A Brief Introduction to Indigenous Epistemology and Unconscious Learning
Artwork found on an abandoned cabin along the Squeah Forest Service Road, along the Fraser River near Hope, BC.
What indigenous nations have been doing for thousands of years is to learn things unconsciously with greater impact than the colonial or settler mindset. Part of this might stem from the difference in cultural goals or in different value schemes. Though this raises the question we should ponder more often as a settler society. Should one overarching goal be about technological advancement to help solve the problems of our world? Or should it be about focusing on sustainability, in a deeper and more meaningful way that sees our ‘resources’ in a different, and less exploitive mindset? Should we do the same for how we treat each other?
In this introduction article, I wish to begin illustrating this notion of unconscious learning, how it is tied to emotional connections, story, and place and how our current epistemology is one of ignorance and ‘surface level’ knowledge acquisition. By the end, one should have the beginnings of an idea of how to engage and begin decolonizing their own perspectives and epistemologies. Yet this is only one beginning, for much work needs to be done on this subject if any real, lasting and meaningful change is meant to happen for our relationship with indigenous people, the land, and a deeper and greater understanding of ourselves.
A Deeper Understanding of Story and Place
Oral word and oral tradition has a greater weight of importance and intent than the colonial written word. Take, for example, the more traditional indigenous experience: an elder tells you a story, you have to remember it because it may only be told once. You may only hear it once. So, you have to listen intently and take every word in as it is spoken and learn it deeply. You need to learn it unconsciously, otherwise, it is potentially lost to your culture.
The colonial and settler mindset is to think of stories as an afterthought, as a piece of entertainment, for the most part. It generally is not seen as true objective knowledge or even as really a piece of useful knowledge at all. Part of this is because the western world is somewhat disparaging of emotional, social, and spiritual intelligence and tends to focus only on materialistic forms of knowledge, rather than taking a more holistic approach.
Indigenous learning is very different than the colonial and settler mindset. One had to know it, or you simply would not know it. Story was equally important besides just the knowledge of construction, hunting, gathering and taking from the land. There was and is still meant to be a greater, deeper connection to the land, as if it was an extension of one’s own life. We need only think of John Locke to understand the colonial mindset and the great differences in an understanding of ‘property’ between the indigenous tradition and the colonial/settler tradition. Indigenous people were more connected to the land. The land was their library, an extension of their language, where they wrote in action, and passed on through oratory storytelling for thousands of years. Where once the stories were learned, they were also tied to a place, which would always be a trigger, or location for them to remember that story, even if they momentarily forgot.
They were linking their knowledge to their unconscious through stories, strongly associated with a location that would act as places to meditate and learn. They had learned to trust one’s knowledge of the land, and to listen to the land when it spoke. This idea was, and still is viewed as ‘too mystical’ for most westerners. The land speaks, if you are willing to listen. This idea might seem foreign, but quite literally it ends up being wildland, forestry knowledge, but on a level that is more intimate than most humans living in cities are familiar with today. It is the knowledge of our forests, wildlands, and how to survive by having deep knowledge of the land. It is about how to survive and thrive by knowing how to automatically learn to read the weather, or how to read the landscape for the most efficient route. It is about how to know when a large animal is near through the sounds and movements of birds. It is about how to read the tracks of any variety of animals, and know where they went, and even behavioural characteristics that reveal why they left. It is the knowledge of how to heal wounds with what our natural world offers and what is and is not edible amongst the foliage all around us.
This type of intimate knowledge in the modern colonial and settler country is known as ‘expertise.’ While many have it in one regard or another, a lot of it ends up amongst the majority of people being pedantic and esoteric in an academic setting. Or it is dispersed through those in-the-field experts, such as fallers, line locators, biologists, hydrologists, and so forth. Instead, in an indigenous framework, almost everyone needed some, if not all, of this knowledge. These traditions were strong enough to endure thousands, to tens of thousands of years, changing and evolving, yet still staying true to their core.
