Tuisem Ngakang
New Delhi
My great-great grandparents were the indigenous inhabitant of this land. They lived and interact with nature, valued and respect sustainable culture. As their great-great grandson, I have learned first-hand that the knowledge handed down by my ancestors on survival in our land is not to be disregarded, and failure to practice and uphold this wisdom can only result in tragedy or disharmony to an individual or a group.
Anthropologist has recently expanded the definition of indigenous people as a member of a common culture and common territory to a common knowledge system. The places they lived in, the tradition they hold true, the language they developed have generated wisdom, which is greater than knowledge. We have been living successfully in climates and conditions most others see as hostile. Over thousands year we have developed complex, integrated, sophisticated and meaningful culture. Yet in recent years, our cultural integrity has suffered colossal onslaught. Our culture, our ancestral wisdom has been devastated because of ethnocide as a result of the globalization, ever since then the war on subsistence has began.
For time immemorial we had made things and had acquired property; we believed, loved, hated, fought, wandered and wondered, and had learned many things by our own experimental existence. Children were taught from birth, about survival, endurance and respect for nature and all humankind, through stories and legends. In our culture, learning has always moved in two ways: back, to learn stories of the past and get them right and forward, to rise above the past and create a more viable future. For our people, the goal of education has always been wisdom: intelligence, intuition, information, knowledge and service to the community to enable the people to survive, until recently the goal has been shifted to job skills.
From the earliest days, our stories and educations have tried to account for the primary “why” and “what” question and strived to know how things work around us. The abilities to observe accurately to create hypothesis to test and retest hypothesis over time have been in place when our earliest ancestors took a short cut to attempt to intercept game! Thousands of years ago, our indigenous agricultural experiences and experiments with plants have recognized that biodiversity was critical to sustainability.
Through our legends, we speak of our close ties with the spiritual world. Secular and sacred, nature and sacred, wisdom and the sacred were inextricably linked. From the young age, children were taught to establish those ties and adults were instructed to make it their daily practice. But unfortunately today, sacred has separated from wisdom, wisdom disengaged from knowledge, knowledge unfastened information, information disconnected from facts, facts from firsthand information and experience.
For centuries, we know that land, human and animals’ health have close ties. The latter two depends on the first for their survival. Stories handed down through time depict our interrelationship with the animal world, and tell of animals and humans exchange roles, acquiring supernatural powers and teaching and providing for one another. It is learnt from our experience and observation that when land health exhaust our productivity decline and hence economies decline, population decline, social health decline, spiritual resources decline. Only recently, psychologist realized that depression, alcoholism, stress, intellectual depletion increases with the decline in land health. Indigenous culture knew it thousands of years before the botanist found the link between the health of the soil and health of everything. The over confident in the superior knowledge of our time, we have forgotten the wisdom of our ancestors that everything we do affects everything. Today, our land, our spirit, our communities all needs healing.
For generations our survival do not depends on literacy, we do not rely on the military might nor on economy, but on the wisdom that our ancestors handed down, the wisdom based on the reason, observation and experience.
Our farming has guided by the principles of sustainability until recently we were exposed to the consumer capitalism where we are asked to consume not only material goods, but also ideas, policies and persuaded us to change our worldview of who we are and who we should be. We have been assaulted by corporate hype, commercial hype, and educational hype! Our civil liberties and freedom has shrunk to choosing from nine or ten bran names of one production! The myth of modern farming called the use of chemical, pesticides, antibiotics is killing us. These are only short-term fixes for the farmers; they are more destructive than constructive. Our animals have fled, our rivers have polluted and run dry, our land has exhausted.
Unlike resources exploitation is the main means for development, survival of the people was the way of life in the past, where everybody takes what he needs, not more than what is required. Our culture has been insisting that individual is not greater than community in any level. We knew that there can be never sustained culture in which individual exceeded the community in value. Individual freedom is always in the back into responsibility to the community. Larger social and ecological communities sustain individual. Individual freedom is integrated into the community. Land, stories, songs all are held collectively by the community. It has collective responsibility to preserve the health of the land, the community must ensure that the stories and songs are necessary to hand down from generation to generation the knowledge and the skills to ensure survival.
Our indigenous belief system taught us that nature and culture, environment and human cannot be separated, human propitiate nature, nature provide human needs. It is all about reciprocal, balance and harmony towards animals, plant as well as towards fellow human, so that human thought and activity and the ecological life could all survive together with least harm to the other.
Call me a hopeless romantic a cynical, a person who live in the past, but I will happily rely on the wisdom, which have a clear view of how the world actually work!
