I magine walking out into a glowing upper Mississippi evening in the spring. The blufflands above the great river are expanding into a green haze where the maples, anchored in steep hills, are just beginning to leaf out. The speed of that process thwarts the mind. In the morning the bud clusters of the red maple are sitting upright on the branches; by evening the red leaves are half unfurled, and by the next evening they are full, rich, and dark with red the color of dried blood; the bud clusters have been as “disappeared” as a dissident in Argentina. This land is lush, fecund, amiable in its appearance. Three months ago it was locked in snow, the wind a gale, the temperature minus thirty, the river white snow rippled like current over the hard ice. Everything that was to survive had gone to ground, seeking whatever cover the land or human shelter allowed. Survival is an issue here, for humans as well as everything else.
Or think of the arid lands of the American West, where the grass is shorter and the trees are reserved to stream banks and mountainsides, and the view opens and expands our vision. Everywhere one looks in the arid West, the land stretches out. Some of it still appears empty, devoid even of grass and game. Often the appearance is deceiving. There is game, but it is laid up for the day in the shade of a rocky outcrop, invisible to an untrained eye. Such desert land sustained American Indian people for thousands of years, though on occasion it failed them and brought hunger or even starvation. Either way it was a cherished landscape.
As one drives across a stretch of central New Mexico in July or flies over the tundra in Alaska in January, the land crowds the imagination to wonder how people manage to survive in such places. Yet they do, and they love that landscape as home in a more profound way than most mobile, modern Americans can imagine. Nearly forty years ago in Barrow, the northernmost town in Alaska, when the weather turned foul, it trapped some bureaucrats from Washington, D.C., who, after two days of whiteout and blizzard, were frantic to escape the godforsaken place. They were sitting in the Mexican café and bar, grousing and lamenting, when the door banged open and a young man in uniform, just back from Vietnam, blew in surrounded by a white dust of windblown snow. “By God, it’s good to be home!” he shouted, while bureaucratic jaws dropped and local folks grinned and cheered. One might puzzle over how one learns how to live in and love such landscapes, but it is not learned in school. Such landscapes ask us, What sort of education is required to pass on the wisdom necessary for survival?
For most American Indian people, the primary purpose of education was survival on the land. That survival depended on learning an elaborate system of courtesy and reciprocity and gaining a profound understanding of complex relationships between humans and the rest of the world’s creatures. One learned to shape one’s behavior so that it would not offend the animals, plants, and streams human life depends on.
What have our own educational purposes become in our day? Is survival of the people still our aim, or are there other goals we strive for? Have we forgotten how dependent we are on the land for our people’s survival, or have we slipped into behaviors that so alienate the land that in some not-so-distant future it will no longer support us? Worrying about committing offenses against animals, plants, and streams seems like primitive superstition to us, so we offend and diminish the world around us every day.
Our culture has learned much about how the world works, but we have failed to learn how important it is, how self-interested it is, to support the earth so that it remains vital and supportive of us. Now we lack the will to act on what we know. Crossing the land in our shiny cars or flying above it at 36,000 feet and staring down, we are faced with another question: What have we forgotten? We have forgotten that Ground Squirrel is grandfather to Bear. Austin Hammond’s comment shows an understanding of the complexity of the relationships among the animals of a place and its human inhabitants, but our understanding of that place, and our own, is so poor that we do not know just what Austin meant. I think what Austin meant is that if we are not careful to treat Ground Squirrel with respect, it won’t be just Ground Squirrel who balances the scale but something far larger: Bear. If we are open enough, perhaps we can let Austin teach us. Austin’s story, taken as a metaphor for our relationships to the ecosystems we live in, offers a clear indication of our proper role in a place and the importance of caring for the small creatures we often overlook. If we harm the littlest critters, right down to the microorganisms in our soil, which we are killing off with our chemical fertilizers and pesticides, it will not be small creatures, Austin teaches us, but Nature itself that rises up to confront us.
In recent years people of the northwest coast and Alaska have worried much about the health of salmon runs. Incursions of foreign fishing fleets on the high seas, limited entry, and conflicts among sports fishers, commercial fishers, and indigenous people, all scrapping to save a portion of the salmon runs for themselves, are among the stories both local and national news media have carried.
