Fourth World Eye Blog » Artby – Randolph Bowers

Indigenous knowledge and value

Dr. Randolph Bowers — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 06:26:17 +0000

Western knowledge is a commodity that is sold only to those who can afford access. Young people today look at the internet and think, of course knowledge is free! Look at the web!

But knowledge of any sizable integrity costs. This is true in all societies in one sense. If you seek knowledge from the elders, in my experience, you will not be directly asked to do anything but you will be watched until they trust you. Your words and actions will be known. Then stories and information come forward.

This next insight might surprise some people. In the western academe, professors do not share knowledge openly with all students. It is rare that students actually benefit by the wealth of knowledge inside a professor’s head, heart and life experience. Bachelor programs by their very nature recruit large cohorts. Knowledge is shared broadly but not usually in-depth. Masters programs take students who have continued and shown sustained commitment to western learning. Fewer of society’s students are involved. Even at this level professors are limited in the knowledge they can share.

Masters research and doctoral students (and bachelor honours students to some degree) may get the ‘most’ time from a professor overall. But even then, only those who tend to be dedicated to the particular field of research of a professor tend to be ‘taken into the circle.’ Even then, the road to gaining knowledge contains many pit falls and hurdles to jump.

In contrast, sit with an Aboriginal elder for more than a couple of hours and you will get an ear full about everything under the sun, including a bit about what you are really interested in hearing or learning about. Indirect stories reveal more than you can imagine, and open up the capacity for dreaming and vision. These approaches are not foreign to the western traditions which if we go back far enough are also tribal, Socratic, and philosophic in dimension.

What is knowledge?

Dr. Randolph Bowers — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 06:11:35 +0000

This is a potent question at a time when Indigenous nations struggle to assert rights to intellectual property. But before we look at the economics and politics of knowledge in the post-colonial context, how about we examine basic assumptions.

Western students very often comment: Why do Aboriginal societies restrict knowledge?

My comment: What do you mean?

Western student: Elders or shamans keep their knowledge hidden, they do not share that knowledge, unless you are initiated.

My comment: And how do you compare this idea to western practices?

Western student: Knowledge if open to everyone. If you seek it, you will find it.

My comment: OK well, first of all, we need to understand there are two incorrect assumptions here. First, Indigenous knowledge is not hidden. Knowledge is shared openly but comes with a cost. And second, western knowledge is not open to everyone. Knowledge tends to be hidden and comes with a cost.

Allow me to explain. Indigenous knowledge or epistemology is relational. If you show respect and honour relationships, you gain “access” to the teachings of elders and community. Your showing commitment over time opens new doors. You are in turn respected with knowledge that is shared openly with you.

In western societies, knowledge has become largely disconnected from relationships and is now a commodity that is bought and sold. Knowledge is costly and difficult to find – just look at your student loans for a serious and long moment – and if you can tell me know that knowledge is shared openly I will eat my left ear. The epistemology of knowledge in the west is often reduced to economic rationalism, where respect for relations and contexts and identity are skipped over in preference for personal gain, power over, and dominance mechanisms within the society.

Students when confronted with these insights usually drop their mouths to the floor. It can take a long time to realise what we have lost, and what we wish to value in future.

The Cultural Vortex of Modernity

Dr. Randolph Bowers — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 08:42:40 +0000

