Category Archives: Indigenous People before Contact

Ancestral Pueblo People (Anasazi)

Ancient Humans, Fear, Indigenous Issues, Indigenous People before Contact

The American Southwest which I have visited for the last few years, is area that receives a mere 10 inches (25 cm) of rain each year, but has supported inhabitants for at least 12,000 years. Paleo-Indians arrived at about 12,000 years ago and they learned how to live there.

Thousands of years later, the Ancestral Puebloans, Indigenous People of the American southwest and are also known as Anasazi, arrived, but that name was given to them by Navajo for it basically means “Ancient enemy ancestor.”  That is not the most complementary name. The Ancestral Puebloans are thought to have settled near Mesa Verde in about AD 550 where they lived in pithouses and later astonishing cliff dwellings. By about 800 AD they had developed significant masonry skills and began to build housing complexes using sandstone, which is fairly common in the region. From about 1100 to 1300 AD they used their impressive skills in weaving, pottery, jewelry and tool-making.

Kivas are round pit-like room dug into the ground and roofed with beams.   The kiva was the religious and ceremonial center of Ancestral Puebloan life and is still used by modern Puebloans. It usually had no windows and the only means of access was through a small hole in the roof. Small kivas were likely used by one family. Larger ones could be designed for the entire community, like a church in Europe.

Ancestral Puebloan ruins can be found in Chaco Culture National Park and Mesa Verde National Park as well as Canyon de Chelly. This is the White House in Canyon de Chelly.

By AD 1,300 the Ancestral Puebloans had abandoned many of their long established settlement sites perhaps on account of climate change. Things got much drier around about the time they left. There was a 50-year drought that placed great strain on their civilization. A large population could not be sustained in the desert with its minimal resources and led to a lengthy period of social upheaval.

The Ancestral Puebloans did not disappear but live on today in Puebloan descendants. The Ancestral Puebloans or Anasazi, lived there from about 500 until some time in the 12th century.  They are the ones that created the numerous evocative ruins found in the area including those at Mesa Verde in Colorado, and the Chaco Canyon in New Mexico and Canyon de Chelly and Camp Verde in Arizona.

 

 

Many people forget that the Ancestral Puebloans were farmers who began to cultivate maize (corn) and pumpkins. Eventually they added beans, squash, and other vegetables to their arsenal. They even domesticated turkeys from a native subspecies.  It is interesting that eventually “Through trade and plunder, the same turkeys would eventually make their way south to the Aztec empire in Mexico. Conquistador Hernan Cortes later appropriated some and shipped them home to Europe. From there, farmyard turkeys traveled back to the New World with colonists of the East Coast. All domestic turkeys descended from the wild turkeys originally tamed nearly two millennia ago in the North America’s drylands.”

 

The descendants of the Ancestral Puebloans include the Hopi whose pueblos are reputed to be the oldest continuously occupied towns in North America. They began to occupy territory a little farther west of Canyon de Chelly.  We drove through First Mesa, where they live to this day, even though our friends Dave and MaryLou advised against it.

 

Then we drove near to Second Mesa, another settlement still occupied by Hopi people.

 

A very interesting question is “Why did Anasazi leave their cliff dwellings?”  I thought about a brilliant book—Desert Solitaire written by Edward Abbey. It is a fantastic book. One of the best books I have ever read on the American Southwest. Abbey compared the ancient Anasazi (Ancestral Puebloans) to modern Americans. Abbey said, “Apparently, like some twentieth century Americans, the Anasazi lived under a cloud of fear.” Why else did they go to such trouble to build their homes where they did?  As Abbey commented,

Fear: is that the key to their lives?  What persistent and devilish enemies they must have had, or thought they had, when even here in the intricate heart of a desert labyrinth a hundred foot-miles from the nearest grassland, forest, and mountains they felt constrained to make their homes, as swallows do, in niches high on the face of a cliff.

Their lives must have been severely cramped by their overpowering fears. As Abbey said,

“Their manner of life was constricted, conservative, cautious: perhaps only the pervading fear could keep such a community together. Where all think alike there is little danger of innovation.”

