Language twisting twisting

Something clicked for me after having lunch with Michael yesterday. Being me, with the training I've had, I usually like things to be explained clearly, directly, and explicitly. But it seems that much of indigenous knowledge is conveyed indirectly, implicitly, through metaphor and story. I never really understood why this was the case. Why would tabaqueros in the Amazon call a jaguar a basket? Why would the Tzutujil Maya talk about fresh water as the daughter of the sun and the moon? Why so much "inside knowledge", and coded language and visual symbols in Aboriginal knowledge and art? Somehow, after our talk over lunch, it seemed clear to me: the kinds of things indigenous elders are talking about are beyond the full comprehension of humans. To talk about them clearly and explicitly would be to treat such things as if the knowledge about them was all tidy and contained in a box, as if the words could convey the complete nature of the thing. Since words cannot do so, the only accurate way to talk about such things is indirectly, through coded language. The only respectful and truthful way to talk about such things is through codes that call on intuitive, implicit processes in the mind. Such codes prevent those who are outsiders (who do not have deep knowledge of the thing) from making the mistake of thinking they understand the whole thing. This may be for their own protection: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

When I knock, there's an answer

Here's a dream I had last night:
I was in a circle of people, and we were all doing some technique to enter an altered state of consciousness. My friend Bobby, from California, was showing us the technique. I don't remember who the other people in the circle were. I don't think it involved any kind of substance or drug, I think it was a ceremony and some kind of meditation, but it's all a bit fuzzy in my head now. The state we entered was a beautiful, ecstatic state, and I found myself saying, "Yes, this is what I've been missing; this is why I've felt like I'm in exile, because I haven't felt this way in a long time." After the circle, I thanked Bobby for bringing me back to this state. He said that he had just got there by following through on things I had told him about my friend Jeremy's books. It seemed strange, that he should have got there by following things that I had pointed him towards, and then been able to lead me back to that state. The causality seemed all tangled up.

Then to hear Kerry Arabena's talk today, and to have the possibility of continuing to write and publish with the group of students in this class, to bring into being in the world some never-before-seen thing. The land is not silent: today the ground is fairly singing under my feet.

When I knock, there's an answer

Here's a dream I had last night:
I was in a circle of people, and we were all doing some technique to enter an altered state of consciousness. My friend Bobby, from California, was showing us the technique. I don't remember who the other people in the circle were. I don't think it involved any kind of substance or drug, I think it was a ceremony and some kind of meditation, but it's all a bit fuzzy in my head now. The state we entered was a beautiful, ecstatic state, and I found myself saying, "Yes, this is what I've been missing; this is why I've felt like I'm in exile, because I haven't felt this way in a long time." After the circle, I thanked Bobby for bringing me back to this state. He said that he had just got there by following through on things I had told him about my friend Jeremy's books. It seemed strange, that he should have got there by following things that I had pointed him towards, and then been able to lead me back to that state. The causality seemed all tangled up.

Then to hear Kerry Arabena's talk today, and to have the possibility of continuing to write and publish with the group of students in this class, to bring into being in the world some never-before-seen thing. The land is not silent: today the ground is fairly singing under my feet.

Issues in indigenous psychology - I had a dream...

I had a dream last night about teaching a new class in the School of Psychology. Here's how the dream went:
Steve Corporal and I were teaching a class on "Indigenous Issues in Psychology" or "Issues in Indigenous Psychology." (The exact title of the course became important later in the dream.) In the dream, the class was at the University of Queensland, but it actually took place in my old high school, Northwood High, in Silver Spring, Maryland. In dreams, you can be in two places at once, and it's not a paradox. We had a group of undergraduate UQ students gathered around in a circle, and I was standing in the center of the circle talking to them. I was talking about my own journey and how I no longer feel entitled to live just anywhere I want to in the world, that I now feel I should have the permission and welcome of the traditional owners of the area I want to live in. Steve said something behind his hand to me, something simple like, "Think about shame." And in that brilliant way he has, it imparted to me what I was missing in what I was saying. I understood him to mean that perhaps the way I was talking about it was making the undergraduate students feel they ought to be ashamed of who they were, of being white. So I changed what I was saying, and said, over and over again, "It's OK to be who you are, whoever that is. That has to be OK. It's OK to be who you really are." Then we took a break in the class, and students were wandering around, and I wasn't sure whether they would all come back. I was worried about the class, and whether they were getting anything out of it. Then I realized that I had never put a proposal for this class through the School of Psychology's Teaching and Learning Committee, and that maybe the students wouldn't even get academic credit for what they were doing. Then I began to think about the title of the class, and in the dream, I wasn't sure which it really was: was it "Indigenous Issues in Psychology" or "Issues in Indigenous Psychology"? I thought to myself that it couldn't really be "Issues in Indigenous Psychology" because there was no field of indigenous psychology yet. I thought, we don't even know what that is. I woke up then.

