Indigenous knowledge and beautiful experiments in the unruly edges

DOI:10.5281/zenodo.13982234

Abstract

Framed within the three dimensions of Joanna Macy’s ‘Great Turning’ this discussion considers how Indigenous knowledge might be intrinsic to survival on a planet in polycrisis. While reflecting Macy’s optimism for a future in which multispecies might flourish, it also highlights challenges, encompassing both the violence enacted upon Indigenous communities, and a resistance to world-making practices that sit beyond Western ontologies. Woven throughout, is a call to anthropologists to amplify lesser-heard voices and advocate for ways of being that foster a planet upon which we might collectively thrive.

“It’s true that the world was failing at its one task — of remaining a  world. Pieces were breaking off. The ice cubes were melting. The species were dying. The last of the fossil fuels were being burned up. A person collapsing in the street might be collapsing from any one of a hundred things. New things to die of were being added each day.”

Heti, 2022, p. 21

With the 17^th century Enlightenment began an era in which has continued to subjugate nature to facilitate the rapid growth of the Western empire. Positioning those living in close relations with nature as ‘primitive’, early colonisers sought to eradicate these intimacies (Hickel, 2020), instead building modernity on the premise of nature “as a resource for us to use as we wish” (Escobar, 1999, p. 6). We’ve truly leaned in; at a pace the planet can no longer sustain. This damage (I’d argue largely wrought by capitalist pursuit of profit) is evidenced in the convergence of ecological and social crises unfolding globally – albeit affecting some (places, people, creatures, critters) more than others. From climate change to loss of biodiversity, food scarcity and pandemics, what many identify as ‘the polycrisis’ can be paralysing in its horror – and so it’s with hope that we might look to other ways of world-making. Indications of alternate means of surviving on a fragile planet. Beautiful experiments (Hartman, 2019), and stories otherwise (Stengers, 2015) that play out in what Stoler (2008) might describe as the shadows of empire; peripheral, overlooked, but potent with possibility. 

Here resides evidence of actions that aren’t augmented towards capitalist growth or a singular idea of ‘progress’, but instead might contribute to what Joanna Macy identifies as the ‘Great Turning’ (2009); emerging pockets of resistance as people seek alternative ways of being that are a little more collaborative, with collective, multispecies thriving in mind. A shift from an “Industrial Growth Society to a life-sustaining civilization” (Macy, 2009, emphasis added). While more academic minds might be dismissive of her optimism, it comes from a place of hunger; a desperate desire for us to attend to, be inspired by, and adopt alternative futures – when our own has become so fragile. Here, I think, resides an opportunity for anthropologists; we who are endlessly curious might use that appetite to illuminate alternative means of world-making, foregrounding that which troubles the hegemonic narrative of Western modernity.

It’s with this in mind that I turn to Indigenous knowledge, which we’ll discuss in the context of three dimensions – a mutually reinforcing framework that comprises Macy’s ‘Great Turning’. Its success, Macy notes, is dependent on “a profound shift in our perception of reality” (Macy, 2009) and as we delve in, it must be with a willingness to think expansively, mindful that “grasping the deepest truth can involve departing radically from everyday perception and knowledge,” (Szerszynski, 2019, p. 204). As such, we’ll also consider the challenge of translation between divergent cosmologies, and the very real dangers faced by Indigenous People participating in the activism that the Great Turning asks of us. This is not to romanticise the world-making practices of those who have been marginalised or suffered in the name of imperial Western progress, and I remain conscious of language of ‘difference’ and ‘othering’ which has historically made anthropology implicit in “the exploitation of dependence, the oppression of peasants and the manipulation or management of native societies for imperial purposes.” (Said, 1989, p. 207). I conclude with the suggestion that as we navigate unstable worlds, anthropology might move beyond the negative connotations of its past, and offer value in advocating for, and amplifying “epistemologies and cosmologies that subtly or explicitly challenged mastery.” (Roane, 2018, p. 244). 

