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Reflection

This blog has been an experiment for me. I’ve been able to read a book that I wouldn’t have otherwise, and given a space to reflect on what this all means and how I can connect this to my current understanding of my world.

I do think that indigenous knowledge, or “place-based” knowledge as Deloria and Wildcat and many other scholars refer to it, is everywhere, and we all experience it on a daily basis. For example, I had another final project due where I had done research and written about the experiences of former female Division 1 endurance athletes in transitioning out of their athletic identities. Almost all of the women I had interviewed, and I myself can confirm this from personal experience, mentioned that our sports had taught us lessons about life that made us grow up in ways than other non-athlete students. For me personally, I had learned lessons about love, anger, staying level-headed, discipline, focus, and how to push yourself. In reading Deloria and Wildcat’s book, I realized that the lessons I, and others, have learned from our sports are forms of place-based knowledge, which we learned lessons from that we are able to take with us and apply to other settings throughout the rest of our lives.

Alongside this, I’ve noticed so much more reductionism in my daily life: seperating ourselves from the environment entirely by shopping at grocery stores and getting from place to place on streets, having our own “rooms” in our houses, and especially how the school reduces learning and knowledge away from the environment (which I know I wrote about in an earlier post). On a personal level, I’ve realized that the gender binary is reductionist. Considering that a lot of cultures view people and bodies and functioning and fluctuating wholes, it is reductionist to choose a gender we identify with while many people and cultures believe that we are simultaneously both masculine and feminine. I’ve come to realize that using gender neutral pronouns doesn’t necessarily reject the gender binary, but accepts it in a way that states “I’m both” rather than “I’m neither”. (I mean, it is totally fair to identify as neither)

However, this book has truly opened my eyes to the world around me– especially to how important the environment is and place-based experiences. This book has truly opened my eyes to a different side of the human condition, arguably a side that understands and interprets the world as whole.

Going forward

Going forward, I wish to keep educating myself on these things, and keep challenging myself to see the world in a way that is different. I would love to read more about non-western healing practices, views of the body, and death– mostly because I think that how cultures mourn death is fascinating. I’m grateful for this opportunity and space to have been able to interact with material from culture other than my own, which has profoundly impacted my understanding of myself and my experiences. I think that indigenous knowledge is around us, everywhere, and that modern education should seek to incorporate it because it would help us learn at such a greater emotional depth than route memorization in a classroom setting.

Thank you, Deloria and Wildcat, for writing Power and Place– I greatly enjoyed reading it.

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Power and Place: Conclusion

In the concluding chapter of Power and Place, Deloria continues to emphasize the shortfalls of modern education, and where to go from here. Deloria places emphasis on the role that the family and community traditionally play in indigenous schooling, and how families are estranged from students at larger public schools. This estrangement then delineates knowledge and knowledge production, by separating the students from their communities and learning through communal interaction.

Furthermore, Deloria spends a lot of this final chapter discussing the changes which need to be made in order for Native American students to find success in the western realm of education. However, a lot of these changes must then take place on western terms and within western frameworks. Deloria mentions how when Native Americans go on to work at educational committees, and take on western-oriented responsibilities, they then “generally leave their Indian heritage behind and adopt the vocabulary and concepts of non-native educators and Bureaucrats” (Deloria, 2001, p.  153). Although these people go off to these reams in order to help advance, and bring awareness to Native Education in America, it is incredibly difficult to see any progress in indigenous terms considering that all progress must happen on western political terms.

So, where do we go from here? Deloria proposes that western culture will reach its limits, given that it is rooted in unsustainable and exploitative idologies, and that maybe this will allow acceptance of native culture, knowledge, and teachings.

Overall, I think that the points Deloria makes throughout this book touch heavily on western reductionism, and I appreciate how he weaves this in to how both community and environment are impacted by the decisions policymakers make on behalf of Native People. I think that the shift he proposes, one that is oriented toward communal education and place, is a beneficial one. One critique I have is that Deloria doesn’t necessarily give forms of action to take in order to accomplish acceptance of Native knowledge and ideology in modern education; however, he proposes that he hopes for a change and doesn’t really elaborate on how that change will happen– unless capitalism collapses. However, I do think that Deloria and Wildcat do a lovely job of articulating indigenous knowledge practices, the clash between native culture with western culture, and piecing together what this all means on native terms.

