Worldview Comparisons

Worldview Comparisons

Unit authors: Brian Gilley(Alabama Creek, Cherokee), Anthropology, Indiana University; Carlina de la Cova, Anthropology, University of South Carolina; April K. Sievert, Anthropology, Indiana University, Emerita

Description

This unit addresses histories and perceptions about worldviews in general. Often, Indigenous worldviews are discussed separately from other worldviews, those that we might refer to as Western, European, or scientific. Here, we introduce and compare these together because worldviews are variable, fluid, and mutable. Furthermore there is common ground among them. We look at values, knowledge sources, the locus of understandings, and logics about time, land, and materials. Activities included in this unit ask students to explore differences and similarities for themselves, with guidance and resources from instructors. 

With nearly 600 federally recognized sovereign Indigenous nations in the U.S. and thousands of scientists with cultural backgrounds extending to Europe and beyond, it is imperative to avoid essentialism. While some general ideas can be useful in appreciating different frames of reference, ascribing beliefs to individuals or extending general beliefs to all people within even a self-identified group or tribal nation (e.g. the Society for American Archaeology or the Osage Nation) is dangerous at worst, and fundamentally unhelpful at best. There is no one way that Indigenous Americans think, just as there is no one way that archaeologists think. Working with NAGPRA requires understanding complicated and often conflicting and contentious views deriving from both within and across Indigenous and scientific groups. 

Academic and Pragmatic Considerations

  • Identify some competing, contrasting or parallel cultural logics that underlie certain Native American and Euro-American systems of social value and knowledge. 
  • Consider the source of the expertise you are using. 
  • Understand community and individualism — where knowledge sits in Indigenous and non-Indigenous areas. 
  • Evaluate the mechanisms of American Indian conservatism as proposed by Indigenous scholar Duane Champagne. 
  • Describe the historical and social constructions of pervasive scientific worldviews that came from the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment between 1600 and 1900 CE, especially in regard to attitudes toward the deceased. 
  • Connect marginalization to attempts by Westerners to categorize by race or ethnicity. 
  • Apply Indigenous points of view to think of ancestors and objects or belongings in new and culturally relevant ways. 
  • Explore concepts of intersection and compatibility in worldviews and briefly introduce Indigenous science. 
  • Learn to identify essentialism and its repercussions. 

Reading Lists

Background for Instructor

Champagne, Duane W. (2007). Social Change and Cultural Continuity among Native Nations brings together articles by sociologist Champagne, a member the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa of North Dakota. Chapters 1, 2 and 10 are particularly germane to discussions of worldviews. Champagne, a regular contributor to Indian Country Today has authored many publications about Indigenous societies, nationhood, revitalization, conservatism and other topics.

Gloria Snively and Wanosts'a7 Lorna Williams, (2018). Knowing Home: Braiding Indigenous Science with Western Science, book 1. [Link to order book

Powerpoint: WorldView [downloadable .pptx]

 

Assigned for Learners

Atalay, S. (2008). Multivocality and Indigenous archaeologies. In Evaluating Multiple Narratives edited by Habu, Junko, Fawcett, Clare, Matsunaga, John M.  (pp. 29-44). Springer, New York.

Blakey, M. L. (1998). Beyond European enlightenment: Toward a critical and humanistic human biology. Building a new biocultural synthesis: Political-economic perspectives on human biology, 379-405.

Blakey, M. L. (2008). An Ethical Epistemology of Publicly Engaged Biocultural Research. In Evaluating Multiple Narratives, edited by Habu, Junko, Fawcett, Clare, Matsunaga, John M. (pp. 17-28). Springer, New York.

Brugger, E. C. (2021). The Morality of Archaeology and Respecting Human Mortal Remains. National Catholic Register. [Note: this blog includes an image of the remains of a Catholic Saint]. 

Csaki, S. (2015) Coming around Again: Cyclical and Circular Aspects of Native American Thought paper presented at the Southeastern Oklahoma State University 2015 Native American Symposium.

Dias, M. (2015). Dignity after Death and Protecting the Sanctity of Human Remains. Voices in Bioethics, 1. https://doi.org/10.7916/vib.v1i.6636 

Fixico, D. L. (2003). The American Indian Mind in a Linear World: American Indian Studies and Traditional Knowledge. Taylor & Francis Books, New York. 

Fixico, D. L. (2013). Indian Resilience and Rebuilding: Indigenous Nations in the Modern American West. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. 

Tsosie, K. S. and K. G. Claw "Indigenizing Science and Reasserting Indigeneity in Research," Human Biology, 91(3), 137-140, (9 June 2020).

Activity and Assessment Ideas

The following activities address different components of worldviews. They can be used in any course, solely, and in any order.

There are logics that underlie the way we think and view the world. Rene Descartes, noted philosopher of the Enlightenment, introduced the concept, “I think therefore I am,” a perspective underlying the concept of individualism, often counted as a core American value. Values, and the logics that support them create a foundation for understanding what the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act requires us to do and why. Ask students to collectively make and edit a list of 10 American values (e.g. you might get: individualism, equality, personal freedom, self-reliance, working hard yields gain, competition, youth, ownership). Then ask them to make a list of the values that scientists have (e.g. honesty, objectivity, empiricism, fairness, stewardship, progress, secularism). Finally, have students discuss Indigenous values or what they think Indigenous values comprise (e.g. trust, cooperation, wisdom, honesty, humility, community, spirituality, tradition). Since NAGPRA is a law enacted in America, to address situations that arose because of colonialist and federal action such as war and removal, along with active scientific research that has affected and exploited land and belongings of Indigenous people, discussing these values mayhelp students identify points of divergence and intersection among worldviews. Duane W. Champagne’s article “Renewing American Indian Nations: Cosmic Community and Spiritual Autonomies” (Chapter 1 in Social Change and Continuity) lays out the logic behind views of community that extend to the nonhuman world of landscapes, beings, and the cosmos. Appreciating these logics is integral to establishing positive relationships with Indigenous people in order to effectively manage repatriation. Most archaeologists trained in the 20th century and many in the 21st, find this challenging.