That seems like a perfect description of the gated communities in modern North America subdivisions. From my experience, the people are fearful, nervous, and entirely lacking in courage. They fear everyone and everything. For example, many people in Arizona fear that Mexicans are coming across the border in hordes to take their best jobs, cleaning toilets in airports. Does that make sense? So they want to build a wall to keep them out of the country. Then the people fear that the Mexicans who someone got into the country, will send their youth to attack their homes.  So they build a wall around their tiny communities. The existence of these walls makes it perfectly clear—the people live in fear. Is that a sign of a guilty conscience or cowardice?

What will happen to the modern Americans in their insular communities? Will they survive or perish as the Anasazi did? Will the same forces like climate change that drove the Anasazi to abandon their cliff top homes cause the modern suburbanites to abandon theirs?  Abbey writing in the 1960s, long before the time the gated communities became so popular, described the situation this way,

Long ago the cliff dwellings were abandoned. Were the inhabitants actually destroyed by the enemies they had always dreaded? Or were they reduced and driven out by disease, by something as undramatic as bad sanitation, pollution of their water and air?  Or could it have been finally, simply their own fears which poisoned their lives beyond hope of recovery and drove them into exile and extinction?

What a great question?  In my view, it is likely that the modern American gated “community” will suffer the same fate as the ancient cliff dwellings of the Anasazi.  No wall no matter how high, can keep the barbarians out. The Romans learned that the hard way, so did the Anasazi, and so will the modern suburbanites. It probably won’t be actual external enemies that lead to their doom. It is much more likely that it will be the combined effects of pollution and minds being cooked in the juices of their own lurid fears.

Perhaps this is what the modern gated communities will look like in a hundred years?

Zuni

Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues, Indigenous People before Contact, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, New Attitude to Nature

 

Jim Enote is an elder of the Ashiwi Nation, a Pueblo group in what is now New Mexico and Northern Arizona known as the Zuni. He says that when his people come to water they lift it and splash themselves with it and then they throw it in the direction of Zuni to encourage rain. They have a name for this very large area in Northern Arizona. They call it the place of emergence.  It includes what we now call the Grand Canyon and Glen Canyon. I visited large parts of the area on a number of occasions. It is incredibly beautiful. Perhaps the most beautiful on earth.

 

I don’t know the exact boundaries of Zuni territory but I believe these photos are from in or near their historical territory.

Monument Valley is in my opinion one of the most beautiful places on earth and I am surprised how few people who winter in Arizona never visit it or haven’t even heard of it.

 

In that region the Zuni produced petroglyphs that have been there for more than a thousand years. To the Zuni this is not just art; it is history. One of them shows a row of sheep descending to the water. It is an ancient lesson. To find water follow the animals.

Jim and the Zuni have been using ancient petroglyphs, images from pottery, and from tapestries, and have considered their thoughts and prayers and together with all that have been making unique maps based on these images. Those maps are unlike any other maps in the world. “Not limited by lines or topography, they depict cultural landscapes and living memories.” Jim Enote put it this way,  in the documentary series Native America that I watched this past winter, “The Zuni maps represent the world without defined boundaries.”

Many people are familiar with maps that contain streets and roads. But there is another way. The Zuni have found one of those other ways. As Enote said, “When they see Zuni hand painted maps, they realize there is a different way of looking at the world.” Isn’t that what travel and education are all about, finding different ways of looking at the world? Isn’t this why we converse with people of different cultures? Is this not what the world of ideas is all about? This is why I watch television shows like this one.

This different way of looking at the world is shared across North America. It is a reverence for place. Sacred caves, underground sanctuaries, grand canyons, real physical connections to earth. Its why many call it Mother Earth.

People like Enote when they visit a place like the Grand Canyon, with its steep walls of red rock, like those I saw at Canyon de Chelly, or Monument Valley, both in the same area, get the feeling that they are in a womb. They are inside Mother Earth. That is a deep and powerful connection! Enote said, in front of an incredible film of Horseshoe Canyon where I stood 2 years, “This is the place we came from so the river is like an umbilical cord. It’s all part of the Mother. The Mother is where we begin. Its our ultimate reference point.” Now that is a real connection to the physical earth.

I took this photo of Horseshoe Canyon getting as close to the edge as a person who is deathly afraid of heights could get. When he said that, I could not help but recollect the words of Paul Tillich that profound German theologian who defined God as our ultimate concern.

