Indigenous cultures are too often represented as if they live in a fog of superstition. In B- grade movies and far too many documentaries, so called ‘primitive’ people are shown performing nebulous rituals to their gods. They are apparently afraid of thunder because they don’t have an explanation for it and perform all sorts of sacrifices to appease the deities. The reality is very different. This essay will demonstrate that the rituals of Indigenous cultures are grounded in reasoned practices. It will demonstrate their ability to retain, maintain and communicate the complexity of their physical and cultural domains.
This essay will also argue that we need to go beyond respecting Indigenous cultures to recognising how much we can learn from them. We can add to Western education practices by grounding our contemporary learning in knowledge structures, fixed by physical locations and enhanced by integrating song, dance and vivid imagination with the way we encode information right across the knowledge domains.
The misconception that we have little to gain from Indigenous intellectual achievements arises from the fact that we who use literacy to store information have not grasped that there is an alternative: orality. We often read that non-literate cultures left no written records. Culture is built around what you do have, not what you don’t. Cultures which have no contact whatsoever with writing are referred to as primary oral cultures and have developed a suite of mnemonic technologies in order to memorise the learning built up over the millennia.
In order to grasp a totally different way of knowing, it is necessary first to appreciate just what is known.
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