My title means to point to the fact that the history of America most of us know is not the only history of America. The indigenous oral tradition, for example, abounds with narratives that the contemporary Wyandot historian Clifford Trafzer calls "thefirst history of the Americas" (474; emphasis added). This is "history," Trafzer notes, "in the native sense of the word," but not only in the "native sense," for Trafzer claims that these narratives of monster slayers, women falling from the sky, and emergences from deep within the earth "reflect actual incidents that occurred in world history" (486n2; emphasis added). For the modern West, of course, these narratives do not reflect the "actual" or factual; for us, they are "myth," not history. Traditional Native people, it should be noted, also make a distinction between history and myth but not on the basis of a judgment as to the (f)actuality of the incidents related. For them, history consists of narratives of events nearer to the present in time, while myth relates an eventfulness very far distant from the present in time, when the world was young and "soft." But both types of narrative are equivalently taken to be true.' The difference between the traditional Native and the modern, settler understanding of history in America is urgently a problem for postcolonial historians and critics who do not wish their work to continue the long and sorry imperial legacy of might making right-of knowledge not merely intersecting with but wholly determined by power. This problem, moreover, will not be solved simply by liberal good will or the adoption of a vague multicultural "tolerance." That is-to repeat-because traditional Native American conceptions of history2 and modern Western conceptions of history are not merely perspectivally different-a matter of vantage point-but epistemologically different,3 a matter of different ways of perceiving, understanding, and representing the world in narrative. In what follows I take on what should be the easier case, the stories Native people tell of times not so very long ago, stories we and they both recognize as recounting historical events. Even these narratives, however, are different enough from Western histories to be troubling to the would-be anticolonialist or cosmo-