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Small Indigenous Schools

I wanted to post about an initiative that I’ve read about– which has been news to me. Although, I’m sure that some have known about these efforts for some time. Reading Elizabeth Sumida Huaman’s article “Small Indigenous Schools: Indigenous Resurgence and Education in the Americas” (2020), she discusses efforts made by small indigenous schools, located on their native land and built with “no disturbance to existing geology” (Sumida Huaman 2020 p. 265), to preserve their culture through educating traditional native knowledge in these spaces while simultaneously teaching western knowledge and worldview.

Sumida Human presents that Indigenous people face a restrictive binary on the ways in which they live their daily lives: either adapt to dominant western norms, or remain marginalized as an indigenous person (Sumida Huaman 2020). I think that small indigenous schools are an incredible way to both preserve culture alongside learning western norms and values. I think it’s amazing how these schools allow for indigenous people to take agency and create a space for their cultures to persist in a western framework– specifically in a classroom and alongside a curriculum, which Deloria & Wildcat refer to as inventions of western reductionism.

Sumida Huaman echoes the arguments of Deloria and Wildcat as she emphasizes place-based education, and how it is “characterized as emergent from the particular attributes of a place where the content is specific to the geography, ecology, and other dynamics” (Sumida Huaman, 2020, p. 264). I appreciate how her writing encapsulates Deloria and Wildcat’s theories, and shows real world, modern examples of ways in which indigenous cultures and practicing their traditions within western frameworks.

Below are some links to these schools, for those who would like to learn more about them:

https://www.centerschool.org/about

National Indian Education Association: https://www.niea.org/

American Indian Higher Education Consortium: http://aihec.org/index.html

Sumida Huaman’s personal website & research: https://www.sumidahuaman.com/researchprojects

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Reductionism Enacted

I decided to take a change of pace for this post, as I’m home and saw my copy of An Indigenous People’s History of the United States By: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Although the book doesn’t necessarily focus on education, knowledge, and the school, like Deloria’s writing, there are parallels in the concepts that are discussed. The one I’m speaking about in this post is the concept of the reductionist nature of western culture, and how we see that play out through the story of colonization which Dunbar-Ortiz discusses.

Chapter three titled “The Cult of the Covenant” discusses migration over from Europe, specifically colonizers who came from protestant backgrounds, and how these people interacted both with indigenous people and the land. Deloria places heavy emphasis on the land, and the depth of the holistic relationship that people share with both the land and the animals that occupy the same environment. Dunbar-Ortiz alludes to this when mentioning that when the European settlers had first come to what is now America, and the land was no longer in the hands of indigenous care, that “the forests grew dense, so that later European settlers were unaware of the former cultivation and sculpting and manicuring of the landscape” (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014, p. 45). Essentially, in this chapter Dunbar-Ortiz emphasizes the role which the Indigenous people played in tending to the land and the environment, and, when they had been removed from it, the land became unbalanced, overgrew, and the settlers did not care for it in the same way.

How the settlers did interact with, and use, the land was through privatization: “Once in the hands of the settlers, the land itself was no longer sacred... Rather, it was private property, a commodity to be acquired and sold” Dunbar-Ortiz further elaborates on how this land then became reduced from plantations and fields to lots with houses on them. Commidifying land through reducing it down to real estate and individual lots is now known, as Dunbar-Ortiz comments, as “the land of the free” (p. 55). This is where I saw Deloria’s discussion of western reductionism begin to surface in a more physical sense. The settlers saw the land and stripped it of all it had to offer in order to live on it, rather than with it. To me, it’s somewhat terrifying to think about how, through placing ourselves in a post-human state above the natural world, we eradicated our relationship with the land through reductionism. Reductionism is very much so action as it is thought and knowledge, and it is seen to an incredible extent when one looks at how the western world interacts with and treats the land and environment.

