de, of facts alreadyperceived as facts (631).Tompkins is saying that there are no facts, just opinions. So what eachhistorian calls a fact is really a perspective or opinion. Tompkins’ position onfacts is that they are not completely true due to the opinions of the author.With this information, Pratt would agree with Tompkins view aboutfactualism and subjectivity in historical accounts. In Pratt’s examination of dela Vega’s and Poma’s essay, she upholds Tompkins’ assumption. Pomawrites an “autoethnographic text” where the inferior writes about the superiorand their conflicts. So de la Vega’s essay is the opposite, an “ethnographictext.” Poma, an Incan, does have a form of writing, one that is not common toothers, so his essay is filled with pictures and text to describe the accounts ofthe conquering by the Spanish. With the essay containing pictures, and amixture of different languages it would be difficult to understand by anyone. On the other hand, de la Vega’s essay is written in the native language ofSpain where they will understand the topics talked about. Each of theauthors, de la Vega and Poma, view their works as the facts. But Pratt istelling us that history is subjective. As it is seen the superior cultures text wasreadily available for people to see based on the accessibility to have the textduplicated. Another example is that de la Vega represents the superiorculture. So with peoples biases one would conform to the beliefs of the culturethat is more like themselves. This is exactly the same reasons why Tompkinsdid not read any texts written by an Indian, because they were not availablefor her to read to get an accurate account of the time period since the Indiansdid not have accessibility to the requirements of writing essays. Also, themajority of people would not understand the text if it was written.According to these two authors, there seems to...