I told my partner the dream, and he said, "Well, why don't you put a course proposal through the School of Psychology?" And he had a point - why shouldn't we offer such a course to our students? Why should something like this happen only in a dream, when we're trying to work on how to make our psychology graduates more aware of indigenous issues, so that those who go out and become clinical practitioners have at least had a little bit of exposure. And why shouldn't this be a required course? Well, I may float the idea past some people in Psychology to see what they think. But I don't think I'll start by saying, "I have a dream..."

an old poem

I wrote this in 1998. I don't seem to have any new poetry in me, but it keeps seeming relevant here:

"Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.
Let all who prate of beauty hold their peace.
...O holy day, When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare." -- Edna St. Vincent Millay, from The Harp Weaver

If Euclid looked on beauty,
    still,
        angles and planes are not
               moist earth,
                    fog-dripping redwoods,
                         soft-curving mother’s belly
                              lung-testing newborn cries.
Euclid looked on Beauty, bare,
but She is clothed in
    bird-screeching, vine-looped canopies of trees,
          emerald-glistening frogs on leaf-sprouting branches,
               moss-springing rocks beside tumbling streams.
                    twice-coiling DNA, fecund with forms.
In laboratories, in universities,
    Euclid’s heirs look with his gaze.
Let all who look for Beauty
    take Her hand,
          and join the tribe of life,
               swirling in its vibrant dance.

Science is young

So here's an idea: systems of knowledge will eventually, over tens of thousands of years, converge on a more "accurate" view of reality. The system of knowledge embodied in Catholicism is quite young, and not adaptive – it is set up to be resistant to change, depending on the authority of an old, sex-deprived man who claims to have revelations. [I always think of that line from the film Ladyhawke, which I would love for someone to say to the Pope, "No offense, but I talk to God all the time, and he’s never mentioned you." Though the "he" should be "they" or "it" or "we".] The system of knowledge in Buddhism is only a few thousand years older than Catholicism, though it is set up to change and adapt in response to debate and evidence.

Science is only a few hundred years old, but it is designed to adapt and change in response to evidence, and, however imperfectly it instantiates its ideals, it does set up nature as the ultimate authority, rather than humans. And because it does use that method, humans' central role in the natural world and the universe has been eroded substantially in a few hundred years. Maybe science might be on a "fast growth" path for a system of knowledge. (And a slow growth path for a system of ethics.) Science has changed its view of the world and humans' place in the world tremendously in the last few hundred years, and seems to be gradually converging on something similar to an indigenous worldview: all living things are kin to each other, living things in ecosystems aren't separate entities, but are interdependent; matter and energy are interchangeable at some level; time and space and the fundamental constituents of matter are relative and constantly in flux, flickering in and out of existence on a quantum level, interrelated in ways counterintuitive to Western thought and language, but possibly quite intuitive in the thoughtways of many indigenous languages. Maybe long ago indigenous people already got to the worldview, the particular understanding of the universe, that science is heading towards. Tens of thousands of years of trial and error in the living world might make you pretty realistic – that is, would make you have to understand reality.

The dogmatic, authoritarian era of knowledge is ending. Science converges with indigenous knowledge, and we come to understand our relationship to the living world.

Who are scholars?

In academia, when one gets a sabbatical, one is often expected to go visit other researchers at other universities. I've asked to do something quite different with my sabbatical: to go to Peru and meet with indigenous elders (Ashaninka and Shipibo) and talk about indigenous knowledge and science. It has suddenly dawned on me that I am going to go visit other scholars. The elders and healers in their cultures are the scholars, the researchers, those who seek after knowledge. Just because they don't have PhD's and aren't in universities doesn't mean they aren't experts and scholars within their own intellectual traditions.