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Humans are, in the western scheme of things, the source of knowledge and information, but they are also isolated from the rest of creation by standing alone at the top of the pyramid

Vine Deloria, Power and Place (2001), p. 60

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The earliest European accounts of this land describe it as having an open understory and being full of oak and walnut trees. These visitors thought they had encountered an unusually beautiful wilderness. But as has become clear, this was no wilderness but a continental-scale forest garden whose crops were trees, the game they sustained, and harvestable understory plants.

Ben Falk, The Resilient Farm and Homestead; on the “natural” state of Virginia’s forests (via mad-hare)

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The goal of modern education is to produce people trained to function within an institutional setting as a contributing part of a vast socioeconomic machine

Vine Deloria, Power and Place: Indian Education in America (2001), pp. 43

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Knowing vs. Understanding

Today I read Wildcat and Deloria’s fourth chapter of their book Power and Place: Indian Education in America and in this chapter they discuss the dichotomy between knowing and understanding. Wildcat wrote this chapter, and in it he continues to elaborate on how western-knowledge persists piece by piece, and is incredibly reductionist and fact-based; whereas, native knowledge is rooted in understanding the world around us and possessing a “whole” of knowledge. This is where the dichotomy of “knowing vs. understanding” arises. Knowing being route memorization of facts, and understanding being the comprehension of the whole. Wildcat eloquently elaborates on this by stating that “people desire just the ‘facts’ without any understanding of the relations and connections between the ‘facts’ and the rest of the world” (Wildcat, 2001, p. 29). These individual facts, as they stand alone, cannot tell us what the larger picture means.

This way of thinking, of digesting data in small pieces rendered from the bigger picture down to “facts” reduces the overall meaning– both of the whole these facts are derived from, and also what our purpose as human beings is; what it means to be human. These facts eradicate the relationships and ties which they shared with the whole; therefore, preventing us from understanding their relation to the systems and fluctuations of the natural world. Wildcat argues that indigenous knowledge comes from places, which allow us to curate personalities. These personalities are specific to the knowledge derived from our environments and the people around us (Wildcat 2001). Personalities allow us to make sense of the world around us, with the people alongside us.

However, simply knowing bits and pieces of information does not enable one to cultivate a personality. These bits and pieces of information are stripped of their meanings, through being reduced down to lone facts. Wildcat continues to explain that, because of how incredibly context-dependent western knowledge is (which I have spoken about in earlier posts), and how it progresses in such a linear fashion, that western-knowledge is geared toward “professionalism”. Professionalism is what is practiced in institutions that guard and reproduce western culture, such as the neoliberal market, higher education, etc. Through making one a professional, one is prevented from developing their personality through understanding the world via the people and places which they interact with on a daily basis.

This enlightened worldview was believed to be of the highest moral good; therefore, it was forced upon those who did not practice it– like people indigenous to lands that were colonized by the Europeans– and these forms of indoctrination are still practiced today, through institutions like the school.

In another piece I’ve read, which discusses uniform policy at schools, it mentions that manners, morals, uniforms, and cleanliness and regulation of the body was proposed by Christianity around the same time as the enlightenment. These practices of upholding the body to a certain standard served to “denaturalize” the body, and essentially distance the body from animals and the body’s unruly “natural” state (Symes & Meadmore 1996). Given that the school is a place where students learn about health and well-being, while (sometimes) also being required to wear a uniform, it is interesting to me to see how the presentation of western knowledge in two different articles about two different concepts is beginning to line up.

Wildcat and Deloria put emphasis on understanding oneself through places and experiences, whereas western knowledge is geared in a more-so linear fashion that reduces wholes and experiences down to fraction-sized pieces which eliminate their relationships with the natural world. It is interesting to see how this knowledge practice surfaces on the body, through “morals”, cleanliness, and regulation. I’ve spoken previously about how taking education out of the environment and placing it in a classroom prevents people from understanding knowledge which their environments have to share with them. However, it is now clear that taking education out of the environment does involve body politics, considering how learning in an institutionalized setting is seen as “moral”, “clean”, and “regulated”. Wildcat does discuss morals in this chapter, and Symes & Meadmore mention how “morals” are culturally constructed (Symes & Meadmore 1996). Essentially, reductionism is culture in and of itself. However, it is interesting to me that in the process of preparing one’s mind for western-oriented “professionalism”, the body is also prepared. Both in ways where mind and body, and arguably the self, are distanced from the natural environment and instructed to learn, think, and act in a post-human, post-environment manner. By distancing ourselves from our natural human state, we are cutting the ties of the relationship of our self and our understanding of what it means to be human.