The ancient American Indian idea that survival depends upon reciprocity, upon mutual consent between the hunter and the hunted, the earth’s creatures and its human occupants, is an honorable concept— and we have broken it. In Naknek, Alaska, I heard from both elders and my students that in “old time,” they were respectful of the little black creatures under the ground. They were always careful to return the whole skeleton of an early salmon to the spawning streams. This sign of respect was a ritual renewed every season upon the salmon’s return. The salmon would then know that they were not ill used or wasted by their captors. When they returned to their homes, other salmon would ask, “How was it over there?” And they would say, “Oh, it was fine. They treated us well.” Then others would say, “Good, we can go back there,” and the runs would be assured.1
But in our time we have treated the salmon with contempt. We have used them as if they owe us their presence, and their death, simply because we want them. We have not honored them with rituals or been grateful for their abundance. Instead we have manipulated them, mismanaged them, ravaged and wasted them. We have not taken them for the sustenance of our bodies, a legitimate use, but for the increase of our corporate wealth, an increase that goes beyond any necessity for health to the stockpiling of profit beyond our capacity to use or spend.
The decline of salmon is more a reflection of us, and our character, than it is attributable to other causes. It is no wonder that there are fewer salmon. They should spurn us. It must be their grace and courage that enable the salmon to give themselves to us at all, an act of sacrifice made to help us recover our sense of awe and gratitude for the mutuality of all life, our awareness that we live and die by the grace of beings other than ourselves. When they return, we should be embarrassed in their presence.
Maybe they are only fish, and maybe the old rituals are only the signs of a superstitious past. Yet when we stand on the bank of the river teeming with salmon struggling upstream in one of the most ancient and epic quests to find a way home the globe knows, they appear mythic, more than fish, just as we are more than people only, both of us sojourners across a landscape of earth and river and time, participants in a larger, longer cosmic process, a journey that always ends in mystery. Both salmon and humans have a larger life, for we are both part of the seamless interdependence of all life, the give and take of existence, participants in the same process, all of us wanderers or exiles looking homeward. At a meeting of the National Congress of American Indians, Pat Locke, a Lakota woman, was exhorting a mutual friend, Bill Vaudrin, a Chippewa, to return to his reservation. He said, “Ah, Pat, I can’t go back now. I’ve been gone too long; I’d just be a stranger.” Pat, wisely understanding our larger human dilemma, said, “But Bill, we are all strangers, returning.” What the people of old time knew, and what they taught future generations, was a system more gracious and more generous than we follow now.
Perhaps only when we reestablish the broken ties, when we atone for the dishonoring of our renewable resources, will the integrity of our systems be regained and humans once more be able to eat in peace, at home with our world and within ourselves. Then perhaps the salmon will return and offer us their forgiveness, and the ancient system of consent to our taking of life to sustain life may be restored. But how do we relearn ways to do that?
What ties exist between our educational practices and those of American Indians? The latter systems have been relatively successful in this place for thousands of years. Will ours work as well for as long? This is a critical issue for all of us, and especially for those interested in creating a sustainable culture.
In the past nonnatives did not share much in terms of educational practice with American Indian peoples. Their methods apparently leaned toward observation of elders, cooperation, mentoring, and coaching, letting a child try something, more or less privately, until he was ready to reveal his skill. Beyond those essentials there was the use of stories, songs, dances. In nonnative American culture, especially since the movement toward consolidation, which took away older students’ opportunity to mentor younger ones, methods have leaned toward individual effort, rote, competition, frequent testing, and display of knowledge, all in a system where songs, dances, and stories are often viewed as add-ons or frills.
What we know now of traditional Indian educational practices is tantalizing, but the possibility of our learning from them has lessened considerably after 150 years of forcing Indian children into our schools, assuming that our educational methods were right for everyone and that we Anglos had nothing to learn from local cultures. We expected them to learn from us, in a language they did not understand, yet we have not been educable ourselves. Those cultures have been in place perhaps fourteen thousand years or even longer. The real record of their longevity may well be buried under the rising oceans that have inundated our coastlines and erased evidence of their settlements in previous eras. Surely there must be something for us to learn from them about education and sustainability.
One of the disasters for Indian teaching methods has been the imposition of Anglo methods—in mission schools, Bureau of Indian Affairs schools, and more recently public schools—on the untested assumption that our pedagogy is superior. We dismissed their practices without examination, and a great number of them have been lost, our opportunity to learn from them largely forfeited. Even many Indian teachers and administrators, graduates of nonnative schools and colleges, who are now working under the constraints imposed by our alien public school systems, use our methods rather than their own traditional tribal methods.