For scientists to engage in mutually respectful dialogue with indigenous scholars probably means we have to give up the idea that universities are the only repositories of knowledge, scholarship, and expertise. The indigenous equivalent of an Oxford don may be an old man or woman sitting out in a rainforest or desert somewhere. Or living in a city, but keeping alive indigenous knowledge. These are the holders of knowledge and expertise within indigenous people's intellectual traditions.

My friend Jeremy has said that some of the elders of certain tribes in the Amazon are revered throughout the Amazon region for their knowledge, that studying healing with one of those elders is the Amazonian equivalent of studying at Oxford or Cambridge. I'm just now "getting" that idea - it has just now truly sunk in.

"Now-ness" and the becoming of knowledge

Yesterday we discussed this issue in class in our groups, or triads:
"Indigenous knowledge is making sense of the world', it is a living knowledge and its very nature demands that it remains in a state of becoming to maintain the vitality of our learning together." - Michael Williams, 2000

This is my second free write after our triad's discussion on this issue.

Well, Norm really threw us for a loop with the banksia story. This brought us to a discussion of who is the "we" in the phrase "our learning together"? Does the land learn? Anna talked about the goannas learning not to eat the cane toads, so the land can learn when something new is introduced. I said I thought biological evolution was a process of the living world continually learning, exploring and learning. Liz asked what learning was, and I said it was knowing something you didn't know before. She asked, yes, but what kinds of things are capable of engaging in that process? So we talked about the idea that plants and land can learn, and can communicate, and are intelligent. But then what happens when a group of people don't believe that the environment is filled with intelligence that's communicating all the time? They are literally cut off from that source of learning. I started to type course of learning again, which is an interesting "error." Liz questioned whether people were really cut off from it, whether they consciously realized it or not they were always getting info from the environment. Hannah talked about talking to her housemates, and how they couldn't even describe the landscape where they grew up. They didn't know what color the soil was or what trees were there, or anything. So it does seem that some people can be cut off. Anna talked about not noticing the banksia trees or the natural environment much on the Moreton trip, because she was so caught up in thinking about what was going on with herself, what was the group doing, what would we do next, was she hungry, thirsty, etc. And I completely resonated with that. I was in the same state. Then I talked about feeling like the land here doesn't communicate with me: I try and try to hear it, and it's silent. Liz told the story of her 7 day walk and how it took her the first 5 days for her mind to become still and finally settle, and be in the now. And being in the now, her awareness expanded, and she was tremendously aware of the landscape, and in tune with it. Hannah and Liz both said maybe the land didn't talk to me because I was trying so hard, and so attached to the outcome, that I couldn't just be in the moment. I am so grateful to them for saying that – it's real wisdom. I talked about that seemed right to me, because "a state of becoming" can only happen in the now, in the present moment, and so if one can't be in the present moment, one is cut off from the vitality of knowledge becoming.
Liz also asked if there was really a dichotomy between humans and nature. To talk about nature could be to imply that humans aren't part of it.
And my ancestors have passed knowledge on to me, and that is part of what it is to be alive, to pass on knowledge, to communicate, to say to other living things, and this is what I am, and this is what I have experienced, here is what it is to be me. I am one branch of the family tree, and I can pass on to other branches what I know.

Static and dynamic knowledge

Today we had our discussion groups, our triads, about this issue:
"Indigenous knowledge is making sense of the world', it is a living knowledge and its very nature demands that it remains in a state of becoming to maintain the vitality of our learning together." - Michael Williams, 2000

Here is my first free write after our triad's discussion of this issue.

We talked about dynamic vs. static knowledge, first explored the idea that written knowledge was static, and oral traditions were, in their nature, dynamic. But then it seems that even written knowledge is dynamic: people are always reinterpreting something that is written, so even that changes. I'm thinking now about how differently the Bible is read by right wing fundamentalist Christians in the US, compared to how it was read by Christians in the 5th century who read it in Aramaic. The words may be somewhat the same, but the way they're interpreted is vastly different. People take out what they want to take out of it, and warp it to suit their purposes, rather than relying literally on what’s there.

