- [Narrator] The Library
Channel is proud to present
the Simon Ortiz and the
Labriola Center Lecture
on Indigenous Land,
Culture, and Community.
Sponsored by the ASU American
Indian Studies Program,
ASU Department of English,
ASU American Indian Policy Institute,
ASU Labriola Center, and the Heard Museum.
Recorded on March 24th, 2011
at the Heard Museum in Phoenix.
Simon Ortiz opens the program.
(upbeat rhythmic music)
- (speaking in foreign language)
Hello and how are you this evening?
It's always good to see
the community with you,
and we of course are the
community at this moment,
but also of course, we are also
part of the larger community
that is Phoenix.
It's not just ASU and its campus,
but beyond Arizona State
University and beyond the campus,
of course, it's the larger
community of Phoenix,
and then of course the
region and the state
and the world, right?
Yes.
And it's good that we can think like that,
because it's reassurance that we are
(speaks foreign language)
because as a community,
which we need for ourselves,
it's always a joyous time and moment,
because that is how we then
are able to press on forward
in a positive way, so
thank you for coming.
(speaks foreign language)
Thank you to all of you
for joining us tonight.
This community is always
good just for the simple fact
of being together.
We are one with each other when
we are within the community.
So thank you in that sense
(speaks foreign language)
for being here.
I want to thank, of course,
the ASU American Indian
Studies Program, or Department,
and the English Department at ASU
and the Labriola National
American Indian Data Center,
the faculty of History in
the School of Historical,
Philosophical, and Religious Studies,
and women in gender studies
in the School of Social Transformation,
and of course the Heard Museum,
which provides tremendous
support and partnership
as a community organization.
I want to repeat some quotes
from our guest tonight,
Mr. Leroy Little Bear.
First one, "For Albert Einstein,
"the business of science is reality.
"If science is a search for reality,
"if science is a search for knowledge
"at the leading edges of
the humanely knowable,
"then there are sciences other than
"the Western science of measurement.
"One of these other sciences
is Native American science."
And another quote,
"Western science is all about measurement.
"The English language has
a hard time explaining
"some scientific phenomenon,
"so it adopts the language of mathematics,
"the language of science.
"Art and literature, therefore,
"get dropped from the picture.
"Nobody wants to learn a new language,
"so most people hate math.
"Native American languages are better able
"to express themselves, these ideas.
"There is more flexibility,
more room for possibilities,
"more room for art and literature."
And then one more quote,
"One way to create change
is for people to stand back
"and reflect, to look at the big picture.
"When we look at the world linearly,
"we look at specifics.
"We see only tiny little
aspects of the big picture
"and not the picture itself.
"This leads to our seeing things
"in isolation, disconnected."
All these are observations
made by, as I said,
Leroy Little Bear, who is
our speaker for tonight's
Simon Ortiz and Labriola Center lecture
on Indigenous Land,
Culture, and Community.
Leroy Little Bear is a
member of the Blood tribe,
or First Nations, of the
Blackfoot Confederacy in Canada,
head of the SEED Graduate
Institute presently.
He is a former director of
the American Indian Program
at Harvard University
and professor emeritus
of Native Studies at the
University of Lethbridge
where he was department
chair for 25 years.
Little Bear has served as a
legal and constitutional advisor
to the Assembly of First Nations
and has served on many
committees, commissions,
and boards dealing with
First Nations issues.
In 2003, he was awarded the prestigious
National Aboriginal Achievement
Award for Education,
the highest honor bestowed
by Canada's First Nations community.
He has edited three books,
including "Pathways in Self-Determination:
"Canadian Indians and the Canadian State,"
and "Quest for Justice: Aboriginal Peoples
"and Aboriginal Rights,"
and "Governments in Conflict
"and Indian Nations in Canada."
With these words, let us
welcome Leroy Little Bear.
(clapping)
(singing in foreign language)
(speaks foreign language)
- I was singing my song, our clan song,
and I was introducing myself.
My name is, in Blackfoot it's
(speaks foreign language),
and I belong to the Small
Robes Band of the Blood tribe,
who in turn are members of
the Blackfoot Confederacy.
I first want to give recognition,
and the reason why I was
singing our clan song
is to bring good message and good thoughts
from our territory to this territory,
and I want to give
recognition to the people
whose aboriginal territory this is,
and consequently why I sang our clan song.
I want to thank Simon
and the Labriola Center,
ASU, for inviting me to come in,
as I was telling a little
earlier audience this morning,
giving me the chance to
mislead you a little bit,
so be prepared to be misled.
And I also want to thank the Heard Museum.
Somebody was telling me,
you're gonna be speaking at
the museum, and I told 'em,
that's what I heard.
(audience chuckles)
So I want to thank the Heard Museum
to being partners to this lecture series,
and so I'm very honored
to be in your presence.
