What Lessons from Indigenous People?

Copyright 1999 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA 91711

We need to get over the concept that Native Americans were "saints" and recognize that they, too, exploited the environment. That is, their relationship with the natural environment was not "innocent" any more than ours is. One of their biggest advantages, if any, is that their populations were rarely out of control, as ours clearly are. If there is a lesson here, it is not something that takes us back into an idyllic past. Indigenous people were pragmatists too.

In Weston's collection, An Invitation to Environmental Philosophy, there are three essays that speak to indigenous issues. David Abram's essay, "A More-Than-Human World," discusses the indigenous experience through his study of shamans in Bali and Nepal. His point, if I can reduce it to a single idea, is that we cannot really understand the shaman until we recognize his/her special relationship with the environment, very broadly conceived. The shaman lives actively within the whole physical and spiritual world and sees everything within that world as powerful. Humans are far from being the only causal agencies, and the concept of "health" includes everything. When the world is out of balance, we will see its effects in our lives. The shaman's practice, then, is to perceive the world in its full depth, to become sensitive to its balance, and to exercise his/her own powers to rectify situations of imbalance. This is echoed in Holmes Rolston's comment, "it is hard to have a healthy culture in a sick environment." (p. 113) While Abram doesn't go this far, I think it is important to recognize that shamanism is not exceptional to indigenous society but, rather, that it is an extreme extension of indigenous spiritualism. Thus, the shaman is a route to understanding all spiritualism in the indigenous world view. The issue is not specifically what indigenous people did within the natural environment but, rather, the character of their relationship with it -- how they saw that environment.

In her essay, "Paths Beyond Human-Centeredness," Val Plumwood echoes this point about indigenous people by contrasts with European people. Europeans traditionally center their thinking and, consequently, their activity on themselves, a process that marks other people and, indeed, the rest of the world as the "Other." When we do this, we inevitably render the "Other" impotent; that is, only what happens in Our world is important and has effects. Carried to the extreme, Western society presumes that we are alone in the world, that nothing else is really potent and, hence, that nothing else really matters. As a result of this, we fail to see that our wounding of the natural environment can have powerful consequences for us as well. The indigenous world view is quite a contrast to our "Othering" world view.

Jim Cheney makes a similar point in his essay, "The Journey Home." Of fundamental importance, is the fact that we should come to see what environs us as alive and potent -- that is, rich in meaning and power. Only through this vision can we escape egocentrism and anthropocentrism. As Cheney puts it, "missing in modern conceptions of knowledge is a sense of active and reciprocal communication with the nonhuman world." (p. 141) From this idea, he moves to the observation that indigenous "respect" of nature is much deeper than we think. While indigenous people utilized elements of their environment in many ways for food, clothing, and shelter, they did this within a pervasive relationship of respect; "respect" lies deeply within the way we think and cannot be read simply out of our physical acts. Perhaps Cheney's most important point, in this essay, lies in his observation that language is always a performance of some kind. The ways in which we think and speak about what we do in the environment is not merely "expressive," as Westerners would see it, but it is actually "performative." As Cheney puts it, "we do things with words. Foremost among these performative functions is the creation of what I will call the ceremonial worlds within which we live." (p. 148) Indigenous respect for nature is crafted within their language-acts by creating and sustaining nature as a ceremonial world in which they live and act.

Not only does this point help us understand indigenous relations with nature but it also helps us understand ourselves much better. All we need do is to observe carefully how we talk about our world. Note, for instance, our use of the word 'resource' for natural objects. When we call things "resources," we create a ceremonial world in which things answer to our needs. Of greatest importance in this idea of language being performative is the fact that the most effective language use is in stories. In indigenous societies, creation stories tell the people how they came to be but, in doing this, they create the "ceremonial world" in which life will be lived. In our own culture, we do the same thing in many subtle ways. Wherever we find ourselves, we should always look carefully (and listen carefully) to see what stories we tell about our lives and the world. As definitions (or characterizations) of ceremonial worlds, these tell us how to behave; accordingly, they tell us a great deal about our relationship with what environs us. "All too often," Cheney says, "the implicit assumption underlying our discussions in environmental ethics is that we can profitably discuss these matters without defining and locating the ceremonial worlds (the stories) within which our discussions proceed. We speak as though from no world at all; and we presumptuously speak for all worlds." (p. 153)