I have talked many times in the blog about indigenous wisdom (e.g. Wisdom of our ancestors 1, 2, and 3 {April 2018}; and Relocalization and Community {January 2018}; and Reframing and Visualizing a New Society 1{March 2018}). While I have used the works of Jared Diamond (The world into yesterday) and Daniel Quinn (The Ishmael stories), I would like to take a different tack and use the words of Native American Indians to convey my thoughts about sustainable living for the next couple of weeks. As I have said, it is not the lifestyle of indigenous groups that we need to understand, but their worldview, which seem similar everywhere and through time. They did not have our technology, so had to live within the natural world. This gave them an ecologically spiritual worldview without them needing to be ecological saints. Those that did it well thrived – any that did otherwise disappeared into the dusts of time.
We modern humans have tried to live outside of the natural world using our technology with a competitive materialistic-consumer worldview. It has worked to a point, because of few people, for millennia, but during the past couple of centuries with exponentially increased technology and human growth has created global havoc. Now all that we have taken from the world without giving back is creating an imbalance, and Nature is now calling in its promissory notes. “Four very diverse historical roots of the environmental crisis can be distinguished, and corresponding to each there is a distinctive kind of response today: (1) Attitudes toward nature have in the past been influenced by western religious and cultural assumptions… (2) Economic institutions prevailing since the Industrial Revolution have engendered ecologically destructive practices… (3) Technologies have developed which use raw materials and create waste products in vast quantities… (4) Growth in population and living standards have produced an ever-increasing environmental demand” Ian Barbour – Western Man and Environmental Ethics.
Wherever medieval civilization onwards arrived around the world, indigenous peoples soon found themselves at odds, not only with the newcomers’ worldviews, but also their technology and poor choices. While there may be rare occasions when the newcomers left the indigenous peoples alone, by and large, the newcomers believed that they had the right to dominate and control whatever they found.
When indigenous peoples observed the newcomers, they were not impressed with anything except their technology. Most newcomers could not understand why indigenous peoples did not flock to live like them. If anything, it was more likely that common people arriving in the ‘New Worlds’ around the globe saw the benefits of living indigenously.
“The Crow country is in exactly the right place. It has snowy mountains and sunny plains; all kinds of climates and good things for every season. When the summer heat scorches the prairies, you can draw up under the mountains, where the air is sweet and cool, the grass fresh, and the bright streams come tumbling out of the snowbanks. There you can hunt the elk, the deer, and the antelope, when their skins are fit for dressing; there you will find plenty of white bears and mountain sheep.
In the autumn, when your horses are fat and strong from the mountain pastures, you can go down into the plains and hunt the buffalo, or trap beaver in the streams. And when winter comes on, you can take shelter in the woody bottoms along the rivers; there you will find buffalo meat for yourselves, and cottonwood bark for your horses; or you may winter in the Wind River Valley where there is salt weed in abundance.
The Crow Country is in the right place. Everything good is to be found there. There is no country like the Crow country….” Arapooish, a chief of the Crow tribe, date unknown.
This striking difference in worldviews can be seen in many of the indigenous records. “As soon as you thrust the plowshare under the earth, it teems with worms and useless weeds. It increases population to an unnatural extent creates the necessity of penal enactments spreads over the human face a mask of deception and selfishness and substitutes villainy, love of wealth and power, and the slaughter of millions for the gratification of some royal cutthroat, in place of the singleminded honesty, the hospitality, honor, and purity of the natural state” A Native American, c. 1800. “Sell the country? … Why not sell the air, the clouds, the great sea?” Tecumseh, c. 1811. Generally, indigenous peoples had territories and hunting rights they negotiated with their neighbors from year to year, which were protected fiercely in many cases, but ownership was foreign to them.
Indigenous naivety of newcomer ways with their concepts of ownership and laws to protect property and transactions was their undoing, wherever in the world ‘civilized’ newcomers arrived. “In the treaty councils the commissioners have claimed that our country had been sold to the Government. Suppose a white man should come to me and say, “Joseph, I like your horses, and I want to buy them.” I say to him, “No, my horses suit me, I will not sell them.” Then he goes to my neighbor, and says to him: “Joseph has some horses. I want to buy them, and he refuses to sell.” My neighbor answers, “Pay me the money, and I will sell you Joseph’s horses.” The white man returns to me and says, “Joseph, I have bought your horses, and you must let me have them.” If we sold our lands to the Government, this is the way they were bought…” Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, “Chief Joseph’s Own Story,” 1897.
This, however, is not a story of how civilization was imposed on indigenous peoples, but of how they thought and lived within a spiritual framework, and considered the natural world as something to be revered.
“We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills and the winding streams with tangled growth as “wild.” Only to the white man was nature a “wilderness” and… the land “infested” with “wild” animals and “savage” people” Chief Luther Standing Bear, Oglala Sioux, 1933.
“As a child I understood how to give; I have forgotten all this grace since I became civilized. I lived the natural life, whereas now I live the artificial. Any pretty pebble was valuable to me then; every growing tree an object of reverence. Now I worship with the white man before a painted landscape whose value is estimated in dollars! Thus the Indian is reconstructed, as the natural rocks are ground to powder and made into artificial blocks which may be built into the walls of modern society” Charles Eastman, a Native American raised by a white family, 1911.
To Be Continued ………..
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