So perhaps writing something down does not reify it.

Then we also talked about memory, and the nature of memory. Is memory really an exact record of something that has occurred in the past? One person's memory of an event will differ from another person's, even if it's the same event, and memory is always reconstructed. We also talked about how memory might be very different in people who rely on written texts, compared to people who work in an oral tradition. Memory can be improved by having to exercise it, having to use it, and in an oral tradition, that's what you've got, is memory alone. So maybe the "memory muscle" is stronger in an oral tradition.

We also talked about law changing and being dynamic, vs. having been stable for thousands of generations. Aboriginal people say that their law is from their ancestors, from the land, and is unchanging, where white man's law is always changing. So how can it be unchanging if it relies on a dynamic knowledge tradition? Knowledge changes, law doesn't. It seems like a paradox, but often there is a real wisdom in paradoxes, so … could be something.

We also talked about notions of time. When someone gives a story, and the knowledge in that story, no one asks, "How old is that story? What was the date and time when that knowledge started?" Though we do in science, and maybe other academic disciplines too. You give the exact source of the knowledge, and in my field, if it's really old, it's kind of looked down on, like, surely that's been overturned by now. But more deeply, the question arises about time, who's to say what's a long time and what's a short time? Who's to say what is young and what is old?

We also talked about the social nature of knowledge in an oral tradition. That you hear a story, and then re-tell it to others. When one person tells a story, others can say, hey, that's not how that happened. I was there, or that's my story, and here's how it goes. It can be fiercely contested publicly. Someone might be the boss for knowledge, for a story, and have the authority to say, this is how it is. So there's a corrective process for how stories get expressed. Hannah pointed out that knowledge isn't just in stories but also is expressed in other forms, painting, dance. And I pointed out that the knowledge isn't just in the people, but also in the land.

We also talked about different meanings of the word know. Knowledge that you have from your own experience is deep in your body and your senses; something you've read or heard is more external to you. So does it make sense to use the same word, knowledge, to refer to both kinds of things? Aren't they different kinds of knowing?

Stories also get known deeply because you hear them and then re-tell them. You are in the role of expresser, not just receiver. With written things, you don't tend to re-express it, you just read it, but you don't go re-telling the book you read to your friends. You can, or at least parts of it you can. And there is the chance to publicly give feedback on something you've read, to contest it. But the media, like TV, is very much a one-way street. You don't get to go back to the source and then contest it in a way that all the public can see. You can't say, hey that's my story, or that's not how it happened. Only those with sufficient power and money get access to publicly contesting what's in the media in a way that the public can see. In indigenous knowledge, that self-correcting feature, or rather, that socially correcting feature is there in knowledge.

Isn't it interesting how I keep coming back to the media as a course of knowledge (there I typed "course" instead of "source" when I meant to type "source") in my culture, and always in stark contrast to forms of indigenous knowledge?

We talked about school as being a place that didn't recognize the value of oral tradition, and that form of knowledge. The white western education system as being one that tries to treat knowledge as if it's not dynamic. As if it's not always shifting. But that might be more true of primary and secondary school. It seems in the academy, once you get to a uni, it is more dynamic and shifting.

We keep running onto the issue of language, and not knowing the Aboriginal languages, and in today's discussion, talked about not knowing what their words for "know" are. As well as how it affects schooling in knowledge when it's conducted in one language vs. another.

The direction of flow between science & indigenous knowledge

As I've said many times before, science tends to take a colonial approach to other systems of knowledge: science is the one right way, other ways are less than. Too often, the interaction between science and indigenous knowledge is one of scientists saying, "You have to believe what we believe and see the world through the same assumptions we do. Anything else is wrong." That's not a flow of knowledge from one system to another – that's cognitive abuse. It's abusive to say that one system of knowledge must be dismissed, and things experienced as real by people cannot be real, but must just be fantasies, imagination, or worse yet, psychotic delusions.

I think that scientists have to learn to listen to other worldviews, and sit with the discomfort of encountering something different and challenging to their worldview. Aboriginal people have certainly had to endure the discomfort of having another worldview forced on them. Scientists won't be forced to deal with another worldview, but I would hope that many could listen and sit with the discomfort of being challenged. Isn't that the essence of the scientific method? Constantly challenging your own assumptions, testing them against other views?