I'm very humbled to be asked to come
and share thoughts with you.
When Simon was introducing me,
he was talking about my legal background.
And, yes, I have that legal background,
but my earliest interests
from high school on
had always been in science.
In fact, when I first started university,
I started, and in the back of my mind
I was gonna go into chemistry and so on,
maybe physics and so on,
so I always had this
interest, great interest,
in the are of science,
but probably the trickster came along
and led me a different way,
and before you know it,
I was in the legal field.
And at one time I was
accepted into a PhD program
at the University of Chicago
to go into the area of
philosophy, but like I said,
the trickster figure came
in and the best of plans
get changed and so on.
So I really love science,
but Westerners, Western
scientists, have really kind of
appropriated the whole notion of science
and the whole approach
as to what is science
and how we do science.
When we think about it,
really, science depends on,
and what is science really depends on
who is doing the defining.
And so in many cases, what
we now accept as science
or definition of science, lot of people,
a lot of science, I
should say, is left out.
It's left out and it's left sitting there.
And in some cases it might be a good idea.
Why?
Well, because I'm thinking of
somebody like Daniel Corkery.
I don't know if anybody has
ever heard of Daniel Corkery.
He was Irish, and in
the history of Ireland,
the British had come
and colonized Ireland,
just like they did North America,
but they had, the British
when they came to Ireland,
they acted as though
the Irish didn't exist,
even though they lived
alongside and so on,
they acted as though they didn't exist,
so just went about as though
those people didn't exist.
Well, Daniel Corkery wrote a book
called "The Hidden Ireland"
and what he basically said
in the book was, hey, the fact
that we were being ignored
was in fact a blessing in disguise,
because it allowed us to
continue with our culture,
with our traditions, with
our literatures, our songs,
and so on without them being
appropriated by the British.
Well, in many ways that
notion can be applied
to North America.
We continue our songs, we
continue our ceremonies,
and so on and they have
not been appropriated
and made use of.
And I'm thinking that now is the time for
what I've been referring
to as a collaboration
to take place because
we've come to a point
where the existing Western
approach to science
is really not giving the answers.
They're simply asking more questions,
but no answers are coming forth.
As Simon was quoting about Einstein,
I used to tell my students
that I knew Einstein,
that he was my favorite scientist,
that I used to go and drink with him
and that when he got crazy,
his hair would stand up.
You see the stereotype
picture of Einstein.
The thing is, he is one
of my favorite scientists.
Einstein talked about science and he said
that it was really the
pursuit of knowledge,
that the business of science
was really about reality.
It was really stretching the envelope,
the edges of where human knowledge was
and trying to stretch it
more to find something new.
Well, when somebody thinks about Einstein,
in his theories of
relativity and so forth,
Einstein did not come up
with those discoveries
by doing the same old thing.
He did not come up with
his relativity theories
by doing more math.
He came up with those discoveries
because he challenged the
underlying philosophical base
of the existing science of the day.
That's how he came up with his theories,
his relativity theories for instance.
Well, I think it's that we've
come to that stage again
where I think we need to
look at and reflect on
the existing philosophical
basis, the existing paradigms,
and the existing methodologies
that we use in science.
And I think the best place to go there
is to go in search out there
with our aboriginal people
in the Americas.
They have it.
We've got knowledge
that has been untapped.
Let me just give you one quick example,
and I'll speak a little bit more about it.
For instance, a large part
of the thinking process
is controlled by the language itself.
Most of us think that, hey,
I can think any which way,
that I've got freedom of thought,
when in reality that
particular language you speak
leads you down a garden path.
So let me give you just a quick example,
and I'll come back to it later,
and that is if I were to say in English
dynamics without motion,
you would immediately think
that's an inherent contradiction.
Well, we were talking to a Haida Indian
from Queen Charlotte Islands,
and we were asking him
about dynamics without motion.
He thought about it for a while,
but then he comes back and he says,
well, that's easy to explain.
He says, you know, go out on the ocean,
they're coastal people, go
out on the ocean in a canoe
and when you're far
enough away from the land,
where you can't see the land,
and use it as a reference point.
You know your canoe is moving
because you're rowing it,
but 360 degrees around you
you're always the same distance
from the horizon.
He says, that's dynamics without motion.
In other words, an example of
where just Native languages
can explain certain things that
are paradoxes, for instance,
in English and even in math.
The Western approach to
science has to a large extent
been one of measurement.
If we can't measure something,
it's almost as though it doesn't exist.
But if you can look at
the Land Survey System,
Northeast quarter up to
Southeast quarter, et cetera,
of section such and such and so forth,
well, the thing is we've
taken that measuring system
and we've superimposed it on the land.
