The Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples
The book Braiding Sweetgrass — Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer has many discussions that support and expand on the findings of Breathing with Trees. Its subtitle describes much of what she brings together — a unique blend of her indigenous Native American culture along with the science of Nature from her PhD in Nature’s science of botany.
Her Native American upbringing in the Potawatomi Nation widens our understanding of the Hunter-Gatherer views described in Breathing with Trees. It turns out that indigenous people are closely related to the Hunter Gatherers. Because they lived directly from Nature instead of from Civilization’s grocery stores and city suburbs, their survival also depended on working very closely together in a sharing gift economy, with gender equality, and without hierarchy. And their direct dependence on the gifts from Mother Nature brought about an awareness of her gifts along with a feelings of gratitude and love for all Nature’s other forms of life. This caused them to feel a great need to help them all wherever possible and to reciprocate.
This is very different than our Civilizstion’s upbringing that is apart from Nature in a world of every man for himself. To defend our country’s white supremacy, those in power today are now trying to break away from DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). Our country’s Democracy could instead now be called a Me-ocracy with all its individualism, a He-ocracy with its patriarchalism, and a Gold-ocracy with its high value on possessions and wealth, with the 13 billionaires on the U.S. president’s staff running the show.
Even though our religions talk about the caring for each other in a We-ocracy, they restrain their views mostly to the individual level and not the societal level because of their dependence on monetary donations.
Eventually, with all the increasing damage being brought to our habitat by climate change, we may be brought to working more closely together with Nature for our survival. But this will require many reductions in our consumption to rebalance our relationship with Mother Nature. And this will be seen as a major hurt for Capitalism as can be seen by our president’s denial of climate change. So, whether we can all reach agreemet to reduce our load on Nature by reducing our consumption in time to stop our extinction is in doubt.
