Required Reading 12

Relativity, Relatedness, and Reality
From SPIRITS AND REASON: THE VINE DELORIA, JR READER

WE ARE ALL RELATIVES

A positive by-product of the entrenchment of relativity in the nonmathematical sciences and disciplines has been the willingness of people to look at non-Western cultures and give them a measure of respect for their knowledge of the natural world. In a previous article I reviewed the tendency of pioneer thinkers to begin to bring separate fields of inquiry together by merging ideas and concepts and in effect create new sciences that weld together the bodies of knowledge that should not have been separated in the first place. Strangely, there has been very little attention paid to Indian methodologies for gathering data, and, consequently, the movement is primarily an ad hoc, personal preference way of gathering new ideas and attempting to weld them to existing bodies of knowledge. We cannot expect fundamental change in the manner in which Western scientists interpret their data until massive changes in individual items occur and a paradigm shift is forced by the failure of the established doctrines in the field to explain the materials.

The Indian perspective of the natural world is not subject to this limitation because it already has a fundamental principle of interpretation/observation that pervades everything that Indians think or experience. Thus verification of existing knowledge and the addition of new knowledge is simply a matter of adding to the already considerable body of information that Indians possess. An unfortunate aspect of the Indian knowledge is that so much data have been lost in the last century as Indians have been prevented from roaming freely over their traditional homelands, gathering plants and animals for food and ceremonies, and performing those ceremonies that ensured the prosperity of the earth and its life-forms. Nevertheless, the information that we formerly had remains available to us if we can return to the traditional manner in which we related to lands and life.

The Indian principle of interpretation/observation is simplicity itself: "We are all relatives. Most Indians hear this phrase thousands of times a year as they attend or perform ceremonies, and for many Indians without an ongoing ritual life, the phrase seems to be simply a liturgical blessing that includes all other forms of life in human ceremonial activities. But this phrase is very important as a practical methodological tool for investigating the natural world and drawing conclusions about it that can serve as guides for understanding nature and living comfortably within it.

"We are all relatives" when taken as a methodological tool for obtaining knowledge means that we observe the natural world by looking for relationships between various things in it. That is to say, everything in the natural world has relationships with every other thing and the total set of relationships makes up the natural world as we experience it. This concept is simply the relativity concept as applied to a universe that people experience as alive and not as dead or inert. Thus Indians knew that stones were the perfect beings because they were self-contained entities that had resolved their social relationships and possessed great knowledge about how every other entity, and every species, should live. Stones had mobility but did not need to use it. Every other being had mobility and needed, in some specific manner, to use it in relationships.

IF YOU THINK ABOUT IT, YOU WILL SEE THAT IT IS TRUE

The wise person will realize his or her own limitations and act with some degree of humility until he or she has sufficient knowledge to act with confidence. Every bit of information must be related to the general framework of moral interpretation as it is personal to them and their community. No body of knowledge exists for its own sake outside the moral framework of understanding. We are, in the truest sense possible, creators or co-creators with the higher powers, and what we do has immediate importance for the rest of the universe.

This attitude extends to data and experiences far beyond the immediate physical environment, including the stars, other worlds and galaxies, the other higher and lower planes of existence, and the places of higher and lower spiritual activities. If many Indian legends appear to be geocentric, to be restricted to the conditions existing on this earth, it is because they are formulated in this manner to make the transmission of information easier. But there are many accounts of people traveling to other worlds, of people becoming birds and animals, living with them, and experiencing the great variety of possible modes of existence.

In the moral universe all activities, events, and entities are related, and consequently it does not matter what kind of existence an entity enjoys, for the responsibility is always there for it to participate in the continuing creation of reality.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE TRIBAL UNIVERSE

The Plains Indians arranged their knowledge in a circular format - which is to say, there were no ultimate terms or constituents of their universe, only sets of relationships that sought to describe phenomena. No concept could stand alone in the way that time, space, and matter once stood as absolute entities in Western science. All concepts not only had content but were themselves composed of the elements of other ideas to which they were related. Thus it was possible to begin with one idea, thoroughly examine it by relating it to other concepts, and arrive back at the starting point with the assurance that a person could properly interpret what constituted the idea and how it might manifest itself in concrete physical experiences.

