Learning Native Wisdom

What Traditional Cultures Teach Us about Subsistence, Sustainability, and Spirituality

Gary Holthaus

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780813141497
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Conservation & Protection
• Index: Biological Sciences

Scientific evidence has made it abundantly clear that the world's population can no longer continue its present rate of consuming and despoiling the planet's limited natural resources. Scholars, activists, politicians, and citizens worldwide are promoting the idea of sustainability, or systems and practices of living that allow a community to maintain itself indefinitely. Despite increased interest in sustainability, its popularity alone is insufficient to shift our culture and society toward more stable practices. Gary Holthaus argues that sustainability is achievable but is less a set of practices than the result of a healthy worldview. Learning Native Wisdom: Reflections on Subsistence, Sustainability, and Spirituality examines several facets of societies—cultural, economic, agricultural, and political—seeking insights into the ability of some societies to remain vibrant for thousands of years, even in extremely adverse conditions and climates. Holthaus looks to Eskimo and other Native American peoples of Alaska for the practical wisdom behind this way of living. Learning Native Wisdom explains why achieving a sustainable culture is more important than any other challenge we face today. Although there are many measures of a society's progress, Holthaus warns that only a shift away from our current culture of short-term abundance, founded on a belief in infinite economic growth, will represent true advancement. In societies that value the longevity of people, culture, and the environment, subsistence and spirituality soon become closely allied with sustainability.Holthaus highlights the importance of language as a reflection of shared cultural values, and he shows how our understanding of the very word subsistence illustrates his argument. In a culture of abundance, the term implies deprivation and insecurity. However, as Holthaus reminds us, "All cultures are subsistence cultures." Our post-Enlightenment consumer-based societies obscure or even deny our absolute dependence on soil, air, sunlight, and water for survival. This book identifies spirituality as a key component of meaningful cultural change, a concept that Holthaus defines as the recognition of the invisible connections between people, their neighbors, and their surroundings. For generations, native cultures celebrated and revered these connections, fostering a respect for past, present, and future generations and for the earth itself.Ultimately, Holthaus illustrates how spirituality and the concept of subsistence can act as powerful guiding forces on the path to global sustainability. He examines the perceptions of cultures far more successful at long-term survival than our own and describes how we might use their wisdom to overcome the sustainability crisis currently facing humanity.

Spirituality

The Power and Pragmatism of Language

It is about 490 B.C. Confucius has been traveling around China, teaching, hoping to find a ruler who will not only seek his advice about running the country but actually implement it. He has had little success. A practical man, a disciple—one suspects he had ties to political insiders—comes to Confucius, asking, “If the Lord of Wei wanted you to govern his country, what would you put first in importance?” The question has the feel of a test question, a hidden agenda left unspoken and lurking behind the interrogative: “Answer this right and I’ll put in a good word for you.” Confucius doesn’t need time to think; he already knows his answer: “The rectification of names,” he replies, “without a doubt.” The practical man is astonished, as would be any presidential advisor in our own country and time. “That’s crazy!” he replies. “What does rectification have to do with anything?” Confucius does not gladly suffer fools and does not coat many pills. For one whose whole life was given to political science, he is often impolitic in his speech. Truth came before schmooze. “You’re such a dolt!” he says, then continues, “Listen. If names aren’t rectified, speech doesn’t follow from reality. If speech doesn’t follow from reality, endeavors never come to fruition. If endeavors never come to fruition, then Ritual and music cannot flourish. If Ritual and music cannot flourish, punishments don’t fit the crime. If punishments don’t fit the crime, people can’t put their hands and feet anywhere without fear of losing them.”¹

