First came bone needles and stone projectile points, then the wheel, then iron and steel, gunpowder, typesetting, and the American Revolution, followed by the steam engine and Civil War. Automobiles showed up next, followed by the first world war and the advent of penicillin, then the A bomb — yada yada.
Logical, linear progression makes sense to minds like mine, conditioned to measure technological advances in civilizations across time.
Linear history fixes complex happenings, including birth and death, in straight lines.
But as I age toward my expiration, I’m catching glimpses of the timeless, ecological succession of all things, and that perhaps history is circular. Or maybe history is zigzag as suggested by Hegel: order, disorder, reorder. Progress is rarely a straight and uninterrupted line, as we’ve been led to believe by Western philosophy. Instead, every original Order learns to include an initially threatening Disorder, which morphs into and creates a new Reordering, a new combination or synthesis — and we begin all over again.
How we view time is a kind of litmus test put forth by Daniel Wildcat in his new book “On Indigenuity: Learning the Lessons of Mother Earth” (Fulcrum Publishing, 2023).
Wildcat is a Yuchi member of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma who directs the Haskell Environmental Research Studies Center and is also a member of the Indigenous and American Indian Studies Program at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence. He heads a National Science Foundation-funded project to develop a research hub where indigenous knowledge will be connected to climate science.
The world does not, in fact, revolve around our species.
Wildcat sees serious problems with us relying heavily on what he calls Rooms Full of Mirrors, defined as humans gazing primarily at our own designs and creations. We fill hour after hour with flatscreen access to blogs, websites, YouTube, Twitter and streaming media — all inculcating ignorance of the biosphere and ecosystems that undergird our existence. Active listening is replaced by an algorithm-driven, smartphone reality that grabs our attention but fails to provide nourishment. We’re building on shifting sands, Wildcat contends.
Insulated by ignorance plus a sort of technological Manifest Destiny, we feel compelled to seek modification and control of nature: our birthplace. Boldly, we call this new thing “connectivity.”
Western hierarchy places humans at the top, plants at the bottom. With Indigenuity, humans are seen as the younger brothers of creation. A cure for what’s ailing us is to spend more time outdoors learning our place in nature, where a mysterious order awaits us as we open our eyes and ears. Not all honey tastes the same, to take just one example. Honeybees produce different varieties according to the kind of soil and species of plants grown in each field.
Wildcat suggests that we each give ourselves to a particular landscape, examining it from as many angles as we can, to wonder about it and to dwell upon it. But people seldom stay put long enough to learn the language of the Earth and her children in that place.
The Renaissance introduced recognition of individuals competing to invent stuff, whereas Indigenuity is knowledge co-produced via interspecies cooperation — with humans expected to look ahead several generations before making key decisions.
Are we relatives or resources?
Wildcat dwells on this question as a way to separate harmful from helpful thinking. All living things are our relatives — the animals, the plants — forming an eco-kinship. Resources are abstracted lists of things — living and extracted — that can be commodified and sold for profit. Have we forgotten the natural law of respect for land, air and water? he asks.
Across the Great Plains, eliminating bison and native grasses to introduce cereal grain led to an unsustainable system.
