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Participatory Practice
there is a web of interconnectedness between the individual and community and between the community and nature. This, in turn, means that everything is relational and by attending to the relational we can attend to the whole. Thus, an individual is only knowable as a member of a recognised community, and communities are only recognised through their constituents. This connection includes our relationship to the land and where we are born and live. These beliefs and ways of being have meant that indigenous groups have often come into conflict with Western views of knowledge creation. Generalisation in indigenous thinking, for example, only takes place at the level of values, while learning is achieved through experience, ceremony and storytelling (Graveline, 1998). For indigenous groups, knowledge is a blend of mind, practice, trusted authority, spiritual values and local social and cultural organisation: a knowledge space (Turnbull, 1997). Tying everything together is the primary focus on nurturing relationships, not only with each other but also with the past and the future, as well as with nature. It is through ceremony, talking circles, wisdom councils and generally taking time to be with people that is so core to indigenous ways. This is a hard lesson for those working with tribal communities but a necessary one. Relating comes before anything else. Table 3.1 illustrates the differences between Western models and indigenous ways of seeing which Peat (1986) discussed in his book Blackfoot Physics some years ago. Table 3.1: Different ways of seeing the world Western science
Indigenous science
Linear thought logic and structure
Being, experiencing relationship
Fragmentation, dualism
Connectedness
Material and concrete
Spirit and emergence
Fixed laws
Flux, change and transformation
Knowledge as something to be processed and accumulated
Coming to knowing through experience, watching and listening, ceremonies and songs, and entering the silence
Individual rights and justice
Obligations, dialogue and balance
Abstraction
Stuff of life
Source: Based on Peat (1986)
The medicine wheel A common – and the most widely recognised – symbol of indigenous ways of viewing the world is the medicine wheel, a circular symbol that encapsulates the essential holistic and participatory nature of this way of thinking (Bopp et al, 1985; Marsden, 2005). 74
