VDeloriaCivsIsodigitl_data1

This is a lecture series at Athabasca University in honor of Merrill Wolfe. The speaker, Vine Deloria, discusses the history of interactions between Native Americans and Europeans. He emphasizes the need to understand different perspectives and challenges the Western approach to knowledge and isolation. Deloria argues for a more holistic and inclusive view of the world. This is the second in the Merrill Wolfe Memorial Lecture Series, and he's also indicated that the first was David Suzuki, and there's really very little more for me to say, but Joe does that to me most of the time. Let me say, however, that we do in this, and I think the word distinguished is appropriate, in this distinguished lecture series, try to ensure that we bring to Athabasca University and to you scholars, people of international repute, and we do so in recognition of the major contribution to the development of Athabasca that Merrill Wolfe played. For those of you who may not be familiar, Mr. Justice Carlton Clement was the first chairman of the governing authority at Athabasca University, and Merrill Wolfe was the second. David Checkland is now the third, and we have named the lecture series, the Merrill Wolfe Memorial Lecture Series, as I've indicated, in recognition of the primary contribution during some very difficult years, as Tim Byrne can attest, for the development of the university, the major contribution to the leadership of the authority that Merrill Wolfe played. We're delighted that Mrs. Wolfe has agreed to allow us to use the Wolfe name to distinguish this lecture series. It is my real pleasure to echo Joe's welcome to you. We are impressed with your presence, and we know you'll be the beneficiaries of the remarks that Mr. Vine Deloria will deliver tonight. Please now turn the microphone back to Joe for the introduction. Thank you, Sam. It's been now about 500 years since European cultures sent their first real estate agents to find some new turf here in North America. You may have seen a recent cartoon that shows two Indians watching an early shipment of Europeans disembark from their boat, and one Indian turns to the other and says with a Well, there goes the neighborhood. Well, the Indian neighborhood did change, and it changed mostly for the worse, and very often with quite a bit of pain and much injustice. Our guest tonight, Vine Deloria, knows all about that history and much that precedes it. He knows about it as an Indian himself through his youth as a Sioux on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and through the many years he spent as a leader of national Indian organizations in the United States. He knows about it as a practicing lawyer also, a man who has argued and testified in scores of cases involving disputes over Indian land and Indian rights, including such well-known cases as the recent occupations of Alcatraz and of Wounded Knee. He knows about that history, too, as a scholar and as a philosopher, whose many books have analyzed the relationships between Indian culture and white culture, have explained the meanings of Indian religions, and more recently and more interestingly, have explored ways in which Indian and other non-Western traditions can contribute toward a healthier philosophical perspective upon mankind as a whole and upon mankind's history on this planet. So Vine Deloria has a great deal to teach us, whatever our backgrounds or whatever may be the history of our cultures. So Vine, please, you talk and we'll listen. I'm very happy to be here to give the second Merrill Wolfe lectures, and it's kind of unusual for a member of the Badger clan to give Wolfe lectures, because those clans are not compatible. And it's kind of a trauma coming north. It was 63 above in Colorado when I left, and right here it was 30-something below. And so it's taken me a while to kind of get adjusted to your temperature here. I told Joe Meeker, I said, when it hits 50 below and you get the snow and blizzard coming I want you to ask yourself a question, whether you took this land away from us or whether we conned you into living here. I used to tell the Indians in Washington State, it rains a lot there. And I said, you know, if the white men hadn't taken this land away from us, we should have made them live here in punishment for coming over. And I'm sure at times you feel that situation also. I was asked to prepare a formal speech, so I actually did type something out. And the problem, I think, when you do that is that those ideas then belong to the piece of paper in front of you and not to your own mind. So since Joe told a Columbus joke, I would like to tell one Columbus joke and then I will be serious. I was on the stand in Cedar Rapids for the trial of the two Indians accused by the government of killing the two FBI men who wounded me. And William Kunstler did a very good examination of my expert knowledge of relationships between Sioux Indians and the United States and the atmosphere of fear and mistrust that had been built up over a hundred years. So when he finished, the U.S. prosecutor got up and of course his job is to cross-examine and show that I really was giving testimony that could be used to support the government's case. But we had the jury pretty much with us. So the prosecutor got up and he went into a big liberal introduction and he said, Mr. Deloria, I don't want to insult you, I don't know how to refer to you, I know that you are of the Sioux tribe, but some people of your race like to be called Aborigines and some Native Americans. He said, I know the only reason we call you Indians is because Columbus was looking for an Indian. I looked over at the jury and saw they were following him very sympathetically and I said, well, we're all happy he wasn't looking for a turkey. That broke up the courtroom and even the judge kind of coughed and spun around in his chair. And that kind of ended his cross-examination. He lost his place in his notes, as I have now, and I think that took us a long way to start getting an acquittal. So that is my Columbus joke, though. You're free to use it for a year and then it must revert to me. I've been