Connection between Hopi and Indigenous People of the Amazon Rainforest

Ancient Humans, Arizona, civilization, Indigenous Issues, Indigenous People before Contact, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy, New Attitude to Nature, New Mexico, religion

I am still thinking about civilization and whether or Europeans who arrived in the Americas had a monopoly on it, as many of them thought, and as many of their descendants still think.

A few years ago some good friends of ours lived on a Hopi Reservation for about a year. They invited us down to visit but I am sorry to say we did not go.  That was a big mistake. We could have learned a lot. The Hopi, like so many Indigenous peoples of North America have a lot to teach us. Chris and I went on our own a couple of years ago, but frankly learned very little.

I did learn a bit about Hopi culture from watching a television series this winter on PBS called Native America.

In my last post on this subject, I mentioned how Chaco in northern New Mexico was connected with the Indigenous People of the Amazon Rainforest. Now I want to mention that the Hopi, many of whom now live in Northern Arizona, make pilgrimages to Chaco in northern New Mexico because they want to maintain their connection to places like Yupköyvi (Chaco in the Hopi language). As a result, there may be a connection to the ancient ceremonies of the Hopi back in Chaco and they are in turn connected too with the Amazon Rainforest To the Indigenous people, the Americas was a small world.

Chaco was built in northeast New Mexico between 900 and 1150 and it covered an area roughly the size of modern San Francisco. That is a pretty big city. And of course at that time people had no buses to get around as they do in San Francisco.

There were 12 great houses in the center of Chaco. They were 5 stories high and contained up to 800 rooms. “These were the biggest buildings in what will be the United States until the 1800s.” They also built cave like gathering places throughout the city. At one time they were covered but those roofs have long since collapsed. They are called kivas. The Hopis still use them in Arizona for special ceremonies conducted by men and women.

1,000-year old Kivasare very important to the Hopi. The rituals inside kivas centered on rainmaking, healing, hunting, all to ensure the continuation of life.” All of these were vitally important to the Hopi people. They often smoked pipes as part of the ceremonies. Like Indigenous people of the Canadian prairies, smoking, to the Hopis is a form of prayer. They meditate while smoking. They pray for rain, long life and abundance. Not that different from Christian prayers when you think of it. People pray to get stuff. But Leigh Kuwandwisiwma, a Hopi, said it is more than that. “We pray to the environment,” he says. And they are part of that environment. “We take the time to contemplate the power around us, the bird world, the reptilian world, the animal world, the insect world, are all part of who we are the Hopi People,” he says. It is a very different attitude to nature.

To Pueblo people of the American Southwest and Hopi people some of their modern corn is also sacred. It is their life-blood. Offering it to earth is a sacred offering. As the smoke carries prayers to the winds Leigh sprinkled cornmeal into the fire and it rose as part of the smoke. “It is a ritual that connects the Hopi to their origin story.”

Many North American Native people believe that they emerged from the earth. I accept these stories with respect. I do not accept them as literal reports of what happened, any more than I accept the story of Noah’s ark carrying two of all species on earth in his ark as a literal rendering of what happened. For example, I don’t think there were 2 blue whales on that ark, or 2 mammoths or 2 tigers. The story of Noah’s ark, like the creation stories of North American Native people are important however. They speak a profound truth. It is just not a literal truth. Sometimes those stories are difficult to interpret.  That does not mean we should discard them. That just means we should work harder to interpret them.

“Many Native American people share a belief that they emerged from the earth. Hopi and ‘Pueblo traditions say that the place of emergence is beneath America’s best known natural wonder, the Grand Canyon. 5 million people visit each year, they come to connect with its natural beauty, but Pueblo people have an even deeper connection. This is their birth place.”

I like that story. Imagine emerging from the Grand Canyon. That would be pretty spectacular. It certainly does not seem any less civilized than the creation story in the Bible.

People of the Amazon Rainforest

Ancient Humans, art, expansive religion, Indigenous Issues, Indigenous People before Contact, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy

The story of where the ideas of Chaco came from arose far from Chaco. Archeologists Anna Roosevelt and Chris Davis were interviewed in the series Native America.  They explained that they have been trying to answer such questions. They have been searching for evidence of the earliest people in the Americas.

