Indigenous Ways of Knowing
Trail of Beauty
With beauty before me, may I walk
With beauty behind me, may I walk
With beauty above me, may I walk
With beauty below me, may I walk
With beauty all around me, may I walk
Wandering on the trail of beauty, may I walk
– Navajo: Walking Meditation
Hózhó: Restoring Land, Community and Culture
By Tammy Hererra, Craig Conley and Avery Anderson
Hózhó is a Navajo word that means “walking in beauty” – or living in a manner that strives to create and maintain balance, harmony, beauty and order. Hózhó is similar to, but much richer in meaning than the term “conservation” as it implies a deep connection between people and land. One cannot restore land health without people and culture. This concept forms the founding principal for understanding ecological and cultural resilience on Navajo land, and the work of the Ojo Encino Chapter of the Navajo Nation over the last decade.
The Ojo Encino Chapter of the Navajo Nation sits on the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau, 30 miles due west of Cuba, New Mexico. The restoration program at Ojo Encino is focused on building upon the traditional resilience strategies of the Navajo people. We aim to restore hózhó by:
The challenges facing this community, and many others in Indian Country, are daunting. First and foremost, is poverty. Many live without running water or electricity, and subsist on commodity food provided by the federal government that is causing obesity, diabetes and ultimately death. Healing the social, economic and political issues that plague this community will be a necessary component of restoring hózhó. As one elder recently said, “we have known imbalance for so long, harmony feels unnatural.”
The second daunting challenge to restoring hózhó is that people no longer depend on the local land base for sustenance. While it is certainly not our goal that the community of Ojo Encino return to a subsistence agricultural economy, there are cultural practices associated with agriculture that clearly sustain the health of the community and the health of the landscape. When land provides something that you NEED – it is natural that you would want to take good care of it! As a society, we have moved towards an increasingly cash based economy, and thus we see the land as cash – instead of as a resource from which we should only harvest what we need. As a result we have entered a vicious cycle of increasing pressure on land, which ultimately leads to land degradation. In a fragile landscape like Ojo Encino, this degradation is particularly pronounced.
The third challenge is getting young people involved, and demonstrating that there is meaningful work to be done in the community. One elder captured the challenge perfectly with the statement, “Our youth no longer see the land, they just see the road out of here.” There are few opportunities for youth to make a good living on the reservation, and a crucial element of restoring hózhó will be re-engaging the imaginations and creativity of the next generation of land stewards.
The final challenge is resistance to change. Old habits die hard, especially when the change doesn’t always fit in well with the “more, better, faster” American dream. Hózhó requires that we take our time, find beauty and meaning in what we do, and ultimately create harmony in the world around us.
Wisdom of the Elders
Native and Scientific Ways of Knowing about Nature
Peter Knudtson and David Suzuki
1992
If shamans and scientists for centuries have asked very different kinds of questions of the cosmos, how different are the "answers" each has elicited? One way to distil the differences between Native and scientific knowledge about nature is simply to list some of the fundamental qualities of Native ecological perspectives and contrast them with conventional scientific ones. By listing them, we do not mean to imply that all these characteristics will necessarily be found in every indigenous belief system. Nor are we implying that no scientist subscribes in any way to any of the Native viewpoints and values that we are suggesting. Nor do we believe our list to be exhaustive.
With beauty before me, may I walk
With beauty behind me, may I walk
With beauty above me, may I walk
With beauty below me, may I walk
With beauty all around me, may I walk
Wandering on the trail of beauty, may I walk
– Navajo: Walking Meditation
Hózhó: Restoring Land, Community and Culture
By Tammy Hererra, Craig Conley and Avery Anderson
Hózhó is a Navajo word that means “walking in beauty” – or living in a manner that strives to create and maintain balance, harmony, beauty and order. Hózhó is similar to, but much richer in meaning than the term “conservation” as it implies a deep connection between people and land. One cannot restore land health without people and culture. This concept forms the founding principal for understanding ecological and cultural resilience on Navajo land, and the work of the Ojo Encino Chapter of the Navajo Nation over the last decade.
The Ojo Encino Chapter of the Navajo Nation sits on the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau, 30 miles due west of Cuba, New Mexico. The restoration program at Ojo Encino is focused on building upon the traditional resilience strategies of the Navajo people. We aim to restore hózhó by:
- Restoring land health and cultural health
- Maintaining traditions by reconnecting people to land
- Creating new land and water management norms
- Feeding the community
- Re-engaging youth
The challenges facing this community, and many others in Indian Country, are daunting. First and foremost, is poverty. Many live without running water or electricity, and subsist on commodity food provided by the federal government that is causing obesity, diabetes and ultimately death. Healing the social, economic and political issues that plague this community will be a necessary component of restoring hózhó. As one elder recently said, “we have known imbalance for so long, harmony feels unnatural.”
The second daunting challenge to restoring hózhó is that people no longer depend on the local land base for sustenance. While it is certainly not our goal that the community of Ojo Encino return to a subsistence agricultural economy, there are cultural practices associated with agriculture that clearly sustain the health of the community and the health of the landscape. When land provides something that you NEED – it is natural that you would want to take good care of it! As a society, we have moved towards an increasingly cash based economy, and thus we see the land as cash – instead of as a resource from which we should only harvest what we need. As a result we have entered a vicious cycle of increasing pressure on land, which ultimately leads to land degradation. In a fragile landscape like Ojo Encino, this degradation is particularly pronounced.