working the last several years to attempt to outline what I think is a very valid view of the world. It's an effort to take many Indian traditions and recast them in philosophical terms that can at least communicate to non-Indians. And in the course of this, I've had to read a great many things on Indians and also go back into some of the greater thinkers of the Western tradition to discover how they form certain questions and how they began to articulate their ideas of the world. After that, after about a 22-year gap, I've come back to the writings of Alfred North Whitehead and I'd like to start my lecture with a comment by him that men can be provincial in time as well as in place. I think this is a good jumping-off point because in the context that we're in today, we really have to deal with 400 years of interaction between Indians and non-Indians. A lot of that interaction is in terms of attitudes, how have the two groups approached each other. I think to clarify where I think things can go with Indians, you have to have a very good idea or at least a sketch of what you want to regard as the non-Indian approach to life. And so consequently, in attempting to outline this idea of provinciality kept arising in my mind, I finally began to play with this concept. I think it comes as a shock to most people for an Indian to come to an audience and say that what has been considered the scope of human knowledge is really knowledge that Western European peoples have cast in terms of their own outlook on the world. What we call scientific and historical knowledge is not universal knowledge, it's the way it particular tradition has viewed human existence. Arnold Toynbee has a good example in one of his books where he says that if you call the present articulation of world history, history is like calling a map of the Mediterranean a map of the world. And I think that that particular analysis and that example is the way I would like to direct your thinking this evening. And that is that I think the present articulation of human knowledge is provincial and parochial in time and I have great fears it may eventually become provincial and parochial in space. I think you have to go back in the Western tradition to see how Western people approach the world. If I were to be asked to pick out a characteristic which I think is a fair characteristic but one that certainly is exemplified in the Western tradition, it is a deeply held belief by Western peoples that you gain truth and knowledge through isolating things. I think philosophically you have to go back to the Greek idea that you can by continual subdivision by continually casting off what they used to call primary and secondary qualities eventually arrive at that single constituent of reality from which then you can define the rest of the metaphysics or the epistemology or religious vision that you intend to use. We call it in the philosophical tradition I suppose the theory deriving out of William of Ockham's razor that you always take the simplest idea and you always continue to break things down. I think that you see that isolation meant concern continually throughout Western European civilization in its antecedent societies and over the last thousand years its movement into science. Certainly in the last hundred years the tremendous concern for research inside the atom, is the atom the smallest constituent of society? We isolate this atom then we begin to look for parts of the atom, we begin to smash the atom and try and find smaller and smaller parts until we find that single part of which the universe is composed. Now if this belief and if this approach to life were restricted only to the scientific lab I don't think it would be nearly as dangerous as it has become. But what happens with the idea of isolation? This is applied in other realms also. If you look at the Western religious tradition, although the Christian church, the Jewish religion and many of the denominations begin as community efforts, their theology moves toward a description of the sinner in the hands of the angry God. It begins to isolate people. The theology eventually boils down to an individualism where you can conceive that each individual has a spiritual telephone to God. You get to the point where Richard Nixon and Billy Graham are right with God but crooked with their neighbors because you have a complete isolation of individuals there. I think that has been very detrimental. It is certainly not the mainstream of belief but it is certainly what happens in practical areas. I think you see this isolation again in democratic processes. Here you have a conception that one person, one vote, with a deeply held belief that if a substantial number of people vote that the majority will then determine the right, truthful and good thing to do. We have already proved in American politics in the last thirty years that this never happens. Almost every landslide that we have had we have regretted six months later. And yet our political theory is based on the idea that one person's vote is as good as another. It can be the wisest person in society or it can be the dumbest person in society. We count those votes as if there were no qualitative difference between people. Consequently down there in the states today we have an administration that wants to lust after things and really doesn't know how to do it. We're already regretting the results of our last election. I think while we talk about the equality of people, we've really not examined what happens when we put isolated individuals who are considered homogenous units into political and social institutions and allow those people to govern us or make decisions about us. Mark Twain of course said that Congress is the only native criminal class that the North American continent has ever produced. I think this is the net product of political thinking that goes that way. I always try and point out to people that of the people in the United States Congress only Senator Thomas Eagleton has been declared sane by competent medical authorities. The rest of them we have no gauge on where these people are at. So I can tell already from your