Much of the indigenous mythology over multiple nations, have some central themes that are repeated, and are even archetypal across the great pan-indigenous identity. One is that we all spoke one language with all the creatures on Earth. Another is that our forms were fluid. We could transmute into other animals and things. Three, we were all a form of spirit, and fell in and out and through everything and each other. Existence was fluid with itself as forms changed and morphed and everything knew a common tongue. One might say everything was everything and individual identity schemes would not or could not even apply. Things shifted through dimensions and planes of existence.
Then things scattered, and were fragmented and broken up. (1) The way was lost and a new way needed to be forged. Typically, there also seemed to be from this point a Transformer in many mythologies who went around, imparting stories, and teaching lessons to the people of the newly scattered world. This would inform and provide the stewardship of being much closer with the land and working with it, as opposed to dominating, parcelling and dividing the land for resources. Instead, things were not thought of as resources but rather as what one needs, and one would only take enough for what they needed and not typically anymore. This is all not to say indigenous nations did not war with each other, or exhibit greed, or ill intent or other terrible human behaviours. That appears almost inevitable amongst our entire species. Instead, those common traits rather speak to the ability of humankind to be protean; to be both great, and terrible at the same time, but also to be anything depending on our context.
What is still clear is that the value of sustainability, weaved into a story with strong ties to place, and an encouragement to explore and know the land intimately (and what it means) can teach us how to live more harmoniously with nature. This emotional and spiritual connection clearly impacts deeper and greater than anything a colonial and settler mindset can teach, or knows how to teach. This deeper way of learning impacts lessons through story, through emotional connection and learning things unconsciously. This is a much more powerful way to learn that we have bothered to acknowledge in the western world, despite such seminal work on global mythology and universal archetypal stories from Joseph Campbell. (2) Training our unconscious and learning and knowing something to the point that it becomes unconscious knowledge is a type of mastery or expertise in what we are deciding to learn. Through this mode of learning and teaching, we might be able to understand ourselves and each other in a way that could completely change the world, if we gave it a serious chance.
Indigenous and Alternative Perspectives Compliment Each Other
Other perspectives coalesce and converge neatly, not from just the past, but from the present too that give more ammunition to this older idea that the western world has purposefully turned its back on. Though in engaging these perspectives and navigating new forms of knowledge, we can also begin to destabilize the current colonial, neoliberal, oppressive mindset.
Professor Jennifer Peterson discusses this but from an alternative western perspective that teases and almost seems to implicitly acknowledges this idea of unconscious knowledge, and learning through emotional and imaginative connections. This ‘counter-power’ against the dominant western epistemology is a type of narrative iconoclasm. This is where narratives, the ideas behind and around them, the symbols and symbolism embedded in the dominant imagination and myths and story that serve to uphold the status quo, are challenged and subsequently destabilized hopefully to destruction. (3)
While this may seem harsh, we have to realize that through this destruction, room will be made for the reforming and creation of this lost idea of a different story, a different way of learning and deeper way of knowing. A different dominant narrative and imagination may emerge that can potentially bring us more in line with a more legitimate and a practically sustainable future. It starts with acknowledging different forms of knowledge and epistemologies that western society has turned its backs on, or suppressed for hundreds of years. Or perhaps more simply, it starts with a willingness, with a quiet patience, to listen to each other more closely. It can start with a story.
Guilherme Rosales is a Master of Public Policy and Global Affairs student at the University of British Columbia. He has been a wildland firefighter with the BC Wildfire Service for the past five years, a community organizer coordinating neighbourhood block parties from 2011 to 2015 in the Oakridge neighbourhood area of Vancouver, as well as a labour activist and advocate with CUPE 15 and the BCGEU.
This article was also edited by Raymond Douglas. He is an Indigenous Advocate for the Sto:lo nation and a friend of Guilherme Rosales. He has worked with the Chawathil first nation developing their land code. He has also been the point person in his work for indigenous connections and affairs.
(1) Wallas, James and Pamela Whitaker. (1982). Kwakiutl Legends. Hancock House.
(2) Campbell, Joseph. (1968). The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton Press.
(3) Peterson, Jennifer. (2018). Resisting Securitized and Militarized Understandings of Protection: Aesthetics as Counterpower. International Politics., Online: First version