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native
Native
Native organisms participate in a local ecosystem. The criteria of “native-ness” ultimately comes down to deeply integrated, reciprocal relationship. Native species have many relationships with their ecology. For instance, in an ecology’s food web a native species would have many edges connecting it; an invasive species would have very few. By contrast, one of the primary reasons that invasive species wreak so much havoc lies in the overpopulation that follows from them lacking natural predators. Of course, native relationships extend beyond mere predation, and involve all kinds of relationships.
Becoming Native
Sheridan & Longboat use the term “old growth” to refer to native culture and mindset; it provides an apt comparison. Old growth forests reach a state of dynamic equilibrium with regards to ecological complexity. Old growth minds in old growth cultures achieve similar stability, reaching a level of saturation in their relationships with the land. The process of becoming native, like the process of ecological succession, takes time, and involves mostly the formation of a network of relationships knitting everything together.
Some theories posit that the latest wave of human migration into the Americas prior to the historical period, the one that brought the Inuit and related peoples in the Arctic, occurred just 1,000 years ago. So, when Columbus reached the New World, they had lived in North America for as long as Europeans have now, about five centuries. Yet, while no one would mistake the Inuit for an invasive culture, by the same token, we would face a difficult challenge in trying to assert that European-derived Americans have become native.
Invasive species can become native over time, usually involving thousands of years of adaptation as they adapt to local conditions, and the local ecological community adapts and incorporates them. We have seen many of the invasive species brought over from Europe, like dandelion, readily adapted into American ecologies, for example (though certainly, more recently introduced species still cause considerable disturbance). Humans, however, often use their culture to accelerate the process of becoming native. Language, art, music and other cultural expressions can weave a human culture into a local ecology more rapidly; humans can learn how to act in an ecology and how to relate to it more quickly.
This leaves us with two historical anomolies in our previous comparison: first, how the Inuit became native so quickly, and second, how modern Americans have remained so invasive. In both cases, cultural priorities answer the question. The Inuit and related groups used their cultures to become native more quickly. The Koyukon language, for instance, learned new words from local bird songs. By the same token, modern Americans have used their culture to actively resist becoming native. Rather than adapting to the local ecology, they changed the local ecology, insisted on carrying on English traditions, clothing and housing adapted to English conditions, and generally treated as abhorrent any consideration of adapting to the ecology, rather than enacting the essential Puritan mythos of eradicating the demon-haunted wilderness and “civilizing” it.
Harriot’s narrative reveals how the English organized the report of the senses. First, he explicitly rejected the holistic naturalism of the Indians. ... Second, the English did not regard themselves as part of nature, or regard nature as simultaneously material and spiritual. Eyewitness testimony from English voyagers to America conclusively demonstrates that the English travelers and settlers were overwhelmed by the novelty of what they sensed. William Bradford, elected governor of the Plymouth colony in 1621, feared the novelty: “What could they see here but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men—and multitudes there might be of them they knew not … all things stand upon them with a weather-beaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue.” (Hoffer, p. 40)
Bradford presents a typical early English view of the wilderness, and though modern times have brought conflicting notions to bear on that word, the emphatic cultural declaration that the division between humanity and culture on one hand, and wilderness and nature on the other, must remain inviolate, rings as clearly today as it did in Bradford’s time. Even modern conservationist movement carry with them a basic view that humans do not belong in nature; in the words of the U.S. Wilderness Acto f 1964, that wilderness means “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
Becoming Traditional
This chapter is interested in the language, thoughts, and actions of people who are, to one degree or another, ‘traditional’…the possibility of ‘becoming traditional’ may seem contradictory, but even prior to contact with Europeans…tradition was always something aimed for and lived towards rather than simply inherited. (Harvey, p. 34)
Native cultures recognize the land itself as the source of tradition, and the people who live in it—including other-than-human people—earn the right to enact parts of that tradition, and carry the duty to make sure that they carry out those parts. Native people often speak of “becoming traditional” as an on-going process that they can never entirely perfect, but nonetheless sets the goal of native life. Becoming native means entering into this process of becoming traditional to the traditions of a particular, local ecology; learning the language, traditions, mythology, art and music of that land, and so on.
