and then again:
""Renewing oral culture is thus not at all a matter of "turning back the clock," but rather of stepping, now and then, out of clock time entirely. It is not a matter of "going back" to an earlier way of life, but of aligning ourselves with the full depth of the present, expanding awareness beyond the gleaming veneer of our mass-produced artifacts, dropping our attention beneath the recently sedimented strata of commercial civilization (beneath the inert, plastic layers of tossed-out toys and discarded water bottles) to make conscious contact with the darker humus in which our humanity is still rooted. The soil at that depth is made of dances, and songs, and the hushed cadence of spoken stories. By remembering ourselves at that depth, by tapping the nutrients in that timeless soil, we draw fresh water on up into the stems and leaves of the open present. We re-create civilization by tapping the primordial wellsprings of culture, replenishing the practice of wonder that lies at the indigenous heart of all culture."
-- Becoming Animal p. 292.
Okay. Nuf said. I do think that we need a thousand and one strategies, and I'm awfully glad that Four Arrows is pursuing his own approach with so much heart"
in wildness and shadowed wonder,
David
Four Arrows: David and I had a chat and I think I better understand that his concern about the binary of "only two worldviews" is not that it violates Indigenous emphasis on the lack of complementarity between apparent opposites but rather that what I am calling the "dominant worldview" should not be merited with anything close to an equal standing with the only rationale worldview, the Indigenous one. I actually love his thinking on this and feel it would be a brilliant endeavor to show that what I am calling the dominant worldview is but a pathological deviation from the Indigenous one. Perhaps, as David suggests, (in my words) a kind of childish fascination with the magic of written symbols and a narrowing of perspective that has had tragic repercussions. I hope David and others pursue this theory. I see him as the visionary to do it.
For me, a critical educator and theorist, I believe that what the dominant reality suggests is that a new worldview did emerge that based its new noun-oriented language and the writing that naturally came from it not on landscape and the animistic flux of observed life, but on categories in support of hierarchy and anthropocentric systems. Perhaps the philosophy in common between the great variety of cultures under the dominant worldview that drastically differs from the "worldview" in common with the great variety of Indigenous cultures is a subset hardly worth mentioning, but it is strong enough to destroy all life systems and the people unconsciously supporting it are doing so with a general perspective on the world that I want to show is insane but curable by returning to the original worldview it left behind around 10,000 years ago. I think we need the work that David is doing to vision and positively focus only on the return to the magic of what we experienced for 99% of human history. In the meantime, my small contribution is to get people willing to metacognitively realize that whatever we call what is allowing them to separate from Nature and its magic is problematic and that the original instructions are right in front of them, some of them usable immediately. I hope our conference follows both pathways (and I think it will).
References
David Abram (1996). Spell of the sensuous. New York, NY: Vintage Press.
David Abram (2010). Becoming animal. New York: Random House.
Four Arrows (2013). Teaching truly: A curriculum to indigenize mainstream education. New York: Peter Lang.
Four Arrows (August, 2016). Point of departure: returning to our authentic "worldview" for education and survival. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.
Four Arrows, & Narvaez, D. (2015). A more authentic baseline. In N. McCrary & W. Ross (Eds.), Working for social justice inside and outside the classroom: A community of teachers, researchers, and activists (pp. 93-112). In series, Social justice across contexts in education (S.J. Miller & L.D. Burns, Eds.). New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Mary Graham (2008). Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews. Australian Humanities Review, 45. Downloaded on February 28, 2016, from http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-November-2008/gr...
Darcia Narvaez (2013). The 99%--Development and socialization within an evolutionary context: Growing up to become "A good and useful human being." In D. Fry (Ed.), War, Peace and Human Nature: The convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views (pp. 643-672). New York: Oxford University Press.
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