FROM NATIVE SCIENCE

TENETS OF NATIVE PHILOSOPHY
BY Greg Cajete

Native philosophy has always been broad-based. It is not based on rational thought alone but incorporates to the fullest degree all aspects of interactions of "human in and of nature," that is, the knowledge and truth gained from interaction of body, mind, soul, and spirit with all aspects of nature. In process, reflection, and practice, Native science embodies the natural system characteristics of diversity, optimization, cooperation, self-regulation, change, creativity, connectedness, and niche. As Robert Yazzie, chief justice of the Navajo Nation (1996), explains

Navajo philosophy is not a philosophy in the Western sense of the word; it is the lived practices of cultural forms that embody the Navajo understanding of their connectivity in the worlds of spirits of nature, humans, animals, plants, minerals, and other natural phenomena. However, explained in terms of Western thought it may be viewed as the practice of an epistemology in which the mind embodies itself in a particular relationship with all other aspects of the world. For me as a Navajo, these other aspects are my relations. I have a duty toward them as they have a duty as a-relative toward me.

Unfortunately, many people today have grown up with the Western culturally conditioned notion that only one science and one philosophy exist. But philosophies are culturally relative, founded on the worldview of the culture from which they come and which they were created to serve. A list of the guiding thoughts of Native science might include the following:

Native science integrates a spiritual orientation.

Dynamic multidimensional harmony is a perpetual state of the universe.

All human knowledge is related to the creation of the world and the emergence of humans; therefore, human knowledge is based on human cosmology.

Humanity has an important role in the perpetuation of the natural processes of the world.

Every"thing" is animate and has spirit.

There is significance to each natural place because each place reflects the whole order of nature.

The history of relationship must be respected with regard to places, plants, animals, and natural phenomena.

Technology should be appropriate and reflect balanced relationships to the natural world.

There are basic relationships, patterns, and cycles in the world that need to be understood; this is the proper role of mathematics.

There are stages of initiation to knowledge. Elders are relied upon as the keepers of essential knowledge.

Acting in the world must be sanctioned through ritual and ceremony.

Properly fashioned artifacts contain the energy of the thoughts, materials, and contexts in which they are fashioned and therefore become symbols of those thoughts, entities, or processes.

Dreams are consider gateways to creative possibilities if used wisely and practically.

Native science operates according to cognitive and linguistic "maps" that chart both collective and individual wisdom. How something is related and the nature of causality in a given natural context are foci of deep reflection. The ways in which aspects of nature are transformed through time and space and the nature of proper orientation to "sacred space" demand the observation of subtle details that are the foundation of knowledge. Ritual and ceremony can be personal or communal "technologies" for accessing knowledge, and symbols are used to remember key understandings of the natural world. Native science is a process for understanding in all aspects of Native tradition.

The "coming to know" of Native science revolves around the natural creative process of human learning. Intervention in a natural process is taken on only with great care and much consideration. Continual

emphasis is placed on "being of nature" or working with its natural flow; listening and looking closely are consistently practiced. Teachers act always as facilitators.

Knowledge is presented in "high contexts," in which many levels of information are shared at many levels of communication. True knowing is based on experiencing nature directly. "Doing" and playing are integral parts of Native learning, apprenticeship is a form of directed learning. Meditation or silence and reflection also play a role in internalizing the lessons of nature.

Elders provide guidance and facilitate learning, often through story along with artifacts and manifestations of traditions, but it is the individual's responsibility to learn. An individual's dreams and visions properly prepared for and properly received may bring true knowing. Even the "trickster" (chaos) may facilitate creative understanding, and this role in whatever form it is played is highly respected.

Process of Native Science

The perspective of Native science goes beyond objective measurement, honoring the primacy of direct experience, interconnectedness, relationship, holism, qualicy, and value. Its definition is based on its own merits, conceptual framework, and practice and orientation in the tribal contexts in which it is expressed. Concerned with the processes and energies within the universe, it continually deals in systems of relationships and their application to the life of the community. Science cannot divide its application into departments; it is integrated into the whole of life and being and provides a basic schema and basis for action.

