Science is about understanding; it is one of the ways we attempt to answer the perennial questions about the nature of existence. The goal of science is, in part, the gaining of knowledge, and, in many cultures, the acquisition of knowledge is associated with the possession of power. Thus, the Elizabethan philosopher Francis Bacon equated knowledge with power—“Knowledge and human power come to the same thing, for nature cannot be conquered except by obeying her.” Knowledge, therefore, is something to be possessed and accumulated. In so many ways this approach to knowledge and to power is very different from that within Indigenous societies.
Knowledge, to a Native person, cannot be accumulated like money stored in a bank, rather it is an ongoing process better represented by the activity of coming-to-knowing than by a static noun. Each person who grows up in a traditional Native American society must pass through the process of coming-to-knowing, which, in turn, gives him or her access to a certain sort of power, not necessarily power in the personal sense, but in the way a person can come into relationship with the energies and animating spirits of the universe.
Knowledge, within a traditional society, is not the stuff of books, but the stuff of life. Even in the English language that word knowledge has its origins in a verb or activity. In medieval times it served as a verb somewhat like our modern to acknowledge, and it meant to own the knowledge of something and perceive something as true. In turn, the origins of this verb lay in yet another process—the verb to know—which is a term of extremely ancient Aryan origins that has to do with perception, recognition, and the ability to distinguish. Thus, to the earliest peoples of Europe and Asia knowledge and knowing had more to do with a discriminating perception of the mind and the senses than with the accumulation of facts.
In time, our own indigenous view of knowledge was transformed into a a noun, something that could be cate-gorized, conceptualized, collected, and stored within the filing cabinets of the mind. Today, Western science often seeks this more static form of knowledge, for in many cases the desire to understand has been replaced by the desire to manipulate, control, and exploit. As the French philosopher Rene Descartes put it, “Knowing the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens, and all other bodies that surround it, men can be the masters and possessors of na-ture”.' Francis Bacon suggested that in order to gain such knowledge nature should be placed upon the rack and tortured to reveal her secrets.
In her book Woman and Nature, Susan Griffin juxtaposes a number of statements made by philosophers and scientists about nature and about women. Again and again a remarkable parallel in attitudes to the two can be discovered. The People of Turtle Island also speak of nature as feminine, as Mother Earth, but in the Western tradition the feminine must be possessed, controlled, conquered, compelled, owned, and exploited.
In deep and subtle ways the attitude of Indigenous science to knowledge and to the processes of coming-to-knowing is profoundly different from that of its Western counterpart. Maybe it is best illustrated by a story, for stories are one step in coming-to-knowing.
In his own life, Joe Couture, a therapist and traditional healer, has explored the implications of these two ways of knowing and the clash between a Western education and his own Blackfoot background. In some ways Joe feels as at home with his laptop computer as he does in a sweat lodge, yet he has also felt that tearing dislocation that comes from living in two worlds. As for the two worlds of knowledge...? Well, one day Joe happened to be sitting with a council of Elders in a northern community when the talk turned to the role of a local school in their community. The people were predominantly hunters and trappers and the school itself took in both Native and non-Native students.
It was at that point that an old man began to tell a story about the time he was a boy and had to make a long trip along the Yukon River to Dawson City. I never did get to hear the full details of what had happened. As Joe Couture related it, the boy had “broken down”—maybe he was driving an old pickup truck. At any event he faced a journey of over a hundred miles on his own and under adverse conditions. In the end he made it through. After telling his story, the old man began to talk about his grandson who had gone to the school. His grandson could now read and write, but the old man was sure that if his grandson were to have to make the same journey alone he would never make it back.
When Joe retold this story, in a circle of Native Elders and Western scientists, it set everyone thinking, just as it must have done when the old man told it at the council meeting. The stories told by traditional people come out of their direct experiences and are ways of teaching that are very different from the simple imparting of facts.
The old man had no need to analyze the philosophy of the local school board or discuss the relative value of different worldviews. He simply told a story, and, in the context of that school board meeting, the story brought into focus some of the things that people were sensing and feeling about the school's effect on their community. Then, again, when this story was retold by Joe Couture in the context of a dialogue about Indigenous science between Western and Native experts, the same story began to operate in a new way. Up to that point some of us had been playing with ideas about worldviews and paradigms in an abstract, analytic way, but then, when we heard of someone who had survived a life-threatening experience, we began to move to a new way of thinking, one that was quieter and took us back to our own life experiences.
The story made us think about the scientific knowledge each of us had accumulated in our training and how that knowledge was supposed to give us power over nature. Yet, how useless that power would be to a young man alone in the bush in the depths of winter. Joe's story alerted us to the possibility of other forms of knowledge and a process of coming-to-knowing. It also made us aware of how people change when societies clash and the knowledge of one begins to dominate and control the ways of seeing of the other.
Rupert Ross is a crown prosecutor from Kenora in northern Ontario and has tried hard to learn about the traditional ways of Indigenous people. A sensitive man, he is very much aware that as a crown prosecutor he is the representative of a legal system that is alien to the very people it was supposed to serve. Thus, in his earlier days, he would ask advice from the Native Elders who were present in the court. Again and again he found that their answers were evasive and of little help to him. Ross wanted to do the right thing, to understand how a person in a traditional society would have acted, yet no one seemed to be telling him what to do.
It was then that he remembered an incident from the time he had worked as a fishing guide. There were a number of Native guides at the same camp, including a young man who was beginning to learn the business himself. One day Rupert was fishing with a group when he noticed the young man's boat was heading toward a region of the lake where rocks were lying just below the water. Ross was about to call out and warn the boy when, to his surprise, he realized the boy's father, an experienced guide, was also seated in the boat.
