Saturday, July 07, 2012

Rediscovering Indigenous Values

Before the European invasions, Indigenous societies in Africa, Asia and the Americas discovered medicine, domesticated plants and animals, created literature, designed architecture, and organized confederacies and empires. Through trial and error these societies evolved to imperfect but harmonious civilizations. Then came the holocausts of religious and biological plagues.

For whatever reasons, the European invaders had long lost a sense of harmony, and it would take them a long time to begin to rediscover their Indigenous values. In the meantime, they had lost control of the machinery of domination to the extent it began to devour them.

With the dawn of their new awareness, the Europeans and their diaspora found they had lost not only their harmony, but their sanity as well. In their attempt at becoming whole, they discovered their identities of domination had to be discarded entirely, and that the machinery they had erected would have to be dismantled.

Sunday, July 01, 2012

Connectedness

In her graduate thesis, Center for World Indigenous Studies associate scholar Renee Davis examines the cultural use of local plants to enable coping with diabetes and generational trauma in Salish tribal communities, and how storytelling and narrative might be employed to potentiate cultural revitalization and health education.