The purpose of such an arrangement was to be certain that all known aspects of something would be included in the information that people possessed and considered when making decisions and reaching conclusions. There were, therefore, almost limitless ways of describing snow, rain, wind, or other natural phenomena, as each particular manifestation of the general concept needed to be described accurately and placed properly within a spectrum of the possibilities of realization. Indian languages, and the Dakota/Lakota language that the Western Sioux used, had a very large vocabulary that enabled people to be specific in remembering and describing the ways that a concept could be realized within human experience.

The living universe requires mutual respect among its members, and this suggests that a strong sense of individual identity and self is .. dominant characteristic of the world as we know it. "The willingness of entities to allow others to fulfill themselves, and the refusal of any entity to intrude thoughtlessly on another, must be the operative principle of this universe." Consequently, self-knowledge and self-discipline are high values of behavior. Only by allowing innovation by every entity can the universe move forward and create the future. This creative participation is always personal and has an aspect of novelty.

Respect in the American Indian context does not mean the worship of other forms of life but involves two attitudes. One attitude is the acceptance of self-discipline by humans and their communities to act responsibly toward other forms of life. The other attitude is to seek to establish communications and covenants with other forms of life on a mutually agreeable basis.

Developing responsible self-discipline is not difficult, but it cannot be done in a society in which equality is perceived as sameness and conformity. Sitting Bull, looking with disdain at the white man's educational style, remarked that "it is not necessary that eagles be crows." We would do well to cast a critical glance at our ideas and expectations of democracy, brotherhood, and equality in the light of the demand for self-discipline.

We want to have certain benefits from the physical world. In seeking something for ourselves, we must recognize that obtaining what we want at the expense of other forms of life or of the earth itself is shortsighted and disrupts the balance that the whole fabric of life requires. Instead of the predatory jungle that the Anglo-Saxon imagination conjures up to analogize life, in which the most powerful swallows up the weak and unprotected, life is better understood as a tapestry or symphony in which each player has a specific part or role to play. We must be in our proper place and we must play our role at the appropriate moment. Mutual respect in many ways is a function of a strong sense of personal and communal identity, and it is significant that most of the tribes described themselves as "the people," a distinct group with dearly defined values and patterns of behavior.

EVERYTHING IS RELATED

A living universe within which events and actions have moral content necessarily suggests that all things are related. Not only is everything related, but it also participates in the moral content of events, so responsibility for maintaining the harmony of life falls equally on all creatures.

This principle of relatedness appears most often in the religious realm in the phrase "All My Relatives," which is used as an opening invocation and closing benediction for ceremonies. All My Relatives, believed by many people, including many Indians, to be merely a devout religious sentiment, also has a secular purpose, which is to remind us of our responsibility to respect life and to fulfill our covenantal duties. But few people understand that the phrase also describes the epistemology of the Indian worldview, providing the methodological basis for the gathering of information about the world.

Western science uses various methods for determining its truths. One of the most common methods is the experimental application of previously derived theories to new kinds of phenomena and the subsequent verification or modification of the theory. But modern science is interested primarily in the physical world and its structure, the search for the ultimate material constituent of the physical universe having been a constant quest since Democritus developed his theory of the atom.

American Indians, understanding that the universe consisted of living entities, were interested in learning how other forms of life behaved, for they saw that every entity had a personality and could exercise a measure of free will and choice. Consequently, Indian people carefully observed phenomena in order to determine what relationships existed between and among the various "peoples" of the world. Their understanding of relationships provided the Indians with the knowledge necessary to live comfortably in the physical world, and to not unduly intrude into the lives of other creatures.

If we could imagine a world in which human concerns were not the primary value, and we observed nature in the old Indians' way, we would observe a plant (or a bird or an animal) for a prolonged period of time. We would note what time of year the plant began to grow and green out; when it blossomed; when it bore fruit; how many fruits or seeds it produced; what animals and birds ate the fruit and when during the maturation process they appeared; what colors its leaves and fruits took on during the various parts of the growing season; whether it shed its leaves and needles and what birds and animals made use of them; and many other kinds of behavior of the plant. From these observations we would come to understand both the plant and its life stages. By remembering the birds and animals who made use of the plant-and when they did so during the calendar year and when in terms of their own growth cycles - we would have a reasonable idea of how useful the plant would be for us.

