Story Is Reality, Not Myth

I don't know what the protocol is in America, but here in Australia it's an insult to call our dreaming stories or history "myths and legends". These things are real, not made up. The only myths I know are those western stories about peaceful settlement, European cultural/technological superiority, ethnic stereotypes, etc.

I'll give you some examples close to home of the sophisticated knowledge carried by the Indigenous oral history texts you call "myths". I've heard about coyote story in some American Aboriginal language groups. This is based on randomness, but following complex algorithms that have eluded western chaos theory mathematicians for decades. The coyote algorithms are an example of what has always been used to inform the selective genetic construction of many Native American crop stocks through rigorously scientific traditional breeding programs, making Indian crops the envy of the world (hence western theft and monopolistation of corn, tomatoes, potatoes etc, you name it, which have since become the staples of the world).

Such advanced Indigenous mathematics tied to so-called "mythology" was also the basis of the famous Navajo Codes used during the Second World War, when American natives were called in to construct codes based on sophisticated smoke signal algorithms. These were far superior to the western ones, and thwarted German attempts to decode intelligence pivotal to the allied victory.

And yet none of this is acknowledged in western history and anthropological texts about Indigenous peoples. Instead we have to sit and endure a foreign academic community patronising us with terms like "mythology", "myths" and "legends".

We don't go around calling Christ stories legends, so why can't these people extend us the same courtesy?

Read more about this at Indigenous Mathematic Systems