Without its right names, the world, as Confucius points out, is unreal, and none of the government’s policies will be realistic, and none of its endeavors will come to fruitful conclusions. In noting the importance of ritual and music, Confucius echoes indigenous peoples around the globe, for those are two necessities for balance and harmony within oneself and in the society. I take the final comment, “If punishments don’t fit the crime . . .” as a way of saying that people will have no confidence in government if the government does not call things by their right names. One might commit a small crime, not even theft, and lose a hand like a real thief caught with the goods. Without right language we have government by caprice, which may be just the way some (many? most? all?) people in power—princes of commerce and industry, members of Parliament and Congress, among others—want it. But Confucius apparently believed what the founders of our own government often said: if the government does not have the support of the people, it cannot stand. So the most critical arena for the implementation of successful, long-lasting government, in his view, lies in getting its language straight. “Naming enables the noble-minded to speak, and speech enables the noble-minded to act,” says Confucius. Part of his definition of the noble minded is that they seek to square their acts with their words. “Therefore the noble-minded are anything but careless in speech.”² How right he seems in our era of government euphemisms and deceit, our lack of the noble minded in our leadership, their determined efforts to use words to gain a chosen effect rather than to get them right.

Thus we begin our thinking about spirituality with the idea of a right name, a clear word. My assumptions are that a healthy spirituality is as deeply rooted in language as in faith and that speech is both cosmic and earth oriented as well as personal. I am also looking for a pattern here, beginning with the idea of clarity in the language, one of the closest and most accessible of our human endeavors—and one of the most complicated.

For those who are Christian, everything, at least since around A.D. 110, begins with the word. The word is logos, and it gets its most artful and meaningful expression in the very first sentence of that Greek-blessed writer of John’s gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God” (John 1:1–3). The logos since then, for those rooted in the Christian tradition, has been taken for the ultimate creative power, and for many it has been synonymous with God or Jesus.

But there is an older logos than John’s, and his is but a descendent of that older logos. Half a millennium or more before John—about the time Confucius was talking about the importance of a clear word— Heraclitus, in the first fragment of his we have, says,

The Logos is eternal

but men have not heard it

and men have heard it and not understood . . .

Through the Logos all things are understood

yet men do not understand

as you shall see when you put acts and words

to the test I am going to propose:

One must talk about everything according to its nature,

how it comes to be and how it grows.

Men have talked about the world without paying

attention to the world or to their own minds,

as if they were asleep or absent-minded.

In fragment 32, Heraclitus goes on: “Thinking well is the greatest excellence: to act and speak what is true, perceiving things according to their nature.”³

“Logos” is Greek for “word,” the creative and active power behind the universe. Classics scholar Hazel Barnes once told me that “logos” for Heraclitus also meant “relationship”; it is our tie to everything else. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, an Islamic professor of comparative religion, takes that idea a step farther; in Religion and the Order of Nature, he tells us that “logos” also means “harmony.” We are created not only for relationships but for harmony within ourselves, among ourselves, and between ourselves and all other creatures. Paul Woodruff, a classics scholar at the University of Texas, would agree with Barnes and Nasr that Heraclitus’s notion is far greater than “word” as language or vocabulary. Over lunch in Austin, Paul told me that the nearest Latin translation would be “ratio,” which has to do with reason, the rational, but also with ratios as in mathematics. The ratios that concern Heraclitus are those that are held in balance as the elements move up and down between heaven and earth. These ties among the word, the earth, heaven, relationships, and harmony fill in part of the complex picture of the logos in Heraclitus’s view. Heraclitus also seems to say that it is the logos, the word, that establishes and maintains our relationship to the real world: “Man, who is an organic continuation of the Logos, thinks he can sever that continuity and exist apart from it.”⁴ He does not need to add, “How foolish!” If we break the word, we cut ourselves off from the natural; we break our ties with the world and one another, our bond with the only world that can sustain us. If the language of our public discourse and personal conversation does not give us the right names for things, then how do we rediscover and regain what is real?

