Another winter has begun and almost passed since I began to write this book. The task has not been easy, for while I have at times been able to glimpse that other world, the world of Indigenous science, it has been difficult to set down its maps and contours in words. Previously words have served me for explaining such seemingly abstract concepts as superstrings and quantum reality, but as I entered the reality, of Indigenous America I realized how much my English words and “Western” viewpoints are inadequate to the task.
The best I can hope for is that this book is a start. If it has not opened a door into another world, at least it may have exposed a chink of light. If it has not built a bridge, then it may have showed the possibility of fording a river. Part of what is in this book relates to what I have been told and what I have sensed and experienced. Other parts of it appear as speculation, speculation in the sense of being about things that lie far beyond my experience, but also speculation in the way in which I have been forced to extend the boundaries of familiar images in order to convey what I only dimly perceive.
I hope that, now, at the end of the book the reader feels that reality is a bit wider than we had all assumed, that other valid worldviews are possible, and that there is much we can learn if only we take the space and time to listen. It is so difficult for us to change our ways. Ironically, we are all tainted with a history of struggle and heroism that does not dispose us to view the universe as a caring home.
In the late sixteenth century an English clergyman, one Richard Hakluyt, began a three-volume series of books, Principall Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation, which was to be “the prose epic of the modern English nation.” Hakluyt had also written Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of America, and for several hundred years these books were the inspirational reading of English-speaking schoolchildren. Hakluyt confirmed the heroic depiction of the early explorers. The first visitors to the New World became role models, largerthan-life figures who had followed their dreams and fought against appalling odds and privations in order to conquer new lands. The New World was virgin territory, ripe for conquest and exploitation.
This view of struggle and conquest did not originate with Hakluyt, for the hero's achievement is an ever-present theme in European thought and literature. In the legends of Greece and Rome, heroes are admired for their struggles against overwhelming opposition, adversity, the hostility of nature, and the force or foreign aggressors. Heroes symbolize the restless human spirit that led to the “Conquest of America,” the “Conquest of the South Pole,” the “Conquest of Everest,” and now, the “Conquest of Space”.
The heroic struggle between victory and defeat spills over into so much of that we do. We “fight crime,” declare “war on want,” and “wrestle” with inflation. Doctors must “conquer disease,” use “aggressive” medical means, and develop the “magic bullets” of antibiotics. If street drugs become a problem, then we declare war upon them; and our organizations include the Salvation Army, Peace Corps, Boy and Girl Scouts, and, a century ago, the onward-marching Christian soldiers of the Victorian hymn. Joseph Campbell's popular books and television presentations on myth also speak of the “hero's journey”.
I believe that this myth of the hero, while it has great value, must be kept in balance, for it is certainly not quite as universal as we assume. In the traditional stories of the Indigenous people of Turtle Island a variety of characters appear; some survived personal danger and performed acts of courage, yet they do not always fit conveniently into our heroic mold. Sitting Bull, for example, did not lead his people by riding into the thick of the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Rather, he led by remaining in his lodge, praying, and offering pieces of his own flesh as a sacrifice. Among the plains people it was considered more honorable to “count coup” on an enemy than to kill them outright. Counting coup consisted of riding into the thick of the enemy symbolically striking a chosen opponent, and then riding away. The trickster, like Napi, is not cast in the Western heroic mold; rather, he performs foolish acts, turns things upside down, and makes the people laugh. It seems as if Native American culture has as much, or even more, respect for humor, comedy and the absurd as it does for acts of heroism.
There is a story about how the Australian army wanted to test the endurance of its crack troops by arranging a race of several days' duration between a small group of soldiers and several Aboriginal people over particularly difficult terrain. Although the military group set a cracking pace, by the end of the first day the Aboriginal people were ahead. After making camp, they sat around the fire all night singing and telling stories. By the morning they had decided that they really did not have any particular reason for reaching their destination—a mere grid reference on a map—so, having had an enjoyable walk through the desert, they packed up and walked home.
