‘Indians’: Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History,” Tompkinsinvestigates how history is shaped in accordance to personal biases andcultural conditions of historians by questioning different writings about NativeAmericans. Each author comes to the conclusion between history andsubjectivity, meaning that history is problematic. The historical accountspondered by Pratt and Tompkins through historical text allows them to realizethat every account that a historian calls a fact is really a perspective. Pratt’sconcepts of “contact zone,” “autoethnography,” and “ethnography” aresupported by the historical ideas in Tompkins essay. The concepts “contact zone,” “autoethnography,” and “ethnography” areused by Pratt to support ideas in her essay about history. A “contact z...
