Had a mini-revelation the other day. I was watching Time Team, the popular archaeology show on ABC TV - it's always amazed me, the professionalism of these experts, that they can dig up a piece of pottery and because they have such in-depth knowledge of their subject, they can instantly frame around it the story of what life was like at that time; what the people wore, their houses, their social structures and infrastructures - all from a tiny piece of pottery. And then I thought how much MORE amazing were/are all culturally taught Aboriginal people (not just the elite few) who could instantly conjure up a complete picture of the past; what animals walked by, when, how many, what they did, where they were going etc etc, all from a few tracks in the sand! [definition of 'intuition' ... knowing what to expect based on a profound understanding and detailed knowledge of the world around you]. And more impressive still because it was contextualised within their entire world view, not just a very narrow slice of time and space that the archaeologist, after decades of university & field experience and the help of the Western world's technology, could envisage.
That revelation has since expanded into a more comprehensive understanding of how we came to be in this ‘us & them’, indigenous verses non-indigenous situation that has divided humanity for thousands of years. The Western world has been, to paraphrase a ‘60’s rock song, ‘murdered by the hand of the inevitable’ due to having severed its relationship with the living planet. We were all indigenous once, all had a virtually identical relationship with nature, but humanity seemed to split around 5,000 years ago, and ‘specialisation’ occurred. Some people’s brains in the Western world ‘mutated’ and began to develop along a different track from the holistic relationship with Earth people had for 2 million years, to fragmenting knowledge into specialised segments, each one having the freedom to take their particular segment further than ever before. This as we know resulted in mankind being able to land on the moon, but indigenous people’s were in no way inferior because they did not diverge in this direction – they evolved as well only in different ways, continually developing varied and distinctive responses to the wide range of environments in which they lived. I once heard that the part of the brain that stores information is much more developed in Aborigines than in Europeans, due presumably to the massive amounts of cultural information the Indigenous brains needed to store - this part of the brain may have atrophied in Europeans as the Western World placed most of that information in books and people had no need to retain it in their brains … again, having freed up massive amounts of time and energy having to encompass an entire culture, compartmentalised knowledge could surge ahead.
Very few of those specialists were able to understand the ‘bigger picture’. For example, Einstein was a mathematical genius but couldn’t boil and egg to save his life – all of his mental capacity was devoted to one very narrow segment of human endeavour. All indigenous societies on the other hand share a comprehension of their world in it’s entirety, including the parallel dimension of the metaphysical world, which is only barely understood in the West. And because it has led to the Western world being cut-off from the whole, from their connection with Earth, they have been able to destroy it without thought, without understanding the consequences & without caring.
It can be argued therefore that indigenous cultures are superior to the Western one, in that they have sustained the Earth’s ecologies for millennia, whereas the alternate path has led to ecological catastrophe.
Looking at it this way, it’s easier to understand how the tragic history of colonisation came about, with the invaders truly believing (and some still do) that they are far superior to the ‘primitive savage’. But like the ‘sorry day’ apology, it’s not about guilt - it’s about recognising how this all came to be, acknowledging past mistakes, and then starting to put things right, which means doing everything we can to help the world’s indigenous societies re-build and maintain their cultures and precious knowledge streams, thousands of years in the building and augmented every generation of sustainable land managers keenly observerving of nature, and currently being enhanced with validation and integration with science. We must do that for the sake of the planet, and for all our sakes.
The phenomena of indigenous holistic knowledge (‘pattern thinking’ as Mowaljarlai put it) was (inadvertently) expressed by Albert Einstein, when he stated: “The Scientist’s religious feelings take the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, in comparison with it, the highest intelligence of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.” i.e., the indigenous mind, having an acute understanding of natural law and the knowledge of how to maintain it in harmony, is a much closer reflection of this 'higher intelligence' than any other people on Earth.
No comments:
Post a Comment