Many commentators including Indigenous scholars have continually raised the issues that settler-invader societies in Australia, Canada, the USA, and other synthetic nation states built on the backs of native people and their lands are culturally troubled. Many have called this trouble the postmodern era, expressive of a meaningful vortex – the absence of morality, connection, belonging, and identity.I see this in my work all the time as a counselling psychotherapist and educational consultant. People are searching, expending enormous energy, trying to find meaning. They look to the East in Buddhism, in the story of displacement of Tibet, in the energies of Reiki, in the experiences of Latin America, in the South Pacific Islander cultures – in anything but their own history and heritage… I am coming to see this as “white fellah’s bad-dreaming” bestowed on the modernity of global identity and conflated with corporate forgetfulness and the absence of moral fibre – we see emerging a new global non-consciousness based in post-industrial materialism and neo-scientific objectification of meaning into meaningless discourse.Indigenous scholarship says wake up to yourself, find the basis of sustainable moral culture attached to local and regional ecology, tradition, and spirituality.Personally I see clients, couples and families rich with gadgets but in crisis of identity. Socially I see people with enormous debts and who give their energy to anything but being present in the now, and their discontent is like a taste in the air, a form of putrid acidity, that generates workplaces of stress, anxiety and frustration.In many respects the centres of this culture of the vortex are contemporary universities, where the elite of the society gather to recreate the dominant ethos, values, and tenor of what they see as most valuable. However, in the erosion of social values and through various governmental policies in Australia and other western nations, the university sector is set adrift without a moral compass. What I am proposing is not a return to conservative moral values. The crux of my suggestion is that we as a society need to critically and wholistically reflect on our central project – the human condition within a sustainable human ecology. To reach that place demands change.My father’s bloodline gives me one of the guiding values that works for me in the notion of “Msit Nogama” which comes from Mi’kmaq First Nation language, meaning “All My Relations.” Many other tribes in North America have this saying in different forms. In my translation and understanding of the term, it means All is One (Mmm, or Emm). This oneness relates to personal identity which cannot be separated from relationship – Msit – All is One Within My Being – in this moment All is As it Is. This is a form of collective and individual identity, a deeply cosmological sensibility, and a philosophy of relation. “Nogama” meaning relations, family, inter-dependence, relying on each other, and knowing who we are as family. This approach applies to all of creation.In western heritage my mother’s bloodline gives me the Celtic symbols of ancient knot work. These symbols speak to me of an older tribal awareness among European settler-invader cultures in the modern nation states that I have mentioned above. The symbols are only pathways to exploring a much more rich cultural repository that needs to be reawakened in today’s world where Anglo-Celtic peoples are set adrift by modernity and corporate amnesia. But this work must happen on a massive scale. We Aboriginal people need Europeans to wake up, to grow up, and face their demons, and to take their spiritual journey seriously and with profound regard for how they have damaged their own relationships with the world and people around them. Only when people are awake to their identity can they work for peace and then, only then, can justice become a sustainable ecology within human and natural environments.Like I tell my students, share with me the stories of your parents. Tell me what challenges and contexts they faced. Then tell me about your grandparents, share the story of their lives. Most people in white societies can not remember. The stories become a year long project. Students are enthralled by researching their heritage. They uncover voids, vacuums, and dusty treasures, while they also discover gems, and many more questions. But at least these questions become like pregnant moments of waiting – they at least know there is something to discover now about their own identity – they at least have a path to follow to make their lives more full of meaning.Every single family, and every person, has a story, a history, a cultural heritage. Every settler-invader family has transplanted their old energy into a new Sacred Land. They need to understand what energy they embody in their bloodlines and in their being right now – mostly unconscious energy, mostly what IS, but this undiscovered country is exactly where they need to begin.So as ironic as it seems, as an Indigenous scholar and teacher, I am pointing people of all races back to their own roots in culture and meaning. Only then can be authentically dialogue about cultural and social issues. Only then can we actually respect each other from a cultural and spiritual place of honouring each other’s heritage and unique ways of being and thinking. Only then can we stop assuming we have the right way for others, once we realise our own cultural identity is so very unique. Colonial invasion is a nasty business, much like modern day corporate ownership is so terribly driven by the cultural vortex arising from what has become a macro social self-abusive psychopathology.When my Aboriginal Ancestors and our Two Spirit Medicine Workers greeted the Europeans in their large ships, we looked for their Spirits but we thought they were dead people come to visit us, why? Because these white bodies had no Medicine. They were empty children without a moral compass. We sought among their leadership but found so few who embodied truth, wisdom, and justice. When I imagine those first encounters with our Medicine People, I am overwhelmed with sadness, for the emptiness and cultural vortex that was transplanted upon our native soils led to the destruction of our ancient forests and the land was forever changed – even though, today, that same land can be healed and restored if we actually take a strategic plan for that land that spans the next five hundred years – which is about the amount of time it will take for an Old Growth Forest to grow into its first stage of infancy. That vision of restoration for the lands of Canada and America is not so far fetched as we might imagine – as there are ways and means to nurture ecology and human agency – we must first confront the heart of these issues raised here today. We have a long way to walk in each other’s shoes. We need to create moral fibre that actually accounts for not only green movement concerns but also to account in economic and real terms for the Seventh Generation whose lives could well be enriched by that Old Growth Forest and all that She represents…

