The Wayfinders

Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

Wade Davis

• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780887849695
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? In The Wayfinders, renowned anthropologist, winner of the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize, and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis leads us on a thrilling journey to celebrate the wisdom of the world's indigenous cultures.

In Polynesia we set sail with navigators whose ancestors settled the Pacific ten centuries before Christ. In the Amazon we meet the descendants of a true lost civilization, the Peoples of the Anaconda. In the Andes we discover that the earth really is alive, while in Australia we experience Dreamtime, the all-embracing philosophy of the first humans to walk out of Africa. We then travel to Nepal, where we encounter a wisdom hero, a Bodhisattva, who emerges from forty-five years of Buddhist retreat and solitude. And finally we settle in Borneo, where the last rainforest nomads struggle to survive.

Understanding the lessons of this journey will be our mission for the next century. For at risk is the human legacy -- a vast archive of knowledge and expertise, a catalogue of the imagination. Rediscovering a new appreciation for the diversity of the human spirit, as expressed by culture, is among the central challenges of our time.

Five
CENTURY OF THE WIND

“The ideal of a single civilization for everyone implicit in the cult of progress and technique impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life.” — Octavio Paz

THE GARDEN OF EDEN has been found, and it lies on the southwest coast of Africa, not far from the homeland of the Juwasi Bushmen who for generations lived in open truce with the lions of the Kalahari. Humanity’s point of departure from Africa has also been located with some precision, on the other side of the ancient continent, on the western shore of the Red Sea. From there we walked through desert sands and over snow-covered passes, through jungles and mountain streams, eventually finding our way across oceans and wind-stripped coral atolls to black sand beaches that fronted entire continents of untold mysteries and latent hopes. We settled the Arctic and the Himalaya, the grasslands of the Asian steppe and the boreal forests of the north, where winter winds blow so fierce that willow sap freezes and caribou graze on branches dead to the sun. On the rivers of India we encountered sounds that echoed the human heart, and in the searing silences of the Sahara we found water. Along the way we invented ten thousand different ways of being.

In the mountains of Oaxaca in Mexico the Mazatec learned to communicate across vast distances by whistling, mimicking the intonations of their tonal language to create a vocabulary written on the wind. Along the beaches of Dahomey, Vodoun acolytes opened wide the windows of the mystic, discovering the power of trance, allowing human beings to move in and out of the spirit realm with ease and impunity. In the forests of Yunnan, Naxi shaman carved mystical tales into rocks, while in the Orinoco River delta their counterparts among the Warao endured nicotine narcosis in their quest for visions and inspiration, knowledge of the Lords of the Rain, the House of the Swallow-Tailed Kite, the heraldic raptor, and the dancing jaguar.

Off the shore of Sumatra on the island of Siberut, the Mentawai people recognized that spirits enliven everything that exists — birds, plants, clouds, even the rainbows that arch across the sky. Rejoicing in the beauty of the world, these divine entities could not possibly be expected to reside in a human body that was not itself beautiful. Thus the Mentawai came to believe that if nature lost its lustre, if the landscape became drab, if they themselves as a physical presence in creation ceased to do honour to the essence of beauty, the primordial forces of creation would abandon this realm for the settlements of the dead, and all life would perish. To respect the ancestors and celebrate the living, the Mentawai, both men and women, devote their lives to the pursuit of aesthetic beauty, preening their bodies, filing their teeth, adding brilliant feathers to their hair, and inscribing delicate spiral patterns on their bodies. In daily life they approach every task, however mundane, fully adorned.

In the mountains of Japan, outside of Kyoto, Tendai monks sleep for two hours a day and, with only a bowl of noodles and a rice ball for food, run through the sacred cryptomeria forests seventeen hours at a stretch for seven years, covering at one point in their Kaihigyo initiation 80 kilometres a day for one hundred days. As a final ordeal they must go without food, water, and sleep for nine days, even as they sit in silent meditation, their bodies exposed to the roaring heat of a bonfire. Tradition dictates that those who fail to complete the training must end their lives. Beneath their white robes they carry a knife and a rope. Slung from their back are rope sandals. They wear out five pairs in a day. In the last four centuries only forty-six men have completed the ordeal, a ritual path of enlightenment that brings the initiate closer to the realm of the dead, all with the goal of revealing to the living that everyone and everything are equal, that human beings are not exceptional, that nothing in this world is permanent.