And we're now stuck with
that system when in reality
nature is not mathematical.
In other words, the notion of mathematics
has been superimposed on nature.
And Einstein once asked,
you know he was wondering about it,
he says, "How can it be that mathematics,
"being a product of human thought
"which is independent of experience,
"is so admirably appropriate
to the objects of reality?"
So in other words, we've
been taking something
that's not a part of nature,
but something that we
have artificially created
and the reason is because our language,
that is the English language,
which I'll talk some more about,
cannot explain, because of
certain structure it has,
cannot explain certain things,
and so scientists have really
adopted a different language.
In this case, mathematics.
When in reality,
Navajo doesn't have to
refer to mathematics.
Navajo language can explain
it, Blackfoot can explain it,
Cree can explain it, Mohawk can explain it
without having to depend
on this other system.
And, again, one of the
things that's very important
is that a lot is left out
in terms of the scientific
approach, a lot is left out.
The notion of relationships,
the notion of spirit,
and so on, none of those,
none of that is included
in the area of science in
our scientific approach.
So in order to appreciate
and to come to understand
these other sciences, one
has to look at paradigms,
in other words the foundational basis
of our thinking processes.
And that's what, for
instance, Einstein was doing.
We have to look at those
foundational basis.
Let me go through the
tenets, or foundation basis,
of Native thought.
And I have used up here on the screen,
and I've used pictures
of space, outer space,
taken by the Hubble Space Telescope
to illustrate some of these points.
The first tenet of the Native Paradigm
is what we refer to as constant flux.
And if you were able to imagine this flux,
if it was animated, you
would see a constant motion
of energy waves and so
on, light and so on,
going back and forth.
So this notion of flux
is a very important part
of the Native thinking.
Have you ever tried to make an appointment
with a Blackfoot or a Navajo?
Well, when you try, and try it next time,
they'll tell you, yeah, okay,
let's meet at two o'clock,
but then they'll tell you,
but if I'm not there at two o'clock,
I'm over at my grandma's.
If you don't see my horse over there,
that means that I'm over at my uncle's.
In other words, they give
you a whole bunch of caveats
and so on.
Well, guess why, it's
because of the flux notion.
Things are forever always in motion,
things are forever changing, and so on.
From that Native thinking, in other words,
there's nothing certain,
there's nothing certain.
The only thing that is certain is change.
That's the only thing that is certain.
So things are forever moving,
things are forever dissolving, reforming,
transforming and so forth.
That's one of the most important tenets
of the Native Paradigm,
is this notion of flux.
A second part of it is
that the flux itself, yeah,
the flux itself, everything in existence,
everything in creation
consists of energy waves.
Now, in classical physics
we talk in terms of matter,
particles, subatomic particles.
Well, in the Native way we
talk in terms of energy waves,
and those energy waves are very special.
Why?
Because it's those energy waves that know.
It's not you.
It's the energy waves that know.
All of us are simply
combinations of energy waves,
and it's the energy waves
that we refer to as spirit.
Yes, people kind of recognize that
but have a hard time articulating,
but that's the reason why spirituality
is so closely associated
with aboriginal people,
because anything, everything
here, anything that exists,
including you and I,
are simply combinations
of these energy waves.
I guess when we pass away, when we die,
all it means is a dissipation
of that particular combination
that makes for you.
The energy waves are still there.
It's just that that particular combination
doesn't exist anymore.
So those energy waves are really
what we refer to as spirit.
A third part of the paradigm
is that everything is animate.
There's nothing in
Blackfoot, for instance,
there's nothing in
Blackfoot that is inanimate.
Everything is animate.
Well, if you step back a little bit,
and you say, well, if we're all animate,
we all consist of those energy waves,
therefore everything,
those rocks, those trees,
those animals out there, all have spirit,
just like we do as humans.
So if they all have spirit,
that's what we refer
to as all my relations.
You'll hear in Native
prayers, all my relations.
When we're talking about all my relations,
we're not talking about human relations.
We're talking about those rocks out there.
I was talking to some rocks over here
when I came to Phoenix,
but they couldn't understand Blackfoot.
(audience chuckles)
I was telling the other
group too this morning that
every once in a while I
end up with an ID problem
and that when I was looking
in the mirror this morning,
and it looked the other way,
but that when I do have an ID problem,
I would get on United or
American, or Air Canada,
to remind myself that I'm a Plains Indian
and that part of the
cause for my ID problem
was that I'm Blackfoot
but that up in Canada
we've gone metric,
and we can't identify
ourselves as Blackfoot
and that Blackmeter
doesn't sound very good.
Anyways, so there is this notion of flux,
energy waves, the energy
waves being the spirit,
everything being animate,
and everything is related,
can show the, everything
about relationships,
everything is interrelated.