A quick note on the terminology of ‘Indigenous knowledge’, which is sometimes referred to as ‘local knowledge’ and ‘traditional environmental knowledge’, among other terms. In this essay, I use the term in reference to the knowledge systems and practices of individuals identifying as Indigenous People. I follow Johnston (2023) in capitalising Indigenous, and Indigenous People, recognising and valuing a cultural group that has been subject to “centuries of dehumanization and derogatory stereotyping.” (Johnston, 2023, p. 8).

Seeking systems augmented for collective thriving

In thinking with the three dimensions of the Great Turning, I would argue that the success of the two to follow, depend largely on the first; a shift in consciousness. 

Despite the damage wrought by capitalist production methods, it’s a model that continues to proliferate creating spaces of ‘out-and-out exterminism’ that “destroy their own base, exhaust soils, exhaust peoples, exhaust plants and animals, and proliferate pathologic pathogens.” (Haraway et al. 2019, p. 10). As the resulting polycrisis becomes increasingly prevalent, Macy notes the growing urgency with which people are seeking alternative approaches to world-making; determined to weave regenerative threads through a global tapestry of destruction. They do well to look to the entangled, multispecies frameworks synonymous with Indigenous practices, which have long contradicted hegemonic understandings of nature as a resource, and instead tread gently; prioritising sustainable, mutual flourishing. While knowledge, beliefs, and practices vary among communities around the world, Lyla June Johnston’s thesis (2022) identifies a common denominator in value systems that are “rooted in relationality, reciprocity, respect, reverence, regenerative practice, responsibility to homeland… and a notion that all life is equal.” (Johnston, 2022, p. 286). To think with this further, many Indigenous cosmologies also recognise more-than-human entities as active participants in world-making. In Chao’s (2018) research with the Indigenous Marind People in West Papua, she describes a multispecies cosmology of the forest, in which “each agent has an interest in seeing the other maintain its existence.” (Chao, 2018, p. 622). Multispecies communities of care emerge, and while it’s a notion that might stretch our current ontological understanding of human and nature relations, (and we’ll return to this later) as Cruikshank poignantly notes, the value of alternative frameworks may become apparent in unstable and uncertain times that “force persons, things and ideas into new and unexpected relationships.” (Cruikshank, 2012, p. 240).

Bound up in these multispecies relations is, unsurprisingly, a deep ecological understanding that informs intelligent systems, augmented for collective thriving (Johnston, 2022). This brings us to the second dimension of Macy’s Great Turning, which asks that we analyse the structural causes of the polycrisis and pursue alternative approaches. Here I could happily dwell, exploring the many instances of Indigenous ingenuity and thoughtful, non-human-centred food production and world-making methods that have effectively sustained healthy ecosystems. 

Johnston (2022) has recorded myriad examples, from Shawnee chestnut grove management through gentle burning, to the Amah Mut-sun Indigenous Nation’s approach to farming salmon, which allows the strongest, most determined to swim upstream and reproduce, passing those traits on to future generations. Or we might consider ‘good fires’, integral to forest management for centuries, as a means of minimising fuel load to prevent catastrophic fires and adding nutrient dense ash to the soil to stimulate healthy grass for grazing animals. Moreover, increased space between the trees prevents the rapid spread of pathogens and allows for easy transit through the forest, while ensuring optimum light and water for all. “By applying methodical… ecocentric disturbance to their homelands, Indigenous Nations managed to augment biodiversity and ecosystems health” (Johnston, 2022, p. 277). A similarly regenerative model, Kimmerer (2015) notes how multispecies flourish in the ‘honourable harvest’ practiced by the Potawatomi Nation, which commands that only what’s needed is taken, received with gratitude, used well, and reciprocated. 

That low intervention, collaborative methods don’t proliferate, has largely been in the interests of a colonial aspirations, Johnston reminds us, who have long been incentivised to “position Indigenous People as ‘passive and primitive hunter-gathers’ to legitimise the seizure of land… resulting in the omission and misunderstanding of these vast systems in many historical records.” (Johnston, 2022, p. 286). And yet, underpinned by the values discussed above (those many Rs), these systems demonstrate the potency that resides in Indigenous practices that have demonstrated their efficacy over many generations. In gently cultivating biodiverse landscapes that are wildly removed from the ‘out and out exterminism’ (Haraway, 2019) favoured by modern production methods, sanctuaries for collective thriving emerge (Tsing, 2012; Li and Semedi, 2022). And the benefits are many; much research supports the idea that species diversity can “stimulate productivity, stability, ecosystem services, and resilience in natural and in agricultural ecosystems.” (Khoury et al., 2014, p. 4001). 