In Native science, sanction of knowledge through appropriate ritual and tribal society acknowledgment is important, because knowledge of the natural world and how best to relate to it is not just a matter of individual understanding but is gained and shared for the benefit and perpetuation of the community. An example is the undertaking of a pledge to Sun Dance in Plains Indian traditions. Commitment to gain and share knowledge is an important aspect of Native science since deep knowledge of nature brings with it responsibilities in its application and sharing. It is a "given" in Native traditions that deep knowledge is not easily gained and requires time and dedication to attain. Sanction and commitment are also connected to ethics, or the care and attitude in which important knowledge is gained and shared. In this way, sanction and commitment act as foundational safeguards for both individual and tribe and form a kind of check and balance for important knowledge.

The maintenance of dynamic balance and harmony with all relationships to nature is the foundational paradigm of Native science. Reality is based on mutual reciprocity, the rule of "paying back" what has been received from nature. The world operates on a constant flow of give-and take relationships. In traditional Native hunting, when a hunter takes a deer, an offering is made and thanks given to the spirit family of the deer and, in some traditions, to the "mother of game" who is another mythic manifestation of the Earth Mother. Hunting rituals are performed before, during and after traditional Native hunting to acknowledge the transformation of the deer's life, spirit, and flesh into that of the human. The Native hunter and community know well that this gift from Nature and the game spirits will have to be "paid back" at some time in the future by humans in the universal cycle of death, birth, and rebirth.

GUIDING THOUGHTS

The guiding thoughts of Native science are simple yet profound, and subtle yet encompassing. Everything is considered to be "alive" or animate and imbued with "spirit" or energy. A stone has its own form of animation and unique energy. Everything is related, that is, connected in dynamic, interactive, and mutually reciprocal relationships. All things, events, and forms of energy unfold and infold themselves in a contextual field of the micro and macro universe.

In the practice of Native science, the more humans know about themselves-that is, their connections with everything around them- the greater the celebration of life, the greater the comfort of knowing, and the greater the joy of being. This relationship to space and time, and between living and nonliving things, is not just physical, but psychological and spiritual, in that it involves dreams, visions, knowing, and understanding beyond the simple objectified knowledge of something. In other words, it is inclusive of all the ways that humans are capable of knowing and understanding the world.

Native people were interested in finding the proper, ethical, and moral paths upon which human beings should walk. As co-creators with nature, everything we do and experience has importance to the rest of the world. We can not mis-experience anything, we can only mis-interpret what we experience. The information gained through experience is considered in interpreting relationship with the natural world, thereby pointing to the kind of "story" that might contain and convey that information. Concerned about the ethical aspects of knowledge, environmental observation, and understanding received from visions, ceremonies, and spirits, Native scientific philosophy reflects an inclusive and moral universe. No body of knowledge exists for its own sake outside the moral framework of understanding.

The tribal universe is a circle of learning, life, and relationship that is inclusive of all-important information needed to make life decisions. The Plains Indian medicine wheel is an example of the circle of learning by orienting to perceived qualities of the sacred directions these people recognized.

The Lakota wheel is probably best known as the medicine wheel. The four directions, each one symbolizing the relationship of certain qualities to the whole, make up the wheel…..[E]ach direction is represented by a word that stands for the quality of that direction. In this wheel, each direction is also represented by an animal. East is illumination, and it is signified by the eagle. South, or innocence, is represented by the mouse. West is introspection and has the bear as its symbol, and north, which is wisdom, is depicted by the buffalo.... The Lakota used this wheel to teach people how to bring balance into their lives. They believed that people were born with a certain energy.... IAI person's task, then, would be to . . . balance with the qualities of the other three directions (Nelson 1994:18).

The following could be described as foundational premises or realities of the Native worldview, and consequently, of Native science as well.

Natural democracy must prevail. The Earth is alive and nurtures all things of her body and all have intelligence and a right to exist. This is the essence of the Native concept of "natural democracy." Democracy, or the concept that all are equal and have a say in how their lives will be lived or affected, is a principle of social ecology.