This race between two cultures is also symbolized by the different attitude of Westerners and Tibetans to a mountain. If a Western mountaineer does not conquer a mountain and stand on its summit, the climb would be thought of as a failure. Tibetans, however, consider mountains to be sacred, and while they are willing to act as guides and climb them almost to the top, they will not normally set foot on their summits.
We interpret the lives of the Cree, Naskapi, Inuit, and others who live in the far North of Canada and Alaska as a heroic battle against an adverse, hostile environment. Yet the people of the North I have talked to love their land and way of life. I cannot forget how my Inuit friend Gideon Qaunaq, sitting in a city apartment, looked longingly at a photograph of a remote expanse of snow in the far North, saying “It would be very quiet there. There would be no one for miles”.
Our Western minds see the wilderness as something to be tamed, shaped, and molded. In his essay “Wordsworth in the Tropics,” Aldous Huxley argues that the Lake Country poet's identification with nature was confined to a gentle English countryside tamed by hundreds and thousands of years of human occupation. True nature, in all its wildness, Huxley argued, would have horrified Wordsworth. Huxleyfs assumption may be true. Yet, in a sense, Huxley himself is guilty of a similar blindness, for untamed nature appears to be associated in his mind with an intrinsic hostility and lawlessness, almost recalling Kurtz's dying cry in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, “The horror! The horror!” Many Indigenous forest dwellers, by contrast, would see the same forest as a nurturing provider of all that they need.
Brute nature is faced with human industry and an ingenuity that seeks to overcome its adversary. Science becomes the tool whereby change can be effected and nature controlled. Indigenous science, however, approaches the reality in a profoundly different way, for human society is not pictured as standing apart from the rest of nature. Animation and consciousness pervade all of nature from tree to plant and rock to star. Human beings are two-leggeds who have their role to play among the other beings of the world. Nature is not competitive, a battle for “the survival of the fittest,” but a cooperative system of alliances. Even the plants grow though mutual relationship and support.
In a universe of animating spirits the heroic human individual cannot hope to control the world through brute force. Rather than seeking control, change, and progress, an Indigenous society prefers to live in harmony with the world. Power certainly exists but it lies more within alliances and the ability to call upon external energies than it does in the human will or the unleashing of mechanical force.
Our world stands in need of renewal. So many difficulties face us: international tensions, poverty, starvation, economic instability, violence in the inner cities, the disappearance of species, and threats to the environment. Our worldview inclines us to perceive these as problems in search of solutions and crises in need of immediate and radical interventions. Yet so many different approaches have been attempted in the past and none of them has really worked. Over decades and centuries the same basic problems reappear and are never fully resolved. Even within the most revolutionary transformations of societies and governments so much remains unchanged and old problems surface in new guises.
Indigenous metaphysics offers us an alternative approach, a way of being within the world that does not analyze and categorize, control, and intervene, but rather admits the openness of the circle, accepts the unexpected, acknowledges obligations, and seeks harmony, balance, and equilibrium.
If we are willing to suspend our activity for a moment and listen to another way of being what can we hear and learn?
Europeans came to the Americas in search of gold and discovered something far more valuable—vegetables and fruits. The Indigenous science of the Americas led to the development of a wide variety of crops that were taken back to the Old World. Today a large proportion of the food the world eats originated in the Americas. It has even been suggested that the Industrial Revolution would not have been possible without the cultivation of the crops that had been imported from the Americas. Ironically, these additional foodstuffs would ultimately lead to an explosive population increase along with the growth of dehumanizing cities and technologies.
Today scientists are beginning to study the remarkable farming methods practiced by Indigenous peoples in the Americas. Their aim is to discover techniques that could be transferred to the Third World and employed by ecologically minded farmers in the West. But this should be done in a cautious and watchful way, for Indigenous science was developed by people living in a particular landscape.
Recently a small number of biologists have begun to look critically at the foundations and ethical values of their subject. They have pointed out the respect that scientists should have for other species and, indeed, for all of life. Rather than biology remaining value-free, as is the case with the physical sciences, it should concern itself with ethics, responsibility, respect, relationship, and even love.