The third challenge is getting young people involved, and demonstrating that there is meaningful work to be done in the community. One elder captured the challenge perfectly with the statement, “Our youth no longer see the land, they just see the road out of here.” There are few opportunities for youth to make a good living on the reservation, and a crucial element of restoring hózhó will be re-engaging the imaginations and creativity of the next generation of land stewards.
The final challenge is resistance to change. Old habits die hard, especially when the change doesn’t always fit in well with the “more, better, faster” American dream. Hózhó requires that we take our time, find beauty and meaning in what we do, and ultimately create harmony in the world around us.
Wisdom of the Elders
Native and Scientific Ways of Knowing about Nature
Peter Knudtson and David Suzuki
1992
If shamans and scientists for centuries have asked very different kinds of questions of the cosmos, how different are the "answers" each has elicited? One way to distil the differences between Native and scientific knowledge about nature is simply to list some of the fundamental qualities of Native ecological perspectives and contrast them with conventional scientific ones. By listing them, we do not mean to imply that all these characteristics will necessarily be found in every indigenous belief system. Nor are we implying that no scientist subscribes in any way to any of the Native viewpoints and values that we are suggesting. Nor do we believe our list to be exhaustive.
- First, traditional Native knowledge about the natural world tends to view all - or at least vast regions-of nature, often including the earth itself, as inherently holy rather than profane, savage, wild, or wasteland. The landscape itself, or certain regions of it, is seen as sacred and quivering with life. It is inscribed with meaning regarding the origins and unity of all life, rather than seen as mere property to be partitioned legally into commercial real estate holdings.
- The Native Mind is imbued with a deep sense of reverence for nature. It does not operate from an impulse to exercise human dominion over it.
- Native wisdom sees spirit, however one defines that term, as dispersed throughout the cosmos or embodied in an inclusive, cosmos- sanctifying divine being. Spirit is not concentrated in a single, monotheistic Supreme Being.
- Native wisdom tends to assign human beings enormous responsibility for sustaining harmonious relations within the whole natural world rather than granting them unbridled license to follow personal or economic whim.
- It regards the human obligation to maintain the balance and health of the natural world as a solemn spiritual duty that an individual must perform daily - not simply as admirable, abstract ethical imperatives that can be ignored as one chooses. The Native Mind emphasises the need for reciprocity-for humans to express gratitude and make sacrifices routinely - to the natural world in return for the benefits they derive from it-rather than to extract whatever they desire unilaterally. Nature's bounty is considered to be precious gifts that remain intimately and inextricably embedded in its living web rather than as "natural resources" passively awaiting human exploitation.
- Human beings are to honor nature routinely (through daily spiritual practice, for example, or personal prayer) rather than only intermittently when it happens to be convenient (on Earth Day, for example, or following a particularly moving speech or television documentary, or in the throes of personal despair over a pressing local environmental crisis). And human violations of the natural world have serious immediate (as well as long-term) consequences rather than comfortingly vague, ever "scientifically uncertain," long-term ones.
- The Native Mind tends to view wisdom and environmental ethics as discernible in the very structure and organisation of the natural world rather than as the lofty product of human reason far removed from nature.
- The Native Mind tends to view the universe as the dynamic interplay of elusive and ever-changing natural forces, not as a vast array of static physical objects.
- It tends to see the entire natural world as somehow alive and animated by a single, unifying life force, whatever its local Native name. It does not reduce the universe to progressively smaller conceptual bits and pieces.
- It tends to view time as circular (or as a coil-like fusion of circle and line), as characterised by natural cycles that sustain all life, and as facing humankind with recurrent moral crises.- rather than as an unwavering linear escalator of "human progress."
- It tends to accept without undue anxiety the probability that nature will always possess unfathomable mysteries. It does not presume that the cosmos is completely decipherable to the rational human mind.
- It tends to view human thought, feelings, and communication as inextricably intertwined with events and processes in the universe rather than as apart from them. Indeed, words themselves are considered spiritually potent, generative, and somehow engaged in the continuum of the cosmos, not neutral and disengaged from it. The vocabulary of Native knowledge is inherently gentle and accommodating toward nature rather than aggressive and manipulative.
- The Native Mind tends to emphasise celebration of and participation in the orderly designs instead of rationally "dissecting" the world.
- It tends to honor as its most esteemed elders those individuals who have experienced a profound and compassionate reconciliation of outer- and inner-directed knowledge, rather than virtually anyone who has made material achievement or simply survived to chronological old age.
- It tends to reveal a profound sense of empathy and kinship with other forms of life, rather than a sense of separateness from them or superiority over them. Each species is seen as richly endowed with its own singular array of gifts and powers, rather than as somehow pathetically limited compared with human beings.
- Finally, it tends to view the proper human relationship with nature as a continuous dialogue (that is, a two-way, horizontal, communication between Homo sapiens and other elements of the cosmos) rather than as a monologue (a one-way, vertical imperative).