So I believe that all humankind evolved from apes (not monkeys, apes) in Africa, and then spread out to other parts of the globe from there. I've always understood from geneticists and archaeologists that Aboriginal people are more closely related to other non-African people than to African people, and that both genetic and archaeological data point to humans' leaving Africa about 80,000 years ago, and spreading into Indonesia and Asia 75,000 – 70,000 years ago, and across to Australia 60-70,000 years ago.

Janine says she doesn't accept that. And Jackie said the same thing, and Larry, the Murri dancer I chatted to at Woodford last year, said the same thing: we didn't come from Africa. Our ancestors have always been here, and we came from this land, from the land in Australia. (Actually, Larry said his ancestors taught that they came from the sea.) Janine had a really great way of putting it: "My ancestors were all sexy blackfellas." I think a typical scientist's reaction would be to say, "No, no, evolution is correct, and your view is wrong. You came from Africa." A typical New Age hippie response would be to say, "Yes, you're absolutely right, and those scientists are wrong. Isn't it awful how they always make these claims and pretend they have authority." But a third approach is to say that neither person needs to say they are right or wrong. I certainly don't consider that I have the right to say to any Aboriginal person, "That view is wrong." And I don't feel a strong need to say that. [I think a lot of scientists do feel a need to say something like that, because they are uncomfortable with people disagreeing with their theories.] But I also have my own beliefs about humanity's history, and where my ancestors came from, and I have not only scientific, but personal reasons for believing what I believe. My ancestors were sexy black men and women too! So a more challenging approach is to simply sit with two different, and incommensurate, worldviews, and say, "That’s OK. This is interesting. This is an opportunity for learning."

I am very curious what Aboriginal people think about DNA evidence, how does that fit into their view? I just remembered that Asians accept the general claims about human evolution, but do not accept that they came from Africa either. Chinese scientists have long held that Homo erectus (thought to be an ancestor species that lived 1.8 million – 800,000 years ago, with fossil remains throughout Africa, Asia, Indonesia and even southeastern Europe) evolved separately into humans in Africa and Asia – the parallel evolution hypothesis, or the theory of multiple origins, I think. This is their compromise of accepting parts of the human evolution story told by Western science, but not all of it. I have always been convinced by the similarities between our species' skull shape and African Homo erectus' skull shape, and dissimilarities to Asian Homo erectus' skull shape, that the Chinese scientists' view is not consistent with the evidence.

But...I don't know for sure. I wasn't there. I didn't see it with my own eyes. I do trust DNA evidence, and I particularly trust it when it's convergent with archaeological evidence. I'm not comfortable dismissing the Western scientific story the way Vine Deloria Jr. does in Red Earth, White Lies. I get frustrated when people critique scientific evidence because they don't like what it says, but haven't really understood how that evidence fits together, because then it feels like the disagreement isn't a genuine disagreement, but is just based on a misunderstanding. Vine Deloria's analysis isn't consistent with DNA evidence, but he doesn't address that point, so for me, it leaves his view incomplete. On the other hand, new archaeological evidence is showing that the Americas were populated much earlier than previously thought, so that is consistent with his view, and that new evidence hadn't been found when he wrote his book. To take the other view, it's not as if any scientist has made the effort to understand how indigenous people's evidence on this question fits together. So that's the learning opportunity. We scientists certainly don't have the whole story of our ancestors' history.

So I'm OK with just sitting with different worldviews, and not feeling like one has to give way to the other. It's uncomfortable, I won't deny that, but so is a new yoga pose before you develop the flexibility to do it comfortably.

I think that in many ways, the best benefit that science can give to indigenous people in this dialogue is just listening with respect, curiosity, and an open mind. Treating other knowledge systems as intellectual traditions with a long, long history. Externally, the flow might look, in such a conversation, like indigenous people were "doing the talking", and scientists just listening, but the flow between the two systems isn't just in who's actually talking and who's listening. There is a flow, in such a conversation, from science back to indigenous people: it's the gift of allowing space for other knowledge systems in today's world, something science hasn't traditionally been very good at. We could make up for a lot of intellectual colonialism by doing that. Furthermore, we could enrich our own intellectual traditions immeasurably.*

* Don't know if scientists can get on board with something being "immeasurable"!