As the boat headed for the submerged rocks, the father did nothing. Indeed, it was only at the last moment that the boy saw the danger and cut the motor. Ross began to wonder; why did the father not warn his son? Why did he risk injury to the people in the boat as well as damaging expensive equipment? After all, he had simply to call out a warning and tell his boy about the rocks. But the father simply sat there, saying nothing.
This does not make much sense to anyone brought up in a Western culture. Our natural tendency is to warn, help, teach, instruct, and improve. However, the more Rupert Ross reflected on his experiences at the fishing camp the more he came to realize that, in the Native world, you cannot “give” a person knowledge in the way that a doctor gives a person a shot for measles. Rather, each person learns for himself or herself through the processes of growing up in contact with nature and society; by observing, watching, listening, and dreaming. His early experience taught Rupert Ross that there was a way to sit with an Elder and to learn what a traditional person would think and do in a particular set of circumstances.
It was another sort of learning, the one that takes usually place within the context of a school, that was preventing the young man in Joe Couture's story from coming to know the tools of his own survival. It was not so much the content the school was teaching that caused the problem, but that its approach to education was alien to a Native society. Many things can be taught out of a textbook, from quantum theory to economics, from history to poetry, but what about the art of learning itself, listening, watching, coming-to-knowing, and understanding the world?
Marie Battiste, a Mic Maq educator, spoke of the rich environment in which a Native child is immersed from birth. It is a world of songs, stories, and ceremonies; the movement of the wind in the trees and the waves on a river; the sounds of birds; the voices of dreams and animals; and the dance around the fire at night. Throughout coming-to-knowing the child is encouraged to listen and to watch, to become sensitive to the rich tapestry of the world. Then one day that child goes to school and is told by the teacher, “Listen to nothing but my voice, cut out the sights and sounds of the world outside the window, do not pay attention to your fellows; filter and focus”.
It is possible that the grandson in Joe Couture's story may have learned far more about geography, astronomy, and natural history than his grandfather knew. But would he understand how to read the signs that were all about him in the bush? A map and a compass would indicate his geographical location, but would he know where he stood in relation to his own culture and traditions? Physical education and sports may have strengthened his body, but would he have had the spiritual strength to survive and make it home? School may have taught him the importance of being an individual, but alone in the night and far from any village would he have felt the presence of his own people and a direct sense of relationship to the birds, plants, animals, and rocks?
During the 1940s two Algonquin men were out trapping northwest of Ottawa, Ontario. It was spring, and while the rivers had already opened, there was still much snow on the ground. The two men had sixty miles to travel in order to return home, but, with all their furs, traps, and moose meat, their canoe was overloaded. One of the men, Kocko Carle, simply cut down a nearby birch tree and set about making a new canoe. Four days later the two men had built a second fourteen-foot canoe so that they could return to their people near Maniwaki, Quebec, with their meat and furs.
This is by no means an exceptional story, for building a canoe was once part of the knowledge of any traditional person who used rivers for transport. What is interesting about this particular story, however, is that it was told to me by a non-Native, David Gidmark, who passed through his own particular process of coming-to-knowing within a Native context.
David Gidmark's story can be found in his book Birchbark Canoe. As a young man he had admired the birchbark canoes that had been used for thousands of years by the peoples of North America, each group employing its own designs. He knew that, by tradition, such a canoe was built using only what is called a crooked knife. Everything else—the birchbark skin of the canoe, the cedar ribs, the spruce roots for sewing and binding, and the spruce gum to ensure that it is waterproof—is readily available in the bush.
David had seen traditional canoes in photographs and museums. He had even read scholarly articles about the way people had made such canoes in the past. If he had continued in this manner he might well have become an “expert” on birchbark canoes, a curator at a museum, perhaps. But a collection of facts is far from coming-to-knowing, and David Gidmark wanted to make a birchbark canoe of his own; to understand which was good bark and which was not; to know how to find and handle the materials; to develop the necessary skills and judgment; to learn how to use his eyes and hands and mind together. And so he traveled to Maniwaki in the province of Quebec in search of one of the last great canoe makers, William Commanda.
After many visits with William Commanda, and even after beginning to learn the Algonquins' language, David Gidmark plucked up the courage to ask William Commanda if he would teach him to build a birchbark canoe. Commanda simply laughed, “I will never teach a white man to build a birchbark canoe. If you want to learn, you'd better find some white man to teach you”.
But David Gidmark persisted, staying in the area, learning the language, and talking to old people. Finally, a year later, William Commanda invited David to move in with him and his wife—and so another stage of his apprenticeship began. This time David helped around the house until one day William was ready to allow him to hang around as he went through the various processes of canoe building.
David Gidmark learned the craft and knowledge of canoe building by watching and helping someone who was an expert. His final test was critical. It was to go into the bush by himself and return when he had built his own canoe. When he finally came back, William Commanda's verdict was, “Well, at least it floats”.
David Gidmark is now teaching other people how to build canoes; running summer schools where people can work and learn the many traditional skills involved. Ironically, however, the rolls of birchbark that are used to build the canoes must be shipped from Scandinavia. In the Algonquin tradition a canoe is made from a single piece of bark, and there are simply not enough birch trees in eastern America old enough to have the girth to supply the necessary size of bark.
Although the traditional knowledge and skills of the Algonquin people are still being passed on, the environment has changed so much that it would be difficult for a person marooned in the bush to build a traditional Algonquin canoe in four or five days. There is an important teaching even in this, for within the Native world there is no such thing as abstract knowledge. The knowledge of the canoe is tied to the environment, to the group, and to its long history. Now, tragically, the environment has changed. What will become of the knowledge?