Everything is related. This premise is based on acute observation of the entire web of life in order to gain insight into the relationships among all living things. Such observation was used in making a living that was unobtrusive and life enhancing.

An relationships have a natural history. People have a history in a place and a history of relationship to each other. People have a history with regard to plants, animals, nature, and all things in nature.

Native science orients itself to a "space and a place." Native peoples' places are sacred and bounded, and their science is used to understand, explain, and honor the life they are tied to in the greater circle of physical life. Sacred sites are mapped in the space of tribal memory to acknowledge forces that keep things in order and moving. The people learn to respect the life in the places they live, and thereby to preserve and perpetuate the ecology.

Everything has a time and an evolutionary path. This is the understanding of natural evolution through cycles. "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 that they initiated, at the proper time, new relationships and new events" (Peat 1994:43).

NATIVE SCIENCE PARADIGM

What is the Native science paradigm? Western scientists believe that science is a Western invention, but as discussed previously, Western science has its own specific history and is a particular kind of expression of Western culture. Given this cultural disposition, card-carrying Western scientists believe that non-Western societies relate to nature only in ways categorized anthropologically as folk tales or cultural technology, and that these ways are not science in their experience of the term.

The word "science" has only recently been used to depict systems of knowledge that refer to the multidimensional world of nature and people's ways or traditions of relationship with the world. Use of "science" by Native peoples contains this type of understanding. This use to describe the experience and traditions of Native peoples remains controversial given the biases and scientism of some Western scientists.

Herbert Read, pioneer arts educator, wrote, "Science is the explanation, and art is the expression of the same reality" (1945:7). That definition has important ramifications for Native science. Within Indigenous consciousness, science is also an art form, which incorporates both an objective explanation of how things happen in the natural world and a way of "looking." The idea that science and art are two sides of the same coin is what Indigenous people have always tried to convey, and this is also in the margin of Western philosophical thinking, as philosophers, artists, humanists, and religious leaders insist that science is a part of the greater whole of human expression.

In Western society, conflict about the definition of science has been underway since the time of Galileo when science was separated from religion. Religion became the antithesis of science-although some would describe science as a kind of religion. These controversies continue to characterize Western philosophical traditions.

This is reflective of one of the oldest ecological principles practiced by Indigenous people all over the world, past and present. If you depend upon a place for your life and livelihood, you have to take care of that place or suffer the consequences, a lesson learned and relearned by many generations over time. As a result of those hard-earned lessons, ecological principles have been incorporated as metaphysical as well as practical rules for human conduct. 1n addition to responsibility, there is also celebration of life, a key element in seeking to understand how to live a good life.

Native science mirrors and celebrates the cycles of time, space, and being, in individual action, community action, ritual and ceremonial activities, and direct relationships with the land. The ubiquitous use of the circle and directional orientations both underpins Native science and is its result.

"Coming-to-know" is the hest translation for translation in Native traditions. There is no word for education, or science, or art in most Indigenous languages. But, a coming-to-know, a coming-to-understand, metaphorically entails a journey, a process, a quest for knowledge and understanding. There is then a visionary tradition involved with these understandings that encompasses harmony, compassion, hunting, planting, technology, spirit, song, dance, color, number, cycle, balance, death, and renewal.

This is where a great deal of misunderstanding between Western objectified science and Indigenous traditions of knowledge has occurred. Knowledge among Indigenous people is acquired in a completely different way, but the coming-to-know process is nevertheless extremely systematic. For example, certain processes must occur in a particular order, which in its way is similar to the precise ways that an experiment is executed within the Western scientific method. Coming-to-know is the goal of Indigenous science, a different goal from that of Western science.

Like Western science, Indigenous science is sequential and builds on previous knowledge. But in Native traditions, guides or teachers-individuals who have gone that way before-are necessary. Building on prior learning and traditions is never a direct or linear path. Instead, Indigenous science pursues a rather meandering path around things and over obstacles, a roundabout way. In the Western mind-set, getting from point A to B is a linear process, and in the Indigenous mind-set, arrival at B occurs through fields of relationships and establishment of a sense of meaning, a sense of territory, a sense of breadth of the context. The psychologies of thinking and approach differ.