I’ve been really busy with the Olympics and television watching.
Some years ago, after playing Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla I got into some Viking shows. First it was The Last Kingdom, then Vikings, then Vikings: Valhalla. They really like their Valhalla.
It was fun, and violent, and old timey. It was entertaining, sure. But it also sent me down various rabbit holes in an attempt to learn fact from fiction. A lot of these shows have characters that existed or mythologized versions of people who may or may not have existed. Watching this latest season of Vikings: Valhalla something hit me like a bucket of ice water.
Christians didn’t erase ancient Viking culture and history, but not for lack of trying; that was the bucket. The ice water was the realization that the reason I don’t see heroic television shows or movies about, say the Aztec or Mayan cultures, is because Christian efforts to erase cultures sometimes succeed. So little of the histories and cultures of the indigenous tribes exists because their European invaders used their own religions as an excuse to eradicate and erase already existing cultures.
It’s more than a little heartbreaking to realize that I am the result of a couple of centuries worth of cultural whitewashing. What I do find interesting is the way that so much of indigenous culture has mixed with christian faiths to create this beautiful bastardized mix of chicano and mexicano culture. So I guess we got that going for us.
But I would have loved to have seen a series about ancient Mexica tribes uniting to create what would ultimately become Teotihuacan, a city rivaled only by Paris at the time of the Spanish arrival. That’s a show I would binge and then eagerly anticipate each off season. More than that, I would love to exist in a world where the ancient gods and mythologies of my own ancestors were as celebrated as the those of my Viking brethren.
I take some small solace in being around to see a sort of a renaissance of mesoamerican history and culture. And I guess, in a way, this absence of video game, movie, and television representation is one less way for the Mexica (Aztec for my white friends) culture to be plundered *eyeroll*. I just wish we hadn’t lost so much of it.