William Commanda once said “I will never teach a white man to build a birchbark canoe.” Today I have heard him speak openly to audiences of Natives and non-Natives about his traditional knowledge and the change that took place in his own life. William Commanda is Keeper and interpreter of ancient wampum belts that tell of the Seven Fires Prophecy. For a long period his heart was filled with anger toward white people and what they had done to his people and to the land. For this reason he would never show or speak about the wampum belts that had been entrusted to him.
A number of years ago however, he experienced a great change. He was visited by a dream, or vision, that told him the time had come to make a bridge between the two peoples. He was to show the belts and to speak about the prophecies they contain. William Commanda now speaks openly, sharing his knowledge of the wampum belts, their history and the prophecies they contain.
The skills necessary to build an Algonquin canoe are tied to a particular landscape, to the trees that grow there, to the game that can be trapped, to the flowing of rivers, and to the movement of winds across the lakes. The way this knowledge is learned is inseparable from the land and from the people who live on it. In this sense Indigenous knowledge is never directly transferable as knowledge is in the West. For the heart of traditional knowledge cannot be translated, written down in a book, or transposed to an individual living thousands of miles away in a totally different environment. Knowledge belongs to a people, and the people belong to the landscape.
This connection between knowledge, the land, and the People is illustrated in another story about canoe building. The Haida people live in their traditional land called Haida Gwaii (the names given to this land by Western cartographers are the Queen Charlotte and Prince of Wales islands) and their language is in danger of being lost. For a long time Woody Morrison, K'aw Daagangaas, along with some of his Elders, had been looking for a way to revive the language, culture, and traditional knowledge of his people. But it seemed almost impossible to do this exclusively within a school setting.
Woody's idea was to revive the language by building an oceangoing canoe. Once the Haida people had made great sea voyages, not only along the west coast of Canada and the United States but to Central and South America and out into the Pacific where, their stories tell, they met with the oceanvoyaging peoples of Polynesia and even with the Maoris of New Zealand. Because of the impact of white culture, these canoes had not been built for almost a century.
Several years earlier Loo Taus (Wave-Eater), a sixteen-meter coastal canoe had been built and with it many traditional skills revived. Later, in 1991, for example, several Haida people went to San Francisco where they carved a totem pole and built a coastal canoe. I, along with many others, was privileged to carry the canoe to the water where it was launched. No one, however, had built one of the even larger voyaging canoes in which the Haida people would undertake trips of several weeks' duration.
Building such a canoe, Woody knew, would involve the Haida people in reviving knowledge that appeared, on the surface, to have been lost, but was still contained in an implicit way within the people and the land. Not only would a canoe be built, but sails would be made using a fabric of woven bark. Cordage had to be constructed and traditional clothing woven. There was also the question of provisions for the duration of the voyage. What had people taken with them on their long ocean voyages? How much water had they needed? There were stories of the Haida people training their minds and bodies before a long voyage by drinking sea water and of their mixing salt water and fresh water on the voyage. Navigation skills would have to be learned, and stories of ancient voyages revived.
There is something half magical and yet highly scientific about Haida canoes, for they can travel at high speeds using a particular method of paddling that enables people to keep going for many hours without tiring. Through the process of recovering all this traditional knowledge, the language itself would be revived, for, as the Elders teach, knowledge and ways of thinking are contained within the language. Woody believes that as his people revive their ancient knowledge they will also come into relationship with their traditional language. Ancient words, remembered only by the Elders, would be revived and their meanings rediscovered; lost knowledge would return in dreams and visions.
This has been Woody's dream for many years, and to this end the Xaadas Voyaging Society was set up with its motto Guutlaay Kaasgiit (We Go, We Meet). Yet, at the time of this book's completion, the great Haida canoe has not yet been built. This has been due partly to the difficulties involved in raising funds for this great venture, but also to the fact that the Haida people can no longer walk through their traditional land to select a great cedar tree that would sacrifice itself in order to be transformed into a living canoe.
As with the birch trees of northeastern America, few of these forest giants remain today. Lands that were once the responsibility of the Haida people are now owned and managed by governments and lumber companies, and the great old trees are not an economic proposition. Companies move in and clearcut the trees, replacing them with more economical and faster-growing varieties. Most of us know about the destruction of the rain forests of Brazil, but few realize that great forests in other parts of the world are equally in danger.
Eventually Woody did locate a tree of sufficient size to build his canoe. He went through the necessary paperwork to obtain the tree for his people, but on making test drillings into its core he found that it was rotten. Other difficulties plagued the project and as I write this, Woody's dream still remains to be realized.
Knowledge in the traditional world is not a dead collection of facts. It is alive, has spirit, and dwells in specific places. Traditional knowledge comes about through watching and listening, not in the passive way that schools demand, but through direct experience of songs and ceremonies, through the activities of hunting and daily life, from trees and animals, and in dreams and visions. Coming-to-knowing means entering into relationship with the spirits of knowledge, with plants and animals, with beings that animate dreams and visions, and with the spirit of the people.
As in all relationships, agreements must be made and obligations and responsibilities entered into with the spirits. Thus, when a person comes into relationship with certain knowledge he or she is not only transformed by it but must also assume responsibility for it.
By contrast, so much of what goes on in mainstream schools is concerned with the accumulation of facts and the practical problems of getting through a syllabus. Once during a PTA meeting I attended a parent asked a science teacher how he dealt with the ethical dimensions of his subject. The teacher admitted that ethics was indeed part of the course, but with so much to get through in a school year such luxuries as the philosophy and ethics of science simply had to be dropped.
Ultimately that teacher should not be blamed because he was merely responding to the value our society places on particular forms of knowledge. In the late 1970s I was invited to participate in a group that was raising funds to build the world's largest computer memory. Under the illusion that this would bring them considerable power the group members intended to feed a supercomputer with all the world's knowledge of science, mathematics, history, economics, medicine, literature, etc.
