Red Alert!: Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge (Speaker's Corner)

Indigenous peoples, as the term is used here, refers to peoples or nations who take their tribal identities as members of the human species from the landscapes and seascapes that gave them their unique tribal cultures.

These removals were done by “friends” of Indians who wanted to solve the “Indian problem” with the classic liberal solution to all social problems: education.

The dualisms or dichotomies between the spiritual and material, culture and nature, subjective and objective, sacred and profane that operate so deeply in the Western worldview appear largely absent from the American Indian and Alaska Native worldviews of which I am familiar.

proselytizing:

a climate shift in our thinking and behavior: a cultural climate shift.

The unfortunate situation for societies that begin to behave as if knowledge primarily resides in words (images) in a book is that they forget we had words before books, stories before books, and analytic abilities before we had texts. For humankind, words—languages—were never only about us, but signifiers of our rich relationships in a complex and

In a world where increasing numbers of people live in highly manufactured landscapes of suburbs and subdivisions, the ancient deep spatial knowledges of people and place held by American Indians and Alaska Natives are crucial if humankind is to find sustainable ways to live in a life-enhancing manner.

Before we focus exclusively on looking for new technological solutions—and there will certainly be some—we should look at indigenous tribal knowledges for insights into how humankind might not merely survive this global crisis, but thrive in indigenously inspired cultures of life enhancement.

Rather, to know “it”—reality— requires respect for the relationships and relatives that constitute the complex web of life. I call this indigenous realism, and it entails that we, members of humankind, accept our inalienable responsibilities as members of the planet’s complex life system, as well as our inalienable rights.