And consequently why the
Native view has always been
a very holistic view, as
opposed to being very specific,
being very reductionist, and so on.
We always look at the big picture.
Examples of this arise, for instance,
I can give you a little personal anecdote,
when I was in residential
school back home on the Rez,
we had a teacher that
was giving us lessons
about the capital cities of the provinces,
similar to state capitals
and states within the Union,
and when she finished her lesson,
she says to us, let me
see what we've learned.
So she called on my friend who
was sitting in the first row,
say, hey, Moses, what's
the capital city of Canada?
And Moses was scratching his head,
not looking at the teacher at all,
looking up at the ceiling
and saying, um, uh,
the capital city of Canada, uh.
Before Moses answered,
the teacher says, next.
And I was behind Moses,
so she was pointing to me,
and immediately what jumped in
my mind was, geesh, you know,
this teacher is really rude,
really making my friend Moses look stupid
in front of the whole class.
I know that Moses knows the answer,
because we were just out there
in the yard talking about it.
I know Moses knows the
answer, and I know the answer,
but in my mind, I said,
I'm not going to perform for this teacher.
So guess what I did.
Capital city of Canada
is, um, um, you know,
and she says, next.
Well, guess what?
She went up and down the rows.
Did not get an answer.
In other words, we, even as little kids,
we were more concerned
about the relational aspect.
We did not want anyone to
kind of be by themselves,
and so forth, we all had to be together.
So that relational aspect
is very, very important.
Everything is interrelated.
In Western science we take
and isolate things, and so on,
and we never really look at the whole.
The next tenet is what
I refer to as renewal,
and I try to put a picture
from the Hubble Space Telescope
showing a circular picture, a circle,
to show this notion of renewal.
Well, let me explain,
let me try and explain
the notion of renewal.
How many of you have seen,
way back in the 1970s,
it's an old movie now, Jurassic Park?
Remember, Jurassic Park?
It was about the dinosaurs.
Well, we asked one time these elders,
you know, those dinosaurs
used to rule the world
just like we do today as humans.
They had a run of the earth,
but where are they now?
Why did they disappear?
And they came back, those elders said,
maybe they didn't do
their renewal ceremonies.
(audience chuckles)
And, you know, took me a little
while to really understand
what they were talking about,
but when they were talking
about renewal ceremonies,
if you look at it from a
slightly different perspective,
I was explaining that to
a couple of our people
at the table at lunchtime, and that is,
take the notion of body temperature,
body normal temperature, what is it?
98.6?
I get crossed between metric and so on.
98.6, well, think of a situation
where your body temperature
rose by 10 degrees
and stayed there,
or it drops by 10
degrees and stayed there.
Would you last very long?
I don't think so.
In other words, we live, we as humans
live within a very narrow
spectrum of ideal conditions
for us to continue to exist.
We live in a very narrow gap.
And as I was saying, we as homo sapiens
lived alongside neanderthal man.
Where is he now?
And we're still around.
It's because, hey,
maybe we were doing and
renewing certain things
that continue to sustain us.
So the notion of sustainability,
the notion of renewal
is something that says, hey,
in that flux that exists
there are regular patterns
we search out for,
those regular patterns that makes for
our continuing existence.
We search for regular
patterns in that flux.
And it's those regular patters
that we want to be able
to use as reference
points to hang our hat on,
to say, hey, this is what
continues to give us life.
If I can just quickly
jump over to the fish.
I was telling somebody I
didn't want to eat any fish,
'cause I was scared to get hooked.
(audience chuckles)
She got it.
(audience chuckles)
But talking about the dinosaurs,
the fish preceded the
dinosaurs by millions of years.
The dinosaurs are gone.
The fish is still around.
I wonder what he's doing that
continues for his existence.
As part of the relational
network, we would say,
we should try and learn from that fish.
Because look how long he's been around
when we as humans are very young,
relatively newcomers on the scene.
So when we talk about relationships,
that's what we should learn
from these other beings.
So renewal is a very, very important part
of the Native Paradigm.
Land is also one of those
tenets of the Native Paradigm.
The land is so sacred,
we refer to it as Mother
because it gives life.
We refer to the earth as
the creator in many cases,
because it's sacred, it gives us life.
So the land is very important.
In other words, if we were to
use scientific cosmic language
we would say that we are spatial thinkers.
We think in terms of space as
opposed to the notion of time.
We can say, for instance,
that in English we have
a religious holiday,
and that is Christmas.
Well, if I'm an English
thinker it would not matter
if I'm in Durban, South Africa,
if I'm in Phoenix,
or for that matter if I was on the Moon.
It wouldn't matter as long
as my little timepiece
says December the 25th.
Doesn't matter where I'm at.
What do I do?
I celebrate Christmas.
In other words,
my main reference point
is the notion of time.