Identity, prejudice and healing

redelk07 — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:30:59 +0000

The work of Professor Judy Atkinson in Australia has moved forward a scholarship and practice around what she has called ‘educaring’ as a distinctly Indigenous approach to what may be thought of as a combination of education, therapy, counselling, and community-based social work. The latter constructs are easily identified from mainstream systems that have evolved within western nations over the past two centuries. However, from an Aboriginal perspective, the field of ‘wholistic medicine’ as an Indigenous approach does not currently and adequately convey the breath and depth of an Indigenous cultural method of intervention. Atkinson’s work is innovative in that she moved forward the discourse around sensitive issues of child abuse, inter-generational violence, and trans-generational trauma and recovery from unique minority frames of reference. Her doctoral work (Trauma Trails: Recreating Songlines, 2002) is both profound scholarship and is a profoundly moving testament to the real human impacts of colonisation as an external force to be reckoned with for Aboriginal communities and families. But more so, her work reveals the high costs to health and well being along with the impacts in identity fragmentation across generations within minority families. As we reflect on global politics and socioeconomic issues, the work of many of us whose efforts focus on education, health and wellness suggests that governments and civic leaders must remain aware of the contemporary and enduring social and cultural impacts of political actions. Policies and practices have real and lasting impact on minority people’s lives. The long term health impacts of poor policy decisions, based in what can only be seen as a form of systematic and prejudicial approaches to minority politics, often resulting in long-term costs for national governments and the international community whose responsibility it remains to address solutions. With any hope these solutions will become authentic cooperative engagements with base communities whose lives were impacted and continue to be impacted by colonisation, relocation, disengagement, familial division, and the other numerous tactics of colonial practice. Not the least of these concerns is the relation between education, health and wellness services and systems and Indigenous communities. Too often this long term social net is overlooked, while back handedly used by policy makers as a catch-all, and more often than a critical sociologist would like to admit, used as a means of continued and politically correct form of colonisation and oppression. Inappropriate education, health and wellness services are simply that, inappropriate.But the argument suggests a deeper cultural mismatch between colonial mainstream practices verses minority cultural beliefs, attitudes and values that remain outside of the official discourses within the helping professions. Another worldview exists and is struggling to be articulated. Included here is the difficult relationship of the helping professions in “managing” issues of family violence, substance abuse, child welfare, and social services. Often these front line services are overshadowed by mainstream politics and policies that have little if nothing to do with Aboriginal perspectives.As a member of these professions allow me to suggest that it is critically important to remain self-critical of the role, status and power that the health, education, and helping fields carry in our daily practices. In one sense, we practitioners stand at the “coal face” between written policy and political agenda verses people’s real lives and the impacts of said policy and political will. In another sense, and reflecting on the work of Professor Atkinson, as well as that of Indigenous scholar Eduardo Duran (Healing the Soul Wound: Counseling with American Indians and other Native Peoples, 2006), in my view within western nations, Indigenous and minority groups are attempting to articulate alternative methods and this, in my view, gives rise to an “Indigenous Therapeutics” as a distinct approach to education, health and wellness that relies on culturally grounded and culturally infused approaches that are appropriate to Indigenous cultures as well as offering innovative and timely solutions to mainstream populations.

Wholistic Medicine

redelk07 — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 01:00:28 +0000

While the dominant discourse relies on codes and categories that separate for ease of analysis, Indigenous models of knowing rely on awareness of the whole. This awareness is spoken through stories, teachings, and medicines that are interwoven in the language, meaning, and spiritual life of the People. This awareness is lived and known, interacted with and understood in relationship. A deep abiding respect for all of creation is part of the whole of life. This and other core values of kinship govern the politics and the ecology of all our relations. This is why, and we need to remind ourselves of this, why the damage of colonisation continues in the lives of all First Peoples. The core relationship we have with ecology, environment, and earth expresses a living relations within our Family of Nations. Our Family of Nations includes Rock People, Winged People, Finned People, and many other Nations.

Thus it is possible to understand that when we fight a political argument, which for other Peoples may be abstract or disconnected, related to an ecology that is othered, that is foreign, that is made to be only material to exploit, and that does not involve a life and integrity all its own, this is why for Indigenous Peoples we carry the weight of our knowledge and our responsibility so heavily. We do not fight for an abstract or material world, per se. We fight and give voice to our relations of trust earned over hundreds of thousands of collective years, and our memory extends that far in our stories of ecology, environment, and place. We stand in solidarity with “the other” who are our brothers and sisters. If they are destroyed, we too, as a collective humanity, will face the threat of extinction.

Thus as a counsellor and psychotherapist, counsellor educator and scholar in minority and marginalisation issues, my work in the healing of identity post-trauma suggests that we all have much to learn. Much to learn about how to treat each other with greater respect. Much to learn about how our trauma lives and is passed between generations. Much to learn about methods of healing, and of bringing our lives back into balance with ecology, environment, and place.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to contribute to this blog – I look forward to exploring these and related issues in future. Msit Nogama, Tahoe.