Sacred Headwaters #9: Indigenous Ways of Knowing
One predominant culture permeates most of our world today. But others have existed in the past (and continue to exist on the margins) that operated in fundamentally different ways. What can we learn?
Sacred Headwaters is a bi-weekly newsletter that aims to guide a co-learning process about the existential issues and planetary limitations facing humanity and about how we can reorient civilization in a way that will enable us to thrive for centuries to come. If you’re just joining us, consider checking out the first issue for some context and read through the other issues when you can. The newsletters are not strictly sequential, but this exploration is meant to build on knowledge and understanding over time. Subscribe below if you haven’t already, and please share with friends, family, and colleagues who may be interested:
Sacred Headwaters #9: Indigenous Ways of Knowing
If you’ve been reading the newsletter up to this point, it’s probably obvious that I believe we need fundamental cultural change and a different approach to how humans interact both with each other and with the natural world if we want our species to last and to thrive for much longer. What’s been interesting, for me, is finding out how many people agree with that sentiment but believe that it’s — by nature — impossible. There’s a pervasive theory that humanity is by nature extractive, selfish, and even destructive. This belief is perpetuated most by the social structure we live in now but also by certain popular authors and out-of-date evolutionary theories extrapolated onto human value systems.
On the face of it, I find this perspective troubling and deeply pessimistic. If we are to have any hope of building a sustainable society, we can’t believe that. If you truly believe that humans are extractive and destructive by nature, then the only realistic personal attitude is some form of nihilism.
Hope and philosophy aside, I think this perspective is empirically wrong. We may look at some of the theoretical and evolutionary arguments about this at a later date, but in this newsletter, we’re going to look at how it’s wrong by glaring omission. There are examples of Indigenous cultures throughout history (both extinct and still living) that exhibited relationships with each other and with the world around them that represent a completely different conception of humanity’s role, one that sees humans as cooperative, not just with each other but with all other life on earth.
I write this issue not intending to say, “This is how Indigenous cultures view the world” nor to place a comparative judgment between our western culture and any others. What I’m hoping to do is introduce you to what it means to genuinely understand that there are other ways of conceptualizing the world. It’s relatively easy to “know” that there are other ways of thinking; reading about Indigenous cultures past and present can make this clear. But to begin to understand what another “way of knowing” is is an entirely more challenging step. Imagine the difference between knowing that other languages exist and actually thinking in another language. Then, imagine thinking in a language that treats pronouns, plants, animals, verbs, and even time itself in a way that can’t be meaningfully expressed in your own language. That’s the beginning of understanding that other thought paradigms exist. I’m using language as an analogy here, but it’s also a fundamental piece of the differences between Indigenous worldviews and western Eurocentric ones: our consciousness is defined and constrained by the language we think in, and it’s no coincidence that many ancient languages are full of concepts that cannot be meaningfully translated into English.
It’s not fair to Indigenous peoples or to denizens of western society to say that the world should adopt their culture nor would it be feasible. But in order to guide our global cultural development to a place that permits sustainability, we need to learn to understand that other cultures existed and continue to exist and that our dominant neoliberal globalism has no greater claim to being the natural or inevitable state of humankind than any other social system. And we need to recognize that as an opportunity to fix what’s broken.
Homework: Whose Land Do You Live On?
Yes, this week there’s homework. I want everyone to find out who lived on the land they now call home 500 years ago. 1000 years ago. 5000 years ago. This map is a good start for much of the world. One of the things western culture doesn’t typically value is place: we’re a culture of immigrants and emigrants, detached from our ancestral homes by generations. For anyone who has time, I’d like to hear about this in the discussion thread following this issue: what people called your land home? What language(s) did they speak? Do those languages still exist?