Modernity’s invention of imagination as an anthropocentric quality dismisses those who comprehend that their very being manifests stories, ideas, and life forces. Those who know that they are composed of and by these beings and places also realize those beings are long Indigenous to the spiritual, psychological, temporal, and spatial dimensions of traditional landscapes. That is why when things happen only in traditional landscapes, they are understood as needing to happen there. Because those places possess mind and those places orchestrate psychological and spiritual ecologies wherein ideas live simultaneously visible and invisible lives. This does not deprive spiritual ecology from being volitional; instead, it humbly recognizes more-than-human nature’s psychoactive reach. If the qualities modernity discounts as imaginative to distinguish them from putative realism were undertaken within ecosystem logic, spiritual ecology would be revealed as a living entity of reconciliation and balance between mind and Creation for Creation comprehends and encompasses everything. And just as stories that want to be told find their tellers, the expression across species diversifies itself by thinking in the consciousness of all beings. One need only keep company with coyotes, wolves, or foxes to know this with certainty. Yet as the experience of biodiversity wanes, so wanes the capacity for thinking with nature and beyond species-specific consciousness.That reciprocity and ecological capacity was deemed to be imaginary only after it had reaped capital punishment as paganism or witchcraft. (Sheridan & Longboat)
Perception includes not just physical sensation, but also the assignment of meaning to sensory input. European systems of thought see this as an internal process, but not all cultures agree on that point. Among oral cultures, meaning arises from social exchange—often with human persons, but not exclusively.
[T]he Indians’ perception was communal—individual Indians heard, saw, smelled, touched, and tasted, but meanings emerged from collective deliberation. ... The communal assignment of meaning was a social act. For example, Indian shamans healed the sick utilizing shared sensory experience. (Hoffer, p. 34)
Traditions like the songlines of aboriginal Australian cultures, or the ‘agodzaahi stories of the Western Apache, relate to a storied landscape. Geological formations, plant communities, and other features of the landscape form a kind of literature in the oral universe, one that oral peoples can read as easily as literate peoples read a book. Australian aborigines recite the appropriate songlines as they travel, sometimes reciting fabulously long epic poems as they cross the countryside. This feat should seem no more miraculous than our ability to recite War & Peace perfectly, word for word, with nothing but the book open in front of us. When Aborigines ride in trucks, they sometimes sing the same songs—only much faster, like trying to read a book as you merely flip through it.
From this perspective, a rootless life, without connection to the living, storied landscape, is the intellectual, emotional and psychological equivalent of inbreeding, leaving the invasive culture with an extraordinarily limited viewpoint—that of only a single species—and disconnected from the ecological context of all relationship. Without reference to the non-human world, human intellect can only talk to itself.
It should be easy, now, to understand the destitution of indigenous, oral persons who have been forcibly displaced from their traditional lands. The local earth is, for them, the very matrix of discursive meaning; to force them from their native ecology (for whatever political or economic purpose) is to render them speechless—or to render their speech meaningless—to dislodge them from the very ground of coherence. It is, quite simply, to force them out of their mind. (Abram)
Since tradition comes from the land, the goal of “becoming traditional” makes more sense; it means learning the traditions from the land, and properly guarding and enacting them. Iroquoian languages call trees by names derived by the sound of wind flowing through them; place names have a quality so pleasing that some native people will simply repeat them constantly, because saying them feels good, but in almost all cases, native peoples see place names as something that they learn, never something they assign. Compare this to the attitude towards arbitrary names found in invasive languages like English, or Adam naming the animals in Genesis 2:19. Native cultures relate to a landscape and learn the proper names; invasive cultures seek to dominate a landscape and assign names to it.
Integration
In the native mind, a statement like the famous Lakota declaration, “All our relations,” went much farther than some warm, fuzzy, utopian principle. It declared their fundamental worldview, as essential to the native mind as a statement like, “The universe operates according to knowable, natural laws,” might appear to the modern mind. Just as a modern person feels threatened and bewildered by something that natural laws cannot explain, and feels pressured to explain it in terms of knowable, natural laws, so, too, do natives feel threatened by things that defy the fundamental matrix of relationship.
We know about cultures that feared things new or alien, and the response typically came in the form of eradicating the offending element. That solution did not occur very often in native cultures; they did feel great anxiety at something that did not relate, eradicating it would not relieve that anxiety; only integration could do that.