PEOPLE OFTEN ASK WHY it matters if these wondrous yet exotic cultures and their belief systems disappear. What importance does it have to a family in Vancouver or Halifax, on a Saskatchewan farm or living in the embrace and comfort of a Newfoundland cove, if some distant tribe in Africa is extinguished through assimilation or violence, if their dreams and spiritual passions articulated through ritual turn to vapour? The query, as you might guess if you’ve had a chance to reflect on the first four of these Massey Lectures, confounds me. If someone needs to ask that question, can he or she possibly be expected to understand the answer?

Does it matter to the people of Quebec if the Tuareg of the Sahara lose their culture? Probably not. No more than the loss of Quebec would matter to the Tuareg. But I would argue that the loss of either way of life does matter to humanity as a whole. On the one hand it is a basic issue of human rights. Who is to say that the Canadian perspective on reality matters more than that of the Tuareg? And at a more fundamental level we have to ask ourselves: What kind of world do we want to live in? Most Canadians will never encounter a camel caravan of blue-robed Tuareg moving slowly across an ocean of white sand. For that matter most of us will never see a painting by Monet, or hear a Mozart symphony. But does this mean that the world would not be a lesser place without these artists and cultures and their unique interpretations of reality?

So I respond with a metaphor from biology. What does it matter if a single species of life becomes extinct? Well, imagine you are getting onto an airplane, and you notice that the mechanic is popping out the rivets in the wings. You ask the obvious question and the mechanic says, “No problem. We save money with each rivet and so far we’ve had no problems.” Perhaps the loss of a single rivet makes no difference, but eventually the wings fall off. It is the same thing with culture. If the marathon monks cease to run, or if the children of the Mentawai shift their sense of beauty to something more mundane and uninspired, or if the Naxi shaman no longer write in stone and abandon their native script, Dongba, the world’s last living hieroglyphic language, will the sky fall? No. But we’re not talking about the loss of a single species of life or a single cultural adaptation. We are speaking about a waterfall of destruction unprecedented in the history of our species. In our lifetime half of the voices of humanity are being silenced.

The problem is not change. We have this conceit in the West that while we have been celebrating and developing technological wizardry, somehow the other peoples of the world have been static and intellectually idle. Nothing could be further from the truth. Change is the one constant in history. All peoples in all places are always dancing with new possibilities for life. Nor is technology per se a threat to the integrity of culture. The Lakota did not stop being Sioux when they gave up the bow and arrow for the rifle any more than a rancher from Medicine Hat ceased being a Canadian when he gave up the horse and buggy in favour of the automobile. It is neither change nor technology that threatens the integrity of culture. It is power, the crude face of domination. We have this idea that these indigenous peoples, these distant others, quaint and colourful though they may be, are somehow destined to fade away, as if by natural law, as if they are failed attempts at being modern, failed attempts at being us. This is simply not true. In every case these are dynamic living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable and overwhelming external forces. This is actually an optimistic observation, for it suggests that if human beings are the agents of cultural destruction, we can also be the facilitators of cultural survival.

To gain perspective on this clash of power and culture, let’s turn for a moment to the history of our own continent and the experience of a single First Nation, the Kiowa. Originally a hunting and gathering people from the headwaters of the Missouri River, the Kiowa came down from the mountains to the grasslands of the Dakotas about a century before the American Revolution. They encountered the Crow, who taught them the religion and culture of the Plains, the divinity of the Sun, the ways of the buffalo, the power and utility of the horse. They later moved north into the Black Hills, where they fought the Lakota, before fleeing south, driven by the Cheyenne and Arapaho across the headwaters of the Arkansas. There the Kiowa clashed with the Comanche, before forging an alliance that gave the two nations control of the southern grasslands and the vast herds of buffalo that moved as shadows across the continent.