In Blackfoot, it is place.
We also have a very important ceremony
we call the Sun Dance.
Well, on our Rez, there's a
place called the Belly Buttes.
And it's called the Belly
Buttes for an important reason.
Because most people think that the mind
is where the power is, but it's not.
In the human makeup the
real power is right here.
This is where the real power is.
And so that's what it's called
after, the Belly Buttes.
That's where the Sun Dance occurs.
There's no such thing as a Sun
Dance happening in Phoenix,
even if the whole tribe was here to say,
hey, let's have a Sun Dance.
No.
It only happens at one place.
So if we're going to participate,
hey, we've gotta go back.
If I am in Durban, South
Africa, I have to come home.
It's quite a difference
in terms of references.
Here one is time reference,
the other one is place, space reference.
Language is also very important.
As I said, language leads
you down a garden pathway,
and you have to think
within the boundaries
of that language.
I gave you one example
regarding dynamics without motion.
Well, the ordinary English sentence
is structured as A equals, or is, B.
That's the ordinary
English structure, A is B.
I often asked if A and B are the same,
if A equals B, then why do we need B?
Why can't we just have A?
So in other words, that's the reason why
we would have to say in
English it is raining.
In Blackfoot we just simply say raining.
In other words, that copula,
the is, or the equal sign,
is not necessary.
In English we're noun oriented.
Everything is about noun.
I'm not saying it's exclusively noun,
but we're noun oriented.
In Blackfoot we're
process, action oriented.
When you're thinking in English,
it's kind of like if you use
as an example a film strip.
It's almost as though we stopped the film
and we look at one picture frame
and studied that one picture frame
and we know it inside out.
In Blackfoot the show goes on.
We don't stop it, the show goes on.
But it's as though I'm running
alongside the happening,
and I'm expressing,
describing what's going on.
In English we're good English speakers
if we have a large vocabulary.
The official Oxford English Dictionary
probably has about 900,000 words in it,
and we would be considered
good English speakers
if we knew a good number
of all those 900,000 words.
Well, a linguist who worked
on a Navajo reservation,
Gary Witherspoon, counted how
many ways you can conjugate
in Navajo the verb to go,
the English verb to go,
how many times you can conjugate that.
And he came out with something
like 354,000, 356,000
different ways to conjugate
the verb to go in Navajo.
In other words, it would
take three Navajo verbs
to surpass the Oxford English Dictionary.
(audience laughs)
From an educational point
of view, think about that.
How many different ways, and, you know,
talking about specificities and so on,
and that that's not being
taken into consideration.
In Blackfoot we don't
carry around a vocabulary.
When I speak the Blackfoot language,
I make it up, and I make it up as I go.
In spite of the fact that there may be
some conventional ways
of saying certain things,
but I basically make it up.
In other words, if you can think of
the periodic table that
chemists use for the elements,
all the different elements,
what do chemists do?
Well, hey, they make combinations.
So when I put sodium and
chlorine together, what do I get?
Sodium chloride, our table salt.
In other words, we play around
with these combinations.
So if I'm a good chemist,
hey, I can fool around
with all these different combinations.
Well, if you can look at
the Blackfoot language,
for instance, carrying
around a periodic table
of primary sounds.
A good Blackfoot speaker is very good
at making combinations.
So in other words, I'm not carrying around
a big inventory of
words, a big vocabulary.
All I'm carrying around is
my little periodic table.
If I'm gonna be a good Blackfoot speaker,
I have to be trained as
to how to be very skillful
at making combinations.
So those kind of
differences make for a big,
a very different way of
looking at reality out there.
The Western Paradigm, we
can say largely consists of
linearity, singularity,
reductionism, and it's binary.
Let me just, I can talk
about each aspect over here,
but let me just talk
about the binary notion.
The binary notion results in dichotomies,
dichotomies thinking, either/or.
And we can go down the list.
Day/night, black/white, animate/inanimate,
and so on, saint/sinner, the
darkness/light and so on.
We can go down the list.
And what happens is a watertight division
exists between these dichotomies.
There's a watertight division,
and you can't transcend that division.
When I'm telling my students
about, and showing to them,
usually I play around
with them a little bit,
and I tell them, hey,
let me draw a dichotomy of good and evil,
and I'll give you a word,
and you tell me if it falls on
the good or on the evil side.
Tell 'em, okay, ready?
And I give them the word widget.
And they think about widget, you know,
you can see their 256K
memories spinning and so on.
They can't really,
because they've never had
experiences with widgets.
And then I tell them, well, but,
let me give you a different
word that we all know about.
Okay, ready?
And I tell 'em sex.
Well, they kind of sit
there and eventually
some will move around
in their seat and so on,
and eventually somebody in the
back row usually comes out,
well, of course it's good,
you know, it's great.