This knowledge, however, would still be general and would need further refining. At certain times some men and women would receive, either in dreams or in visions, very precise knowledge on other ways in which the plant could be used by humans - information that could not have been obtained through experiment or trial and error use. Some knowledge was so precise that it might only be needed once in a human lifetime. And of course tribes often shared their knowledge of plants or even traded medicinal plants back and forth across large distances so that the knowledge of plants took on an encyclopedic aspect.

ALL RELATIONSHIPS ARE HISTORICAL

Part of the experience of life is the passage of time, the fact of personal growth, and the understanding of oneself produced by reflective memory processes. As the universe was known by the Indians to be alive, it followed that all entities had some memory and enjoyed the experience of the passage of time. Thus relationships were understood as enduring in time and were characterized by the same kinds of disruptive historic events as we see in human history. All covenants wore out and changes seemed to occur in the same way they do in human experience. Thus plants might gather together for a long time but then suddenly disappear, beginning to grow in different areas or adapting themselves to new lands and climatic conditions. We call this kind of change evolution today, but the old Indians did not see it that way. They knew that any changes that occurred were already inherent in the creature, or within its potentiality for change - a possibility that some Western scientists are now beginning to accept.

Knowledge of the historical relationships can be exceedingly useful in modern science in providing guidance for ecological restoration projects. The appearance or disappearance of a certain plant can be used to predict similar behavior by related plants and animals. We must note, however, that the relationships established by the Indians are personal relationships between and among other forms of life, and therefore they do not necessarily follow the definitions established by Western scientific systems of classifications. Thus the characteristics that modern botanists and biologists use to define species and genera are not comparable in many respects to the Indian classification by personality types. A good judgment of the accuracy of Indian knowledge and Western scientific knowledge might be made by allowing Indians and scientists to restore similar tracts of land according to different conceptions of what kinds of life can be sustained on the land.

SPACE DETERMINES THE NATURE OF RELATIONSHIPS

Although the preliminary discussion of the living universe has emphasized spiritual/personality values, the idea that everything is related has definite space/time relevance. Here perhaps we begin to speak mysteriously and vaguely when we try to explain concepts. For most forms of life there appears to be a definite pattern of spatial existence. With plants it is not difficult to see that they are restricted to certain locations, although in fact they can move if they so desire. Most locations of plants can be easily explained by reference to soil, climate, and availability of water. But many medicine men spoke of the places that the various entities were destined to occupy, and of the beginning of a world age as a time when everything was in its proper place.

Some of the language appears to be quasi-Aristotelian in that they attributed a sense of purpose to an entity without having evidence of it. But because each entity has a set of relationships with other entities, all of these relationships were established in a particular geometric pattern and manifested themselves in spatial arrangements. Thus people became concerned when a plant or animal was found in a place where it should not be.

There were basically three major manifestations of space in the Sioux universe: the ceremonial directions; the sacred places that define meaning for the life around them; and the particular place that each species, including particular groups of humans, comes to occupy and live in.

1) The Ceremonial Directions: These were the most abstract expression of the idea of space. Each entity, and by extension each place, was the center of the universe - thinking that fits well with scientific relativity theory. In ceremonies the object was to draw into participation all the powerful elements of the cosmos. So the sacred pipe was offered to the four directions, to the sky and the earth, and acknowledgment was made that at every ceremonial the center of the ritual action is the seventh direction - which is the "here and now." As distance was not regarded as a meaningful obstacle when spiritual powers were invoked, each ceremony began with a representation of the whole cosmos, whether it was a vision quest pit, a sweat lodge, the bowl of the pipe itself, or a Sun Dance arbor.

The object of ceremonial is to make whole again what has now become disassociated and chaotic. In order to accomplish this goal, all possible elements of the universe must be brought within a harmony; sacrifices must be made to heal the injuries of each party, and a new beginning must be made.

Some observers are correct when they describe a ceremony as "world-renewing," as the object of ceremony is to cleanse the participants and offer them a new beginning. But they are wrong when they interpret renewal as simply symbolic in the Western sense of representation. Without the four directions, in the Sioux understanding, the world would not have its physical structure; sky and earth are necessary for human and animal existence, and the center itself represents all possible times taking place simultaneously. In practical terms, relationships are renewed and restored and must be conducted in accordance with the structure of the human universe of the directions once again.