When, on rare occasions, local Indian culture is included in the curriculum, too often the teaching methods and the context of the lesson remain those of the mainstream American classroom, not those of the local culture. It is hard to imagine that the inclusion of cultural elements apart from the culture’s educational methodology will prove effective. Recently Indian educators like Rina Swentzell and Gregory Cajete and their many colleagues in tribally controlled colleges have been showing us how an Indian pedagogy might actually work. Their insights are important and, if we are educable ourselves, will eventually shape our own pedagogy, but for the present they are too little known and too little understood. Methodology, then, is not yet a common ground upon which we can build a system of value to all cultures and to the earth and its creatures.
Trying to find that common ground, my mind goes to thoughts of subsistence culture in Alaska, to subsistence as a base, as the culture from which education grows and for which education is essential. Subsistence culture carries within it the comprehensive complexity that faces us as we consider what a sustainable culture might be. Indeed subsistence may be an appropriate model for other cultures, once we understand what it really means. What do Eskimo people need to know to find their way in a subsistence world? And how do Eskimo people teach that?
We and our educators have forgotten that our nonnative culture is but a different elaboration of subsistence culture. We are all, regardless of differences in economies, dependent upon the land, as surely now as any culture since the world began. Is subsistence the arena, then, where educational systems as different as American Indian and Anglo-American can meet, our common ground?
We have something to learn from tradition at this point. Both our education and our environmental practices might be improved if we were to see ourselves as living a subsistence life dependent on natural resources, all of them interrelated, some of them in short supply, some of them threatened by our manufacture and use of chemicals and by the pollution and decay-resistant garbage we pile up, bury in our oceans, and send into the sky. Apart from the land, nonnative people will die just as surely as Eskimo people will, for we are equally dependent on the physical energy and nourishment the earth has to offer. But there is more to the parallel. We too depend upon the land for more than our food and energy. Our religion, art, philosophy, technology, and economy all come to us from the land. Whatever nourishes our spirits also depends on the land.
Whence do our own religions rise but from fire or earth, sacred animals and systems, stars or moons we hold, or once held, worthy of worship? In the Western tradition, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were born and nourished in the great deserts. The desert tradition of hospitality, of patriarchs whose sternness matches the desert’s harshness, still informs their codes of conduct, even now, after the religions themselves have spread to tropical rainforests. And where does Western philosophy find its root but from the examination of earth, from natural philosophy trying to determine first what is most knowable and then to extrapolate from that to the larger, more difficult unknowns?
In three thousand years, Western arguments about art have gone from how accurately it imitates Nature to whether it should imitate Nature. Nature remains a constant even when we avoid or distort its appearance. One question, often overlooked in discussions of the environment, has to do with how much we can alter the environment without altering our artistic expression. So much of our vocabulary and so many of the forms and images in our visual and literary arts come to us from the land.
Our economy, too, remains Nature bound. Logging, mineral extraction, and oil are contemporary examples of vulnerable “natural industries” whose demise causes widespread fear. Even our computers, rather than freeing us from Nature, put us at the whim of Nature’s storms and temperature fluctuations. One-hundred-ten-degree heat never stopped my pen or typewriter, but my little Hewlett-Packard suffers, and its instructions warn me to protect it from such extremes.
Everything comes from the earth. One goal of education, then, one that will match what our lives require, whoever we are, is education for subsistence, a kind of learning that allows us to live in harmony with the world. This is a notion that is much more complex than it appears, for we must live in the world over vast stretches of time. We therefore must learn to understand and take care of the earth’s health as we do our own, recognizing that they are inseparable. We may, with our fantastic machines, escape the earth, but what then? We have not escaped either the world or Nature. So how do we devise learning systems that assure us that we know how to live in the world with little enough damage to it that we have time? I am not thinking of brief time here but of transgenerational time: time for ourselves and other creatures; time for evolution to run its course in this place as it will in others for the unnamed generations of all the creatures we cannot yet see. What might such an education be about?
