Indigenous Wisdom

Back in a past life as an academic at the Leadership Institute of Seattle, one of my favorite courses to teach was Epistemology.? This branch of philosophy sounds very heady and high-falutin’ with no real practical application in the real world.? A theory of knowledge is a simple definition of the term – how do you know what you know?? It’s a simple question – or is it?? For instance, I KNOW that humans are creating changes to the climate (though far too many people still believe this assertion is entirely erroneous).? How do I know that?? Primarily through scientific research – one type of knowing.? Another way of knowing about climate change is now becoming more prevalent than, say, two decades ago – direct experience.? Just about everyone is now directly experiencing the changes in our environment.? Just step in the ocean in southern Florida and feel the bathtub temperature. ?Predictive mathematical models aren’t needed for this kind of knowing.? The scientific method for knowledge creation has brought amazing advances to humanity ever since the Scientific Revolution.? However, it has also created an unnecessary level of arrogance and rigidity that undervalues other ways of knowing.?

One hundred years ago, the phrase “indigenous wisdom” would have been considered an absurd oxymoron.? Centuries before, colonizers from Europe spread to the New World, armed with the “Doctrine of Discovery” – the papal pronouncement that territories in the New World were available for colonizers to take and "the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself." ?They “knew” that indigenous people were “primitive” and “savage,” which required their souls to be saved by the Christian faith.? A few centuries later, the supposed “objectivity” of the Scientific Revolution confirmed their beliefs about the inferiority of non-white people.? Back then, what could possibly be considered indigenous wisdom?

Most of us white folks living in the West have come from a worldview that values scientific objectivity and industrial productivity.? Interdependence with the natural world does not come easily.? These deep assumptions about how the world works resonate with parts of Tema Okun’s characteristics of White Supremacy culture.? The following story is a case in point.? At the beginning of “Braiding Sweetgrass,” author Robin Wall Kimmerer – an ecologist/botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation – provides a telling story about university students.? To quote from the book:

“One otherwise unremarkable morning I gave the students in my General Ecology class a survey.? Among other things, they were asked to rate their understanding of the negative interactions between humans and the environment.? Nearly every one of the two hundred students said confidently that humans and nature are a bad mix…? Later in the survey, they were asked to rate their knowledge of positive interactions between people and land.? The median response was “none.” I was stunned.…? When we talked about this after class, I realized that they could not even imagine what beneficial relations between their species and others might look like.”

Meanwhile, indigenous people are continuing to steward the natural world in the same manner they have for centuries.? And what constitutes indigeneity?? While no formal definition exists, here is one way to describe indigenous people:

1. Self-identify as indigenous.
2. Follow traditional customs that trace back to pre-colonized societies.
3. Have a relationship with the environment that is governed by a system of beliefs that determine how they will interact with the world.

According to the UN Department of Economic and Social Development, “indigenous peoples account for most of the world’s cultural diversity.?Throughout the world, there are approximately 370 million indigenous peoples occupying 20 per cent of the earth’s territory. It is also estimated that they represent as many as 5,000 different indigenous cultures. The indigenous peoples of the world therefore account for most of the world’s cultural diversity, even though they constitute a numerical minority.”? One eye-popping fact is that 80% of the earth’s biodiversity is represented in that 20% of land they occupy.? Clearly, indigenous people have perfected a beneficial relationship between humans and all other species way beyond our “modern western epistemology.”?

In last Sunday’s edition of 52 Weeks, Wild(fire) Summer, we reported on the prevalence of major wildfires throughout North America.? The increase in wildfires has many causes – climate change being a major driver.? Another key ingredient has been the thick density of the forests, dried out from years of climate induced drought.? Let’s take California for an example. When the colonists seized land from the Native Americans, they began a policy of fire suppression on public properties.? This ran counter to the centuries of “cultural burns” the first peoples had used to keep the forests healthy.? A recent study from UC Berkeley, investigating the forest management practices of the Karuk and Yoruk tribes of the Klamath mountains, “found that forest biomass in the region used to be approximately half of what it is now, and that cultural burning by the tribes played a significant role in maintaining the forest structure and biodiversity, even during periods of climate variability.”?? Thankfully, this wisdom, now rebranded as Traditional Ecological Knowledge, is being acknowledged and numerous partnerships have emerged between tribes, the Department of the Interior, the National Park Service and other governmental land management agencies with the goal of re-introducing cultural burns.? Other examples of indigenous wisdom include farming and ranching practices that promote biodiversity and healthy soils that act as carbon sinks, not carbon sources like monocultural industrial agriculture.?

The need to integrate our many systems of knowledge to address climate change is eloquently voiced by Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim in this short TED talk.? I highly recommend viewing it.? In closing, it is noteworthy that Pope Francis, who finally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery this past March, just last week issued an “Apostolic Exhortation” on the climate crisis entitled Laudate Deum.? You do not have to be Catholic to appreciate his pointed messages in the document.? The section on “A Growing Technocratic Paradigm” is more than relevant:

25. Contrary to this technocratic paradigm, we say that the world that surrounds us is not an object of exploitation, unbridled use and unlimited ambition. Nor can we claim that nature is a mere “setting” in which we develop our lives and our projects. For “we are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it”,?[18]?and thus “we [do] not look at the world from without but from within”.?[19]

26. This itself excludes the idea that the human being is extraneous, a foreign element capable only of harming the environment. Human beings must be recognized as a part of nature. Human life, intelligence and freedom are elements of the nature that enriches our planet, part of its internal workings and its equilibrium.

27. For this reason, a healthy ecology is also the result of interaction between human beings and the environment, as occurs in the indigenous cultures and has occurred for centuries in different regions of the earth. Human groupings have often “created” an environment,?[20]?reshaping it in some way without destroying it or endangering it. The great present-day problem is that the technocratic paradigm has destroyed that healthy and harmonious relationship. In any event, the indispensable need to move beyond that paradigm, so damaging and destructive, will not be found in a denial of the human being, but include the interaction of natural systems “with social systems”.?[21]

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