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Living at the lower end of the Kentucky River watershed is what is now known as an 'educational experience'– and not an easy one. A lot of information comes with it that is severely damaging to the reputation of our people and our time.

Wendell Berry’s “Making of a Marginal Farm” (1998) p. 340

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Wendell Berry’s“Making of a Marginal Farm” & Indigenous Knowledge

During my years in undergrad, I had the privilege of majoring in English. Because of this I was able to read, like actually read. After a long day of both school and practice for the sport I played, I remember curling up in my bed and reading the books I was assigned. I usually wouldn’t get too far until I began dozing off; however, in retrospect, I cherish every single piece I read.

Now, I’m in grad school, and my reading is inundated with academia and studies, findings, and statistics. So, now, I look for the chances where I’m able to simply read literature.

I’ve recently re-stumbled upon a piece I was assigned my Junior year of college, by Wendell Berry titled: “The Making of a Marginal Farm”. In this essay, Berry discusses moving to a plot of land, “twelve acres more or less” (Berry, 1998, p. 330), which has been dilapidated by prior industrial farming and use. Berry delves into the restoration process of the land, the journey which this took him on, and how he had learned so much about himself, the world around him, and the human condition. through tending to a plot of land.

I found that this piece parallels a lot of what Deloria refers to as “Indian Metaphysics” (Deloria, 2001, p. 2). As I explained in my previous post, here Deloria talks about how Native American knowledge conceptualizes information as wholes, whereas western knowledge is reductionist. Deloria’s emphasis on “Place and Power” are very much so seen, and reflected, in the Berry piece. In the 2nd chapter of “Power and Place: Indian Education in America” it is stated that “we, human beings, in all our rich diversity, are intimately connected and related to, in fact dependent on, the other living beings, land, air, and water of the earth’s biosphere” (Wildcat, 2001, p. 12). Wildcat emphasizes how human beings would neither exist nor persist throughout the world if it weren’t for other living beings and places that allow our ecosystem, therefore us humans, to flourish.

Berry emphasizes this in his piece, and begins by stating he did not realize how intimate his experience with this particular place, this Kentucky farm, would be as he got to know the land. Berry and his wife began to restore the land, and because of this they were able to grow all the food they needed; As they continued their restoration process, everything they ate came from the farm: “as our land and our food became healthier, so did we” (332). As Berry and his wife tended to the land, the land then produced food they needed to survive– a symbiotic dynamic of man caring for land, and the land caring for the man. Food is necessary for survival, and through cultivating, and caring for, the land in a way that allows us to do so, it is emblematic of this connection which Wildcat and Deloria discuss: that we are intimately and inextricably connected to the ecosystem, and how this is visible through the food we consume.

Berry realizes that “in coming home and settling on this place, I began to live in my subject, and to learn that living in one’s subject is not at all the same as ‘having’ a subject. To live in the place that is one’s subject is to pass through the surface” (337) and to become the subject. Given Berry’s narrative of becoming his subject, this exemplifies Deloria’s discussion of western reductionism versus native knowledge of place and power. In modern society and culture we live in industrialized consumer-oriented areas which reduce our living quarters down to a house or apartment in a suburb, town, or city. We travel by train, car, or bus, and we purchase all of our food, and other necessities, from stores. These processes are reduced down to pure efficiency, and seldom provide intimate interaction with the immediate ecosystem or environment. Furthermore, this separates the environment from the humans, leaving it subject to exploitation, overuse, and erosion: in the industrialized world we live in today “the land is heavily taxed to subsidize and ‘affluence’ that consists, in reality, of health and goods stolen from the unborn” (340).

Our human nature wants us to move slow, so why don’t we? What knowledge could we gain?