response you're beginning to see what I'm talking about when I talk about isolation. I think the corollary of that isolation is in the manner in which Western European people have handled knowledge of human experience and knowledge of the universe. And that is that we have seen in the last two or three hundred years a fragmentation of what used to be the old natural philosophy. A fragmentation into a number of fields where people borrow from each other's fields but never question authorities in other fields, eventually never question authority in their own field. I have a continual debate with the people at the Smithsonian Institute over the Bering Straits Theory. They tell me that no one likes the Bering Straits Theory but it's better than any other theory and therefore they all accept it and therefore it is doctrine. And I continue to argue that that does not make it true. It just makes it acceptable. And I think there is a great difference between truth and statistical truth. But I think this is what we end up dealing with when we talk about isolation. We talk about then the separation of knowledge into certain categories. Now I think a lot of people have recognized that this is a bad movement and they've tried to do what they call interdisciplinary work. But too often interdisciplinary work is a person highly trained in one field who decides to be a vulture or scavenger on another field. And he or she walks over to this other field, picks up exotic doctrines that colleagues in the primary field have not heard of and then runs back with all kinds of new ideas. Consequently, we don't have a true coming together of knowledge. We have been crossing of fields. And I'll say something about this later on because I think it does give us an out. But I think the ultimate result of the isolation of things is a production of an amazing number of fields that are isolated from each other and the only thing holding these together is the sincerity with which people in individual fields approach their data. Ultimately, sincerity becomes the doctrine which holds all of these separate fields together. There is no central framework that you can appeal to. Now one of the problems that we face also in isolation is that in the Western tradition, isolation begins with a concern for the physical universe. I think as you move from the Greeks on even to the modern physicists, concern with isolation and isolating physical reality turns into an assumption that the universe is machine-like. And consequently, it can be comprehended in laws of cause and effect and that we can model our institutions after mechanical processes. All of you have seen television where the little b's race the little a's through the human stomach, right? The net result of isolating the physical universe first and then attempting to deal with this is that we begin to treat ourselves like machines. We begin to look at ourselves in a wholly objective situation. And this, in the last hundred years, has been the creation of social sciences. The idea that you actually can look at human beings as if they were objects and make predictions on what they're going to do. This is very popular in the United States. We now call it in its pop name the public opinion poll. And this is how, for the last several administrations, decisions have been made. Not on whether they're right, not on whether they're intelligent, but on whether a good proportion of the United States population will support the person that makes the decision. And consequently, I think we've reduced truth first to a statistical basis and finally just to a crude popularity. And that's why, in one sense, Billy Carter is more representative of the current administration than Jimmy. Because he appeals to the lowest common denominator that we're talking about. And certainly appears to be smarter. So I think that as we begin to look at these things, you can see that the Western civilization takes a track and moves down it. And as I've characterized this track as isolation. I think it has been amazingly successful in certain ways. And that is that if you exclude a great many things that occur in nature or occur in human society or occur in the emotions of individuals, and train them to perform certain functions, that by isolating things and concentrating on goals, you can create very efficient things. A lot of people forget that one of the key figures in certainly American education, if not North American education, was Horace Mann of Massachusetts, who went to Prussia to learn how the Prussian militarists train their soldiers. From that, he derived ideas that he then came back and advocated for education of children in the United States. And I think this is what you end up producing when you isolate the individual, when you isolate on physical reality, when you begin to conceive the world as a machine that can do your bidding. Now how do people in that tradition begin to work their way out of it? And when they start to work their way out of it, which way do they work? I think here the American Indian and North American and Canadian Indian traditions are very helpful. If you look at the way Western Europeans have approached the original peoples on this continent, it's almost always with an intense desire to see in the culture, the religious outlook, the behavior of the original people, something that's familiar to Western Europeans. When that familiarity is established, then the assumption is acceptable that these people are human insofar as they share those characteristics. The first Europeans coming over here, running into Indian tribes and nations, were horrified that the Indian tribes did not have a written language, they did not have written laws. You read some of the early political philosophers, I'm thinking primarily here of Hobbes, Montesquieu, and Locke. They continually call Indians people of nature, and they say these people are in their very beginning stages of civilization. They have no written laws, they have no jails, and none of these things that you mark civilized people. So Western Europeans coming over and looking at this other tradition, which is a distinctly different