The biologist Brian Goodwin has called for a “reanimation of nature,” while his colleague Mae-Wan Ho echoes Wolfgang Goethe's critique of the artificiality and ultimate distortions implied in the scientific experimentation of nature. It is their intention that the “new biology” should remain strictly scientific, in that is seeks to use reason and observation in order to come to an understanding of nature, but the same time they call into question the reductive and mechanistic approaches that are currently being employed in biology and, indeed, the whole way in which science approaches the phenomenon of life.
For thousands of years The People have supported ways of living in harmony with nature and of avoiding serious ecological disharmony. Their science of biology is rich, relying upon painstaking observations that are not exclusively objective but are the result of entering into relationship with each living thing. Indigenous biology also makes use of the knowledge and teachings of birds, animals, and insects. A dialogue between biology and Indigenous science could give Western scientists a new insight into gentle noninvasive observation, relationship, respect, and harmony with all of life.
Modern medicine has in many ways been highly successful. Each year surgery becomes more skillful and less risky, infectious diseases that once ravaged certain areas of the world have been eliminated, and good sanitation and diet have helped to limit other forms of sickness. In the U.S. the death rate from heart attacks and heart failure dropped by 22 percent in the 1980s, while deaths from stroke dropped by 33 percent.
But Western medicine is not without its critics. To begin with, it represents the greatest cost that our society must bear. Ipcreasing use of medical technologies has had the effect of alienating doctors from their patients to the point where marly people feel that medicine now lacks a basic human touch. Indiscriminate use of antibiotics has had led to the evolution of drug-resistant bacterial strains, while modern life has created the very conditions that contribute to heart disease, cancer, and degenerative disorders. In addition, the whole area of mental health remains a cause for serious concern. Indeed, the act of simply living in our modern industrial world seems to create more medical, mental, and social problems than modern science can correct. Clearly medicine, as with all science, cannot be fragmented from society and human values.
Medicine is another one of those areas in which a productive dialogue could be held between the two worldviews. Indigenous science, as well as some forms of alternative medicine that are often based upon more ancient forms of healing, accents a profoundly different way of promoting health. Native medicine stresses relationship to the patient and the role of the whole society. It addresses the spiritual origins of disease and health and the way healing arises out of the patient's relationship to society and the cosmos. Within Indigenous medicine it is not possible to fragment an individual's sickness from the condition of society and the surrounding environment. A bridge between Native and Western medicine would be of importance to those who are concerned with the physical, mental, and spiritual health of society and the world at large.
While medicine and biology seem natural avenues for dialogue, at first sight it would seem more difficult to contemplate a genuine exchange of knowledge between contemporary physics and Indigenous science. Indeed, what could be further apart—the one being concerned with the objective analysis of levels of inanimate matter, and the other, among other things, with the domain of the powers and animating processes of animals, plants, and rocks?
However, it is important that some sort of a bridge should be established between Western physics and Indigenous science and metaphysics, for physics is generally taken as the model and paradigm to which all the other sciences aspire. In addition, the concepts and attitudes of physics have had a profound effect upon our general worldview and the way we behave toward the world. In many subtle ways the worldview of physics has a dominating effect upon attitudes and, thus, if a dialogue can be established with Indigenous science, the door may be opened to something even broader.
I think that the most profitable discussions will come about as Indigenous and Western scientists explore their worldviews and underlying metaphysics. Investigations of the nature of time and space, causality, matter, and energy; and the connection between language, thought, and culture, and matter and consciousness are extremely valuable. It would also be salutary for physicists, who have now begun to deal within the flux of forms demanded by quantum theory, to talk with people whose whole worldview has been historically based upon process, animation, and flux. Indeed, it is my belief that a serious, sensitive, and extended dialogue between these two worlds would reveal surprising degrees of concordance and lead to insights about the whole meaning of theoretical speculation in modern physics.* I wonder if, at some time in the future, Leroy Little Bear's dream that one of the great theoretical physicists of the next century will be a Native American will be fulfilled.