This image of a giant computer memory accorded very well with their attitude toward knowledge as something that could be accumulated and stored. A computer memory could be filled with the poetry of Milton, the plays of Shakespeare, the theory of relativity, the 1 Ching and the Bhagavad Gita. When the computer memory was full it could be electronically erased and we could begin again, this time feeding it with information about the world's geography, sequences of prime numbers, or the classification of plants. No one would ever think that the computer memory would be changed by that knowledge; that the computer, having been fed Darwin's theory of evolution, would begin to operate in a different way. For knowledge is passive. Within a traditional society however, knowledge as a process transforms and brings with it obligations and responsibilities.
In one of his essays, the English writer Aldous Huxley pointed to the fragmented nature of our Western education system and the way it focuses upon the mental accumulation of facts. The cultures of the East, he observed, educate mind and body together; they are less concerned with imparting facts than with teaching how the mind actually works.
The philosopher Michael Polyani has written of what he calls “tacit knowledge”—a knowing that he says is not passed on through books or verbal instruction but is learned by direct experience through the whole of one's being. An example of such knowledge is riding a bicycle. No one can tell you how to ride, yet one day you find that you can. You may forget the phone number you had as a child but no matter how long you live you will never forget how to ride a bike.
Polyani's tacit knowledge comes close to the Native American's vision of coming-to-knowing. In both cases the knowledge is acquired through experience and relationship with the thing to be known. In both cases the knowledge is not so much stored as data in the brain but is absorbed into the whole person.
There is one important way, however, in which the Indigenous approach to knowing differs from Polyani's. Most of us believe that knowledge has no independent existence apart from the one who knows. If everyone were to forget a particular dance, or song, or the way of doing something, and if this had not been filmed or videotaped or written down in some way, then we would say that such knowledge had been lost forever.
Knowledge, for us, is an abstraction with no independent existence. Its only manifestation is its existence as a physical record in a book, as chemical and electrical signals in a human brain, or encoded as muscular skills in the human body. Once those particular physical systems have died or been destroyed the knowledge itself ceases to exist.
When I listen to Native people I get the impression that knowledge for them is profoundly different: It is a living thing that has existence independent of human beings. A person comes to knowing by entering into a relationship with the living spirit of that knowledge.
Let us approach this thought in a slightly different way. An individual or group may “know” how to carry out a particular skill, such as beadwork, but will never actually perform the task in practice. When asked 'about why they don't do it they may say that it is because they have not been given authorization to do this work; they have not entered into a relationship, or agreement, with the knowledge. The authorization itself may come from an individual or from people that already has the proper relationship with the knowledge, or it may come through a special dream or vision. It will also involve an appropriate exchange.
What happens when these skills are totally lost, in the sense that no one remains alive who knows a particular way of doing certain things? Has the knowledge vanished? Traditional songs are said by anthropologists to be lost, as are certain languages. But, as far as I can understand it, these songs, languages, and traditional ways are still alive because they have existence as spirits, energies, and powers. I have been told how a song lives on after the singer has died and that it may reappear in the future as a gift in the heart and mind and throat of some other singer.
Dan Moonhawk Alford, a linguist and close friend of Sa'ke'j Henderson, loves to relate the story of the man who went to a ceremony but could not get a particular song out of his head. In the end it bothered him so much that he told one of the Elders. “Then why don't you sing it?” the old man said. The song was sung and the old man replied, “That was Joe's song. He died in 1910. I guess it got kind of lonely waiting around with no one to sing it”.
I have heard stories of people who go into the sweat lodge or attend a sacred ceremony not knowing the particular songs. As soon as the drum beats they say that the song enters into them—the song sings them.
Although traditional ways may appear to be lost, some Elders are confident that when the time is right this knowledge will come back. Like the grass that grows again each spring, it will reappear in dreams or during ceremonies.
In our schools, education tends to end in the late teens, or at the completion of college or university. But, coming-to-knowing, entering into a relationship with the spirits, powers, or energies of knowledge, is a process that must continue throughout a person's life. Pete Standing Alone is a Blackfoot from the Blood Reserve in southern Alberta and a member of the sacred Horn Society. In Fraser Taylor's biography of him (Standing Alone: A Contemporary Blackfoot Indian), Pete is quoted as saying about the Horn Society's knowledge: “It's something a good Indian should do, and that's give service to the people. So you should join at least once. Actually, you can't learn everything well enough in four years to teach someone else coming in for the first time.... maybe in twenty-five years with four times into it, to learn all the matters well enough to teach others”.
There is so much to know that it takes a lifetime of relationships. But how does it all start? Danny Musqua is an Elder and traditional storyteller of the Soto people. I was introduced to him by his adopted son, Dick Katz,'who is also the author of two illuminating books on Indigenous people, Boiling Energy: Community Healing Among the Kalahari Kung and The Straight Path: a Story of Healing and Transformation in Fiji. As a boy, Danny was brought up by his grandfather, a man then in his nineties. Danny told me how his grandfather had once set his chair close to an ants' nest allowing the insects to crawl up his boot and onto his pant leg. “Everything has a limit and everything respects its limits,” the grandfather told the young boy as he set his own limit for the ants—an unseen line partway up his leg. Sure enough, the ants advanced so far and no farther; except for one very bold ant that began to climb toward the old man's knee. At this, Danny's grandfather tapped his leg gently with his fingertip to remind the ant, which then descended. “Everything has its limits,” he said again.