2) Sacred Places: The Sioux also understood the earth to have special places of power and significance, and these places were regarded as sacred in the sense that they required respect and human self-discipline. The Black Hills, for example, were sacred because they were at the center of the Sioux universe (as represented by Bear Butte on the eastern edge of the hills) and because they were set aside by the higher powers as a sanctuary for the birds and animals. Scattered in many different locations throughout the Sioux lands were certain other places where revelations had been given to the people or they had experienced a spiritual presence.

3) Particular Places: Finally there was the idea that particular places were designed for particular species, and, in human terms, for particular peoples. Long ago, even before kinship relations were established, a Sioux man had a dream about the great inland hills toward which the people were supposed to migrate. In the course of tribal history, the people wandered through the southeastern United States, into Pennsylvania, and west toward the Great Lakes, until finally they came to the Black Hills where they were destined to live. After finding the proper place, migrations ceased and the people took on ceremonial duties for particular locations.

The importance of finding the proper living space is illustrated by plants and animals. In the Pacific Northwest, for example, tribes would share a river and catch salmon at a bewildering variety of locations, from the mouth of the river to the final spawning grounds. Because the chemistry of the salmon was changing as the fish went upstream, different ways of preserving the catch were used at each location. Each place determined the various life-forms it would support and these creatures then worked cooperatively at their chosen location.

The implications for Western science of the idea of a special place are tremendous. Knowing the sets of relationships between the various plants and animals enables one to predict what kinds of species will be present in a healthy environment, and so failure to locate a species in a particular location will alert people about the condition of the place. Within that place, however, one will also find the most precise examples of species as the place itself affects things.

TIME DETERMINES THE MEANING OF RELATIONSHIPS

Time is a complicated concept in a living universe. The basic pattern seems to be that of growth processes, which is to say that time has qualitative packets of quanta that are regulated by the amount of time it takes an organism or entity to complete a step in maturation. Thus all entities are regulated by the seasons, and their interaction has a superior season of its own that encompasses their relationship and has a moral purpose. Tribes broke human patterns down into several steps: pre-birth, babies, children, youths, adults, mature adults, and elders. The idea of the "seven generations" was commonly used by the Plains tribes to describe the relationships existing within a genetic family. If a family was respectable and responsible, its members would be granted old age and a person could live long enough to see and know his great-grandparents and his great-grandchildren. Thus generations, not decades, were the measure of human life.

As there was interspecies communication between humans and other forms of life, people also became aware of larger cycles of time, which can be described as the time jointly shared by all forms of life within a geographic area. This time line seems to have been dominated by the idea of vocation and/or the idea of the fullness of time. In some undetermined manner, the universe had a direction to it: Every entity had a part to play in the creation of the future, and human beings had a special vocation in which they initiated, at the proper time, new relationships and events.

In the experience of the vision quest, people were given the basic outlines of their lives but not specific predictions as to when, in chronological time, certain events might occur. During the ceremonial experiences, as the years passed, humans would be told when and how the larger cosmic time was moving, and would at times be urged to hurry or counseled to wait until conditions were right for them to play their particular role.

There was a profound sense of determinacy within this aspect of time, but there was also flexibility, so that sequences of action that people knew were to take place did not necessarily have to occur in a manner that people understood or could anticipate. This sense of a determined sequence of specific future actions was seen as evidence that the earth was a living being and that smaller entities were her children and subject to the larger motions of the universe.

PHILOSOPHY

On more everyday levels, there was the recognition that over a long period of time human behavior itself changed as the people perceived, or had revealed to them through ceremonials, the occasional behavior of other life-forms that indicated the depth of power contained within them. So, in general, it was recognized that not all information is available to us immediately; some things may simply come into being during the course of time.

Medicine men taught that plants and animals do not become extinct - they go away and do not come back until the location is being treated properly. This belief is being verified today in ecological restoration projects. Lands abused for generations, if treated properly and with respect, will see a flowering of plants that once lived there and that were believed to be extinct, and the birds and animals related to those plants will return. It is worth nothing that the plants return first, then the animals, and finally the birds. (Thus antelope have returned to some portions of the Dakota plains, but prairie chickens have still not made a complete return.)