Provided Western scientists remain sufficiently open and sensitive, I believe that the dialogues held with Indigenous scientists and Elders can be of considerable value to the West. But what could be the effects upon Indigenous societies in such bridge building? It may be presumptuous for me to answer this question, but I have outlined a few suggestions below.
The First People of Turtle Island continue to suffer the prejudice of having their spirituality, social customs, arts, science, law, and government compared to the dominant standard of the West and dismissed as “primitive,” “underdeveloped,” “animistic,” and “superstitious.” In an age when political correctness has become the stick used to beat academics into impotence and submission it is ironic that so many of its norms simply do not apply, in practice at least, to the rights of Indigenous America.
So many of the cultural myths of North America exclude or devalue Native American culture and history. To take a somewhat extreme example, on Columbus Day 1992, Michael Berliner of the Ayn Rand Institute hailed the European conquest, describing the aboriginal culture as “a way of life dominated by fatalism, passivity, and magic.” Western civilization, he claimed, brought “reason, science, self-reliance, individualism, ambition, and productive achievement” to a people who were based in “primitivism, mysticism, and collectivism” and to a land that was “sparsely inhabited, unused, and undeveloped.” Ironically, despite his prejudice and factual ignorance, Berliner is correct when he contrasts Indigenous “collectivism” to Western “individualism, ambition, and productive achievement.” These latter values are certainly alien to most Indigenous societies.
To take another example, in Quebec, Canada, plans are afoot to extend the massive James Bay Hydroelectric Project. This will involve flooding huge areas of traditional hunting lands and building roads into the far North. Such an enormous engineering project will have a profoundly disruptive effect on the lives of the Cree who continue to live in a traditional way by hunting and trapping. Officials of the Quebec government, however, welcome this enterprise, arguing that it will “bring the Cree into the twentieth century” and give them “new concepts of space and time.” Again, there is the unconscious assumption that North American culture is superior and its imposition will benefit everyone.
On the other hand, dialogues are beginning between Western and Native American thinkers. Elders claim that they attempted to talk to the white people five hundred years ago but they did not know how to listen. Today they are willing to try again. A Blackfoot Elder said that the white race is the youngest race. It has great energy and potential, but, for the past few thousand years it has been playing like a child while it is watched by the black, yellow, and red peoples. Now the time has come for the white race to begin to learn, and assume its responsibilities along with the three other colors in the world.
As we Western thinkers listen and learn, we will begin to understand the achievements of Native American societies and acknowledge their worldviews as viable alternatives to our currently dominant industrial worldview. How will this affect the Indigenous people themselves?
I have been told that many young Native people are now obtaining their values from television, non-Native teachers, and other students in mixed schools. As a result, many yearn for the culture of the West. Others, angered by the prejudices of non-Natives, reject North American society out of hand, while at the same time cutting themselves off from their own roots.
If Native children come to see their traditions being accorded respect by non-Natives it may help them retain a balance within a torn and threatened society. They may realize that some Western thinkers look to Native American philosophy, ecology, social structures, and systems of justice and government for insights into the very problems that face them today.
Native science could also play an important role in recreating cultural connectedness across the globe. Within Indigenous science can be found a metaphysics, a way of being and of coming-to-knowing, that is quite different from the approaches that presently dominate the world. The Western scientific paradigm is tied to the ideals of advancing technology and unceasing progress. Its effect has been to create global cultural homogeneity based upon values that were originally European. The idea of an Indigenous science could perhaps provide an antidote to a particular cultural dominance and could also assist in the survival and renewal of endangered cultures.
Five hundred years ago Europeans arrived on the American continent but did not listen. They did not understand the land and the people they sought to conquer. Today, in the light of so much that has taken place in world history, we can no longer feel such confidence in the rightness and inevitability of our position. Perhaps the time has at last come when we can simply sit down, listen, and come-tb-knowing. Maybe, as the millennium reaches its close, we can all engage in a ceremony of renewal that will cleanse earth and sky. Maybe the time is right.
1 Already these dialogues have begun, under the sponsorship of the Fetzer Institute.