Some interesting data has been discovered in the Amazon Rainforest of western Brazil. They looked in a cave there referred to in Portuguese as the Caverna da Pedra Pintada, or in English, the cave of the Painted Rock.  The walls of the cave are covered with art of animals and the sky. “This cave in the Amazon is re-writing the history of when and how people settled the Americas and who those people are.”

For a long time history books presented only one view of how this happened. They said that about 11,000 B.C. during the last Ice Age big game hunters from Asia crossed over to North America a frozen land bridge in the area known a Beringia. That land bridge arose when sea levels dropped dramatically during the last Ice Age.  Later when the continental ice sheets of North America and the world melted. the ocean levels rose again sharply growing that land bridge once more. It was thought that after the ice melted the people of Asia who had arrived in North America  migrated south into North and South America. They were thought to have hunted mammoths, giant sloths and caribou with finely fashioned stone spear points. Many of these animals have since disappeared.

According to the standard view people reached the Amazon about 1,000 years ago.  Recently scientists have discovered evidence in caves that people arrived in the Amazon much earlier than that. ?That evidence even includes some surprising art as well as human remains which have been carbon dated. .  As Anna Roosevelt from the University of Illinois said, “The remains we found and dated in the cave show that people were living deep in the Amazon forest at least 13,000 years ago. This is some of the earliest art and its definitely so far, the earliest art, so far, in the hemisphere.”

This demonstrates, she said,  that, “Thousands of years before the Romans or Greeks, eight thousand years before the Egyptians, at least 13,000 years ago, people arrive in the Amazon, and their stone tools and paintings reveal these first Americans are not only mammoth hunters, they are foragers, fishermen, artists, and perhaps scientists.”

Chris Davis is a specialist in archaeoastronomy, the study of how ancient peoples looked at the sky. He and Roosevelt found images that appear to be a grid that indicates how something was tracked  in the sky, because it was outdoors, not in a cave. These two scientists believe that these images represent calculated observations.

Davis thinks the art represents very sophisticated thinking. As Roosevelt said, “This art links people with their environment through its animals, its plants, and the heavenly bodies of the sky.” This actually reminds me of what Northrop Frye, Canada’s pre-eminent English literature scholar described as the purpose of art. The purpose of art is to give the world a human face.  Artists try to connect the world to us.

Bertrand Russell also agreed. As he said in his book On God and Religion:

“Men, as is natural, have an intense desire to humanize the universe:  God and Satan, alike are essentially human figures, the one a projection of ourselves, the other of our enemies.” Of course this is exactly what Northrop Frye said too.

Roosevelt concluded, “These paintings are the earliest art ever found in the Americas. They suggest that people 13,000 years ago had already developed ideas about the world that centered on the sky, caves, and nature. But what exactly are these First American artists trying to say?” What is clear though is that we ought to be wary of making easy conclusions that Europeans and their descendants were vastly superior in knowledge to the Indigenous people. If you recall, this is the point I am trying to make. I think that for too long we in the west have been blinded by bias about our own superiority to Indigenous peoples. The point is that this is a bias.

People of Chaco

Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues, Indigenous People before Contact

This past year I watched an amazing series called Native America on PBS. It was narrated by Robbie Robertson of the Band.

The more I learn about Native Americans the more I am surprised by them. By Native Americans I mean the people of North, Central, and South America that lived here when the Europeans officially arrive in 1492. Like Europeans, there were an astonishing variety of peoples. No stereotypes fit. They did not think and act alike anymore than humans from Europe, Asia or Africa did. Diversity is the most important key to understanding Indigenous people. And that diversity is their greatest asset. We can learn a lot from them. But to do that we have to ditch our inbred sense of superiority. We  have to look at them without bias and with empathy. If we can to that we will be blessed.

More than a 1,000 years ago, 500 years before contact with Europeans, Native Americans built one of the largest cities of North American New Mexico. It was called Chaco.

Most of the city has been destroyed. All that remains are largely dismantled or ruined structures that most of Americans have forgotten about. To them they are insignificant. But they aren’t.

Some Native Americans still maintain a strong connection to Chaco. People like the Hopi from Northern Arizona make pilgrimages to Chaco because it is a way of connecting to their ancestors. One of these people is Leigh Kuwandwisiwma who is an ancient keeper of knowledge. He husbands and cherishes ancient knowledge–the traditional knowledge of America’s first peoples.