And I said, well, okay,
let's think about that.
How many of us when we
were kids, especially if we
were brought up in a
good Christian tradition,
were taught that sex was a sin?
And then when we get
older, and we get married,
and especially if we get
married in the church,
all of a sudden it becomes
a sacred institution.
How does that happen?
Well, we can't transcend
the watertight boundary,
but what we've done is we've
developed a rite of passage
to get around it.
And that's how we shift from the bad side
over to the good side.
And so this notion of dichotomous
thinking in many cases,
for instance, in the scientific
field, causes paradoxes.
For instance, the whole
notion of cause and effect
in physics.
It's a paradox.
It's a chicken and egg argument.
So just that one aspect of the language
causes different notions about science.
Probably the best example is linearity,
and linearity is best exemplified
by the notion of time.
We go from A to B to C
to D on down the line.
Well, the thing is in English I would say,
my brother came to visit me for one week.
In other words, a unit of time.
And in Blackfoot I would say,
my brother came to visit
me to the seventh day.
You can see the
difference, in other words,
a repetition of days.
And that notion of time, just
like the Land Survey System,
just like mathematics, is superimposed
on our explanations of what the cosmos,
what the universe is all about.
And we talk about it in terms
of past, present, and future,
and it's as though we're
standing by a river,
we're facing upstream,
this river of time is flowing past you,
past is back here, I'm
looking into the future.
That's how we picture the notion of time.
Well, in Blackfoot
we're very sophisticated
in our notions of time.
And I'll just talk about
two levels of time.
One is somewhat similar
to the linear notion.
I can say in Blackfoot
(speaks foreign language),
meaning right now.
I can say (speaks foreign
language), meaning tomorrow.
(speaks foreign language)
The day after tomorrow.
And I can work backwards.
(speaks foreign language) Right now,
(speaks foreign language) yesterday,
and day before yesterday
(speaks foreign language).
And I stop there, in
Blackfoot we stop there.
It's not because we can't count past two.
In fact, we can count to
infinity in Blackfoot,
but there comes a point when
you say, what's the point?
(chuckles)
Trying to count to
infinity, what's the point?
But you can count to
infinity in Blackfoot.
But two days is sufficient, and that is,
beyond the two days, the
best we can say about it
is just is.
In other words, in English
what we would refer to
as past, present, and future,
would all amalgamate into
a concept of just is.
Now, at a different level,
what I refer to a cosmic level,
and this is best illustrated
by our Medicine Wheels,
those medicine wheels, the
spokes on the Medicine Wheels
are aligned with solstices,
sometimes with stars,
and so forth.
Well, when alignments take place,
certain things have to happen.
In other words, at the cosmic
level we're very exact.
We're very exact.
One of our Medicine Wheels,
some technicians came over
and measured one of the spokes
with the solstice,
couple, three years ago,
and they found that it
was .07 degrees off center
with the solstice, in other words,
seven hundredths of a degree off.
And the only reason it was off
is because of the precession of the axis.
Takes 26,000 years roughly
for the precession of the axis
to make one circle,
and that's the Mayan great cycle.
Well, this was off just .07 degrees.
And over in Chaco Canyon, there's what,
what did they call it?
There's that setup too for
marking the time and so on
and aligned with the solstice and so on.
So the notion of time is
very important in science.
It's also very important
in Native thinking.
What are some of the
ways that we can come to,
when we see these
differences, these paradigms,
what do I mean by a collaboration?
Well, let me use the
notion of superstrings.
Superstring theory came
into existence, oh,
back in the '50s,
There was not one superstring theory.
It was more like about five
or so superstring theories
that had been more or less amalgamated
and they now refer to it as
the matrix, a matrix approach.
But superstring theory
basically is a situation
where it's all mathematical.
It's all mathematical calculations.
Through those mathematical calculations,
they came up with something
like 26 dimensions.
Think about it, because we
supposedly are four-dimensional.
They came up with 26.
Through their calculations,
they were able to come
up and reduce it down
to 10 dimensions, and if
you add the notion of time,
it becomes 11.
And that's where they've been stuck,
the superstring theories
have been stuck at
those 10 or 11 dimensions.
And they have not been
able to reduce those
down to the four-dimensional basis
that we're supposed to be about.
In other words, height, width,
depth, and notion of time.
And it's gotten to the point where now
the superstring theorists are now saying,
maybe we should forget
about those four dimensions.
I think we're more than four.
Maybe we're 11.
And so in other words,
they're starting to think
in a holistic manner
and getting away from this reductionism.
But the reason I'm talking
about superstring theorists
is because in what is
known in quantum physics
as the standard model, as
part of the standard model,
the physicists have come
up with four major forces
in the universe.