Once each year, at the height of summer when down appeared on the cottonwood trees, the people came together for the Sun Dance, a time of spiritual renewal. The teepees went up in a wide circle, the entire encampment oriented to the rising sun. The medicine lodge was the focal point, for within it, on a stick planted on the western side, hung the Tai-me, the sacred image of the sun. It was a simple fetish, a small human figure with a face of green stone, a robe of white feathers, and a headdress of ermine skin and a single erect feather. Around its neck were strands of blue beads, and painted on its face, neck, and back were the symbols of the sun and the moon. For the Kiowa the Tai-me was the source of life itself. Kept in a rawhide box under the protection of a hereditary Keeper, it was never exposed to the light save for the four days of the Sun Dance. At that time its power spread into all and everything present: the children and the warrior dancers, the buffalo skull that lay at its base as the animals’ representative of the sun, the Ten Medicines Bundles displayed before it, the men who for four days and nights slowly turned their shields to follow the passing sun, the young dancer who stared at the sun all day every day sacrificing his vision that the people might come to see.

As late as 1871, buffalo outnumbered people in North America. In that year one could stand on a bluff in the Dakotas and see buffalo in every direction for 50 kilometres. Herds were so large it took days for them to pass by. Wyatt Earp described one herd of over a million animals stretched over a grazing area the size of the state of Rhode Island. Within nine years of that sighting, the buffalo had vanished from the Plains. U.S. government policy was explicit. Exterminate the buffalo and destroy the cultures of the Plains. Theodore Roosevelt, revered today by conservationists, expressed the national mood. “The settler and pioneer have justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages.”

In less than a decade the systematic slaughter reduced the bison to a zoological curiosity, and destroyed all native resistance. General Philip Sheridan, who orchestrated the campaign, advised the U.S. Congress to mint a commemorative medal, with a dead buffalo on one side, and a dead Indian on the other. On July 20, 1890, the Sun Dance was officially outlawed, and on pain of imprisonment the Kiowa and all the Plains cultures were denied their essential act of faith. An outbreak of measles and influenza in the spring of 1892 struck a final blow.

What transpired on the American frontier was repeated throughout the world. In 1879 in Argentina, General Roca launched the Conquest of the Desert, a military campaign, which had as its expressed goal the extermination of the Indians of the Pampa and the seizure of their lands and cattle. The people of Tasmania were annihilated within seventy-five years of contact. The Reverend John West, a Christian missionary, rationalized the slaughter as the necessary cleansing of the land of an offensive people he described as a “detested incubus.” The colonial administration of French Polynesia in 1850 as a matter of principle formally banned all expressions of Polynesian culture, inter-island trade and voyaging, ritual prayer and feasting, tattooing, wood carving, dancing, and even singing. In 1884 British colonial authorities outlawed the potlatch in the Pacific Northwest. A year later, as European delegates gathered at the Congress of Berlin to carve up the African continent, they formally pledged their support for all efforts “calculated to educate the natives and to teach them to understand and appreciate the benefits of civilization.” The follow-up conference leading to the Brussels Act of 1892 called on colonial powers throughout the world to “bring about the extinction of barbarous customs.”

That same year the first of 40,000 Bora and Huitoto Indians died in the Northwest Amazon, along the Río Putumayo, murdered by the traders and overseers of the Anglo-Peruvian Rubber Company. In the Congo Free State, King Leopold’s private armies, again in pursuit of latex, the white blood of the forest, slaughtered as many as 8 million Africans. In 1919, in the immediate wake of the First World War, a global conflict that had obliterated European youth and violated every notion of decency and honour, the victors gathered in Paris, and by the terms of article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, placed tribal peoples, all those incapable of withstanding the “strenuous conditions of the modern world,” under their tutelage as a “sacred trust of civilization.” In the hundred years leading up to the war, indigenous peoples had been forced to surrender to colonial powers lands spanning nearly half the globe. Millions had died, victims of the very civilization that in its own spasms of self-destruction would twice, in little more than a generation, come close to immolating the entire world.

This legacy of dispossession, in what Eduardo Galeano called “the century of the wind,” reminds us that these fateful events happened not in the distant past but in the lifetimes of our own grandparents, and they continue to this day. Genocide, the physical extermination of a people, is universally condemned. Ethnocide, the destruction of a people’s way of life, is in many quarters sanctioned and endorsed as appropriate development policy. Modernity provides the rationale for disenfranchisement, with the real goal too often being the extraction of natural resources on an industrial scale from territories occupied for generations by indigenous peoples whose ongoing presence on the land proves to be an inconvenience.

