Waldemar Torenstra crawls out of his tent, rubs the sleep from his eyes and says: “It starts here, guys.” What begins is the childhood dream, the road trip with the boys on the motorcycle across North and South America, with the aim of drastically rewriting the boys’ book about this continent. The tent is on the other side of the Hudson River, and from there he can see Manhattan, New York. The place that the Dutch ‘discovered’ in 1609. For sixty guilders, some trinkets and tools, they bought ‘Mannahatta’ from the original inhabitants.
Upside Down of the Americas is the second travel series that actor Waldemar Torenstra makes for television by motorcycle, for the first he drove across Africa. But his quest, which was shown on Saturday, is the same in both continents. What he wants to find is what is left of the original culture and traditions of the people who lived there before the white people came and usurped the land. And whoever seeks, finds. Torenstra’s begins his journey at a Brooklyn native motorcycle club. Its chairman, a scion of the original Lenape people, tells him that the concept of “wealth” did not exist for his ancestors. Everyone had the same amount and no one had more than the other. It was the Dutch, he says, who introduced the concept of wealth. And to protect and defend their property, they also brought axes, muskets, and other killing implements.
Torenstra asks the 94-year-old leader of the Haudenosaunee what ‘we’, the Europeans, can learn from his culture and background. The old man holds up two fingers. Having respect for the earth, trees and each other is one. And two: share everything with everyone, then you will never get to war. On his motorcycle on his way to the next indigenous population, Torenstra thinks aloud about how difficult it is for him to grasp the ‘indigenous gaze’. And “how different their view of our Western history is.”
Torenstra shows pictures showing that until 1776 only a tiny part of North America had been colonized, a century later almost the entire area was taken over and only a few million people of the indigenous population remained. Most succumbed to germs that the Europeans also introduced. He reads how rude and uncivilized the original inhabitants thought the newcomers were. Pale, blue-eyed, clumsy, bearded, oddly dressed, and unbearably filthy.
Representatives of the Seneca, Mohawks, and Haudenosaunee tell him that democratic decision-making existed among them long before the settlers came. Just like a constitution, egalitarianism and the equal role of women. In their culture, it is the female line that determines which clan you belong to. Women raise men to be leaders of their community. The woman, Torenstra concludes, is “super important”.
That’s a different story from the stories we knew about the white heroes who chased away the ‘savages’. The murderous ‘redskins’, the feathered Indians, the weirdly babbling Hiawatha from Donald Duck. Racist falsification of history full of caricatures and offensive stereotypes. But Torenstra counters that with something that can’t quite be right. As he puts it, ‘the’ indigenous people of North America seem to be a Better Person: peace-loving, democratic, women-friendly. Would that be the case with all 575 indigenous peoples spread over such a vast area? He thus creates a new narrative of the colonization of America, but with new stereotypes. Only the roles of who was the villain and who was the hero are reversed.