Education for subsistence—rather than for jobs—would work toward the restoration of wholeness to our learning and lead us toward a restoration of wholeness in our culture, now so clearly fragmented among different disciplines with rigid boundaries in our schools. Our schools are still divided by race and its illusions of superiority and inferiority, by class and its myths of work and accomplishment. Division comes, too, from our myths of work—a “work ethic” that characterizes Anglos and a “laziness” that characterizes those of other cultures. We are divided further by our myths that portray artists as romantics and businesspeople as realists or pragmatists. So many of the distinctions we think we make rationally are built on the tricky sands of myth, self-deception, and self-aggrandizement.
Education for subsistence would assure the survival of the people, provide adequate definitions of who we are and what the nature of Nature is, and help us see the wholeness of that. One step toward that goal might be to rethink our view of nonnative cultures, to see them again as parts of Nature. Another might be to restore math, science, and the humanities to the unity they once had. This is a great, essential task for our time, and one that scientists are more apt, and perhaps better equipped, to undertake than humanists. At any cocktail party I more frequently run into a scientist who wants to talk about Wordsworth or Snyder or Kodaly than I encounter a humanist who wants to talk particle physics or chaos theory. Education for a subsistence life would alter many of our definitions of who we are and how we should live. It would also radically blur the distinctions we make between disciplines.
How much of education, of learning, is a matter of acquiring definitions—of mulling things over in our minds till new definitions emerge, rather than accepting the classifications schooling puts on us. We have acted as if we are not subsistence people, or we have forgotten that we are, but the concept of subsistence allows us to recognize our culture in the same way native peoples recognize theirs, whether we acknowledge that fact or not. In 1991, J. Edward “Ted” Chamberlin, professor of comparative literature at the University of Toronto and former chancellor of New College there, sent me a note about the importance of such recognitions in education:
It is not much as things are now, but—(1) any act of classification, both of disciplines and within disciplines, is an act of definition . . . an act of naming, with all of what Merwin would call its imperial implications. And the system we now support is obsessed with classification—as distinct from and often opposed to the sense of wonder. (2) We like to think of literature as helping us to live our lives. To the extent that this is true, it must in some sense help us develop definitions different from what I refer to in (1): i.e., more positive, though still establishing limits of self, a community, etc. At the same time, I don’t think we teach literature that way, at least normally, in the current system.
Should classifications and definitions—knowledge—be what learning is about? Or, in light of Ted’s comments, do we want to foster recognitions and tentative ideas that we can test instead—those awarenesses that do establish perimeters but lack the distancing and denaturalizing we have come to fear and abhor when carried too far? Recognitions lead us to think beyond wherever our mind has previously come to rest. They lead us to wonder, to speculate, to brood, and to create for ourselves rather than accept without question the opinions of others. Our minds tend to stop when we have definitions; wonder tends to cease. We think we know a thing when we have defined it. But recognition, re-cognition, by its very lineage as a word, allows for continuing both thought and wonder—two important elements for keeping the educational process alive.
Why do the data about the destructive impacts we’ve made on the environment appear to fall on deaf, or at least indifferent, ears? Even folks who recognize the threat may remain unmoved because they have not made the prior recognitions necessary to change behavior. Perhaps the majority still have not recognized that we are indeed a subsistence culture, dependent entirely on the land. Or they have not recognized that we still languish in the legacy of Newton and Bacon, thinking that we can separate our science from our humanities, and in the legacy of Descartes and Kant, thinking that we can separate ourselves from Nature. Those two separations, it seems to me, go hand in hand; it is a short step from the former to the latter. (Ah, the ease of the second guesser, the Monday morning quarterback!) Those separations are also the source of Philip Sherrard’s notions of the dehumanization of man and the desanctification of Nature. The shallowness of scientific thought, in Sherrard’s view, is ultimately caused by its (our) separation from traditional wisdom.2
But if our knowledge of the world can be split off from our knowledge of ourselves, why can’t we separate ourselves from the world? Our minds take such turns the way salmon occasionally take a turn that leads up a fatally dry tributary. If we can be separate from Nature, superior to it, able to control it, and if we are not a subsistence culture or do not recognize ourselves as such, then the consequences of our destructive acts do not matter much. We can assume we’ll find a way to fix things up again and “manage” Nature back onto the “right” path. But if we see ourselves as a subsistence culture, dependent on the land for all health, then—perhaps—we will recognize that we cannot destroy the land without destroying ourselves, and we will change our behavior.
