|
| ||||||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||||||
by Winona LaDuke
04.15.97
a little bit, set aside your thinking, and try to think about North America from an indigenous perspective. In doing so, what I'd like to ask is that you think about it in terms of islands in a continent.
I live on one island, White Earth reservation. It's thirty-six miles by thirty-six miles. It's a rather medium-sized reservation, as they go in North America. That's one island. A little bit west of me is Pine Ridge, a slightly larger reservation. Rosebud. Blackfeet. Crow. Cheyenne Navaho. Hopi. Some of the larger islands are further north. When you go north of the fiftieth parallel in Canada, which is somewhere a little north of Edmonton, you'll find that the majority of the population is native. 85% of the people who live north of the fiftieth parallel in Canada are native people. In terms of land occupancy, we retain a large portion of land in that region.
How that is perhaps best reflected is in a place called Northwest Territories. Northwest Territories, a couple of years ago, was split into two territories. One of those territories is now called Nunavat because the people who live there are Inuit. They are the people who are the political representatives. They are the administrators of the school boards. They are the firemen. They are the doctors, the physicians. They have a form of self-governance in Nunavat where the majority of decisions are made by Inuit people. That area, Nunavat, is, including land and water, five times the size of Texas. It is a large area of land. It is the size of the Indian sub-continent.
So perhaps for that reason alone, it is important to know something more about indigenous people. For while we are not part of most American thinking, we are very much a part of this land that is America. We are in fact very much a part of the Western Hemisphere and the rest of the world. The reality is that indigenous people are not just people on reservations in the US and Canada. We are, for instance, the majority population in countries like Guatemala and Bolivia. 80% or more of the people there are indigenous people. Aymara, Quiche, and Mayan people. In Ecuador, 40% of the population and 40% of the land is legally titled to indigenous people. Throughout the Western Hemisphere indigenous people represent a significant portion of the population in many countries. Indigenous people are not all brown or red-skinned people.
On a worldwide scale, it is said there are 5,000 nations of indigenous people; 500,000,000 indigenous people in the world; 5,000 nations. These nations have existed for thousands of years as nations. We share under international law the recognition as nations in that we have common language, common territory; governing institutions, economic institutions and history, all indicators under international law of nations of people. Yet the reality is that on an international scale most decisions are not made by nations and people. Instead they are made by states. There are about 170 states that are members of the United Nations. Most of those states have existed only since World War II.
I would actually suggest to you that most decisions in the world are not, in fact, made by either nations or states, but are instead made by the 47 multinational corporations whose annual incomes are larger than many countries in the world. That is who I would suggest makes most decisions in the world, and who I believe are the root of the problems we face today in the world, as indigenous peoples specifically and all people collectively.
Indigenous vs. Industrial Thinking
want to talk about the discussion of what is indigenous thinking and what is industrial thinking and the implications of that for where we are today. It is my experience that not only do most people know little about indigenous peoples, but most people do not know much about indigenous thinking. What I will tell you is that indigenous peoples have our own intellectual traditions, our own cultural traditions, our own scientific medical traditions that are our own and which have existed for thousands of years. However, we are not viewed as having the same kind of intellectual property or intellectual foundations as European culture.
Having said that, let me talk a little bit about indigenous thinking, because I believe that is fundamental for understanding the conflicts that exist in the world today. In the world today it is not a conflict so much between the left and right, or the communists and the capitalists, so much as it is the conflict between the indigenous and the industrial. It is my experience that most indigenous communities view natural law as pre-eminent. It is the highest law, higher than the laws made by nations, states or municipalities. Natural law is the highest law. As such, one would do well to live in accordance with natural law. Most ceremony, much cultural practice in our communities, is about the restoration of balance and living in accordance with natural law. Because it is our view that in order to sustain oneself as a society, one should live in accordance with natural law, instead of trying to transform nature to live in accordance with your laws.
How do we know what is natural law in our communities? There are two primary sources of our knowledge. The first source of our knowledge is spiritual practice. Indigenous peoples' spiritual practice—prayer, fasting, vision quest, ceremony or dream—those are all sources of our knowledge of what is indigenous natural law. That is our foundation. That is why it is absolutely essential to support indigenous peoples' rights to religious freedom and to protect our sacred sites. That is the wellspring of our instruction as individuals and collectively as societies.
Our second source of knowledge is intergenerational residency. I'll give you an example of that. My children's grandfather is a Cree man named James Small, who lives either on James Bay or on the Harricana River in northern Canada. Right now he's on the Harricana River. It is a river that flows off of James Bay on what is called the Quebec area of Canada. I'd call it Euaskee, since the Cree called themselves Euaskee, which means "land" in their language. Since they have lived there for thousands of years, I would say it is probably not Quebec or Ontario. It is in fact Euaskee. James Small is on the same trap line that his great-great-great-great-grandparents were on. The same place where they have lived for all those generations. A few years ago I was up goose hunting with James in the spring. He said to me, Winona, you know the martins are migrating west. You all know what a martin is? Furry animal. I think it is related to a mink.
"Martins are migrating west."
I said, "What do you mean, the martins are migrating west?"
"They migrate west once every seventy years."
Who knows the martins migrate west once every seventy years? The only people who know martins migrate west up on James Bay, except for all of you now, are Crees. There is no person with a Ph.D who has gone up there for 210 years or 280 years to figure out how many times the martins migrate and what their rotation is. That is something that only Crees know. That is intergenerational residency. That is the foundation of traditional ecological knowledge, which is knowledge contained by people who live in the same place for that long. That is valid intellectual scientific resource management and biological knowledge.
In fact, I would suggest to you that James Small, who only went to school until the eighth grade, knows more about the James Bay ecosystem than anyone with a Ph.D. from a southern university. Because he has lived there for that long and he has all that body of knowledge which was transferred down to him. That is the source of our knowledge of what is natural law, those kinds of experience and those kinds of practices.
What is natural law in our experience? There are no ten commandments of natural law. What I will tell you is that our experience tells us that natural law is cyclical. All that is natural is cyclical. That is why in most Indian cultural practices you will hear the saying, "What comes around, goes around." What you will hear is that our view is always about the circle, the sacred hoop. That is our practice. That is our belief. In fact, in most of our cultural practices we look out and we see that all that is natural is cyclical: the tides, the moons, the seasons, our bodies themselves are cyclical. In most indigenous worldviews, time itself is cyclical.
Our most fundamental concept is that you always take only what you need and you leave the rest. To not do so, we believe, would be disrespectful. We believe it would be a violation of natural law.
Those are some basic tenets of indigenous thinking. I present them to you because I believe that indigenous thinking, value systems, and traditional knowledge are as valid as any other form of knowledge taught in this society. I believe that we deserve a place at the table. I also present them to you to contrast them with what I call industrial thinking. I do that because industrial thinking has come to permeate this culture. Industrial thinking does not have to do with a state of mind. Perhaps the best word to describe industrial thinking is in fact a Lakota word that describes white people.