Western science is committed to the doctrine of evolution and consequently sees changes in plants, birds, and animals as responding to the passage of time and changes in the environment. Although science cannot adequately explain the mechanism of evolution, it regards changes as permanent. The Sioux traditional people say that the important thing is the spirit of the creature; that it can and does change aspects of its physical shape in order to deal with change but that basically it remains the same entity. As the Indian interest is in the spirit or soul of the other creature and not in its morphology, some substitutions can be made in ceremonial objects, provided that the substituted materials have the same spiritual relationship to people that the former objects had.

In outlining the Sioux knowledge of the physical universe, and attempting to demonstrate the principles that govern it, we are able to see new applications and interpretations of our existing knowledge. We are also able to reach out and begin to bring emotion and logic back together again. This synthesis is necessary if we are to make sense of our world and our experiences.

ETHNOSCIENCE AND INDIAN REALITIES

Anthropological literature often suggests that our ancestors spent a great deal of time arranging their information about the world in a systematic fashion so as to gain an advantage and later control of natural forces and processes. According to this functional narrative, primitive peoples were able to apprehend the complex concepts of modem science that were inherent in the accidental events of their lives, and, having once grasped a scientific principle, they moved steadily toward the modern understanding of it. Eventually one branch of the human family, the Indo-European peoples, overcame their superstitions and developed a technology that enabled them to achieve mastery over the rest of humankind and to order nature to do their bidding.

In this scenario the knowledge possessed by tribal peoples and the non-industrial societies represents a few valid insights and a considerable number of superstitions that represent earlier stages of scientific endeavor. Western science can examine tribal knowledge to locate interesting tidbits and insights and use these ideas to enhance its own activities, expanding the scope of experiments or increasing the applicability of its existing doctrines and dogmas. In addition, tribal knowledge is often regarded by many educated people as simply "fun" or "quaint" because it is so exotic, suggesting great mysteries that we have not yet unraveled. Very few people accord this knowledge the status it deserves and hardly anyone can articulate the principles that lie at its foundation.

A most encouraging sign today is the number of young Indians who are coming to respect and learn the ancient tribal knowledge. Most discouraging, however, is the rate at which tribal elders who have this knowledge are passing away. These two curves may well intersect in the immediate future, leaving tribes considerably poorer in their ability to deal adequately with their natural resources and to continue their ceremonial life.

Today we should make a concerted effort to gather traditional tribal wisdom into a coherent body of knowledge that can be passed on to the next generation of Indians.

I applaud the efforts of the generation below me to begin to give voice and substance to the revival of tribal knowledge of nature, and I certainly do not want to inhibit the writing and speaking they are now doing. I do think, however, that the effort to preserve and revive the tribal traditions must be placed in the most significant intellectual context possible. I believe firmly that tribal ways represent a complete and logical alternative to Western science. If tribal wisdom is to be seen as a valid intellectual discipline, it will be because it can be articulated in a wide variety of expository forms and not simply in the language and concepts that tribal elders have always used to express themselves.

TRIBAL INSIGHT

One of the difficulties today in speaking about tribal knowledge is the tendency to suggest that when traditional teachings correspond to the findings or present beliefs of Western science, then traditional wisdom is validated. It is comforting to see a reasonable "match" of data and conclusions, but why does that correspondence necessarily validate the tribal insight rather than the other way around7 Why do we think that Western science is the criterion of truth and accuracy? Why is tribal knowledge described as striving on an ad hoc basis to rival the information obtained by Western science?

In answering these questions, we should look at the epistemology of Western science and tribal traditions. The first question to be asked, prior to a comparison of the results, is how the two groups gathered information. What makes the data that each group considers in making decisions about the natural world reliable, either in their own eyes or in the view of impartial observers? The initial approach to experience, the process by which we identify data as important or irrelevant, determines how we choose to connect experiences and facts. We formulate the subsequent patterns of arrangement and interpretation that we impose on experience after this initial identification.