Wildcat elaborates how “the practices and products of Western science [and culture] have, intentionally or not, had the net effet of making ‘humans act more and more like machines’“ (Wildcat, 2001, p. 17) arguably, how western culture emphasizes success in immediacy. Berry’s piece is a modern, western, personification of one interacting intimately with the land on which they live, and through forming this connection they are able to produce enough to live while also helping the land heal and flourish. Industrialization causes a clear split between the ecosystem and human beings, which causes a horrific disruption in the health and well-being– both of ourselves and the land. Furthermore, given we are sequestered into our suburban and urban homes, living a machine-like lifestyle, we are unable to learn from the land and build knowledge in the ways we used to. Berry emphasizes the amount of time his project of restoring the land took. Simultaneously, Deloria and Wildcat emphasize the experiences that being present in, and interacting with, a particular place can bring. Both emphasize how to learn from our environment, we must give it our time, attention, and care.

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A Brief History of Food

– Julia Rothman, Book – Food Anatomy

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We live in an industrial, technological world in which a knowledge of science is often key to employment, and in many cases is essential to understanding how the larger society views and uses the natural world, including, unfortunately, people and animals.

Vine Deloria, “Power and Place: Indian Education in America” (2001)

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Deloria & American Indian Metaphysics

I shall continue this analysis in another post– also because it is 11:21pm and I need to get to sleep. However, today I began reading Deloria and Wildcat’s book: Power and Place: Indian Education in America (2001). I’ve just finished the first chapter, written by Deloria, which discusses the concept of “Indian Metaphysics” and how this contrasts western metaphysics and, therefore, western knowledge.

The main contrast which Deloria makes between the two realms of knowledge– western versus native knowledge– is that native knowledge emphasizes the whole, whereas western knowledge breaks things up, causing dissonance and understanding in our understanding of the world. Deloria mentions how, in Native American culture, one story– regardless of what the story is about– can contain applicable data and information about the world; however, western knowledge cannot achieve this same synchrony, harmony, and resonation within and throughout the natural world with the data and knowledge it produces.

Western knowledge is context-dependent. In Seana M. McGovern’s article “Reclaiming Education: Knowledge Practices and Indigenous Communities” she discusses the (attempted) erasure of indigenous knowledge and practices through the mechanism of western education. However, McGovern explains how western education is not applicable to indigenous practices because of its context-dependence. When Eurocentric frameworks of understanding and being are “applied to contexts outside of European borders” it loses its meaning (McGovern, 2000, p. 525). Arguably, western science and knowledge does not produce information and data in a sustainable and applicable way.

Part of why this is, which both Deloria and McGovern explain, is because western knowledge rejects, whereas native knowledge accepts. Deloria states that western knowledge and science are “reductionist in nature and seeks to force natural experience and knowledge into predetermined categories that ultimately fail to describe or explain anything” (Deloria, 2001, p. 4). By reducing the world into smaller pieces, we lose sight of the whole picture and interconnectedness of everything around us. Indigenous knowledge places emphasis on this whole, and how people can understand themselves, and organize their culture, in relation to the needs and conditions of their natural environment (McGovern, 2000). Deloria emphasizes “place” and “power” which allow Native Americans to holistically understand  each being’s place in the world: “what kinds of experiences that place allowed, encouraged, and suggested... enabled people to relate to the living entities that inhabited it” (Deloria, 2001, p. 3). By understanding the world as a whole, we are able to gain a more abundant and fruitful understanding of the world, and conceptualize it in a way that is emblematic of its truest and most-whole self.

Decolonize education through conceptualizing the whole.

Thinking through these articles opened my eyes to understanding how sorting and compartmentalizing things takes away from the whole. By understanding things as a whole, we are able to gain knowledge applicable to all aspects of life, and, in turn, are able to decolonize our worldviews. This also reminds me of some readings I did in undergrad about western medicine– and how certain cultures treat the whole body when it is ill, whereas western culture pinpoints certain areas to treat. Fascinating how the same worldview is applicable to our own bodies as well as our environments– almost in a backward way showing that they are one of the same.