The long shadow of colonialism

As such systems of mutual flourishing are increasingly subsumed; prey to an insatiable capitalist appetite, many Indigenous People (and allies) are motivated to participate in movements that comprise Macy’s third dimension, ‘actions that slow down damage to the earth and its beings’. While it’s beyond the scope of this essay to explore the humbling number of grass-roots actions galvanised by Indigenous communities, briefly we might consider the (successful) fight for compensation from Ok Tedi mine in Papua New Guinea, which damaged swathes of rainforest and produced chemical toxicity that made the local Indigenous community’s subsistence impossible (Kirsch, 2002). Or the (unsuccessful) Dakota pipeline protest (2016) that residents of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation fought in defence of their water security. 

A campaign I’d like to think with in more detail is documented in de la Cadena’s ethnography, Earth Beings (2015). It illuminates a key challenge within this space; that of translating Indigenous knowledge – and it being taken seriously. De la Cadena calls our attention to Sinkara, a Peruvian mountain threatened by a mining corporation, which the Indigenous Quechua community of Pacchanta were motivated to defend, predominantly due to their understanding of it as an earth-being (sentient more-than-human entities that participate in daily life). Protecting nature was inherently intertwined, but wasn’t something they felt needed to be highlighted; because surely, earth-beings as world-making participants were a worthy cause in and of themselves? This concept presented such a radical departure from hegemonic thinking, that NGOs supporting the campaign deemed it to be outside of what might be understood – or important – to their opposition. Instead, they insisted on an environmental angle, a “cause the state could recognize,” (de la Cadena, 2015, p. 275). While in the end the mountain triumphed, the process made earth-beings (and by extension, Indigenous world-making practices) invisible, discrediting their worth.

Chao (2018) describes similar circumstances for the Marind community discussed above, who, in their efforts to protect their region from encroaching oil palm plantations, also exclude what might be considered beyond ontological understanding from the narrative. While the Marind fear oil palm because it imposes itself on “preexisting multispecies lifeworlds and appropriates the resources necessary to their survival only to sustain its own” (Chao, 2018, p. 624) they recognise that in negotiations with multinational corporations this might “reinforce entrenched stereotypes of Papuans as primitive and superstitious peoples” (Chao, 2018, p. 636). Supressing certain knowledge systems becomes necessary when “how indigenous actors engage in strategic self-representation before powerful and predatory audiences… profoundly determines the shape of reality itself.” (Chao, 2018, p. 636). While these are only two of a great many more examples, they demonstrate a failure to take Indigenous knowledge seriously – which I’d argue presents one of the biggest challenges to the Great Turning, when therein lies such a wealth of valuable and brilliant knowledge that has become lost amid colonial efforts to devalue Indigenous world-making practices and close relations with nature (Johnston, 2022). It’s perhaps this that leads Macy to argue that a shift in perspective is intrinsic to the Great Turning’s success. That hearts and minds must be open and receptive to that which might exist beyond our ontological understanding. To think with Viveiros de Castro will be helpful here, in recognising the “indefinitely many possible worlds of which humans are capable,” (Viveiros de Castro, 2003, p. 5), and what I hope this discussion goes some way in demonstrating, is the wealth of knowledge and stories of collective thriving that are unfolding – if we can learn to ‘take native thought seriously’ (Viveiros de Castro, 2023).