What they refer to as
the strong nuclear force,
the weak nuclear force,
electromagnetism,
and gravity.
Strong nuclear force is
what keep things together.
In other words, so that this
thing doesn't fall apart,
this stand, it's what
keeps things together.
The weak nuclear force results in decay.
Electromagnetism is
about light, and gravity,
we all know what happens
if we jump off the roof.
Well, the physicists, what
they've been trying to do is,
and play around with what they call
the Grand Unified Theory.
The Grand Unified Theory
is that supposedly
they're coming close to, and
in some cases have succeeded,
in synchronizing strong,
weak, and electromagnetism,
but their problem is with Einstein.
They can't bring gravity into the fold.
And scientists basically say,
just the way that the
formulations are set up,
you're never gonna have
Grand Unified Theory,
but they're still trying.
They're wasting lots of time
and money and our tax dollars,
'cause they get all
these grants and so on,
trying to bring about
this Grand Unified Theory.
When in reality, they can't do it.
And I'm one of those people
that say it'll never happen.
Using what is known as the standard model,
it'll never happen.
Because, it's very simple,
gravity is about motion,
it's about motion.
The physicists are talking in
terms of matter, particles.
That's like oranges and apples.
The only time you're gonna
be able to bring about
Grand Unified Theory is if
you have a common denominator.
In other words, that's
why I have some hope
in the superstring theorists,
because they're talking about
motion in their calculation.
It's about these one-dimensional
strings of energy
that they're talking about.
So in other words, if
we talked about in terms
of motion to motion, you'll
have a common denominator.
Then you can bring about
a Grand Unified Theory.
But as long as we're talking about it
in terms of apples and
oranges, motion and particles,
it'll never happen.
And so we've talked to
superstring theorists
and tell 'em, hey, you
should learn Navajo,
because that language is all about motion,
it's all about process.
It'll bring you so much closer.
If you were able to speak Navajo,
you'd be able to understand and get at
what you're trying to
prove and bring about.
The latest effects, the latest attempts,
I don't know if any of
you have heard about,
what is called the Large Hadron Collider
over in Geneva, Switzerland,
extending a little bit into France.
And one of the mandates of
this particle accelerator
is to come up with and
prove the existence of
what is known as the
Higgs particle, H-I-G-G-S,
the Higgs particle.
Now, according to the
physicists, they're saying
what they're dealing with is,
we all know and familiar with
Einstein equals MC squared,
they say the Higg, we know
that in our calculations
the Higgs particle should
be here, all right,
because that's what takes and
converts energy into matter.
The Higgs particle, or
sometimes referred to
as the Higgs field,
converts energy into matter
and vice versa,
but they have not been
able to prove the existence
of the Higgs particle.
Well, we went and talked
to an elder about it
and explained to him, and
it took him a little while
to understand what they
physicists were trying to do,
but once he had a good idea of it,
he came back and he says, that's easy.
He says, the Higgs particle
is what we call spirit.
Well, if those physicists
would learn Blackfoot,
Navajo, we would be able to talk.
And, like I said, because
English, because of its structure,
can't explain certain things,
therefore a reliance
on a foreign language,
which is math, does not happen in Navajo.
In other words, the
language is rich enough
that it can explain
those seeming paradoxes.
So that's where I see the
collaboration taking place.
That's where I see partnerships
occurring in science.
In many ways, in quantum physics,
we talk about the same
things, things such as,
the quantum physicists
talk about constant motion.
We talk about constant flux.
The quantum physicists
talk about non-locality.
They have a problem with
the notion of non-locality.
It's not a problem in Blackfoot.
It's not.
And those kind of major
concepts in physics
and in Native thought
are the kind of things
that I think if Western science
were to stop and reflect,
will come to realize, hey,
there's a hidden science,
just like Daniel Corkery
was talking about.
There's a hidden science that
has not been made use of.
I think I had a few
comparative notes up here
where I say Native science
and quantum physics,
in Western thought, we think
about chaos over order.
In other words, we all
remember Walter Cronkite,
the old CBS news anchor,
what was his famous saying
at the end of his newscasts?
And that's the way it is.
Well, when we think
about chaos over order,
what we're really saying
is that there is an underlying order,
and the assumption is this
is the way God made it.
There's this underlying order.
If there is chaos, it's we as humans
that are causing the chaos,
because we're not understanding
the underlying order,
and that's what we're searching for.
Einstein, again, God does not
play dice with the universe.
In other words, there is
this underlying order.
Well, from a Native point of view,
it really is order over chaos.
In other words, the chaos
is the constant flux.
We never know what's going to happen.
Things are forever changing.
What we're trying to do is,
our culture is our window
looking out into the universe,
looking out into what we call reality,
and that flux that's going on,
we're trying to put an order to it
by establishing regularity,
looking for regular patterns.