The Hopi are one of the pueblo communities–the most ancient people that live in the American Southwest. Leigh Kuwanwisiwma helped lead a group of elders from the Hopi community to a cave north of the ancient city of Chaco. The Hopi are notoriously reticent to share their culture with outsiders. For the filming of the series Native America, for the first time, the Hopi people shared an ancient ceremony outside their community. They offered cornmeal and eagle feathers in gratitude.

The Chaco housed a lot of people with high spiritual knowledge. A lot of great teachings were shared and stored there. The Hopi and other native peoples see this ancient city as being still alive. The structures contained 100s of rooms and were, skyscrapers by standards of the time. “Their walls were carefully aligned to the sun and stars. They transformed the surrounding desert into gardens and fields of corn.” The Hopi believed that many people, perhaps thousands came here to learn about natural forces. As Robertson said, “It was a place of higher learning hundreds of years before Harvard University was built.” In the Chaco the people shared secret knowledge, traditional practices, about the world of nature and the natural forces that governed it. Except for being secret, isn’t that what universities are all about? They believed that in this way they learned to influence the natural elements like wind, rain, and clouds. “Here a thousand years ago in the American Southwest was a thriving center of science and spirituality.”

What people learned at this center of knowledge helped them to cope, survive, and even thrive in a harsh environment. That knowledge was not useless; it was essential. Many clans came together there to share their knowledge. Each wanted to learn from the other and each wanted to help the others for the mutual benefit of all. They shared their wisdom about how to be and act as caretakers of the earth.

Recent archaeological evidence is showing how far Chaco influenced societies and how far people were willing to travel to come there. They came from hundreds of miles away. Archaeologist Patti Crown was the lead scientist in the search.

One of the rooms is very interesting. It is called Room 28 and when it was originally excavated in 1896 it contained dozens of cylindrical pots of which scientists have only recently come to understand the significance. Crown thought they were drinking vessels but was not sure what they were drinking. She used modern forensic techniques to get at the surprising truth. What they were used for was chocolate! Chocolate comes from the Cacao bean that only grows on trees in the tropics of Central America more than 500 miles away! Obviously they had to trade with people that far away to eat drink chocolate at Chaco.

There  “Chocolate was considered food for the gods.” I know my wife would agree. It was used in ceremonies where it would be poured from one vessel to another. The shape of the vessels in Central America were similar to those found in Chaco. “Chocolate and its sacred drinking ritual must have travelled from Central America to Chaco.” It is surprising how far ideas travelled in the ancient world.

Many other sacred objects were found at Chaco. They found carved shells from the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. They found precious metals and minerals that could only have come from far off mountains. They found colorful tropical bird feathers that came from Central America over a thousand miles away! All of these were objects of ritual significance that had been carried here from a great distance.

As Crown pointed out, “It made Chaco part of this very, very deep and distant belief system. The remains of an ancient city, combined with Hopi traditions of a great center of knowledge, and sacred artifacts that connect Chaco with distant cultures, have together helped create a new vision of what Chaco was all about.

“In a world of cities teeming with people, immersed in the science and spirituality of earth and sky Chaco is a metropolis of ideas and beliefs that span two continents.” That of course leads to the next question, ‘Where did these ideas come from?’

Cultural Relativism

Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues, Indigenous People before Contact, racism, Sociology of Knowledge, , ,

 

If you want to understand Indigenous People you should know something about anthropology. Sadly, I know little about anthropology. Of course, as faithful readers of my blog know, absence of knowledge has never stopped me from offering my opinions. Today is no exception.

I have said that to understand the relationship of the invaders of the western hemisphere to the Indigenous people cannot be understood without realizing the arrogance and superiority they felt to indigenous people.

Franz Boas, sometimes called the father of modern Anthropology was perhaps the first anthropologist to poke holes into the false sense of superiority of the west. He was interested in how beliefs and convictions coalesced into something he referred to as culture. He thought this was a valid organizing principle. So does Wade Davis another eminent anthropologist. Boas, appreciated, as very few of his fellows did, that cultures of the west had a lot to learn from indigenous cultures.  As Davis said of Boas, “Far ahead of his time, he sensed that every distinct social community, every cluster of people distinguished by language or adaptive inclination, was a unique facet of the human legacy and its promise.”

