I have had lots of opportunities to work with and mix with folks from indigenous cultures during my lifetime. I worked years ago on a SPIPA health care project with the Chehalis Tribe, the Squaxin Island Tribe, the Nisquallies and a couple other tribes that are in SPIPA. I had a long working relationship with an Inuit who retired from DSHS a few years ago. I worked with the Chehalis, Cowlitz, Upper Cowlitz, Yakimas and Colvilles during my years as a social worker. I was pretty engaged with the indigenous folks who lived up in eastern Lewis County a couple of decades ago.

These days when I work with native americans I am working primarily with Chehalis, Cowlitz and Squaxin Island tribe members. I have invested a significant amount of time in becoming familiar with these local tribes and their cultural histories. My family has some longstanding connections with the tribes on the res in Oklahome, so I come to these encounters with folks from the local tribes with some larger perspective about and respect for these cultures anyway.

Read more...

These folks can be frustrating to work with. They do not fit a western, industrialized view about efficiency. I think that despite a couple of centuries of trying to wipe out their cultural heritage, history, world view, art and knowledge, many of the tribes have managed to keep some part of their cultural heritage alive.

These folks have not had good luck in their dealings with the illegal aliens that washed ashore here on Turtle Island a few centuries ago. I try to cut them a little slack.

One of the problems that arose for the Turtle Island people when illegal aliens starting arriving here by boat from Europe was that Turtle Islanders had done a very sloppy job of recording title to their property and the failure to have clear title recorded to land allowed for some really horrendous land disputes that escalated to killings, mass killings that may have amounted to genocide. It was really a pretty horrific dispute that might have been resolved had the indigenous people of this country done their homework and understood the record-keeping habits of the illegal aliens arriving from Europe. Maybe it would not have helped to have the titles in order. Treaties were not routinely honored and fulfilled between Turtle Islanders and the illegal aliens, so maybe titles and recordkeeping deficiencies would not have prevented the disputes that arose.

And that is one way of looking at the land conflict that took place in the Americas since Euopeans began arriving here a few centuries ago.

I think this ownership view of land as a primary model develops to some extent as a society moves from a culture of hunter/gather economy to something else, cultivation and/or industrial economy. The dominant culture's view of land ownership, that of a cultivation and industrial economy has prevailed on this continent as it has throughout the world to a large extent.

That dominant view believes that the world and its resources should generally be subject to private ownership with a small amount of the world and its resources being held in a Commons. A hunter/gatherer view of the world would see more of the world as a commons that yields sustenance for hunting and gathering economy better if the bulk of land is held in a Commons and smaller amounts are held in some closer type of ownership.

There are some disconnects that happen when a person of an indigenous world-view of world as primarily a commons comes into contact with a person of a cultivation/industrial world-view of world as primarily economic commodity, with as little or world or its resources or characteristics to be held as a Commons seen as a good thing because this world-view allows for "growth and development." The utility and value of the natural world as a Commons to sustain a hunter and gatherer economy is easily lost on a person who is steeped in cultivation and industrial economies.

Is it possible to own the world, and to be owned by the world in some indigenous sense that creates a body of knowledge that cultivation/industrial societies cannot easily understand or acknowledge?

Are we willing to acknowledge any such body of knowledge if it does not conform to the scholarship model that we human beings of cultivation and industrial societies are steeped in?

What if that huge body of knowledge was held in a library format that we refuse to recognize, no Dewey Decimal system anywhere in sight?

"Knowledge is inherent in all things. The world itself is a library."

Chief Luther Standing Bear

What if this great library of knowledge is held in an oral tradition, stories, songs, rituals that creates little or no written artifact? Is there anyway that we educated, industrial human beings can recognize that Chief Luther Standing Bear has sophisticated and deep knowledge in a format that will not fit into our "libraries" without significant translation? Is it possible that something crucial will be lost in the translation of Standing Bear's library of knowledge as we try to make it fit in our library? Scientists in general are going to have trouble with the mystical nature of knowledge that may exist in indigenous traditions like that of native americans or others who have explored some other ways of being and knowing things. Quantum physicist who have had to try to understand wave and particle mysteries might be able to get outside the newtonian box and say, aha, great mysteries, but we industrial science folks like things nailed down a little better than that. I think the quantum physicists are trying to nail things down, maybe the universe is open to our understanding, maybe not. I don't lose sleep over that. I

It is a hard sell to talk about the nature of knowledge if the knowledge is held in an unfamiliar format. We industrial cultivator human beings have trouble seeing the world as library or understanding what that could possibly mean. The world isn't a library, it's a bunch of countries, municipalities, zones of influence, opportunities for commercial growth and development.

The fact is that in the USA, including the South Sound region of Turtle Island, you can't expect to maintain use of land if you can't show a clear title. You can't expect to have your knowledge, your indigenous scholarship based on an oral tradition that thinks the whole world is a library respected until you can get your footnotes together.

Some might argue that it is a good thing we finally secured title to some reservation land for these simple indigenous folks and helped them build and appreciate a real library. Some think that is a good thing that we took the kids away from the tribes and put them in schools where they could learn english, learn to farm, learn to sew. There was a strong, scientifically based argument that this was the best thing we could possibly do for these people. I am not sure we were right about all that.

Today when I happen across knowledge that seems to have an indigenous base, I listen and try to think like an indigenous person might think and feel. I attempt to learn from the brush with this other form of knowledge, this library of the world that may exist in the words and the meanings behind the words. I am tolerant of the fact that attempting to experience and know this body of knowledge may be a stretch, some knowledge exists without footnotes. Some knowledge exists indifferent to scholarship.