Before the logos, Andre Padoux writes, there was in Sanskrit the word Vāc, which represented another creative power, the “mother of the gods.” It stood as “symbol for the Godhead” and revealed a “divine presence within the cosmos, as the force that creates, maintains, and upholds the universe.” “Vāc,” Padoux tells us, is translated as “word.” “Vāc” was always an oral, aural word. An alternative translation is “speech,” but this word “is an energy” that can be “tapped and used by anyone who is able to penetrate its secret nature and mysteries,” explains Padoux. One of those mysteries is that, though “vāc” can be translated as “word” or “speech,” as a creative force it comes before language and cannot be translated as language. In ancient India this word indicated a “constant ambivalence” about the nature of the human and the cosmic. The “knowledge of the supreme reality, the highest understanding, was founded on knowledge of anthropo/cosmic correlations,” writes Padoux. So there was “no distinction between the human and the cosmic, the vital, the psychic, or the spiritual.”⁵

Nasr also points out that in ancient Egyptian theology, the divinity Ptah contains the creation in his heart and creates beings through his tongue, that is, by his word. The great cosmic realities, called the Ennead—including Atum, the primordial Adam—are created by Ptah’s simply pronouncing their names.⁶

The power of the word in all these traditions is related to the power to name things. In fact, the name of a thing and the thing itself seem to be the same. Thus John’s gospel tells us that the word is not only with God but is God. Extending the dimensions further, the Upanishads hold that the name is conjoined not only with the thing it names, but with any action that is undertaken in that name. Thus the Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad reads, “The Universe is a trinity, and this is made of name, form, and action. Those three are one.” This whole notion takes a very human creative act, the act of speaking, and gives it primacy, says Padoux, then “chooses to reverse the order of things” so that the word comes first and our human speech is simply the continuation of a divine, cosmic process that continues forever. These comments echo the Yup’ik: “Through the naming process, the essence of being human is passed on from one generation to the next,” Ann Fienup-Riordan explains in Eskimo Essays.⁷

In The Great Digest, Confucius seems to say that clarity in the word—not the purity that guardians of grammar seek but the precise word—is the root of integrated persons, strong families, and good government. “If the root be in confusion,” he says, “then nothing will be well governed.” The precise word is the result of the widest and best learning possible, and it becomes the source of all self-discipline and self-cultivation. Ezra Pound translates the Chinese characters for the accurate word as “the sun’s lance coming to rest on the precise spot verbally,” as if the clear word will bring anything to light, even the very heart of our most inward self.⁸

The Tao Te Ching opens by insisting, “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.” Yes, there is a certain contempt for language built into those lines, and it conflicts with Confucius’s concern and appreciation for language, even though words cannot do everything we’d like and may be as often imprecise as accurate. Yet even in that Taoist insistence on a way that transcends language, there is room for the clear, creative word, for the next line is, “The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.”⁹ The ten thousand things are of a lower, noneternal order—the immediate, contingent, immanent, earthly stuff in all its manifestations that surrounds, perplexes, pleasures, elevates, expands, sustains, and tempts us, all those created things that compose our world—nevertheless they seem to come from a word. How do we get from the nameless to the named without a word slipped in there someplace, somehow, between the eternal and the immediate? The eternal is uncreated, I take it; the ten thousand things are created, but by what or by whom, how? Perhaps by what names them? I admit there is room for more than one thing between the eternal and the things around us—a divine agent, perhaps, who gives names, and the names themselves. But if the name is the agent, then the naming word has a role here, if not as a being then as an action or a force that gives form to the ten thousand things, quite like the logos or the Upanishads—or the Chinese qi, a word for the creative principle that holds the world together, regenerates us anew from the losses we all face, and offers us the benevolence of fecundity. If the ten thousand things come to us by their naming, and if they are as complex, linked, united, related, all one, as our own contemporary observations lead us to believe, then the naming in the Tao Te Ching is a powerful force akin to the power of relationship and harmony that Heraclitus says binds us together in the right ratios. And if the creative agent that gives us the names is language or the word, does it matter if the word is logos or vāc or something else?