To get students talking, ask them to read this open-access article by Vanessa Watts, a Canadian scholar of Indigeneity, “Indigenous place-thought & agency amongst humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!), for insight into different ways of looking at matters relevant to repatriation.  

Ask students to read through the blog posting, Indigenous Peoples vs Western Worldviews, that introduces and compares worldviews of Indigenous people with those of westernized science. This blog comes from Indigenous Corporate Training, Inc. (ICT), a Canadian company that provides resources to other companies and institutions for working with Indigenous people. The post includes eight comparisons between Indigenous and western scientific and capitalist views. Students can work in pairs or small groups to investigate and evaluate these stated comparisons, and bring what they find back into the learning community/classroom to discuss where they found potential conflict or disagreement, and where they found common ground. The instructor can ask the class to research ICT’s website to find out where their information comes from. If you represented an Indigenous concern, would you trust this site?

In Indigenous communities, Elders are often the most important knowledge keepers. Ask students to explore the website Wisdom of the Elders and bring an impression, substantive comments, critique or question about the site to class. How does this website define science? Engage the learning group in a search for who the scientific knowledge keepers are and where you can find scientific knowledge (e.g scientific communities, among scientists, in scientific repositories, or in scientific literature). Then ask the students to figure out who and what they think scientific knowledge is for and how one goes about gaining it. Who and what do they think Indigenous knowledge is for and who is permitted to gain it? Students should come away with some new perspectives on accessibility to knowledge. Is it appropriate to characterize Indigenous knowledge systems in opposition to science?

Do Western views of time really differ from Indigenous ones? Ask the students to free-associate about how they think about time and what kinds of things that they do that are linear or cyclical.

Readabout Indigenous views of time and Western linear views of time. 

The article by B. Steve Csaki, Coming around Again: Cyclical and Circular Aspects of Native American Thought, was presented for the 2015 Southeastern Oklahoma State University 2015 Native American Symposium, in Durant, Oklahoma. Have students explore the values that they place on things that follow linear time, or cyclical time. The students might think of timelines, syllabi, Gantt charts as examples of linear time. They might think of calendrical cycles, ripples that move out from a central location, or menstrual cycles as examples that are cyclical.

 

Problems arise when we think that western cultures own science. A recent dialogue was published online by the Institute of Food Technologies, or IFT about traditional and scientific knowledge. Ask the class to read through the short article and identify statements that describe how traditional and scientific knowledge may differ, or may not, and then discuss these. Then ask the students to find additional materials that set Indigenous and scientific knowledge at odds and ask them to evaluate these suppositions 

Activism regarding the treatment of Indigenous human bodies is at the foundation of repatriation law. Funerary and mortuary activities across religions, within ethnic communities, and across time and space are highly varied. It was however, the issue of disrespect for Indigenous human remains, as compared to European or American remains, that impelled the U.S. Congress to enact legislation in 1990 to provide a mandate and process to return human remains (Indigenous Ancestors/People)and cultural objects (belongings) to their descendants.

Ask students to find and bring to class examples linking respect for the material remains of deceased people to morality and ethics. Blog articles by Dias and by Brugger, included in the reading list may encourage discussion as well.

Duane Champagne (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa of North Dakota) is a prolific researcher and author who has been a regular contributor to Indian Country Today. His many publications about Native American tribes look at nationhood, sovereignty, economics, revitalization, conservatism and law. He writes (2007:29): 

"The emphasis on retaining cultural integrity, whether worldview: ceremonies, religion, art, dress, identity, or kinship groups, is not an antiquarian or ad hoc interest or merely created in defiance of colonial assimilation efforts, but is deeply seated in the values and orientations of Indian cultures and in the organization of Indian social orders.” This statement by Champagne hints at why, 500 years after contact, there are 574 federally recognized tribes in the U.S. that maintain their cultural identity in spite of the methods used by colonial and federal governments to encourage military action, force assimilation, and disassociate people from their land. There is much we can learn from the persistence of Indigenous values. Indigenous societies across the world have been referred to as traditional, a problematic term that discredits innovation, economic flexibility, or nimble responses to change (e.g. see Mallon 2016).  

Applying the concepts: Have students discuss the relevance of concepts, traditions, science, wisdom, cultural persistence, in this unit for NAGPRA. 

Picture Credits/Links; References; Acknowledgements

Champagne, D. (2007). Social change and cultural continuity among Native Nations. Lanham, Altamira Press 

Fixico, Donald. (2013) Indian Resilience and Rebuilding: Indigenous Nations in the Modern American West. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. 

Institute of Food Technologies, 525 W. Van Buren St., Suite 1000 Chicago, IL 60607 

 https://www.ift.org/news-and-publications 

Mallon, Sean (2016). Opinion: why we should beware of the word ‘traditional’. Te Papa Blog. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. (Accessed 2/27/2023)

National Science Foundation grants 1449465, 1540447 

Wisdom of the Elders, Inc. is a not-for-profit corporation headquartered in Portland, Oregon.