Each culture provided an opportunity that every one who contacted it would be well advised to pay attention to it and learn from it. Ideological blinkers are never helpful. Boas is seen by many as the originator of modern cultural anthropology and for good reason.  He looked at cultures without bias and without suffocating feelings of superiority. Boas wanted to learn from people he met. He was not there to teach them. He was not there to save them, he wanted to benefit from their stored ancient wisdom. That attitude was extremely unusual in its time. Boas worked among many people including the Inuit of Baffin Island, the indigenous people of the west coast of North America and in every case made sure that his students kept an open mind. Boas ensured that his students communicated with the indigenous people they met in the language of those people. He asked them to participate as much as possible in the lives of those people they studied.  As Davis said of Boas,

“Every effort should be made, he argued, to understand the perspective of the other, to learn the way they perceive the world, and if at all possible, the very nature of their thoughts. This demanded, by definition, a willingness to step back from the constraints of one’s own prejudices and preconceptions. This notion of cultural relativism was a radical departure, as unique in its way as was Einstein’s theory of relativity in the discipline of physics. Everything Boas proposed ran against the orthodoxy. It was a shattering of the European mind, and ever since, anthropologists have periodically been accused of embracing an extreme relativism.”

That does not mean we have to abdicate from making judgments. That does not mean we can’t cherish the good from our society too. Lets cherry pick the best from each world. Lets just not be blind to the good fruit from our kin. When we make judgments, lets make sure that they are informed, based on reasoning not wishful thinking, or worse, no-thinking, and free from bias. In other words we should always try to be ideal observers.  We owe that not only to them, but to ourselves.

One day Boas in the cold winter of 1883 was caught in a dreadful snowstorm in northern North America. It was the mother of all blizzards. Temperatures dipped to minus 46º C. That would even impress people from the prairies of Canada like me. Boas and his group understandably became disoriented in the storm. For 26 hours in the freezing cold there was nothing he could do to help his men. He left himself and his entire crew to the care and custody of the local Inuk companion and their dogs. Eventually the Inuk guide led them to safety and the men survived, though half dead when they arrived. They were nearly frozen to death and nearly starved. The next day Boas wrote this in his diary,

“I often ask myself what advantages our good society possesses over that of ‘savages’ and find, the more I see of their customs, that we have no right to look down on them…We have no right to blame them for their forms and superstitions which may seem ridiculous to us. We highly educated people are much worse, relatively speaking.”

Boas opened the eyes of anthropologists, but many more. Many people came to realize we have a lot to learn from others. Our hubris must be put on the shelf.

Boas  explored the idea that random beliefs could coalesce into what he called “culture.” Boas was among the first to promote the idea of culture as an organizing principle of anthropology.

Boas became the leader of modern cultural anthropology. He studied with an open and unprejudiced manner how human social perceptions are formed and how members of distinct societies become conditioned to see and interpret the world. I would say Boas was the father of modern cultural anthropology and also the father of the sociology of knowledge.

Boas insisted that his students learn and conduct their research in the language of the place and even participate in the lives of the people that they studied. These were revolutionary ideas at the time.  Davis said of him, “Every effort should be made, he argued, to learn the way they perceive the world, and if at all possible, the very nature of their thoughts.”

Of course this required his students to set aside their preconceptions and actually look at, and listen to, the people they were studying. Prejudice had no place in their science. One had to look skeptically at one’s own cultural preconceptions in order to avoid being enslaved by them.

This led Boas to his revolutionary idea of cultural relativism. According to Davis, “This notion of cultural relativism was a radical departure, as unique in its way as was Einstein’s theory of relativity in the discipline of physics. Everything Boas proposed ran against orthodoxy. It was a shattering of the European mind, and ever since, anthropologists have periodically been accused of embracing an extreme relativism.”

This does not mean that all cultures are equal. It does mean that all cultures merit respect. It does mean that all cultures have something to teach us. It does mean that cultural arrogance is misplaced. As Davis said,  “In truth, no serious anthropologist advocates the elimination of judgment. Anthropology merely calls for tis suspension, so that the judgments were are all ethically obliged to make as human beings may be informed ones.”