When I knock, no one answers the door

This land is silent to me. North America is not. Sometimes it communicates loudly, sometimes just a whisper or a hint, but I hear the communication. I don't always understand it, but I hear it. Here, almost nothing. I try the same kinds of techniques I would try in North America, visualizations, being out in the natural world, etc., and it's like ringing up when no one is answering the phone. So I feel I can't practice my spirituality in this land, and without access to my spiritual life, it's pretty hard to feel settled here.

Ecosystems have rights

I have a bone to pick with the Dalai Lama. In thinking about how to bridge the gap between science and other worldviews, I've been reading the Dalai Lama’s recent book, The Universe In a Single Atom. It's fascinating to read how someone who started with no exposure to science, in a medieval monastic worldview, took the journey to try to explore and understand science. But, this is very different from an encounter between indigenous knowledge and science. Indigenous culture in Tibet had been pushed underground thousands of years ago beneath the reign of hierarchical monastic religions. I hear Michael's point that everything and everyone has indigenous knowledge, but...Buddhism was from India, not indigenous to Tibet, not any more than Christianity was indigenous to Europe. It was imposed on Europe. The particular hierarchical form of Buddhism in Tibet was not the original form of Buddhism, either. A hierarchical system with wealth concentrated in the hands of a few was not Siddartha Gautama's vision, nor is it Tibet's indigenous form of social organization. Colonial incursions from India and Mongolia had an influence on Tibet's form of government and religion.

On the flip side, of course, Tibetan Buddhism owes its distinctive form to Tibet's indigenous heritage. This is, as I learned it, why Buddhist teachers in Tibet used vivid imagery of spirits and deities to symbolize aspects of mind – by grounding the new religion in images the people of Tibet were already familiar with, by linking it to Tibet's indigenous knowledge. The Bön form of Tibetan Buddhism is said to be closer to Tibet's indigenous form of spirituality, and it is also the form of Tibetan Buddhism most at odds with the Dalai Lama (though recent controversies within Tibetan Buddhism have also been fueled by the colonizing Chinese government). Anyway, the basic point is that the Dalai Lama's encounter with science is quite different from an encounter between science and indigenous knowledge. It's more similar to an encounter between a medieval monk and science.

That's all just a preamble to my main point, which is that the Dalai Lama's obsession in this book with defining which beings are sentient and which are not bothers me. It seems very Catholic. The Catholic church was obsessed for years with defining the differences between humans and animals, all to the purpose of saying that humans were special, particularly blessed by God, unique in our spiritual status. Our special status also meant that ethical considerations applied to humans only, not to animals. Now, Buddhism is a good bit more inclusive in its ethical considerations than the Catholic church was – they include animals in the class of sentient beings, and believe that the ethical injunction to prevent suffering should apply to animals as well. But really, they're just drawing the same line, in a different place.
(This is my journey, from someone who has practiced Tibetan Buddhism in the past and revered the Dalai Lama as the head of those lineages of Buddhism, to being someone who says, "You know what? The Dalai Lama pisses me off!" I can only imagine what my teacher, Lama Lodru, would say!)

Science now provides clear empirical evidence of animal and plant intelligence. Why draw the boundary only around animals? Obviously plant intelligence is of a very different sort, not being based on brains and neurons, but plants do behave and respond and process information about the world around them. A lot of their behaviour is aimed at reproducing and avoiding being eaten, just like animal behaviour. It seems to me that science is much closer to indigenous knowledge on this point than to either Catholicism or Buddhism. Indigenous knowledge comes from the perspective that sentience is certainly not limited to humans, nor to animals, but that plants, forests, rivers, land – all have sentience, all have knowledge. I don't know about rocks being sentient – I'm still having trouble with that one – and I don't even know about individual plants and animals being highly intelligent, but it certainly seems to make sense to think of ecosystems themselves as sentient. Ecosystems are large, complex systems of interacting units, as are brains, that respond to the world around them in adaptive ways. I think science can accommodate the idea of ecosystem sentience.

