Addendum: Native Paradigm in Flight

While broad concepts of Indigenous knowledge or the Native Paradigm translate into languages spoken in contemporary civilizations, a lot of detail, resonance and meaning is lost from the original language and culture.  Unfortunately, many Indigenous languages are themselves extinct, and many others are on the brink. 

 So we can generalize and say that Indigenous peoples live in deep relationship to the rest of nature, but what does that mean in detail, in specifics?

 One of the best examples I’ve run across recently is in an article on the BBC Future site by the aptly named Jim Robbins, author of The Wonder of Birds, about the various functions of local legends and stories about birds in local languages in Papua New Guinea. 

 Birds are a major element of the ecology, and Steven Feld, an anthropologist who had studied the Bosavi peoples for more than a quarter century, suggests what “deep relationship” to nature means in their lives:

" And while we may enjoy the trill of bird song, the Bosavi hear in the songs of 125 species near their village, a richly detailed ecological portrait. "They instantly know the time of day, the season of the year, what layer of the forest canopy the bird is in, what fruits are in season, soil acidity changes, the knowledge of the migratory situation, who's nesting where.

"Listening becomes a science journal, a system for sensing on an everyday basis and putting into memory all of the diagnostics we would be writing down or using equipment to measure," says Feld. "It's a deep science."

It can be so deep that it goes beyond our typical means of knowing:

" Felice Wyndham, an ethnoornithologist and ethnobotanist who works on the EWA project, says peoples she has worked with have the ability to move their consciousness out of their body and intimately sense the world, which she called a "heightened form of mindfulness".

"It's quite common, you see it in most hunter-gatherer groups," she says. "If you are in a highly diverse and sensuous natural environment, you are also going to be doing that with all of the organisms, the plants, the water and the birds – especially the birds – because they fly and it gives you a completely different perspective."   

Intimate knowledge preserved in local languages has practical application beyond the locality.  “A recent study found, for instance, that most of the Indigenous knowledge about medicinal plants in North America, northwest Amazonia, and New Guinea are to be found in one language in each of the regions."

 When ornithologists studying tribes  “realised that these cultures related to birds in vastly different ways than our own and in studying biology they were getting only a small, distorted picture of a rich, ancient and holistic relationship that had evolved over thousands of years,” the discipline of ethnoornithology was born.  Now there is an ongoing, online Ethnoornithology World Atlas, to which Indigenous peoples contribute. 

  That languages and the species those languages speak about are both going extinct together is not just coincidence.  Without the value placed in these species by those languages, humans aren’t motivated to save either the birds or the bird stories.

 Andrew Gosler, the research director of the Ethnoornithology World Atlas, teaches at the University of Oxford. "Half of our first-year students in biology can't name five British birds and 20% can't name one," says Gosler. "That's a common story across the world."

Yet, he says, one 19th century study showed that there were 78 songbird species in England that once had 7,000 folk names. "When those names vanished common local knowledge about their biology and behaviour went with them.”

A Swiss linguist in his 90s has gathered more than 100,000 folk names in many languages for 600 species of birds throughout Europe. “Every valley once had its own name for the same birds. They say a huge amount about how people related to birds across Europe for thousands of years," says Gosler.    ' "As natural experiences dwindle an emotional investment in protecting nature goes with it – that may be part of why birds are in steep decline."

"When you say to students 'Did you know that this species has declined 70% in the UK?' it means nothing to them," Gosler says. "They say 'Why should I care? I didn't know that bird existed until you told me.'"

But as they hear the bird folk knowledge of Britain or hold a bird with fluttering wings in their hand to band it, he says, "it is a life-changing experience for them. Then they care."