tradition than Western Europeans, failing to see familiar institutions and familiar artifacts, and don't know how to deal with the Indian tradition. That attitude really continued and can be documented in numerous instances. This continues until 1926. Indians in both Canada and the United States are categorized and described as a lawless people because they do not have written codes and laws and languages. And so policy is made on the basis of the lawlessness of the Indian, Indians approach to savagery, and federal policies in both countries are based on the fact that you have to take these people who are lower in the evolutionary scale and move them up to the point where they can deal in an objective manner with the institutions and with the knowledge of Western Europeans. So what happens in 1926? Malinowski, an ethnologist, publishes a book, Crime and Custom in Savage Society. In this book he says, far from being the most lawless people in the world, Indians had customs, in fact all primitive peoples had customs, that were so rigid that they were the most lawful people in the world. The Indians were chained to their customs to an amazing degree so that they did not have the freedom that modern civilized man has. Since 1926 then, a complete 180 degree reversal in attitudes with respect to whether Indians are lawless or not. Now we are the most lawful people in the world and you people are the criminals. You don't have customs and we do. What do you see in that transformation? You see this phenomenon of isolation. The first people have to find the single identifying characteristic of the aboriginal peoples of North America and they focus on one thing and that becomes the determinative factor. Then somebody else with a new idea comes along, it's 180 degrees off, but he makes a good argument. And then you get another single isolated explanation. It gets extremely bizarre as you go through social sciences. The most bizarre is a man called Claude Lévi-Strauss. He is a French ethnologist who has created this system what he calls structuralism. This is the primitive peoples have this peculiar pre-scientific logic and they balance things off. He has a very famous analysis of the way the Mandan Indians used to catch eagles. To catch adult eagles, the Mandan Indians used to go in the bluffs and they would dig a pit and the Indian would get down the pit and they would put a grid, kind of a checkerboard grid, over the top of that pit and then they would cover that with boughs, boughs of pine, different berries and bushes kind of camouflage it. And then they would put off in the rabbit that they caught or a big chunk of meat there. And this thing would either be exposed or still a live rabbit flopping around on top of this grid. And then an adult eagle flying by would see this down there and swoop down, land on this grid to pick up this meat. At that point then the Indian reaches up through the branches and grabs the feet of the eagle, quickly ties them with rawhide, yells and the other Indians come out of hiding, trap the eagle's wings and you've caught yourself an adult eagle. This is a very simple technique and Levi Strauss explains the technique. Then he says the reason that Indians learned how to catch eagles that way was the reason like this, that the eagle is the creature flying highest above the earth. Therefore you have to balance off this equation so you have to go under the earth to catch the animal that flies, the creature that flies highest above the earth. And consequently once you have set that polarity and balanced it off the eagle is helpless in your hands. This is a very popular theory, interpretation of culture by contemporary ethnologists. And I have argued this theory with anthropologists all over North America. Because I believe it is again a classic example of the single, simple, isolated answer which is nonsense. Because I want to ask you to think just for a moment using Levi Strauss' logic. How would you catch a groundhog? In sequence of structural analysis, the groundhog is the animal that goes under the earth so you must get as high above the earth as possible, right? And consequently you climb a 300 foot pine tree and you sit up there with a gunny sack and groundhog's day when that animal comes up from the earth you leap out of that tree. I could go on and on but anthropology is a fictional field and I have promised Joe Meeker that I will stick as close to metaphysics and the truth as possible. But I think that you can take examples in almost any field and what you find is this attitude that there's got to be a single, simple answer. And once we find that then we can move on and solve our problems. Now I'd like to submit that having drawn that picture whether it is a caricature of western civilization or not that the opposite is the Indian and I would like to now go into what I see as the Indian view. And that is that you can never isolate anything. That you have to take things always in their context. That you have to always find out what things are related to. That you have to look at the total field or the total experience and out of that you make statements about what that experience was. What that situation was. In the single answer situation what you are doing is interpreting from a variety of experiences a general rule which you feel will explain reality. In the Indian situation you have a variety of experiences. You make statements about those experiences and you are basically reporting things you are not interpreting things. Now to say that one is isolation and another is synthesis or togetherness doesn't quite, I think, bring us to the point I want us to be at. Because it's too easy today in the post-civil rights and post-Vietnam period to simply talk about togetherness. It's a very popular word. Perhaps a much better word is relatedness. When you talk about the Indian universe you are not ever talking in vagueness or generalities. When you talk about things being together or related you are talking about the most intimate specific relationships that you can conceive. And I'll give you a very good example. The Osage Indians used to plant their corn in the spring