In an epistemological sense, there is no question that the tribal method of gathering information is more sophisticated and certainly more comprehensive than Western science. In most tribal traditions, no data are discarded as unimportant or irrelevant. Indians consider their own individual experiences, the accumulated wisdom of the community that has been gathered by previous generations, their dreams, visions, and prophecies, and any information received from birds, animals, and plants as data that must be arranged, evaluated, and understood as a unified body of knowledge. This mixture of data from sources that the Western scientific world regards as highly unreliable and suspect produces a consistent perspective on the natural world. It is seen by tribal peoples as having wide application. Knowledge about plants and birds can form the basis of ethics, government, and economics as well as provide a means of mapping a large area of land. In fact, tribal knowledge systematically mixes facts and experiences that Western science would separate by artificial categories. In tribal systems there is never a sense of disorientation within the tribal understanding of the world.

Western science, on the other hand, discards anything that has a remote relationship with the subjective experiences of human beings and other forms of life. The essence of science is to adopt the pretense that the rest of the natural world is without intelligence and knowledge and operates primarily as if it were a machine. Dreams and spiritual experience are thought to be illusory or delusive and cannot be made a part of the scientific method of gathering data. At the deepest level of thought in Western science, the greatest thinkers rely heavily on intuition, dreams, and visions. But this phenomenon is regarded as evidence of the individual genius of the scientist and not as data derived from external sources or drawn from a reservoir of subjective information available to all individuals.

TWO WAYS OF KNOWING

Let us examine the two approaches to gathering information and transforming it into usable knowledge. The Indian understands dreams, visions, and intra species communications, when they are available, as a natural part of human experience comparable in many respects to the mundane daily experiences that constitute his life. Even though data come in a highly emotional context, the task is to make sense of the experience or withhold judgment on its meaning until a sufficient number of similar experiences reveal the pattern of meaning that is occurring. The Indian arrangement of knowledge holds in memory, individually or collectively/communally, many experiences of a similar type. Wisdom and the number of specific cases increases with age. As a person gets older he or she is able to remember and understand a wide variety of events or activities that are species-, location-, and time-specific. Instead of matching generalizations with new phenomena, Indians match a more specific body of information with the immediate event or experience. Exceptions to the rule become a new set of specific behaviors that open new classifications for future information.

In Western science the propensity is to classify certain kinds of phenomena under major generalizations and then to accept or reject all additional data according to their proximity to the behavior that the generalization is capable of explaining. Thus Western science develops the "either/or" method of analysis - this creature is either a dog or a eat, it is hot or cold, living or dead, and so on. Each category, and the information stored in it, was devised by many observations and experiments that had as goals the expansion, enhancement, and application of the primary category of classification. The purpose of science is to find that concept or model that best explains all phenomena. Over the centuries the scientific quest focused on locating the "building block" of the physical world.

For a terribly long time people thought that if the atom were understood, the subsequent actions of the physical world could be predicted. Science thus adopted a reductionist epistemology that basically eliminated the world we know and experience in favor of mathematical formulas that described certain kinds of behavior at the subatomic level. Science is thus terribly complex and sophisticated about minute particles that are irrelevant to just about everything we do or want to do. But it was assumed that this information could be used by anyone to predict future manifestations of the same phenomena. Today any new phenomenon is expected to fit into preexisting categories of interpretation, and scientists are finding that this manner of arranging data is not satisfactory.

These systems of thought - tribal and Western scientific - do not seem to be radically different, but in actual application they diverge radically. A good deal of data are simply discarded by science. To include these data within the experimental framework would mean that nonrational and partially subjective conclusions would have to be drawn and, most important, mathematics would not be the sole criterion of measurement and verification. Data that are individual specific cannot be reproduced arbitrarily. Consequently, they are often described as "anomalous, falling outside the parameters of the experiment" and therefore of science itself.

Western science thus excludes a considerable amount of information that tribal peoples would feel to be a necessary part of understanding the phenomenon.

A good many scientific beliefs and experiments simply produce ad hoc explanations, as the focus of the investigation is to give some account of specific phenomena. Thus, at any one time, science has scientific answers and explanations, but these ideas do not relate to other parts of science. Presumably when the number of ad hoc answers and anomalies increases to a disturbing proportion, a new scientific paradigm must be called into operation that reduces the number of these dissident and not to be neglected facts. But there is no good guarantee that anomalies and ad hoc explanations will force a change in the interpretation of phenomena.