Sometimes his grandfather would set Danny to watch a particular bird and at the end of the day would ask him what he had seen. On other occasions he would be assigned to watch an animal that always returned to a particular spot. Day after day Danny sat and watched, beginning to understand what the animals were teaching him. By watching each animal Danny began to learn its habits, how it behaved, what its relationship was to other animals, how it fit into the web of nature, and how sometimes human beings did the same sorts of things that animals did.
As Danny lovingly told me about his grandfather, he kept moving between English and his own Soto language. It was late and I was tired. Soon I began to hear him as one hears a river or a distant bird, I seemed to comprehend what was being said to me, not in any intellectual way, but directly in my heart. There were times when I was not sure if Danny was talking about his own particular grandfather, the historical individual who had brought him up, or about the Grandfathers themselves, the Old Ones, the ones who had come long before, the spirits who stretched back for hundreds and thousands of years, the Grandfathers who can be seen moving within the hot rocks of the sweat lodge, who appear in dreams, and whose voices can be heard at night. In the space of just a few hours and in what may have been a small way for traditional people—but was very important to me—I was taken into a relationship with spirits that could teach.
Growing up like Danny Musqua, in a traditional society young people learn that the whole of nature can teach and that they learn by being silent, by observing, and by listening. Often an older person will watch over them and introduce them to situations in which they can learn. In our society parents are usually responsible for our earliest education and discipline. But in most Native societies, although parents are the ones who feed and nourish, as part of an extended family, children spend a lot of time staying at relatives' houses and playing with their many cousins.
While the parents provide love and shelter, the responsibility for bringing up a child generally resides with a grandparent, aunt, or uncle. When Woody Morrison, K'aw Daagangaas, was seven years old, his grandfather Kun Kwiiaan, called Peacemaker, presented him to the Haida Elders and charged them to be the boy's guide and teach him of “the wind, water, trees, and fire.” Normally, as Woody explained to me, the daily responsibility of educating a Haida boy resides with his father's brother.
Guided, in the case of a boy by a grandparent or his father's brother, a child learns through the direct experience of watching and listening. Cree children play together hunting porcupine and in this way develop the skills and understanding needed for hunting larger and faster-moving animals. Later, a boy will travel with a hunter and watch how he moves through the snow looking for signs, setting traps, moving across great distances, and always knowing where he is. In this learning, no one instructs or tells the child what to do; rather, the child watches and takes things in. Then, one day, that child is allowed to go out alone and set traps, for the testing of a piece of knowledge is always done in private. And, finally, there will be some form of public acknowledgment that skills have been learned and that the young person has acquired new knowledge.
This may be yet another reason why Native children from traditional backgrounds often feel uncomfortable in schools where an emphasis is placed on presenting knowledge in a highly structured way through textbooks, lectures, and blackboard presentations. There is little direct experience in this. Instead teachers attempt to stimulate interest by asking questions and soliciting answers, or at least guesses, from children.
Leroy Little Bear told me of his experiences at school. One day they had had a lesson on Canadian geography. To test the children, the teacher pointed to a boy in the front row and asked: “What is the capital of Canada?” The boy began to scratch his head and think: What does this question mean? What does it really mean? I know things are all connected to each other, so what is really behind this question? The teacher has already told us that Ottawa is the capital of Canada, so why did she ask me this question? Why is she asking me when she already knows the answer?
Exasperated with waiting for an answer, the teacher pointed to Leroy and said, “What is the capital of Canada?” Leroy began to think: Why wouldn't the teacher let my friend answer? I know that he knows the answer. And if I answer, that's going to make him look foolish. So Leroy just sat there, scratching his head, while the teacher pointed to the next child and repeated the question. In the end she had the whole class scratching their heads and no one would volunteer an answer!
In a traditional society children learn by watching and hanging around rather than through structured teaching, questioning, or experiment. Moreover, they are not singled out and quizzed, because only after they have gained sufficient confidence would they attempt the task themselves—and this would be done in private. Having developed the necessary skills and confidence they would then return to the group and perform the new task in public.
Children in Western schools are often bored because they are passive consumers of knowledge. By contrast, the “watching” and the “listening” that takes place in a traditional society is a more active form of observation. A child is encouraged to take his or her time, for things only happen when the time is right. The attention a child gives in a school is often not very different in its quality from what we all do in front of the television set. The watching that leads to coming-to-knowing may be closer to the active watching of a kingfisher who sits poised on a branch over a fast-flowing river.
Not all schools are like this, however, some are very creative and experientially based; based on “play” Coming-to-knowing in a traditional society is based on direct experience, but there is much less emphasis upon “playing,” in the sense of trying a thing out before a person really understands what he or she is doing, or has developed the necessary skills.
Knowing through direct experience is also reflected in the way some Indigenous languages work. Suppose that someone wants to tell you that caribou are crossing a river. They will use different verbal forms to distinguish between their own experience of having actually seen the caribou and the experience of having been told that fact by someone else. Linguistic care is taken when, in telling a story, one must repeat what someone else has said. Native language makes it very clear that when you repeat someone else's words they are not your own.
In the West when we want to emphasize a point we may quote an important authority. In traditional societies, personal experience, what a person has actually seen or done or heard in the bush or during a dream or vision, is considered to be the most valuable form of knowledge. When Native Elders want to make a point they do not contradict or argue things out as we would; they tell a personal story and leave their audience to make the necessary connections and understand how the story illustrates and illuminates the issue in question.
Coming-to-knowing through a combination of watchfulness and direct experience is the antithesis of programmed learning that first structures knowledge and then imparts it in “bitesized chunks”.
