Art Work by Khatija Possum, daughter of Michelle Possum Nungurrayi and granddaughter of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri (1937 – 2002), founder of the Modernist Movement and one of Australia’s most celebrated Aboriginal artists.
"The aim of [Indigenous] cultures is to let the whole world know that they too belong to the same family and to start caring for the land, for the environment, for the mountains and waterways and the trees and every other living thing on this earth as brothers and sisters and family members. That’s our greatest dream and desire, to see that happen.
A Worldview of Interconnection
"We need a sense of meaning and purpose, and many of us no longer have the societal framework that provides it.
Fortunately, there is such a worldview, and it’s both ancient and modern, rooted in ancestral and indigenous ways of knowing, and aligned with the latest discoveries in science. It calls us to a different way of seeing the world, not as an assembly of separate, isolated objects, but rather as a tapestry of relationships in which we are embedded.
This worldview is ancient because it is shared by many indigenous cultures. I’m always wary of saying ‘indigenous culture’ as if it were one thing, because there are thousands of different indigenous societies and they have a myriad of worldviews. Yet there is a common thread that runs through cultures of those who live deeply connected to land and place, and that is the understanding of our deep interconnectedness. We are in relationship with other human beings and with the whole of nature, and tending those relationships is a core task of what we are meant to do in life.
In the words of Aboriginal writer and teacher Tyson Yungaporta, “In Aboriginal worldviews, nothing exists outside of a relationship to something else. There are no isolated variables—every element must be considered in relation to the other elements and the context. Areas of knowledge are integrated, not separated. The relationship between the knower and other knowers, places, and senior knowledge keepers is paramount.”
Or as Potawatomi botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer says in Braiding Sweetgrass, “It was an architecture of relationships that I yearned to understand. I wanted to see the shimmering threads that hold it all together.”
This understanding is also cutting-edge current—it infuses systems theory and all of its applications to other disciplines, from psychology to ecology. It forms the basis of quantum physics, where atoms and their component particles are no longer seen as tiny billiard-balls circulating, but as waves of probabilities. It underlies the architecture of the internet itself.
Yet science alone lacks the emotional component that makes a set of beliefs more than an intellectual exercise. There are also “the questions science doesn’t ask, not because they aren’t important, but because science as a way of knowing is too narrow for the task.”
Kimmerer studied botany because she was fascinated by plants and thrilled by the beauty of the world, by the way goldenrod and asters bloom together in a meadow, making a carpet of purple and gold. “I wanted to know why we love the world, why the most ordinary scrap of meadow can rock us back on our heels in awe.”
When we truly understand the world as one fabric of interconnection, we are moved to love. Instead of a dogma telling us to believe in things we can’t see, a relational world-view inspires us to regard those things we can see with awe and reverence. A green leaf glows against a blue sky. What a miracle! Within it, tiny cells are doing alchemy, using sunlight to combine air and water and create sweet food. What a wonder, that in so doing they fill the air with oxygen, that very thing we need in order to ingest that food and turn it into the energy for growth and life! How incredible that two billion or more years ago, tiny bacteria figured out this magic at a time when new life was about to run out of food. Knowing that, can we doubt that the tapestry is woven of threads spun from some innate creative force?
...If we see ourselves as part of a unified whole, then the well-being of the whole must be our concern. We can no longer justify extracting and hoarding the lion’s share of benefits for ourselves or for a privileged few. We can no longer prize profit over the well-being of the environment. When we take, we must give back. What we extract, we must replenish. The world itself is a gift, and it is the generosity of sharing that gift, passing it on through ever more complex cycles, that makes the world go round."
Christopher Chase has an interesting way of looking at things over on Inner Workings.
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