All things are bound together. All things connect. Indigenous knowledge does not dictate how to control nature but how to live in harmony with the gifts of the Creator. The collective memory is passed, within a community, from one generation to the next orally through language, stories, songs, ceremonies, legends, and proverbs.
It has been argued that Indigenous knowledge, not capital, is the key to sustainable social and economic development. There is a growing recognition and respect for IK and a desire to collaborate with Indigenous communities on environmental monitoring projects. Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.
Cree Indian Expression [5]. There is nothing western science can do to replace or replicate Indigenous knowledge. An aspect of Indigenous knowledge that is sometimes overlooked by scientists, and others, is the critical connection between IK and language.
Indigenous languages are in decline and as languages die, so goes the Indigenous knowledge that is part of that language and the collective memory of the speakers of that language. There is a morality in Indigenous knowledge - a right and wrong way to interact with nature; there is a responsibility given from the Creator to respect the natural world. Time, patterns, migrations and movements of animals are cyclical. In the process of how life evolves, how the natural world grows and works together, how all things are connected, and how all things move toward their destiny.
Aboriginal peoples see and respond to the world in a circular fashion and are influenced by the examples of the circles of creation in our environment". But their decisions also weighed what would be best for the community seven generations in the future.
In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations. Iroquois Confederacy Maxim [8]. Indigenous knowledge is not embodied at the same degree by all community members. Elders will obviously carry more knowledge than younger community members. Indigenous Peoples generally believe they are responsible for the well-being of the natural environment around them.
Indigenous knowledge is rooted in a social context that sees the world in terms of social and spiritual relations among all life forms. All parts of the natural world are infused with spirit.
Mind, matter, and spirit are perceived as inseparable. Great spiritual power is also found in the spirits of all living things, natural phenomena and ritually significant places.
In general, supernatural mystery or power is called Orenda by the Haudenosaunee , Wakan by the Dakota and Manitou by the Algonquian peoples. This power is a property of the spirits, but also belongs to transformers, tricksters , culture heroes, or other spirit figures, as well as shamans , prophets and ceremonial performers. Ritual objects such as the calumet , rattles, drums, masks, medicine wheels , medicine bundles and ritual sanctuaries are filled with spiritual power.
Various Indigenous oral histories tell of contacts made between humans and the world beyond. Ceremonially, columns of smoke, central house posts or the central pole of the Sun Dance lodge represent such connections. Many nations tell of a primeval sea or great flood. Historically agricultural societies such as the Haudenosaunee have ceremonial calendars organized around the harvest times of various food plants, with a life-renewal ceremony usually held in midwinter.
A key concept among many societies is the notion of guardians. Among the Abenaki , for instance, Bear is considered one of six directional guardians west , representing courage, physical strength and bravery. Among the Inuit , the sea goddess Sedna is the guardian of sea mammals and controls when stocks are available to be hunted.
Shamans may visit Sedna and coax her into releasing the animals by righting previous wrongs or presenting offerings. Shamans are the most notable of the multiple religious figures present in traditional Indigenous religion. They function as healers, prophets, diviners and custodians of religious mythology, and are often the officiants at religious ceremonies. In some societies, all these functions are performed by the same person; in others, shamans are specialists.
Members of such societies were not necessarily shamans but did practice religious ceremonies and rituals. Shamans were associated with powers generally thought to be beneficial to the community but were believed in some cases to use their powers for sorcery. Shaman-prophets and diviners were concerned with predicting the outcome of the hunt, relocating lost objects and determining the root causes of communal discontent and ill will. Siksika, Cree , Ojibwe and other societies had diviners who made their prophecies perhaps in trance states in the dramatic Shaking Tent ceremony.
Shamans in these societies were custodians of the sacred medicine bundles containing objects and materials endowed with great mystery and power. Innu shamans divined game trails by burning a caribou shoulder blade, then reading the cracks and fissures created by the fire.
As healers, shamans typically recognized natural causes for many diseases, especially physically curable ones; other illnesses were commonly believed to be the result of intrusion into the body of objects placed there by sorcerers. Vision quests sometimes referred to as guardian spirit quests once occurred throughout most Indigenous cultures in Canada; it has undergone a revival in many communities.
Males, especially at puberty but also at other times of life, make extended stays in remote areas while fasting, praying and purifying themselves by washing in streams and pools. The goal is to seek a vision of, or an actual encounter with, a guardian spirit — very frequently an animal, but possibly a mythological figure. Contact with a guardian spirit is believed to make an individual healthy, prosperous and successful, particularly in hunting and fishing.
The individual focus of the quest is also present in common celebration of life events. Among these rituals are ceremonies at birth or the giving of a name, at puberty, marriage and death, all of which are normally accompanied by some solemnity.