So what would the world be like if, instead of having debates about animal rights, we had debates about ecosystem rights? Suppose we treated ecosystems as legal entities, as entities to whom ethical consideration must be extended: it is unethical to cause unnecessary harm to ecosystems. Not only unethical, but dangerous. Ecosystems bite back. Indigenous knowledge, I think, contains this insight.

A dream I had about a year and a half ago comes back to me very strongly when I think about this. It was a dream about Brisbane, and I think about Kurilpa, where I was living last year. But mostly, it was about ecosystems. Here's how I wrote the dream down the next day after I had it:
"I had a dream that there was a hillside covered with rainforest. In the dream, Americans came in and cut down the rainforest to make room for new modern apartment buildings. They did it overnight, so suddenly, and then in the morning the forest was gone. I was overwhelmed with grief that something so precious had been destroyed beyond repair, and was gone forever. It's the same way I have felt when someone close to me has died, the feeling that something irreversible has happened. In the dream, I wandered through the stumps on the hillside, and finally found a few scattered old growth trees - huge old eucalypts more than an armspan wide. This did nothing for my grief, though, because the forest, the living system they had been a part of, was still dead. If someone wonderful had died, and someone said, no, look, the rest of the body is gone, but we've still preserved some lung tissue in a Petri dish, it wouldn't comfort me. The point was that the forest was gone, irrevocably. I woke up still feeling the grief."

And here's what I wrote in my other blog last year about that:
"An ecosystem cannot be brought back. Individual species can find new ways to survive, as peregrine falcons have done in the "canyons" of modern cities, but the complex interdependence of an ecosystem, once destroyed, cannot be put back together. What took hundreds of thousands or millions of years to develop, with its intricate web of interrelationships, cannot be put back together by human action, it can only be destroyed by it. This now seems to be our species' role in the ecosystems of the world. But we are also a species who can grieve these losses, foresee them, and try to stop them. Where I live [Kurilpa] used to be covered with rainforest or dry eucalypt forest a century ago, and though there are many trees around, there is no more forest. My dream was a dream of this place, where I live. So what can I do now to stop this from happening in other parts of Queensland? Conservation shouldn't be about individual species, it should be about ecosystems. Can we develop an ethos in which ecosystems have as much right to exist and live as do people?"

Isn't that indigenous knowledge?

Be the change you want to see

What kind of change would I like to see in the world? What have I intended to dedicate my life to for the past 6 years? I want to see scientists around the world, both in academia and industry, recognizing that their science and scholarship can be enriched by engaging with indigenous knowledge. This is what I see as my life's work. This is why I took this class with Michael.

I'm beginning to realize that my own area of study, psychology and neuroscience, might be very relevant to this enterprise. For a few years, I think that I felt like I couldn't really take any kind of leadership role in working on science and indigenous knowledge because a) I didn't personally know any indigenous people, and b) I didn't feel like a "real" scientist. Well, since moving to Australia, now I do know some indigenous people. But still, there was that feeling that I'm only a psychologist/neuroscientist, not a real scientist like geneticists and ecologists and physicists. I could see how biology, or genetics, or medicine, or even physics could be enriched by engaging with another worldview, and how such scientists might have a lot to say to indigenous elders in which they could find common areas of knowledge. For example, biologists understand from studying DNA and evolution that all life is interconnected and all living things related to each other, something indigenous people around the world have been saying for thousands of years. Quantum physicists are starting to understand the interdependence of matter, both living and non-living, and the role that observation plays in changing the nature of reality. Michael has said that the insights of quantum mechanics don't seem counterintuitive to him, so I imagine physicists and indigenous elders would have plenty to talk about. But I never saw before how psychology and neuroscience could be part of that discussion. I'm starting to.

Psychology and neuroscience are both about understanding consciousness, and how people think. What could be more relevant to epistemology? If I'm interested in questions such as "What is knowledge?" and "How do people know what they know?", then a field of study focused on the nature of the human mind is a great field to be in. I also felt that when some of us from psychology starting to work with Michael and others in ATSIS, that my work wasn't as relevant because I'm not a clinical psychologist. But it's not just clinical psychologists who need to understand indigenous perspectives. I've seen for myself a little of how psychological research and theories can be enriched by thinking about indigenous perspectives. Current psychological theory about mental health and well-being focuses a great deal on interpersonal relationships, and does not acknowledge anything about relationship to the nonhuman living world or relationship to specific places. Even where eco-psychologists acknowledge the importance of connecting to nature, there is still no acknowledgement of connection to a specific place.