Boas wanted to see the world through the eyes of his subjects. He wanted to walk in their moccasins. He practiced radical empathy, not arrogance. That is the attitude we need to understand Indigenous issues. Not arrogance. Not a sense of superiority. Empathy is much more helpful.

Wade Davis and the Lessons of Anthropology

Indigenous Issues, Indigenous People before Contact, Moral Humility,

 

I never studied Anthropology. I wish I had. I think I could have learned a lot.  I think it would encourage humility. I think a study of anthropology would relieve one of a sense of superiority. For example, the feelings of superiority that westerners brought to the “New World” are truly breathtaking.

One person who knows intimately how unfair and how unjustified these feelings of superiority are is Wade Davis, perhaps Canada’s premier Anthropologist. In June of, 2015 he delivered the Milton K. Wong lecture at the University of British Columbia. The name of the lecture was “Catalogues of Culture.” Part of his talk was aired on CBC radio’s Ideas, my favorite radio show on my favorite radio station. It aired September 22, 2015. It was fantastic.

Davis was an anthropologist, ethno botanist, and an author of 17 books, one of which I have read, The Wayfarers. He talked of being an anthropologist who tried to discover as much of the diversity of human culture as possible. In doing that he came to realize the immense loss that we would experience if we permitted the continued obliteration of cultures around the world. For centuries we in the west have been doing exactly that out of a horribly misguided sense of our superiority that has no justification at all when the evidence is examined and myths scrutinized.

A basic question that Davis asked was ‘what kind of world do we want to live in’?  Do we want to live in a world of monochromatic monotony or polychromatic diversity?  The answer was obvious. Who would choose differently?  That was why Davis had so much respect for a wide variety of cultures. We have a lot to learn from them, but learning is difficult if our minds are chained by prejudice and self-serving misguided beliefs in our own cultural superiority.

As Davis pointed out, one of the great benefits of travel is to live among those people who have not forgotten the old ways, who still feel  truth in the path in the wind, feel it in the stones polished by rain, and the taste of the bitter leaves of plants. He said he was comforted by the knowledge that the Shamans of the Amazon still journey beyond the Milky Way, that to the people of the high Arctic the myths of the elders still resonate with meaning, and that in the Himalaya the priests still pursue the breath of the Dharma.

According to Davis, a key insight of modern anthropology is that the world in which each of us was born is just one model of reality and there are many such realities. As Davis said, “the social central revelation of anthropology: the idea that the social world in which we live does not exist in some absolute sense, but rather is simply one model of reality, the consequence of one set of intellectual and spiritual choices that our particular lineage made, however successfully, many generations ago.”

Anthropologists study people around the world. And there is an incredible variety of people around the world. Davis realized what many anthropologists have learned, that “all these peoples teach us that there are other options, other possibilities, other ways of thinking and interacting with the world. This is an idea that can only fill us with hope.” That is the same insight that travelers around the world have come to realize; tourists seldom understand that.  It is for that reason that Paul Theroux was right when he said, “Travellers don’ t know where they are going, tourists don’t know where they have been.”

Our world in which we were born is just the result of a particular set of adaptive responses that our cultural lineage made however successfully many generations ago. Any claims we might want to assert to cultural supremacy are but “worthless foam from the mouth” to borrow the words of Bob Dylan. If we forget that we we lose the world.

Whether it is a voodoo acolyte in Haiti, a yak herder in Nepal, or an eagle hunter in Central Pakistan, or a thunder hoof shaman of Mongolia, all of these people teach us that there are other waysof thinking other ways of being, other ways of orienting yourselves culturally, in social, spiritual, ecological space. That is an idea that if you think about it can fill you only with hope.

From this insight made Davis concluded, “together the myriad of cultures of the world make up a web of social life that envelopes the planet and is as important to the well-being of the planet as the biological web of life that you know so well as the biosphere.” He called this the ethnosphere. He believed it was just as important as the biosphere.

Superiority and Race

Affinity, Ancient Humans, Indigenous Issues, Indigenous People before Contact, ,

 

People of European descent have long had a grossly exaggerated sense of their own superiority to indigenous people around the world. After all weren’t they politically and technologically dominant around the world? They must be superior. What other explanation could there be? This is part of what I have called the Original Sin.