Life-event ceremonies, though individual, had some level of communal integration. For example, the 17th-century Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead may have incorporated features of both seasonal and life-crisis rituals. Contact with European religious systems — through settlers, missionaries , church- and government-sponsored residential schools , and direct and indirect government policy — brought change to all Indigenous religious forms.
In areas where sustained contact occurred relatively early — in the 16th and 17th centuries — many Indigenous peoples were baptized into Catholicism by French missionaries. The song fuses Indigenous imagery and mythology — including Kitchi Manitou — onto the Christian Nativity story.
Wise men bearing gifts become grand chiefs bearing pelts, and the manger becomes a lodge of birch bark. The stories of saints, and of Jesus, closely resembled familiar culture heroes, and were readily adapted in many Indigenous communities.
So that kind of image, I think, is quite prevalent. And those who do it most are those who have gone to university, who have probably learned from Religious Studies scholars, or anthropologists, or others, that religion is something that exists everywhere, in all societies, at all times and that indigenous peoples have a certain kind of religion.
And then they return home, or they turn their gaze towards their own community and start to translate indigenous traditions into indigenous religions. Which I think is quite interesting. These categories feed back into the world and have very real legal ramifications for people.
I wondered if you wanted to reflect on that, because indigenous religion is not only an academic religious category or a practitioner category but a legal, ethnic kind of category as well. And I think that is happening increasingly. Especially if we are fighting for national identity, or sovereignty, or trying to safeguard ethnic identity within nation states.
So the platform that really affords that kind of space is the United Nations and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples , which is advanced a lot by the UN. So, here you enter into another arena of how these terms are actually quite positive and quite useful and quite empowering as well.
And, of course, protecting your religion, your culture, your traditions, is also tied in with human rights. So in the kind-of broader global sense, the term indigenous, or the term indigenous religions has a lot of purchase. BT : And in order to gain something from it you have to translate you traditions, your practices, your narratives into recognisable units, in order to be recognised as an indigenous people, or as an indigenous religion. You have to make it come across in a way that makes the judges in the courtroom — or whoever it is, the politicians that make the decisions — they have to recognise this as an indigenous religion or as indigenous people.
And that sort-of forces actors also to play into these expectations that are floating around now. And I think to translate those kind of experiences, I think you tap into again, the academic and intellectual discourses out there on what exactly is culture, what exactly is heritage, or religion, or politics, and all of that.
Yes, the cycle of the exchange of these ideas and categories are both local and global and they feed each other, I think. DR : A couple of maybe slightly more critical takes on that. You can also relate it to LGBT and all these different interest groups, rather than national representatives. At which point, by claiming indigenous status they were able to prevent the drilling from taking place, because the land was now seen as sacred by the UN, or protected , rather, by the UN.
BT : I also think that history has to be taken into account: the history of religions, not as a field of study, but as something in society. I certainly think that in the Costa Rican context there has been a pluralisation of the religious field.
And as indigenous culture and indigenous peoples have gotten more attention, and they have been looked upon more positively from the outside, so has their religion. Or, the rise of indigenous religions in the public sphere also has to do with the decline of the kind of discourse that before would immediately classify it as a superstition, or idolatry, or something that has to be fought, or primitive religion.
AL : Or even primal. So I mean, all of theses academic terms like primitive, primal, superstitious. And I think the whole question of identity politics is interesting. And of course identity politics exists and I think a lot of indigenous activists are also aware of that, and they take advantage of that. DR : No, of course. Just one further. Do you want to [say something else] before I change the subject? BT : It made me think also. But sometimes it also creates internal tensions.
For example, when indigenous traditions are recast as indigenous religions. So bringing religion into the mix sort of changes a whole lot of situations, and relations, and the ways things are talked about. AL : Also, just one final point, I think. If we are looking at indigenous peoples practising a kind of religion, then are we also open to what kind of religion indigenous peoples are practising? So, I mean it could be say, Christianity.
So, in that sense, is Christianity an indigenous religion? And I think, the common perception is that indigenous religions are largely non-Christian. Because, if we have a formal definition of what indigenous religion is, then I think it might problematise some of the ways we tend to think about indigenous religions.
DR : Yes, absolutely. And that kind-of relates, actually, to the question that I was going to raise, in an unexpected way. So I was going to ask about. Is that just because of the newness? Or is it the colonial power aspect? Or is it a hangover to the hegemony of Christianity, for instance?
So as you say, actually, once we start looking, the further down we go these distinctions get more and more blurry. Absolutely and I think the term indigenous. I think people like Jim Cox has written about this transition from primal to indigenous and all of that. I think in Canada it is.
And of course in North America it is, and in Latin America it is. I mean, we can perhaps easily see that actually Christianity is an indigenous religion of Scotland. But the Zulus migrated into South Africa from the Sahara, what years ago? Whereas, the Dutch arrived there about years ago. So, the choice of which of those is indigenous is entirely temporal. BT : Again, I think this has to do with [the fact that] there are different language games being played here.
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