But there are some forms of learning that require words and these are the songs and stories that are repeated to children at night by their aunts, uncles, and grandparents. Elders also have their teaching stories, which can last many hours. One old woman told me how an Elder would begin telling a story in the evening and continue right through to the following morning. People in those days, she said, were supposed to show respect and pay attention. Of course, with a teaching that lasted that long she could not remember everything that happened; rather, she was expected to take only that part of the teaching that was appropriate to her level of understanding. As she grew up she would hear the story again and again, each time taking something more from it.
This system of learning was once common in the West. From barrel making to Renaissance painting, the apprentice system was the way most people learned their trades. Dr. Ruth Dempsey who is an educational researcher at the University of Ottawa, has told me that if an adult wishes to learn something new the most effective way is not to ask a professional teacher, but an expert in the field. Most experts have never analyzed their skills and knowledge and may not even be able to tell a person how they do a particular task, but by hanging around them a person will pick up their skills. By contrast, a professional teacher analyzes, structures, and articulates knowledge in a series of programmed steps which, at least in Dempsey's opinion, appear to hamper the natural processes of learning.
True learning is generated by the student and not the teacher and is best when a human relationship exists between the two.
Several years ago the medical school at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, established a radically different approach to the training of physicians. No longer would medical students be required to attend formal lectures. Instead they would attach themselves to a doctor and follow the physician around, learning his or her medical skills and knowledge through direct experience.
In the Native tradition a grandparent, uncle, or aunt does not instruct, dilute, or protect the experiences of young people, nor generally punish them when they are doing what other people may consider to be wrong. Rupert Ross's story of the young man at the fishing camp illustrates this point. It is an expression of respect for others and the way they choose to live their lives. Since no one can truly look into another person's heart, judge him, or understand his motives, it makes no sense to attempt to “help,” “improve,” “correct,” or punish him.
Learning from nature and from an Elder involves a special quality of silence and alert watchfulness. The respect one shows to an Elder acts to create that area of quietness and receptivity into which the Elder can speak.
The Indigenous people of the Americas and their Elders have much to teach us. It is just that we have forgotten how to listen or, rather, how to create that silence within ourselves into which knowledge can speak. Therese Schroeder-Sheker, a musician and thanatologist, once told me of a medieval belief that the angels want to sing to us, it makes them happy to do so—all we have to do is listen to them.
Speaking, therefore, seems to be created out of an active silence. In quantum physics there is also a kind of vibrant silence; it is called the vacuum state, the state of total and absolute emptiness. The theories of modern physics indicate that this state of nothingness is in fact an infinite ocean of energy in potential. All the energy within our universe—the energy of suns and galaxies—is as a mere flicker on this vast ocean of nothingness. Likewise, the big bang origin of the universe—the creation of all that is—began as a tiny fluctuation within an ocean of absolute silence.
All over the world ancient peoples have said that the cosmos was created in a song, a word, or a name. Now modern physics speaks of creation out of a fluctuation or vibration. Yet not one of these primordial acts could have taken place had it not been for a preexisting attentive silence.
Coming-to-knowing arises out of silence. It is this same quality of silence that strikes so forcefully when you meet with a Native person. Native people love to gossip and will talk right through the night. Yet, at the same time, each person has a quality of silence, the silence of action suspended in potential. Their silence is like the surface of a calm pond; throw in a pebble and you can watch the ripples expand right to the pond's edge and reflect back inward again. Drop a pebble into a pond that is ruffled by the wind and its disturbances are lost in the general agitation of the water.
In the summer of 1992 the Fetzer Institute hosted the first of a series of circles in which Western scientists could meet with Native Elders and thinkers. After the meetings Carol Hegedus of the Fetzer Institute told me that what had impressed her most about the gathering was its expansiveness, the way in which each participant was able to speak and put forward his or her ideas and experiences.
Out of this power of silence great oratory is born. When Native people speak they are not talking from the head, relating some theory mentioning what they read in a book, or what someone else has told them. Rather, they speak from the heart, from the traditions of their people, and from the knowledge of their land; they speak of what they have seen and heard and touched, and of what has been passed on to them by the traditions of their people. It is their inner silence that allows them to listen to the prompting of their hearts and to the subtle resonances that lie within each word of a language and which, when uttered, reverberate throughout the world.
Elders are great teachers. By tradition, becoming an Elder is part of the great circle of life and renewal. It involves that period of life when a man or woman gains a particular wisdom and philosophical detachment through having seen so much of life and having traveled so far along his or her Earth Walk. Today Native society and culture has become so dislocated and perturbed that there are some who have only reached middle age but must serve as Elders, while old people who have been cut off from their traditions do not qualify for that role.
An Elder is the oral historian of the group, someone who is called upon for his or her knowledge of how to perform a ceremony or determine a protocol. An Elder thinks back to childhood when he or she was instructed by a grandfather or grandmother and told stories that had already been passed down though many generations. Among the people of the plains an Elder may tell how his or her grandparents had never seen a white person when they were growing up. Other Elders will tell stories of ancient encounters with other peoples, of old ceremonies, and of voyages that were made hundreds of years ago.
In a people whose traditions do not lie in reading and writing, memory is very highly developed and accounts of events can be passed on from generation to generation with remarkable accuracy. In addition, some peoples use mnemonic devices such as talking sticks and wampum belts to help them relate a long history.
It is not uncommon today that when an Elder is invited to speak, after saying a few words he or she will glare around the room and pick on some poor individual who is taking notes. Launching into the scribe the Elder will ask how a person can expect to hear anything when he is preoccupied in writing everything down. “You write things down,” the Elder says, “so that you can forget them”.
When they want to rap your knuckles, Elders can be very fierce. I remember meeting with a Blackfoot Elder who, quite naturally, viewed me with considerable suspicion. “White men come to talk to me,” she said. “They write things down on pieces of paper.... And then they always get them wrong”.
