Ancestral knowledge is knowledge passed down from one's ancestors, through story, song, art, dance, recipes, explanations of ecology, planting techniques, hunting techniques, etc. How much is anyone's ancestral knowledge intact? I am left with the feeling that it is part of being a non-native American or a non-Aboriginal Australian to be cut off from one's own history. I do not know much about my ancestor's lives. I don't know what they did day to day, I don't know what went into their decisions to come to North America, how they felt once they got here, what they missed most about the homelands they had left behind. I don't know their stories, songs, or recipes. And I certainly don't know anything about their spiritual practices. So I lack much ancestral knowledge.

But how much knowledge from ancestors does anyone have, intact? What is knowledge in an oral culture? The exact content of stories (and songs, dances, etc.) would certainly shift and change a bit over time, and from one teller to the next. But what are the most essential details of stories, and how much do those change in an oral culture? Perhaps with people who do not have external means of memory recording like writing, memory is more reliable than it is in cultures with writing. There is the story of the whale in the Klamath River, told by the Klamath Indians, that was verified by archaeologists who detailed an inland skeleton of a 10,000 year-old ocean whale. The key feature of that story stuck around for 10,000 years, or 4,000-5,000 generations. The Klamath Indians kept that story alive and intact, so they kept some of their ancestors' knowledge the same as it was. (Further reflections needed on this word, "intact".)

I am puzzling over this, because I don't know who my ancestors were, and I'm trying to find out more about their stories and myths. I believe, from geneological research that family members have had done, that my ancestors come from Scotland (on my father's side, some from the island of Colonsay on one side) and England (my mother's mother). I know that my father's family comes from the Carolinas after that, and my mother's mother's family from Arkansas. And I know that my mother's father's father and mother came from Isojoki or Karajoki (Karijoki?) in Finland. My mother did learn from her father that the Kalevala was important, and she passed that on to me. The Kalevala, a series of runic songs/poems, in a particular meter, telling myths and folk stories, from Finland. The most famous collection of these, Elias Lonnrot's Kalevala, would first have been published in Finland shortly before my great-grandfather left. How much can I rely on the Kalevala to tell me anything about the knowledge of my ancestors?