Western science is now giving way in its strict construction of categories of classification and is beginning to open doors it had firmly closed dluring the past half millennium. Books describing the life of the unborn child, the use of controlled fires to ensure the fertility of forests, the use of "indicator species" to measure the environmental damage of an area, observations of animal behavior to detect useful plants and secure derivative chemicals and drugs from them, the use of dreams in psychotherapy, and the effect of music on plant growth top the list of anomalous insights into the natural world that are now regarded as valid. That these observations were an integral part of tribal knowledge is surprising to most people.

Unfortunately, these discoveries are coming to light on an ad hoc basis derived from the experiments and observations of new thinkers who are suspect within the scientific community. The information often remains on the periphery of science. Unless a concerned effort is made to understand the basis by which tribal peoples acquired their insights, there will be sparse and sporadic improvement in scientific knowledge because these data will be difficult to connect with the existing body of scientific findings. The common knowledge of Indian tribes, when discovered by non-Indian scientists, is seen as an exciting breakthrough. But from the Indian perspective, it is mere child's play. It is information that traditional people expected youngsters to acquire as a matter of course.

VIEWS OF NATURE - AN EXAMPLE

Let us compare tribal knowledge and Western scientific knowledge in one instance to demonstrate the relative predictability factors that each view of nature contains. If we were to raise a herd of buffalo on an exceedingly large tract of land, we might one day discover we did not know where they were. Turning to Western science, we would scamper through reports on buffalo behavior, we would get a map and try to pinpoint the location of streams and watering places, and we might organize a search for the herd. The data we have would be in every way comparable to the information that the Plains Indians possessed regarding land and buffalo behavior, and there would not be too much difference in the manner in which we approached the problem of locating the herd.

In addition to everything that we can reasonably determine as valid data in locating the buffalo, however, the tribal tradition has a few additional bits of information that would make our task easier. The buffalo loved sunflowers. At times they would gather in a draw where the sunflowers grew and frolic among them, uprooting the plants and tossing them over their heads onto their backs so that they were virtually decorated with these colorful flowers. So we might look more closely at sunflower patches. Grazing buffalo frequently had flocks of blackbirds among them. The birds would sit on the backs of the buffalo, and when the animals grazed and disrupted the insects, the insects would give themselves away, making them easy prey for the birds. We would then narrow our search to locations with sunflowers and many blackbirds.

If we were really sophisticated, we would know that on top of many of the buttes and hills on the northern plains lives a little dun beetle that has two antennae on its head. These antennae always point to the nearest buffalo herd, whether that herd is down in the next valley or fifty miles away. All we need do is pack a picnic lunch and move from one group of beetles to another until we locate the herd. These additional bits of knowledge came as a result of the many other ways that Indians gathered information. Some facts might have come from dreams, others from communication with beetles, and other facts from knowledge of birds that would include their relationship with the buffalo. This information is not extraneous to the knowledge of buffalo, and it is not simply an ad hoc observation. It is included in the teachings of the tribe regarding these animals. And it can be used to predict buffalo, bird, insect, and flower behavior.

Within the Western scientific framework, according to which the natural world is lacking intelligence and personality, it would be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to discover these kinds of relationships. The idea that nature is mindless and insensate would have precluded the scientist from observing the proper kinds of behavior and drawing the obvious conclusions.

It does not make sense, when this plenitude of knowledge is available to us from the traditional tribal perspective, to continue to accumulate ad hoc insights into the working of the natural world. Collecting ad hoc bits of interesting data is, at its very bottom, simply unscientific, because no framework of interpretation emerges. To reject sources of information because the scientific mind is not ready to admit them as valid repositories of data or to pretend that part of the natural world has behavior approaching intelligent and deliberate decision making is simply childish. But we are not saying here that anyone can wander out into the landscape and derive these insights and similar bits of information. While this information can be transmitted or communicated in many ways, the specificity of it and the requirement of personal involvement eliminate the chance of duplication by anyone through the simple memorization of the mechanics of the phenomenon.

TOWARD ETHNOSCIENCE

As "ethnoscience" continues to expand its reach and attempts to win acceptance within the present scientific body of knowledge, the opportunity for American Indians to speak in a sophisticated manner to the most complicated theories of modern science will be greatly enhanced. Indians now studying Western science would do well to talk with their elders and traditional people and learn to critique the cherished doctrines that their professors and institutions now promulgate. Scholarly papers and dissertations based wholly on the knowledge of the tribe could well hasten the day when our species could deal intelligently with the world in which we live.