Personal Insights Into What Extent

¶ … personal insights into what extent I believe it is possible, and beneficial to both sides, to expose people to both indigenous and western educational methods and subjects. The objective will be to answer such questions as if non-native people can and should preserve native peoples' cultural traditions and sacred spaces and in the same sense, should non-native people emulate, or institutionalize into their own cultures, native views?

The essay used various views of authors as well as my personalized opinion to help shape the response. Consider that through our current trend of mass globalization, more indigenous people will become affected by the views and issues faced by the industrialized world and those so believed advanced cultures will need to systematically find ways to incorporate the old ways so as not to overwhelm native cultures. Unfortunately, I believe however, that the old way of doing things may be more beneficial for non-natives to incorporate than the western ways being forced on the natives.

Non-native to Native

Historically, integration with native and indigenous peoples has been sad. Christopher Columbus for example was not the friendly explorer that the history books portray him out to be as there have been many historical discoveries that show where his tactics of inclusion with natives entailed mass torture, rape and abuses -- all for the glory of Spain. In the same sense, mass marches to reservations in the United State have totally incapacitated the Native American Indian populations as we still continue to prosper from stealing their land.

The invisible people of the South American Rainforest are slowly becoming more visible as their homes are decimated for western profits. "The indigenous were and still are Persians in Brazil (where the landless now represent another type of Persians). The indigenous in the United States once were but have almost ceased to be Persians. In their time Incas, Mayas and Aztecs were Persians, as were and still are their descendants, wherever they have lived and still live." (Marcos)

In Canada today, it is far less likely for an indigenous student to graduate from high school than a non- indigenous student. "Even in Toronto, aboriginal school students are the highest risk group by far at secondary level, with nearly half not accumulating enough academic credits to graduate, compared with only a quarter of other students who are "at risk." And this disparity worsens drastically in rural areas, where the aboriginal dropout rate markedly increases." (Corson) These educational problems can be applied to indigenous cultures around the world.

They demonstrate the inherent problems associated with the integration of native and non-native lines of thinking. "In the Aboriginal community, 58.5 per cent of the adult population doesn't have a high school diploma and only 3.9 per cent have a university degree. By comparison, 41.7 per cent of the adult non-Aboriginal population don't have a high school diploma and 10.4 per cent have a university degree." (Bartlett) Those indigenous cultures that are integrated into western modes of thinking have problems that most likely stem from the European style school systems.

By law students have to attend school even though the schools have been deemed to be dangerous to indigenous cultures, traditions and values. "The issue is usually understood, especially by non-Aboriginal people, to be a problem of Aboriginal students failing in school, of their having a dropout rate double that of non-Aboriginal students. But framing the issue this way leads to 'deficit' thinking-- i.e., that Aboriginal students have a deficit, that they are the problem. Once it is assumed that the problem is the Aboriginal students, then it follows that it is they who need to change. This inevitably leads back to the thinking that drove the residential schools-- the belief that Aboriginal students need to become more like white people. This assimilation strategy has never worked. Aboriginal people do not accept these racist assumptions. In fact, many resist them, and thus resist schools." (Silver & Mallett, 2003)

At no other time in our history have there been as many technological advances available to bring the indigenous world into the modern world so seamlessly. For example, through technological advances like the internet, an indigenous aboriginal Australian can email an Eskimo friend in Northern Alaska to discuss their common friend who resides in the rainforest of South America and later in the same day each of these indigenous people can see their respective shaman for an exorcism. But cultivating the ancient natives is a costly process. Present day Mexico for example is struggling to find itself and once great nations of Aztecs, Mayans and Toltecs has been immersed into a state of continuous economic and political upheaval. These transformations have indigenous people around the world exposed to the whims of the industrialized nations and ideologies like capitalism, socialism and communism.

Insights into the economic and political ways of modern day indigenous people show that they can expect upheaval and turmoil when the western ways are forced on them. "The indigenous of Chiapas aren't the only humiliated and offended people in this world. In all places and at all times, regardless of race, color, customs, culture, and religious belief, the human creature we are so proud to be has always known how to humiliate and offend those whom, with sad irony, he continues to call his fellows. We have invented things that don't exist in nature: cruelty, torture, and disdain. By a perverse use of race, we've come to divide humanity into irreducible categories: rich and poor, master and slave, powerful and weak, wise and ignorant. And incessantly in each of these divisions we've made subdivisions so as to vary and freely multiply reasons for disdain, humiliation, and offense." (Marcos)

Indigenous residents of Toronto and throughout Canada, Mexico City, Mexico, Sidney, Australia, San Paolo, Brazil and the reservations of the United States to name a few are all true indications of the industrialized world presenting western views to natives. All of these people cope with the harshness of everyday life because, in a sense, they have become accustomed to the situation. They have never seen living and working conditions this bad but thousands of year old cultures seem to be prepared for the inhumane conditions. Situations like the maquiladora sector in Mexico demonstrate how the people can remain strong through adverse working conditions and expulsion from their homes and lands. How many proud Sioux Indians throughout the United States still cry over the adversity of their tumultuous histories and are there any rich aboriginals in the modern day Australia society? Throughout history, any attempts to reinstitute their native beliefs have been quashed through the use of modern armies or political removal that forced people from farms, homes or lands in order to maintain the western way of thinking.

Western leaders must take into consideration that the world's natural resources are not more precious than the people who live on the lands that house these assets. The solution to the issues seems simple. Indigenous people should simply be integrated into the modern way of doing things because there are factories and industries that can help them grow and prosper. But the western way of doing things means that working conditions and hours be extremely unfair and that younger generations of natives learn less about union operations and legal retribution in the realm of the western industrialized way.

Native to non-native

But, when looking at the reverse - preserving native beliefs we should reconsider. Shamanism can be used as a good example of why we should consider preserving the indigenous ways. The term shamanism has been traced to Siberian tribes that practiced the way of the shaman. Throughout history, shamans were equivalent to medicine men and women. There work by modern science has more or less been considered to be based on myths and folklore. For example, in Siberia, indigenous people actually wore garlic around their necks to promote good health. Was there some rational reason behind these practices that were promoted by shamans like wearing garlic worked because it kept away those carrying some infectious diseases?

Really it may not matter as to why garlic was worn as much as it is important to note that many other indigenous people throughout the world have their own beliefs and folklore, remedies and superstitions. "Native Americans perceive nature as having great power and believe that by touching certain animals, eating certain game, or being insensitive to environmental changes they invoke illness. Southeast Asians attribute natural illness to an imbalance or obstruction of Chi, which is energy, whereas Afro-Caribbean people believe that natural illness results from defying laws of nature." (Wing, p. 155)

Shamanism has many stories of journeys into the depths of the soul into the forbidden or hidden worlds through myths, dreams, or near-death experiences. Many of these experiences and trips by shaman may have been drug induced like those of the peyote insights of the Native American Indian medicine men or trance induced experiences such as those of the Ecuadorian Jivaro Indians. Shamanism is the oldest form of healing known to man and the art may go back as far as the beginning of human kind. "Our human bodies have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years through their relationships to the physical environment." (Wangyal-Rinpoche, 1980)

There is clear evidence that the basic principles of shamanism are pretty much universal phenomenon and studies of shamanic practices over many diverse and disparate cultures show that even with no interaction with one another, the methods and beliefs are the same. In other words, cultures throughout the world access the spirit world and with no physical way of communicating with one another, these indigenous cultures have some how cultivated the shamanistic journeys in surprisingly similar ways. These include: