Indigenous cultures have survived for thousands of years until they came into contact with European civilization. The result was a wholesale slaughter of people, resources and aboriginal rights.
Wade, Davis, an award-winning anthropologist and writer, locates the reason for this destruction in one word — power — the "crude force of domination" that assumes indigenous people are "failed attempts at being modern, failed attempts at being us."
In his 2009 CBC Massey Lectures, published in The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World ( Toronto: Anansi, 2009), Davis makes a compelling case for the preservation of indigenous cultures by suggesting that their spiritual connection with the land and their knowledge about sustainable living provide the most viable answer to our survival as a species in the 21st century.
The Buffalo and the Plains Indians
The problem of sustainable living was not an issue with Plains Indians until the arrival of the settlers. Indigenous cultures all over the world have lived for thousands of years in forests that provided all they needed for food and shelter. According to Davis, even as late as 1871,"buffalo outnumbered people in North America." Wyatt Earp described seeing a herd of over one million buffalo grazing in an area the size of the state of Rhode Island.
Yet, within 9 years of this sighting, the buffalo literally disappeared from the Plains because US Government Policy insisted on destroying these "squalid savages" by eliminating their source of food and sustenance. At the same time, US Government outlawed the Sun Dance and other ceremonial congregations, essentially depriving aboriginal peoples of their spiritual and religious rights.
Since the 19th Century, this systematic eradication of indigenous cultures has been repeated all over the world.
The Penan in the Borneo Forest
For thousands of years, the Penan in Borneo had a spiritual and physical relationship with the land. Unlike the slash and exhaust policies of the logging industry, the Penan people practiced the most fundamental form of sustainable living. They passed through their forests in a cyclical fashion, re-occupying the same sites over and over within the lifetime of an individual, using only enough from each site for survival and then moved on to allow the used site time for renewal.
Each family was self-sufficient, with each member doing whatever was needed for communal survival. Because survival was dependent on social relations, working together cohesively and sharing resources became priorities.
A Penan delegate, protesting the infiltration of logging industries into the Borneo forests, told the UN General Assembly in 1992, "My father and my grandfather did not have to ask the government for jobs. They were never unemployed. They lived from the land and from the forest....We were never hungry or in need."
Since the 1980's, the entire Penan community has been resettled by the Malaysian government intent on removing indigenous people standing in the way of industrial development and profit. According to Rain-Tree.com, a timber company bought a huge section of the Borneo Rainforest in 1986 by paying the local tribes a price that amounted to 2 bottles of beer for each member of the community.
Since then, the company has managed to destroy a third of the Borneo Forest, evict the local tribes from their ancestral land and force them to work for the company at "slave wages."
The Barasana and Sustainable Living
For the Barasana people, an indigenous culture who live in the Northwest Amazon of Columbia, rivers are the arteries of the earth, the "link between the living and the dead." To avoid incest, Barasana men choose wives who speak a different language, a practice that has resulted in a sustainable community known for its linguistic diversity. To enhance communication and reciprocity, the Barasana maintain a strong tradition of dance and festivities. The community's goal is to create coherence within multiplicity, a reality that still eludes us in our modern world.
As Davis explains, the Barasana world is "a fractal world in which no event has a life of its own, and any number of ideas can coexist in parallel perceptions of meaning." Thus the longhouse is both a structure for communal meetings and a symbol of their cosmology: the roof is shelter and sky; the floor is earth and underworld.
Time is nonexistent in indigenous cultures. Every moment is the present. Every visible form has an invisible dimension. Nature and Culture are one and the same: man without forest and rivers would perish; nature without man would have no meaning.
It is this understanding that has allowed the Barasana to live as true stewards of the land, making use of natural resources in the Amazon without destroying forests and lakes. To preserve animal population, the people focus mainly on the lower end of the food chain. Fish and insects are their main sources of protein.
In 1991, the Columbia Government granted the Barasana legal land rights to an area the size of the United Kingdom. Because of this proactive and creative decision, this sustainable community will not be threatened by extinction.
Is Davis romanticizing the lifestyle of indigenous people? He has certainly spent enough time with these cultures to understand that their world is a violent one. He claims that their "rituals were austere in the extreme," some even involving physical mutilation. However, the fundamental priority of every aboriginal man and woman is the literal preservation of the land and this is something we need to embrace.
What can We Learn from Indigenous Cultures?
Davis claims that within our lifetimes, 50% of the 7,000 languages spoken around the world will disappear. This means that within two generations, half of humanity's "social, cultural and intellectual legacy" will vanish.
Much of this legacy, like the sense of stewardship for the land and the sustainable land management systems these cultures have developed, can become "wayfinders" for those of us in the 21st Century who are looking for means to survive on a planet threatened by the climate crisis and a world without trees.
Mary Desaulniers - I am a retired teacher and grandmother looking forward to the next 30 or more years with great relish and enthusiasm. My passions are ...
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