In discussing challenges, I’d like to return briefly to the participation of Indigenous People in environmental activism, and acknowledge the well documented danger inherent in their engagement. In Lopez’s (2022) article on the devasting number of environmental activists murdered in Mexico, it’s striking how many are identified as Indigenous. Accurate figures are impossible among the unrecorded deaths and ‘disappeared’, but in the space of several months he reports the killing of three Indigenous environment activists, including Mr Rojo, a leader of northern Mexico’s Indigenous Yaqui community locked in “a decades-long battle with the Mexican government for control of the river, exacerbated by the construction of a giant aqueduct to siphon water to send to the state capital.” (Lopez, 2022). Simultaneously in the Amazon, the murder of Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips (June 2022) was widely reported as he sought to protect ancestral land threatened by a complete spectrum of “poachers and fishing gangs encroaching from the north, drug traffickers from the west, goldminers from the east and cattle ranchers from the south” (Phillips, 2023). These accounts reflect Global Witness (2023) reports that 1,910 environmental defenders have been killed in the space of a decade (2012-2022), of which over a third (34%) were identified as Indigenous – despite making up only 5% of the global population.  As modernity threatens to raze not only Indigenous land, but erase ways of world-making and the people who practice them, Luz Mery Panche (identified as both an Indigenous leader in Colombia and an activist in the Amazon rainforest) notes that while “Some have decided to keep quiet out of fear, for us that’s not an option,” (Lopez, 2022), because of the threat to their very existence. Her words are echoed in Phillips article which recounts the words of a young Indigenous man readying himself to continue Pereira’s fight “we’re going to continue fighting our enemies until they can no longer bear it… If I have to die, it will be for our people.” (Phillips, 2023).

Pursuing alternative pathways on a fragile planet

Without the scope to discuss these themes more extensively, I hope the above goes some way in demonstrating how Indigenous knowledge might provide a thoughtful and necessary departure from the dominant Western narrative of progress; illuminating stories otherwise unfolding in the unruly edges of capitalism. Perhaps most exciting, is the evidence that humans have been (and therefore could be again), a ‘keystone species. “A linchpin that helps hold ecosystems together” (Johnston, 2022, p. 17), enhancing, and not exhausting biodiverse life systems. But recognising the value of Indigenous knowledge and creating space for unfamiliar world-making practices more widely – which feels imperative to the future of more-than-human, and planetary survival – will require new and expansive thinking; a willingness to unlearn individualism and lean into that which sits outside of our hegemonic understanding of nature; as a resource, as a backdrop, as inexhaustible.

This necessitates reverence and respect; there is a violent and oppressive history of abuse and co-option of Indigenous knowledge, not only that which has been discussed above, but of widely documented intellectual theft. Azúa (2023) documents repeated instances of Indigenous knowledge shared by Mexicans living in the south Texas biome regarding the area’s biodiversity and how it might be utilised for healing, who never received recognition or compensation. Worse still, this information was used to demonstrate the region’s value, “heralding in an era of extraction, militarization, settler colonialism from both Mexico and the United States, and ecological destruction in the twentieth century and beyond,” (Azúa, 2023, p. 4). When knowledge sharing has become entangled with exploitation and abuse, a response of trepidation, reluctance and even resistance to the increasing interest in Indigenous knowledge is understandable. 

While I’m conscious of anthropology’s history of collusion in this, I also see an opportunity for contemporary scholars to disrupt this narrative, aptly demonstrated by the collected knowledge above which has been produced by or in collaboration with Indigenous People. In producing ethnography collaboratively with care and respect, anthropology has the power to communicate valuable stories otherwise, platform knowledge and amplify voices that might not otherwise be heard. Disputing the idea that ethnographers should be neutral, Kirsch argues that “activism is a logical extension of the commitment to reciprocity that under-lies the practice of anthropology.” (Kirsch, 2002, p. 178). Advocacy, he suggests, might go some way in levelling the playing field in which Indigenous communities come up against governance and corporations. 

As anthropologists seeking a purpose on an unstable planet, advocacy seems a poignant sentiment on which to conclude. Macy’s Great Turning proposes a valuable set of tools for navigating the polycrisis, that might make some (not all) worlds possible, and in illuminating means of world-making more collaboratively and generatively, we might inspire others to join in. Savransky (2021) describes the modern world as crumbling “under the pressure of its own imperial weight” (Savransky, 2021, p. 93) and it’s in this space and time that experimenting – beautiful or otherwise – (Hartman, 2019) becomes essential. While this discussion has focused specifically on Indigenous knowledge – and still only touches the very edges – cast the net wider and such experiments are truly many, and amplifying them might lend our practice an honourable purpose as we navigate possible futures.