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Western Education & Its Shortcomings: The Environment

I’m currently sitting at Penn’s Fisher Fine Art’s library, sitting in the present moment for a bit before embarking on my trek to study for finals. I had been reading over an article I was assigned for class: “Without the Forest: Educational Projects for Indigenous communities” By: Dinny Risri Aletheiani (2021) which discusses modern-day efforts to attempt to drive the Orang Rimba tribes (belonging to Indonesia) out of the forest, and away from their traditional migratory patterns, with the intent that they would become sedentary and partake in modern, westernized Indonesian culture.

I felt as if this article focused heavily on the surface dynamic: drawing indigenous people out of their native land so that same land can be capitalized upon for the production of crops (specifically palm oil in this article (Aletheiani, 2021)), and the oral knowledge traditionally passed down through indigenous cultures erased through forcibly having these people learn to speak a new language and partake in new and unfamiliar cultural norms. However, this article did not talk about the indigenous experience with the land as much as I had hoped. I for one am not indigenous, however I do appreciate the history and knowledge that indigenous authors share about ties to the land, and how land and environment shapes culture and community. Aletheiani’s article draws concerns to the unsustainable practices of capitalism, and how harmful westernization can be to communities, the land, and cultures– yet I felt that she could go a bit deeper as to what connections capitalism is truly affecting.

I then looked up another article in order to help me digest this one, and I found Seana M. McGovern’s “Reclaiming Education: Knowledge Practices and Indigenous Communities” (2000) which examines indigenous communities all across the globe, and explores and articulates their connection to the land. McGovern states that “forms of knowledge require an understanding of the contexts in which they have developed” (524) therefore, attempting to force western knowledge upon people who do not live in a western framework proves to be difficult and cause a dissonance. Furthermore, western knowledge is mass-produced and one size fits all: one learning experience, one curriculum, one correct answer. Again, this knowledge is only valuable given certain frameworks. If we were to take this education outside of western society and culture, it would not get us very far. However, indigenous knowledge “reflects the dynamic way in which the residents of an area have come to understand themselves in relationship to their natural environment and how they organize that folk knowledge of flora and fauna, cultural beliefs, and history to enhance their lives” (McGovern 524). Indigenous knowledge emphasizes the land, environment, one’s place in the world, and how all of these things come together. How the people are able to take care of the land and understand the environment, so the land and environment can take care of the people; this knowledge is symbiotic, not unilateral.

Given every single person on this earth lives in an environment, indigenous knowledge is arguably more applicable to many different frameworks of knowledge than western, academic, knowledge is. How are we able to take care of ourselves in a way that also takes care of the world around us, and keep a record of this knowledge that we can share. These readings reminded me of a piece I had read during Junior year of college: “The Making of a Marginal Farm” By: Wendell Berry where he discusses the process he underwent turning former industrialized agricultural land back to its natural flourishing pre-colonized state. Aletheiani had commented that “reading and writing are foreign practices for Orang Rimba” (340) which also reminded of a book I found at my favorite bookstore in Chicago, Myopic Books, called “The Alphabet versus the Goddess” By: Leonard Shlain which mentions how, when the alphabet was invented there began to be a shift to more left-brain thinking, and away from right-brain thinking; therefore, ushering in a shift to more analytical, male-dominant, capitalistic, western practices, and away from art, creativity, and the feminine essence– like female deities (hence the title being “The Alphabet versus The Goddess”). Overall, these readings all re-emphasized how capitalism is deeply-seated in the world around us, and how it has even taken people out of nature, and normalized the human experience as existing post-nature, in order for it to exploit natural and vital resources that it is our human job to take care of.

I plan to build off of this post by exploring these aforementioned pieces in my next post, and continue to build off of each post with something I learn hope to dedicate this blog to something I learn, and can share, everyday about indigenous knowledge and practices that allow us to understand the shortcomings of western education, the harm it has caused, and ways in which we can participate in decolonizing information, knowledge, and education. I hope to explore new and different ways of learning, while also revisiting articles and written pieces I have read before that accentuate and support the information I happen to stumble upon. I hope for this blog to educate both myself and anyone who comes across it, and to serve as a nexus of resources for understanding indigenous practices alongside ways to decolonize education and practices within our daily lives.

Pieces I hope to explore next time:

Deloria

American Earth

Alphabet Vs. The Goddess