One essential task for an educational system that will buy us transgenerational evolutionary time and allow us to continue to subsist is to teach us how to find our way toward reconnection. It must recognize the conjunctions between ourselves and the world, between what we know of the world and of ourselves. Subsistence-based education will enable us to take steps toward recognition of coherent patterns, to take steps toward wholeness and toward the kind of cooperation, rather than competition, biologists now say runs the world. The wholeness and the cooperation are there, present in the world, fundamental to it, operating in it. We do not have to create it. We only have to let our comprehension grasp it, our recognition apprehend it, for us. If we and our children can come to know the world in this way, we can live in the world over time, and the earth will be viable for every generation.
The task is formidable, for our science still remains largely a separate enterprise. It remains a reductive process of taking things apart, removing them from their contexts, assuming that somehow we will find what things really are by looking within, finding what is smaller and smaller and therefore, we think, closer to the “core,” as if the core must somehow also be the essence. That is perhaps half of the true task of science, but the last few hundred years it has been the major part, perhaps because it has worked so well for us. But what if everything is onions? What if there is nothing at the center of our reductions? What if the real meaning of our search is to be found in relationships, in the scent of the connections between layers? What if the essence of everything lies not inside itself but outside, in its connections with other things? The new science of ecology is looking hard to discover relationships and how they work, but at present it represents only a small part of our scientific endeavor.
To find out if connections are the real essence, we need to look at wholes and relationships, not only within but at and between, trying to recognize what exchanges are flowing. Then we might discover how they and we reach out, are stimulated, moved, made operative, by things outside ourselves. It seems we have only begun to develop the skills for that kind of inquiry, that we do not yet know how to look at wholes or at larger systems rather than smaller. Perhaps our astronomers have that capacity, but it hardly registers on the popular consciousness. Astronomy now is more apt to be equated with NASA than with science, though even there, what captures the lay imagination is the technology, the power of the rocketry, the courage of astronauts, the miracle of huge telescopes slowly tracking stars without a human hand to guide them.
Even in our psychiatry we are asked to look deeper and deeper within. Only recently have family therapy and twelve-step groups made an effort to look between, not exclusively within, examining our relationships to discover how we really feel about our lives and our relationships with others. What many have found, looking at relationships, is life and the means to endure it, even to love it. Perhaps one distinction to be made between psychiatry and a shaman’s practice is that the shaman looks first to an individual’s relationships to the land and its creatures and to the tribe, seeking to discover what is out of balance, lacking harmony. The psychiatrist, in contrast, looks first at how an individual sees his or her own history, or simply prescribes the latest medication. Emerson says, “I cannot greatly honor minuteness in details, so long as there is no hint to explain the relations between things and thoughts; no ray upon the metaphysics of conchology, of botany, of the arts, to show the relation of the forms of flowers, shells, animals, architecture, to the mind, and build science upon ideas.”3
Maybe the ancient astronomers were right: we can come to know ourselves best by looking to larger systems. Coming to recognize ourselves as part of ever larger systems or patterns, we may finally find the pattern for ourselves in the linkages between systems and, finally, in the stars—not by consulting astrological charts but by achieving some Chaldean recognition that in the turning of stars we ourselves turn. We are learning that even our own tiny turnings and flounderings have their influences too, clear out to some already extinguished nebula whose light is still pulsing toward us. We have known from the beginning, if the elders of every culture are right, that the exchanges we need to understand are not only between us and kin, neighbor, countryman, or stranger but also between us and stone and plant and field mouse; between us and ground squirrel and bear, and everything in and beyond the galaxies we know. If that is so, we have to be careful how we move on this earth, how we move through our lives. If we act as if we are disconnected, the connections will surely snare us, for, as Gary Snyder reminds us, they are nets, not tethers.4
If we break the connection between ourselves and the world, then we are merely fools who may unwittingly jostle the stars from their courses. Kathleen Dean Moore, in The Pine Island Paradox, asks a question that reveals how dangerous that might be for us: “And what is a human life but a rearrangement of molecules that once were stars?”5 Enabling us to know the world, to know ourselves and our place in the midst of it, and to know it whole, could be the purpose of an educational enterprise worthy of people who, like Alaskan villagers, other indigenous peoples, and us, are participants in subsistence cultures. Fulfilling that purpose through our educational systems, finding our common ground in the world, may ensure the survival of all cultures.