of the year. They lived approximately a little bit west of where St. Louis, Missouri is today. They would plant their corn and then they would go to the Rocky Mountains for the summer hunt. They would hunt there for a while and when one of the ground flowers began to turn a certain color they would pack their camp take all the meat they had preserved for the summer and they would begin their march back from the Rocky Mountain areas to the St. Louis area. They would invariably arrive within one or two days of the time to harvest their corn. Now what you're doing in that situation is not simply togetherness. You're talking about the most intimate knowledge of an ecosystem that extends the better part of a thousand miles. You're talking about a knowledge of the relationship of plants so precise that a mountain flower and its process of growth are correlated with the growth of corn in the flat bottomlands along the Missouri River. A knowledge so intimate that you know the growth of two entirely different things will correlate at a certain chronological point and at that point you must switch from one relationship to another. And that's what we talk about when we talk about synthesis or togetherness in the Indian universe. That you are no longer dealing with simple answers and you are not dealing with togetherness. You are dealing with the most precise knowledge that a human being can have of environment. And to begin to look at environment as a model for you to use to create your political institutions to find your technology to identify who your relatives are and your social relations. A great many tribes developed psychoanalytic systems not on an astrological basis not on a single explanation basis such as Freud with sex, Adler with power, Jung with religion. But they had immensely complicated psychological systems where you would compare parts, different types of human personality with different animals. When we start talking about clan we are not simply talking about totem animal. When I say I am from the badger clan I mean the personality type that behaves like the badger behaves. The badger stays close to the ground to fundamental things, tries to go to the roots of things. Is a friend and an intimate relative of all things that he has all things that are close to the ground. Is not carried away by strong winds or is not fighting. Has certain enemies and certain allies. You can go to traditional people in I would say still a majority of Indian tribes. If the people know their tribal psychology intimately they can be in a room with you or be in contact with you for somewhat less than 24 hours and observe the way you behave and give you as complete a personality psychological personality rundown as any western European psychoanalyst or psychologist who has run you through a battery of tests. Simply by observing the way your whole body moves your expressions, your informalities and comparing that with a vast knowledge of how the different animals behave with respect to each other. Some of the best work now being done in the United States in terms of taking psychoanalytic systems and moving out of those Greek archetypes and moving into other things. There are a number of creative thinkers who are beginning to look at Iroquois, Cherokee and Pueblo psychoanalytic systems. They began to look at how these people handled dreams how they handled visions how they handled a great many other things. So when you talk about synthesis and togetherness you're talking about being more and more aware of what the relationships among different forms of life are. That's why in Indian society it's not a formal education that counts it is long standing service in a community long experiences with a relationship to the rest of the universe so that you have a tremendous backlog of these specific instances that you in your wisdom then can call on over and over again the concrete experiences human beings have gone through and apply those to different situations. There's a very good story with respect to this. In early Massachusetts one of the commissioners came out to talk with I think it was one of the Wampanoag chiefs about a land session and the young men of that tribe had been through the mission skills and they had some smattering of European knowledge and so they had the people wanting to sign a treaty had talked to a significant number of young people thought they had them pretty well convinced that this would be a good land sale and it seemed that the missionaries in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts were going to provide the tribe with a number of additional benefits than presently have in exchange for a session of some of this land and so the younger people were more or less in favor of this land session. The non-Indian commissioner who came out to sign this treaty was an elderly gentleman and he was bald-headed and he had a nice fringe of white hair on his head and he treated the chief of the Wampanoags as if this man were a little child because the chief had never been to any of the schools and he made this speech with kind of a demeaning undertone he got up and said we're both old men and many snows have fallen on our heads till our heads have now turned white and the breezes of many summers have blown through our hair and the chief said yes, he said the breezes of many summers and winters have blown through my hair and then he pointed at the white men and he said but they never blew my brains away like they did yours and needless to say that treaty was not consummated and that's one of the examples I want to leave you the wisdom of the old Indian and the wisdom of the old non-Indian but I think that what we begin to talk about in the Indian in the Indian tradition is this knowledge of what is related how things are related and the fact that you can't isolate any of these things the experiences that you have are experiences that are passed down now I'm not content to let that analogy drop there because what I see happening in the scope of human knowledge is a very good and positive movement that there are a great many people now taking what are basically semi-heretical thoughts