Historical Truth? 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 history lesson tells the children of the dependence each group had on each other. But as the children mature, the relations between the two groups began to change with their age. So the story that the teenagers are told is a gruesome one of savage killings and lying. When the teenagers learn of this, they themselves might want to do research on this subject to find out the truth. But as one searches, one finds the inconsistency between the research books. So the question is, who is telling the truth? Mary Louise Pratt and Jane Tompkins 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 history gets favored and whose gets limited by analyzing the circumstances surrounding Guaman Poma’s and de la Vega’s letter to the King of Spain. In “‘Indians’: Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History,” Tompkins investigates how history is shaped in accordance to personal biases and cultural conditions of historians by questioning different writings about Native Americans. Each author comes to the conclusion between history and subjectivity, meaning that history is problematic. The historical accounts pondered by Pratt and Tompkins through historical text allows them to realize that every account that a historian calls a fact is really a perspective. Pratt’s concepts of “contact zone,” “autoethnography,” and “ethnography” are supported by the historical ideas in Tompkins essay. The concepts “contact zone,” “autoethnography,” and “ethnography” are used by Pratt to support ideas in her essay about hi...