Aboriginal people take it as a given that they are in relationship with country, not just with the natural world as in the whole Earth’s biosphere, but with a specific part of the natural world, with their own people's country, whether that's Uluru or the Fortescue River or the coast near Cape York. I'm not saying that interpersonal relationships aren't important or that connection to nature isn't important, but I've started to do research on attachment to land and to places. Current psychological theory does not acknowledge that attachment to land is a real phenomenon, that someone can grieve when they leave a place, grieve when it is destroyed, and feel a kind of love for it that is as strong as the love of a child for its mother.

Ironically, a neuroscience article on how mammalian infants get attached to their mothers is what gave me the first clue to think about place attachment, and all I've learned about Aboriginal perspectives has reinforced it. So in my own thinking on this there has been an interplay between science and indigenous knowledge. There is a particular brain hormone, oxytocin, that is involved in forming the emotional bond between mother and infant when the infant is nursing. This molecule is very close in chemical structure to a molecule that is involved in territoriality in animals. So I began to think that there might be some similar brain chemistry involved in attachment to people and in attachment to places. But whether or not anyone ever figures out the relevant brain pathways that mediate attachment to places, it is clear talking to indigenous people that they are attached to land. What was it Michael said that was in the opening to the book, Grandmother's Ways: There is no greater violence that can be done to an Aboriginal child than to remove him or her from country. Now I've got two of my honours students doing research on place attachment with uni students, and we're finding that many people feel strong emotional bonds to particular places.

Aside from a particular research topic in my field, psychology also gives me a rich perspective on how to think about knowledge. Indigenous sources of knowledge are different from scientific sources of knowledge. Many psychologists would take a dismissive approach to the spiritual and ancestral sources of indigenous knowledge, "Oh, that's just all superstition; we can explain that as a set of biases and cognitive illusions." As I said in my first entry in this reflective journal, that's not a very scientific attitude, really. Instead of dismissing a worldview that's different, why not see it as a fascinating ontological opportunity? What does it mean to see signs in nature? What is that, psychologically? What does it mean to communicate with someone after they've died? What does it mean to communicate with spirits of plants, animals, land? There is so much that we do not understand about how the brain and the mind work, that psychology is not really in a position to dismiss phenomena that currently fall outside the scope of our theories. We don't even understand how the visual system recognizes an object from an unfamiliar angle from which it's never been viewed before. We don't understand how memory is encoded and retrieved in the brain. We don't understand exactly how children learn languages. We don't have any idea, when someone is in a visionary state, exactly what is going on in the mind and the brain. With so much unknown, how can anyone say, "Oh, that couldn't possibly be true," about indigenous sources of knowledge? The skeptic says, "That's superstition. Nature doesn't communicate; it doesn't send signs." Maybe it does; maybe it doesn't. "That's just magical thinking. People can't communicate with non-human things." Maybe they can; maybe they can't. But it's worth looking at that phenomenon with curiosity instead of with dismissal.

One more point. I might only be a lowly psychologist instead of a "real scientist," but I am in a good position to talk to scientists in a variety of disciplines. I have studied evolutionary biology – I can talk to biologists. I have a bachelor's degree from Harvard in astrophysics – I can talk to physicists. I understand logic and mathematics – I should be able to talk to engineers. I've published in PNAS, one of the world's top science journals. I'm an associate editor for two neuroscience journals. And, what's more, I've studied the history and philosophy of science, so I'm able to talk about the epistemology of science in a relatively sophisticated way. In short, I have "street cred" with many scientists. If I can also develop a good rapport with indigenous people, and I hope that I've made a good start on that this semester, then I'm in a good position to do my life's work.

This is work that will go on for the rest of my life, whether I'm at UQ or not, whether I'm employed at a university or not, whether it takes place through formal or informal channels. It's what I'm meant to be doing, so it will happen. I hope that I can be a good channel through which such work can be done, and that I can bring benefit not only to indigenous people, but also to scientists and skeptics who are suffering from rationalist materialism. My friend Jeremy once reminded me, "Don't try to change the world; be the change you want to see in the world." I hope I can.