The Indians managed sensory novelties by fitting them into holistic frameworks of natural behavior. No thing stood alone, just as no sensation existed by itself. Perception demanded integration. Whatever could not fit into the whole must be outside of nature, hence dangerous. Just as the nonconformity of an individual Indian imperilled his kin, so the ill-fitting cognition endangered the people. (Hoffer, p. 37)
Initiation played an important role for this reason. Initiation created relationship and integrated the previously unrelated into a web of relationship.
Perception
We might assume that native humans, while they might think and feel differently, would nonetheless fundamentally perceive the world the same as we do, but such assumptions do not hold up. The sense of relationship extends to perception itself.
For the Native American, making sense of what was seen and heard was a skill taught to children as soon as they could walk and mastered in hard schools of hunting and raiding. Watching the Indians process sensory novelties, Europeans came to believe that the Indians’ senses were keener than Europenas’. As one English settler in New England recalled, in 1637 he had “observed that the savages have the sense of seeing so far beyond any of our nation … in the sense of smelling they have great perfection.” (Hoffer, p. 33)
We tend to dismiss claims like this today as “Noble Savage” mythology, but we know how native peoples achieve this, not through acute physical senses, but by sensing differently.
There are beings, many of them human beings, that see, smell, hear, remember, sense more than we do. This is not a genetic accident, like being taller than six-foot-five or having an IQ of 150 or high cheekbones. This is a matter of culture. The human beings who maintain these hyper-refined senses are hunter-gatherers. Their impressive powers of perception have been noted and detailed by just about every student of hunter-gatherer groups. It is not only that they sense more than the rest of us do, but that they do so in a qualitatively different fashion. In his book The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram leans on philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of synaesthesia to explain Abram’s own experience with hunter-gatherer perceptions. The term “synaesthesia” describes something every child knows. In fact, Merleau-Ponty believes that we have “unlearned how to see, hear, and, generally speaking, to feel.” Synaesthesia is the mental function (or suite of functions) in which the senses run together, in which colors have a feel to them and tastes have a color. We speak of a loud shirt, of bright music, yet how often do we sense reality this way? For Abram and other observers, the phenomenon marks a total immersion in sense, when the observer is no longer in control, no longer separating and analyzing sight, sound, and texture, and becomes a part of his sensual surroundings. That is, the observer calls forth the world. (Manning)
Natives may have difficulty, then, disentangling their senses and generally applying the kind of critical approach we often do when “doubting our senses,” but in exchange for that fallback, they gain the ability to fundamentally feel with their whole bodies, allowing them to sense with far greater acuteness.
Studies of modern oral cultures, including those of the Mbuti of the African Rain Forests, the Inuit of Alaska, the Saami of Finland, and the Maori of New Zealand, suggest how peoples living in close accord with nature integrate the various aspects of the senses. They process the sensory in its totality, with the result that the sense data “possess” the observer. The hunter can mimic the natural sounds and see the almost invisible trails of their prey. The wind and the odors it brings become part of this dynamic whole. The senses capture relationships, not objects. Space and form are not abstract calculations of fixed measure but part of living mental maps. Re-creations of such holistic experiences in song and dance were not artistic performances, but literal extensions of the sense data itself. (Hoffer, pp. 33-34)
Modern tracker Tom Brown, Jr. also talks about “concentric circles,” which also played a significant role in native perception. Intimate familiarity with bird songs, animal calls, and the general relationships of their native ecology also meant that native humans could rely on those things to extend their senses. A human might not see a recent kill a half mile away, but a bird overhead might. By understanding the bird’s calls and songs, the human essentially co-opts the bird’s sight. The entire land around him becomes an extended set of his own senses.
See also
Further Reading
Books
- Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World.
- Harvey, Graham. Animism: Respecting the Living World.
- Hoffer, Charles Peter. Sensory Worlds in Early America.
- Manning, Richard. Against the Grain: How Agriculture Hijacked Civilization.
Online Articles
- Sheridan, Joe & Roronhiakewen “He Clears the Sky” Dan Longboat. “The Haudenosaunee Imagination and the Ecology of the Sacred ”