with respect to traditional doctrines of knowledge as I have begun to pursue these I find that there is fantastic correlation between Indian oral traditions and the foremost thinkers particularly younger thinkers and thinkers that the establishment regards as heretical I see a whole new day coming when as western people begin to move away from the isolation of different disciplines that they're going to have to adopt an increasingly synthetic approach to knowledge and as they do this they're going to have to confront not simply the process of synthesis but what is that oral tradition that non-western peoples have had and you see if what you're doing with your oral tradition is reporting experiences and not interpreting them then you have to look at the oral traditions particularly I think the oral traditions of Indian tribes as an accurate report of events perhaps very spectacular events that happened in the history of those people now right away you're starting to move into extremely dangerous ground because it has been in the western tradition one of the tenets of religious faith that the literal events of the bible prove the absolute truth of western religions and when I tell you that there are a great many Indian traditions that support the literal truth of Noah's flood I'm not saying therefore that the Old Testament is true I'm not saying that the Indian religions are true I'm saying that once you put those things together then you can make statements on what people experienced at some time in planetary history and you have to be very careful to distinguish what happened from how people interpreted it I think that we are going to see in the next ten or fifteen years the framework and knowledge must come in confrontation with events of planetary scope planetary catastrophes or extremely unusual events or situations that so many societies on this planet experienced and we can show their historical truth although we may violently disagree with how the people interpreted it to give you an example if we want to talk about the literal nature of Noah's flood what we must hypothesize is that some extraterrestrial force or body brings one hell of a lot of water into the vicinity of this planet and dumps it and that is a physical historical event the fact that it rains on people in Palestine and they attribute it to their version of God is their business but does not deny the fact that it rained I say this because if you dump water on a planet what do you get in the higher reaches northern latitudes in some southern latitudes you get snow if you go into the traditions of North American Indians particularly people I would say from Montana, Wyoming on up you are talking in almost every instance about a tradition that says at one time there was snow boy was there snow there was so much snow that we didn't know what to do I mean we just about got frozen out not quite as bad as the snowstorm I've called down for tonight Joe but pretty close to it now what we've seen in the western approach is that because the Bible says there's a flood therefore it's going to rain every place and if it rains every place the testimony of non-western peoples testifies the validity of the western tradition but that's not what it testifies to it testifies to the fact that our planet experienced something and every society who remembered those things had a different interpretation but preserved the memory that something happened and when you begin to look at the Indian oral traditions not as the superstitions of savages who didn't know how to explain things but as the memories of people who lived in particular places at particular times and preserved the unusual then you are in for an eye-awakening experience because scattered all over North America particularly all over Canada are a great many rock paintings if you look carefully at these rock paintings you will find some of the most beloved characters in cartoon history you find Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, Tyrannosaurus all of those creatures we used to call dinosaurs the current controversy in the field of paleontology is fantastic over whether the dinosaurs were mammals or reptiles I don't know whether it will be settled one way or another I think the preponderance of the evidence for interpretation right now is the fact that they were probably mammals they were at least warm-blooded they gave birth to their young life and they traveled in groups you can go to a surprising number of Indian traditions in North America, particularly in Canada they talk about the water monster with the saw-toothed back who used to tip over canoes and it can only be one person that can be Stegosaurus I had great debates with anthropologists at the Smithsonian over this question before Adrian Desmond's book, The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs came out the sole response of the people I talked to in the Smithsonian they said, yeah, the Indian tradition sounds like a dinosaur but you see, the Indians say that the creature had red hair and dinosaurs don't have red hair therefore it couldn't be true Adrian Desmond points out in his book which all of you, I think, should really grapple with that most of these creatures that we think were big reptiles and lizards were warm-blooded and had hair he doesn't say red they're going to have to talk with some soon medicine men before they can finally perfect paleontology but you're getting very close identities here this is happening in a substantial number of fields I referred earlier that fields are isolated in disciplines but there's a corresponding movement backwards it's a movement in geology to correlate geology and mythology it's called geomythology some of their prize exhibits are Indian descriptions of when volcanoes exploded how they exploded, the type of land they covered what were the after effects there's tremendous work done today in what they call archaeoastronomy did ancient peoples have a knowledge of the stars? I've heard a number of lectures where they take the Indian medicine wheel and they say obviously a number of lectures where they take the Indian medicine wheel and they