THE MOUTH OF THE BARAM RIVER in Borneo is the colour of the earth. To the north, the soils of Sarawak disappear into the South China Sea and fleets of empty Japanese freighters hang on the horizon, awaiting the tides and a chance to fill their holds with raw logs ripped from the forests of Borneo. The river settlements are settings of opportunity and despair — muddy logging camps and clusters of shanties, their leprous facades patched with sheets of metal, plastic, and scavenged boards. Children by the river’s edge dump barrels of garbage, which drifts back to shore in the wake of each passing log barge. For kilometres the river is choked with debris and silt, and along its banks lie thousands of logs stacked thirty deep, some awaiting shipment, some slowly rotting in the tropical heat.

Some 150 kilometres upriver is another world, a varied and magical landscape of forest and soaring mountains, dissected by crystalline rivers and impregnated by the world’s most extensive network of caves and underground passages. This is the traditional territory of the Penan, a culture of hunters and gatherers often said to be among the last nomadic peoples of Southeast Asia. In myth and in daily life they celebrate the bounty of a forest whose biological richness and diversity surpasses that of even the most prolific regions of the Amazon. In a series of plots comprising a total area of but a single square kilometre of Borneo woodland, less than a fortieth the area of Vancouver’s Stanley Park, have been found as many species of trees as exist in all of North America.

The term nomadic is somewhat misleading, implying a life of constant movement and with it perhaps a dearth of fidelity to place. In fact, the Penan passage through the forest is cyclical and resource dependent, with the same sites being occupied time and again over the lifetime of an individual. Thus the forest is for them a series of neighbourhoods, wild and potentially dangerous in certain ways, but fundamentally domesticated by generations of human presence and interaction. Every feature of the landscape resonates with a story. Every point along a trail, every boulder and cave, each one of the more than two thousand streams that run through their lands has a name. A sense of stewardship permeates Penan society, dictating consistently the manner in which the people utilize and apportion the environment. Individual resources, a clump of sago, fruit trees, dart-poison trees, fishing sites, medicinal plants are affiliated with individual kin groups, and these familial rights acknowledged by all pass down through the generations. “From the forest,” they say very simply, “we get our life.”

What most impressed me when I first visited the Penan in 1989 was a certain quality of being, an essential humanity that was less innate than a consequence of the manner in which they had chosen to live their lives. They had little sense of time, save for the rhythms of the natural world, the fruiting seasons of plants, the passage of the sun and moon, the sweat bees that emerge two hours before dusk, the black cicadas that electrify the forest at precisely six every evening. They had no notion of paid employment, of work as burden, as opposed to leisure as recreation. For them, there was only life, the daily round. Children learned not in school but through experience, often at the side of their parents. With families and individuals often widely dispersed, self-sufficiency was the norm, with everyone capable of doing every necessary task. So there was very little sense of hierarchy.

How do you measure wealth in a society in which there are no specialists, in which everyone can make everything from raw materials readily found in the forest, a society in which there is no incentive to accumulate material possessions because everything has to be carried on the back? The Penan explicitly perceive wealth as the strength of social relations among people, for should these relationships weaken or fray, all will suffer. Should conflict lead to a schism and families go their separate ways for prolonged periods, both groups may starve for want of sufficient hunters. Thus, as in many hunting and gathering societies, direct criticism of another is frowned upon. The priority is always the solidarity of the group. Confrontation and displays of anger are exceedingly rare. Civility and humour are the norm.

There is no word for “thank you” in their language because sharing is an obligation. One never knows who will be the next to bring food to the fire. I once gave a cigarette to an elderly woman and watched as she tore it apart to distribute equitably the individual strands of tobacco to each shelter in the encampment, rendering the product useless but honouring her duty to share. When, some time after my first visit, a number of Penan came to Canada to campaign for the protection of their forests, nothing impressed them more than homelessness. They could not understand how in a place as wealthy as Vancouver such a thing could exist. A Canadian or American grows up believing that homelessness is a regrettable but inevitable feature of life. The Penan live by the adage that a poor man shames us all. Indeed, the greatest transgression in their culture is sihun, a concept that essentially means a failure to share.

The Penan lacked the written word; the total vocabulary of the language at any point in time was always the knowledge of the b...