Luckily I did not have a notebook with me at the time. Pretty early on I had realized that if I was going to have any hope of understanding even the smallest aspect of this other world then I had to stop acting like a Western scientist. I had to trust my own observations, intuitions, and memory, Curiously enough, after I had left my notebook behind things did seem to work. Later on, when I made the decision to write this book I was astounded at how much I could remember of what people had said to me and how they had said it. I realized that by listening, and by not trying to record things or deliberately remember them, my mind had been moving in different ways. The person with the notebook and camera has chosen to maintain a critical distance, to act as an observer and resist the invitation, or the threat, of becoming too intimate with what lies outside the self.
All over the world Indigenous peoples recognize the power of the night: for telling stories, giving teachings, and holding their ceremonies. Over the past few years I have been in correspondence with Dr. M. S. A. Sastroamidjojo from Yogyakarta, Indonesia, a physicist who is seeking to bridge Western science with the traditions of his own people. He has written about the famous Indonesian shadow puppet play and the levels of reality it presents. On the screen one does not see the puppet itself, but its shadow and the shadow of the one who operates it. Sastroamidjojo feels these levels resonate with those of modern physics. For him, this ancient play of the universe is similar to David Bohm's idea that the reality we normally experience is no more than the surface manifestation of a deeper implicate or enfolded order.
Dr. Sastroamidjojo cautioned me that should I visit Indonesia I would see the same play put on for tourists—a short version that only lasted several hours. The true drama, he wrote, the one that would be attended by Indonesian people themselves, begins in the evening and lasts throughout the night and into the dawn. Watching the play, a person moves through different states of perception, beginning with keen interest, then moving on to the wandering of attention, tiredness and dozing off into a sort of half-sleep half-dream, and, finally, in the morning, waking into alertness to begin again. To understand the meaning of the performance one must pass through these different stages of internal and external engagement.
Something similar happens in Native American where ceremonies begin at night and continue for several days. The act of giving attention to what is going on, of being there over such a long period, moves heart, mind, and body into states of perception in which a person reaches the deeper meanings of a teaching, or a story, directly.
A person who listens at night to the teachings of the medicine wheel begins to see the sacred hoop in the circle of light cast by the fire, in the circle of people around the fire, in the circle of the tepee, in the smoke hole above, in the way the pipe moves from person to person. They feel within their bodies the great circle of Mother Earth and the movement of the seasons. They see the four directions stretching from the center of the fire, feel the presence of the Four Winds, and see the Four Colors. They sense the movement of the hoop, the circle of a person's life from birth to old age, and the progression of the seasons. Through these movements a person moves into balance internally and in relationships with others.
The stories told in the night reach back hundreds, thousands, and maybe tens of thousands of years. They enable a Native person to enter into a relationship with the great cycles of time, the history of the people, the land, and the cosmos.
Teachings can also come from the animals, from the movement of the seasons, from the Four Winds, and, in particular, from dreams and visions. Within this century dreams have taken on a new significance. Freud pictured the origin of dreams as lying in the repressed material of the unconscious. Jung added the collective level of the archetypes, but, above all, the origin of our dreams, we firmly believe, lies within ourselves. If a dream profoundly disturbs us we search for its meaning in the traumatic events of our childhood or as the symbolic manifestation of some universal archetype. Few of us would admit that its origin could live in the outside world. Likewise, if we hear voices in our head we assume that is we who are producing them.
Within the Torah, or Old Testament, however, there are many stories of messengers appearing from God and of great dreams that portend happenings on earth. Likewise, Indigenous science teaches that the world of the senses is only a tiny fraction of a vastly greater reality. Dreams are often the doorways into these other worlds.
When a great dream occurs it does not make much sense to look at the individual happenings of a person's life; rather, it is understood to be a message from a reality that lies outside the normal limits of our senses. It is a visit from the world of powers, energies, and spirits, from the Keepers of the Game and the spirits that give life to the rocks, trees, and winds.
To dream is to enter another world, and the information available from that world is often highly practical. Moreover, since Native Americans are not so much individuals as parts of a group, their dreams are common property, and it is not unusual for more than one person to dream part of the same dream.
In dreams people see distant relations; they spot the herds of caribou that will be crossing the river at a particular point on the following day; they see a group of strangers approaching and know that they will reach their camp in so many days time; they follow spoor on the ground and reach the place where the bear is walking. Like stock market reports and weather forecasts in our society, the information contained within dreams can be discussed and interpreted by the group.
My friend Clem Ford has told me how, when he was living with the Naskapi people in Labrador, a person would wake in the middle of the night after dreaming and begin to drum and sing—to tell the dream. I have heard how as one person relates a dream others will offer their interpretations, adding what they have seen in their own dreams.
Within Indigenous science the voices and images of dreams are not symbols of the unconscious but aspects of a reality that is far wider than anything we assume in the West. By discoursing with the beings of dreams and visiting the landscape of a dream a person can obtain useful knowledge for the whole group.
Some dreams and visions move far beyond everyday information about hunting, the movements of strangers, or the welfare of relatives. In such dreams a person may be taken up into the sky and shown the faces of the great energies of the world. One man told me how he had been given a vision of peace across the world and of sweat lodges built within the earth. He had been moved by what he had seen but did nothing about it. Some time later, however, he had another vision in which he was taken up high into the sky until his home looked very tiny below him. In the sky he was questioned as to why he had done nothing about his original vision.
One of the most famous visions to have reached the nonNative world was that of Black Elk, a medicine man of the Oglala Sioux. In his youth Black Elk had seen the Battle of the Little Big Horn and, later, the massacre of his people at Wounded Knee. But what was of greater significance in his life was the great vision he was given when he was nine years old.