say obviously this was a computer designed to find the solstice I haven't asked any Indian medicine men what it was I suspect that some Indians, this is their last defiant act before they went on a reservation, went around and piled rocks in all kinds of ways but you even look at those remnants if you look back over the history of social science first there were religious monuments then there were athletic things now there are computers what are they going to be ten years from now? almost every relic that you find in the world today is now a computer of some kind Stonehenge is a computer and other things I think what we begin to finally talk about is where do people go in the future is that people of the Western European tradition have got to look back and recognize where they have come from insofar as their knowledge of the world originates I'm not saying that it's bad to isolate things but if all you do is isolate things you're getting yourself into trouble you end up setting goals and those goals are rarely correlated with the circumstances that you're in you end up saying we had to destroy the village in order to save it that's the logic that eventually results from that we had a secretary of the interior some years back went to Pyramid Lake, Nevada talked with the Paiute Indians about the problem they had of stabilizing the water level of the lake so they could build marinas and set up economic development and wrote an astounding report saying the best way to stabilize the water level of the lake was to drain the lake and when you drain a lake what you've got is a lake bed, not a lake it never occurred to this man that seeking the single answer and setting it up in an isolated situation the course that he proposed to use to solve the problem in fact destroyed not only the problem but the whole situation and consequently I think you get to look at how human knowledge has been formed in the West and you look at the fact that it really is provincial it's very efficient but it has not given respect to non-Western traditions and is badly in need of the corrective input that non-Western traditions can offer and you get a look at these other traditions in the understanding that they were not simple and superstitious proto-scientific explanations of the world the common interpretation I know some of you psychologists in the audience may disagree but the common interpretation of non-Western people is that they were very fearful of nature and therefore made up all these stories to explain their relationship to nature but if you look at the facts of the situation that is simply not true there have been white men lost in North America there have been blacks lost in North America there have been Mexicans lost in North America whoever heard of an Indian getting lost in North America? the Indians were at home in North America they didn't have anything to be frightened of if I tell Indians sometimes you've got to go out of your way to understand the trauma the white men went through as they crossed the continent because they didn't know what was on the other side of the mountain and our grandfathers sat on their ponies on the hills they knew every creek and rock for thousands of miles around there's no way in the world they could have got lost and here are the whites that don't even know which way is north trying to get across this continent I said no wonder they got frightened and shot at us no wonder there was conflict because how could people take covered wagons and be lost for six months? tell them we lost no wonder they're frightened I said you've got to recognize all those things were part of history so the attitude when you deal with Indians in the oral tradition you're dealing with superstitious people it is simply not true it was not us who came to Europe seeking the fountain of youth or the seven cities of gold it was you people coming over here who thought you were going to find that I think the first thing that we have to talk about really is is lending respect to the different traditions the different ways people have looked at the world their different experiences and then begin to talk about interpretations people have given things I think what you talk about when you talk about the Indian traditions the personalized forces of nature is not that these are superstitious characterizations this is the only way Indians had in oral tradition to describe the intensity of something and when they say the thunders were angry they're talking about winds and thunder and lightning qualitatively different than anything they had ever experienced because when they phrased it in those terms all of you are married who are married and have been in a domestic fight know that there is a certain intensity that can only be described in human terms I think that is what Indian people are talking about in those traditions so I think there is a tremendous synthesis of knowledge and understanding in peoples on the very horizon of where we are today I think we have to be very careful and very precise and very responsible in achieving that horizon I think within 30 years hardly any of us will recognize knowledge as we used to know it the great many things we've been taught will simply have vanished as fields come back together as knowledge overcomes the isolation that it's been kept in I think to finally close with Whitehead there is a single requirement that Whitehead mentions that I think is very important and that is he says it requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious and I submit we have to develop unusual minds to look at data that we have looked at so long in an isolated sense the obvious data of our knowledge and ask the right questions is this knowledge provincial? has it been frozen by our culture in time? is it in danger of being frozen in place? recognize the need to transcend this provincialism and create knowledge that truly belongs to all human beings I do not see how that can be accomplished without giving respect to North American Indian traditions and bringing them into the process as fully equal partners in developing it so I thank you very much for having me here Thank you