Augustine, the obsessively self-cultivating bishop of the early church, emphasized the importance of the oral word for teachers when he said, “And so I learned, not from those who taught, but from those who talked with me.” James Hillman, a psychiatrist, tells us in Healing Fictions that the avenue to wholeness and integrity lies in keeping our stories straight, standing by our word. Pushing the notion even further, Victor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and creator of a whole psychiatric system, named his approach to creating a healthy psyche “logotherapy.”¹⁰

We have not followed John or Confucius or Heraclitus, or listened to the goddess Vāc, and have thus made Hillman and Frankl and all our psychiatrists, shamans, and curanderas necessary. Bill McKibben points out in The End of Nature how serious breaking our bonds with the earth may be.¹¹ Jinx Everett, a Colorado schoolteacher, told me in a teachers’ workshop that he thought the crooked language of government and the media might be an even more dangerous threat to our society than the current ecological threats to our environment.

The Pragmatism of the Word

All that may sound pretty abstract, even ethereal, and many of us are impatient with abstractions. We turn away from them because they are too vague, not pragmatic enough, or because they do not appear to offer an immediate return. We are like the practical man who came to Confucius; we don’t believe we can take abstractions back to the prince or the office or the classroom and do anything with them. But I want to reclaim the value inherent in certain abstractions, including the idea of the word. Often we want to “get on with things,” “get up to speed,” get away from the conceptual and lose ourselves in action. How we speak about things, then, is rendered unimportant. “That’s just semantics,” we are told, and semantics are seen as an obstacle to action. It is possible to pick up speed much earlier if we bypass the language of conception. What that most often means, however, is that the wreck waiting for us down the road will be a fatal one instead of a fender bender.

Mathematics is an abstraction, yet we do not ignore or dismiss it, and when things finally add up, we see its value. We see government as an abstraction until we attend our first precinct meeting or party caucus, where it can quickly become very personal, demanding our thought and our time. We see the law as an abstraction until we begin to apply it, or a uniformed officer begins to apply it to us. We see the idea of the word as an abstraction—until we break it, or put it in the service of unworthy ends. I am utterly with Confucius in this. I do not believe for an instant that the idea of the word is an abstract notion, for clear language is critical to the development of trust, the maintenance of social cohesion within as well as between societies, and between citizens and the governments that represent them. But I’d have to confess that my own approach to this is based in my experience and is therefore personal, perhaps idiosyncratic, and can’t be blamed on Confucius or anyone else. Neither does it come from the multitude of deceits promulgated by our government with increasing frequency. Where’s Confucius when we need him?

America has always been known as deceitful. In 1897, Sitting Bull informed a reporter for the New York Herald, “I have told my people that the Americans are great liars.” We seem to think, because we Americans have such restricted access to the world’s news (or did have until very recently), that the rest of the world does not know that we were lying about Nicaragua, Panama, Guatemala, Grenada, Chile, El Salvador . . . Afghanistan, Iraq. But they did know; they knew it when it was happening. The unreality of our word has become so egregious recently that no one, even those nations whose aims and means are as duplicitous as our own, trusts us. No wonder. Our deceits started long ago, and they will not end soon, for they have never been limited to a single political party. But all that is global, so let me spell out a couple of personal experiences that lead me to believe that the idea of the word is not abstract but pragmatic and, despite the lure of realpolitik, is essential to a sustainable government that is the expression of a sustainable culture.

In February or March 1986, I was in Nicaragua, standing on a porch in the dusk in La Paz del Tuma, an asentamiento in the mountains beyond Jinotega. Oscar, a Nicaraguan from Managua, and I were simply staring across the big valley, watching the mountains across the way looming black and beautiful against a rapidly darkening sky. Whatever thoughts were absorbing Oscar, I was practically mindless, soaking up an evening of sunset clouds and shadows and the mystery of bei...