That's how we try to bring out order.
So in Native science
you cannot get away from
looking at culture along with the science.
The science is the culture.
In Western science what
we're really trying to do
is undress ourselves from our culture
so that there's nothing
that interferes with
our view of the underlying order,
and consequently, the
emphasis on objectivity.
When in reality everything
we know is subjective.
So that's one major difference.
Yeah, that's good.
In Native science and quantum physics,
consciousness affects reality,
something similar to Native science.
Matter or objects are,
along with Einstein,
spacetime curvatures, they call it.
In Blackfoot they're mere descriptions.
In other words, what is matter
is really what are objects,
are really just descriptions.
Time in quantum physics is
the space-time continuum,
and Blackfoot it just is.
Matter in physics is about particles,
whether those be atoms,
neutrons, protons, electrons,
neutrinos, quarks, and so on.
In our case, it's wave.
We're wave thinkers.
We think in terms of waves.
Reality, the scientists
are beginning to say
there's no deep reality.
There's no deep reality
that exists out there.
In ours, it's all subjective.
It's what you know, that's
what you've come to experience.
Cause and effect is a paradox.
In Blackfoot, it's either
all cause or all effect.
It's all cause, so the
paradox, the either/or notion
is really not a problem.
Perspectives, we take
reductionism and it's holistic.
Method, we use experiments
in Western science,
and that's because we're impatient.
In other words, we don't
wanna wait for nature,
so we speed it up by
doing the experiments.
In Native science, hey, we
let nature play itself out.
We observe, it's about observation.
Knowledge in Western
thinking is cumulative.
In Native thought,
knowledge has to be renewed.
And the example I give about renewal
from this point of view is
not always, but generally speaking,
you can imagine the
situation of a young couple
who have gone over and are
past the honeymoon period,
whether it's six months,
whether it's seven years,
so one morning, and
like I said, not always,
but generally speaking, the wife,
one morning over a cup of
coffee, she tells her husband,
you have changed.
And him seeing something coming, says,
what do you mean I've changed?
And she says, you know,
when we were dating,
when we were courting, you
used to bring me the flowers.
You used to bring me the gifts.
You don't do that anymore.
And he says, I married you, didn't I?
Well, if we just stop there,
you can see the wife wanting the renewal.
In other words, like anything else,
love needs to be renewed,
just like knowledge needs to be renewed.
Whereas for the guy, it
was a one time thing,
okay, I married you.
You go do your thing, I'll
go play golf with the boys.
So this notion of renewal
is very important.
And, of course, language is binary,
and in the other one it's about process.
Okay, it's about process, we can go on.
And in current science,
I've mentioned the notion
about the Higgs particle,
and we would say that it
really is about transformation,
because in the flux notion
it's all about transformation and so on.
That's why in Native thought,
hey, people can change forms,
and there's many stories about that.
In other words, the outer anthropomorphic,
the actual structure, the
actual anthropomorphic form
of anything is not important.
In other words, somebody can
shift from a human to a dog
to a horse and back
again, and that happens,
and it has happened.
So anthropomorphic aspects are not,
what is important is the
underlying commonality,
and that is the spirit.
That's what's important.
And the Grand Unified Theory,
as we've said, won't happen
with the existing approach
with the standard model.
So if we're going to
move forward in science,
we're going to have to,
like David Bone says,
we're gonna have to look at science
from a different point of view,
from a different perspective,
'cause the existing approach
is not giving us the answers.
We're just asking more questions,
but we're not getting any answers.
So when you bring these
two foundational bases
of the approach, I see possibilities,
especially in the area of quantum physics
and Native science entering
into powerful relationships,
into collaborations.
I've gone so far to say,
in 50 years from now,
in 70 years from now, aboriginal
people are gonna be out
in the forefront of science,
because they already have
the mentality for it.
The only comment I would say,
and I'll close with that,
is that many people
refer to technology as science,
and I say it's not.
Technology is not science.
Technology is about the application
of what is already known.
Science is about pursuit of knowledge,
it's about stretching the envelope,
getting into something that's unknown.
That's what science is about.
But technology really is
about what is already known,
the application of what is known.
We have all our toys, our cellphones,
all the modern electronic conveniences.
Well, did you know that the knowledge,
the scientific knowledge behind all that
existed in the '50s?
In other words, scientists
knew about those kind of
electronic stuff a long time ago.
It's just now being applied.
In other words, technology
is just now catching up.
So a lot of people mix
technology with science,
but technology is not science.
The science I'm talking about
is that science that delves
into the unknown.
And with the flux notion,
hey, aboriginal people on a daily basis
are forever dealing with the flux.
From that point of view,
we are and have always been scientists.
Thank you.
(audience claps)
(easygoing rhythmic music)