For some time the young boy had been hearing voices, then, one evening, he heard a voice say, “It is time; now they are calling you.” The next day the camp moved on and young Black Elk became sick. As he was lying in the tepee at night he saw two men coming down head first from the clouds like slanting arrows. They told him that the Grandfathers were calling to him. After they had left, Black Elk walked out of the tepee and a cloud gathered him up and took him to a part of the world where he saw many wonderful things and was taken to the Council of the Grandfathers. It was there that the Grandfathers taught Black Elk and showed him many things. In a teaching that took several days Black Elk was conducted through the universe by the Grandfathers, finally coming to the tall rock mountain at the center of the world.
As the vision ended, Black Elk was left alone on a great plain, guarded by an eagle. Feeling homesick, he walked back to his parents' tepee but was saddened when they did not realize how long he had been absent. As he grew up Black Elk was to treasure the teachings he had been given in the vision and became a religious leader of his people.
The vision that was given to Ganidoa'yo of the Seneca people created a great religious revival among the Iroquois people. As a young man, Ganidoa'yo, or Handsome Lake, as he was known in English, had led a dissolute life. His half brother, called the Cornplanter, had gone to Pennsylvania to learn from the Quakers and later established a school in his house.
In 1799 Handsome Lake's health broke down, and on June 15 he appeared to be dying—lying in an almost breathless coma for two hours. During this period Handsome Lake heard someone calling to him. He got up from his bed and went to the door of his house where he saw three men. At this point Handsome Lake fainted. He then heard a voice telling him that the Great Spirit was displeased with his behavior. During his coma many things were revealed to Handsome Lake and teachings were given to him. He was also told that a white dog should be killed and the White Dog Feast held.
When Handsome Lake revived, his message was relayed to the local Quakers who seemed to approve, agreeing that they too saw wonderful sights during their trances or visions and that, since people were all of 'one flesh, the messages that Handsome Lake had received would have universal appeal. The same day a traditional White Dog Feast was held and Handsome Lake began to recover. From that time on he began to work as a teacher and spiritual leader, directing his people away from the abuse of alcohol and urging them to return to some of their traditional ways.
Handsome Lake's teachings were never written down, but in 1840, twenty-five years after his death, his grandson Jimmy Johnson recalled and passed on the teaching. Handsome Lake's Good Message is still spoken today in Iroquois longhouses. It is estimated that the teachings themselves take between four and five days to recount.
Traditional people open themselves to the visions, voices, and winds that surround us. Different peoples have different ways of doing this, and some of these involve ingesting plants, fungi, toad secretions, etc. I once met a non-Native who had sought out these experiences and, in the company of Native people, had ingested a variety of substances. His experiences had been profound and he had been moved to write about them in a book. Some of my Native friends said they liked the book but that the writer had sort of missed the point. The nonNative seeker had focused on plants and roots, but what he had not stressed was the ceremony itself; that was the important part, the way a person came into relationship with energies and powers of another world.
When we think of the knowledge that comes as a person lies in a coma close to death, or watches night after night in a state of extreme thirst and exhaustion, it is good to remember that a great teaching can also come from a joke. Within the Indigenous world knowledge can come in the guise of human laughter, from seeing someone walk backward, or having a bucket of cold water thrown over your head. All this is the business of the clown.
Napi, the sacred figure of the Blackfoot people who created the land out of his body, is also the trickster who is constantly turning rules on their head and doing all sorts of foolish things. Napi's foolishness teaches us about boundaries, limits to behavior, and human nature. It is good for us to drop our Western trappings of seriousness and remember that some of the most profound teachings can come from tricksters and clowns.
The sacred figures of the People—Raven, Coyote, Napi, Nanabush, and the rest—are all tricksters, beings who turn the world on its head. Even our own Western science has its trickster: entropy, or disorder. Thermodynamics tells us that for nature to continue in her work, she must metaphorically defecate. In scientist's ierms the overall entropy of a system and its environment must increase or, to put it another way, if we insist upon generating order, this can only be done at the expense of creating disorder somewhere else.
Laughter is never far away when Native people meet. J remember someone telling me about how he had been explaining the ways of the sweat lodge. He pointed out that when you take responsibility for a sweat lodge you are actually putting your life on the line. Then he pointed to one of the hot rocks, saying, “You can see the spirit moving in it?” His friend looked and nodded. “Yeah, it sure looks like Elvis”.
Sometimes, in the midst of a sacred ceremony a person will enter and make fun of what is going on. This is a clown, someone very different from our own familiar circus figure. In the West the clown has become a harmless figure of fun, but Indigenous clowns are disturbing in the way they assault, frighten, and even beat people. Clowns can also be openly sexual, waving giant phalluses and indulging in mock intercourse.
Clowns are disturbing because they turn the world upside down and openly challenge the order of nature and society. Wherever harmony and order are present, the clown intervenes. The clown makes boundaries explicit by crossing them; demonstrates the meaning of order through disorder. Most important of all, the clown reminds us that in the flux of the world nothing is certain. In Blackfoot ceremonies the circle is always open so that something new can appear.
A relative of the clown is the “contrary” who does everything in reverse. The contrary will walk backward, face the rear of a horse when riding, and wash in dirt. The contrary's behavior is also linguistic, with No used for assent, and Yes turned into a denial. Thus, through the medium of speech and action, a contrary teaches the limits and conventions of social behavior and social inhibitions.
Clowns and contraries, how much we need them in our own society today. We need the Fool in King Lear who constantly mocked the king, reminding him of human mortality and stupidity. The clown reminds us of the irrational within our universe, the Dionysian forces within human society that must be balanced rather than repressed or denied, and the futility of our quest for certainty, control, and absolute power.