From that robust sense of superiority sprang the notion that they must have sprung from a superior race.  Even though that notion has been intellectually discredited, this feeling of superiority runs deep. It is easily sublimated when under siege, but invariably bobs up somewhere else.

At one time such notions were convenient. For example, they were used to justify first the destruction of native societies and then slavery and later more subtle forms of dominance over other races. That allowed Europeans to prosper unimaginably from an economic perspective.  It also allowed them to sleep at night, or perhaps, put their conscience to sleep.

It is difficult for us to comprehend objections to what is to our advantage. That is why slavery and  racial bias were so difficult to defeat.  These were convenient biases. Bias has in fact not been defeated in centuries of trying.

Yet this entire feeling of being a superior race is a feeling built on sand. There is no secure foundation for it at all.  Partly because the entire notion of race itself has been discredited. As Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis said in his book The Wayfinders, “science in fact suggests an end to race, when it reveals beyond any reasonable doubt that race is a fiction.” Of course racism is not a fiction!

Science has clearly demonstrated:

“The genetic endowment of humanity is a single continuum.From Ireland to Japan, from the Amazon to Siberia, there are sharp genetic differences among populations. There are only geographical gradients. The most remote society on earth contains within its people fully 85 percent of our total genetic diversity. Were the rest of society to be swept away by plague or war, the Waroni or the Barasana, the Rendille or the Tuareg would have within their blood the genetic endowment of all of humanity. Like a sacred repository of spirit and mind, any of these cultures, any one of these 7,000 would provide the sees from which humanity in all its diversity might be reborn.

What all of this means is that biologists and population geneticists have at last proved to be true something that philosophers have always dreamed: We are all literally brothers and sisters. We are all cut from the same genetic cloth.”

This of course is a recurring theme in my blog. I come back to it over and over again. We are connected. None of this should come as surprise to anyone. After all, we are all descendants of a small group of humans, perhaps as small as 150 people, that migrated out of Africa about 60,000 years ago and proceeded to colonize the world. And guess what, those people were likely dark skinned! I remember when we were in Africa a few years ago in what was called “the Cradle of Humanity,” when I mentioned this fact to an evangelical Christian in our group, he was obviously disturbed by that possibility. Why should that be?

The consequence of this is, as Davis said,  “all cultures share essentially the same mental acuity, the same raw genius. Whether this intellectual capacity and potential is exercised in stunning works of technological innovation, as has been the great achievement of the West, or through the untangling of the complex threads of memory inherent in a myth—a primary concern, for example, of the Aborigines of Australia—is simply a matter of choice and orientation, adaptive insights and cultural priorities.”

After all how can one say the people of the west who created a great technological society are superior to the indigenous people of North America who learned to flourish and not just live in North America where the Europeans who arrived on contact would have starved or frozen to death? Who can say Europeans are superior to the people of the Amazon rainforest who have learned to live with robust knowledge and experience amidst the natural splendors of their homeland? In particular, when modern industrial society, of which the West is inordinately so proud, has led to the destruction of about half of life on the planet, does it even resemble sense to hold the western ways superior?

Davis got it profoundly right when he said,

“There is no hierarchy of progress in the history of culture, no Social Darwinian ladder to success. The Victorian notion of the savage and the civilized, with European industrial society sitting proudly at the apex of a pyramid of advancement that widens at the base to the so-called primitives of the world, has been thoroughly discredited—indeed, scientifically ridiculed for the racial and colonial conceit that it was.  The brilliance of scientific research and the revelation of modern genetics have affirmed in an astonishing way the essential connectedness of humanity. We share a sacred endowment, a common history written in our bones. It follows, … that the myriad of cultures of the world are not failed attempts at modernity, let alone failed attempts to be us.  They are unique expressions of the human imagination and heart, unique answers to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive?  When asked this question, the cultures of the world respond in 7,000 different voices, and these collectively comprise our human repertoire for dealing with all the challenges that will confront us as a species over the next 2,5000 generations, even as we continue this never-ending journey.” And we need that entire repertoire.

The ignorance of western cultures mired in the excrement of  feelings of superiority is magisterial in its colossal stupidity. There really is no ignorance like it–anywhere any time.