“Indigenous Science Declaration” (5 minutes)
In media coverage, Indigenous rights are often cast as opposed to or standing in opposition to “science.” Even if they are given a degree of what seems like respect, Indigenous ways of being are cast as “faith” instead of science-based. What this perspective misses is that Indigenous knowledge is science in every sense of the word. It’s a way of living that’s based on thousands of years of experimentation with and observation of the natural world. It just isn’t “western science.” This letter was written by a group of Indigenous university professors who bridge the gap between their own cultures’ knowledge and the western science of the academic world. It’s a statement of solidarity with the March for Science (2017), but it’s one that emphasizes that science is far broader than traditionally understood and that for humanity to move forward sustainably, it needs to embrace a more holistic perspective.
“Jagged Worldviews Colliding” (20 minutes)
This essay uses a matter-of-fact academic tone to describe the ways that language, culture, and place interact to determine how a society governs itself, exploring and contrasting North American Indigenous perspectives (the author a member of the Blackfoot confederacy born in Canada) and the western or Eurocentric one. The author explains how origin stories, language, and even perception of time are deeply intertwined with societal governance, law, and value systems. You may be somewhat taken aback by the frankness with which he describes Eurocentric values, but it harkens back to what we read about in issue #4 (Introduction to Systems Thinking). The author argues that Indigenous perspectives are holistic, seeing the world as a network of relationships between beings — humans and non-human. By contrast, traditional western perspectives are deterministic and often reductive. In a practical sense, this is being recognized globally in the need for place-based land management, holistic ecosystem restoration, and more, and you can see it talked about in the report from the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction that we read in issue #8.
Learning From Indigenous Humanities (20 minutes)
This essay was written in response to a talk by Leroy Little Bear (the author of the previously linked piece), but it stands on its own.
In this article, Rita Wong reflects on what the study of “Indigenous humanities” (as a counterpart to traditional Eurocentric “humanities” education) means and why it’s important. She draws in stories and language-based lessons from North American Indigenous culture and from Asian cultures to emphasize how starkly different from the Eurocentric worldview they are — and more than that, how hard or even impossible it can be to express certain cultural concepts from Indigenous cultures in English. Ultimately, she points to the Indigenous concept of humans as belonging to the land (rather than land belonging to humans) as a guiding principle for global decolonization, arguing that we need to draw lessons from these perspectives in order to reorient our relationship with the natural world and avert ecological disaster (global warming, etc.).
Podcast: “How Western Media’s False Binary Between ‘Science’ and Indigenous Rights Is Used to Erase Native People,” Citations Needed
As we try to broaden our perspectives, it’s helpful to learn a bit about how those perspectives have been formed (or, arguably, molded). Citations Needed is a podcast focused on the media; their perspectives on media bias can be very helpful for trying to unwind those unconscious biases within our own minds. In this episode, Citations Needed looks at how “Science” has been used as an excuse for marginalizing Indigenous peoples for centuries, pointing out how the media has created a false dichotomy between “Science” and what they often call “religion” — but what is really Indigenous rights and sovereignty. This podcast doesn’t advance my point of proving that other very different cultures have existed over the course of human history. Instead, it gives some context to the way western culture and media have shaped the discourse about Indigenous cultures, pointing out that the idea that our modern society is at the leading edge of a linear “human progress” scale is a concept that was manufactured by the interests of colonialism and imperialism.
Book Recommendation: Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
Kimmerer is a botany professor in upstate NY and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. This book is a collection of essays that try to connect the reductive, deterministic world view of modern, western society -- something she's deeply embedded in as an academic -- with the holistic, story-based reciprocity of Indigenous ways of knowing. It's really well done and, for those of us who have grown up not knowing anything but the western worldview, it gives a window into another way of being, of knowing, showing that it's not necessarily human nature to live in an extractive relationship with each other and with the world. These are thoughts I've had for a long time and other books like Wade Davis's The Wayfinders have made the same case to me, but Braiding Sweetgrass was the bridge that started to make me feel like I could internalize and actually understand the fact that there are other paradigms of thought and being.
I would also very highly recommend The Wayfinders. It’s a collection of stories of Davis’s time studying Indigenous cultures around the world from Polynesia to the Amazon to Borneo. He describes these peoples’ ways of life and histories and subtly draws a connection between our modern situation and the lessons we can learn from alternative cultures. It’s a shorter read than Braiding Sweetgrass and well worth it.
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