I'm so thrilled to see these Idle No More protests happening. Voices are being raised and people are coming together. It's been a long time since there was a big popular movement for the good in our society and I would love to live through another period of positive transformation. It's time to talk about a revolution, and that's what Chief Spense is saying by asking to speak to the very top of our established hierarchy.

The problem is that a revolution is not something that happens in isolation. The current protests will not have the desired effect until there is an effective communication of the underlying philosophical shift that is being demanded. A revolution needs NEW IDEAS to thrive. What is lacking is an understanding of WHY we need to protect the First Nations cultures, for their own sake, above and beyond the atrocities they experience and the myriad other reasons that we presently have to rise up. We need to understand that they actually do have a different way of seeing the world that defies a lot of the things that our society takes absolutely for granted.

My message is that there has indeed been something brewing under the surface for decades now, that there is a big philosophical shift ready to happen if enough people make the connections. It's started already if you know where to look. It's the revolution that the dynamical systems and chaos theorists have been calling for for decades, with ideas that challenge reductionist science for its lack of context and its failure to exist in the complexity of the real world. Atheism is the first thing to go. Spirit is a thing that exists, even though it's not really a thing, it's more a way of moving. Once you understand, it's everywhere, you just can't pin it down. The Natives understand and they're showing us the way.

The traditional Native American life is a holistic and intuitive relationship with the land (the land is so important) that is manifested with variations in the oral cultures of the Nations that exist in all of the Americas and worldwide, which has allowed them to thrive since time immemorial. Therefore, they place a lot of importance on metaphor and extended verbal discussion - hense Chief Spense's hunger strike and her request to speak for "seven days or two weeks". As non-natives who are enthusiastic about this movement, we need to recognize that we are witnessing a big communication gap accross cultures. The dialogue is finally beginning, and slowly we will come to understand the ways that these people live in spiritual harmony with the land, in a great web, with "all our relations." Their approach is decentralized and ecosystemic, and it aims to describe things as they really are, rather than creating a reduced theory to project onto the system. It is about many different complex real-world identities interacting desirably, which is what's meant by "Nation to Nation discussions." It will only be when our cultures can speak to each other with genuine understanding that that the social change we seek will come.

Oh, and this is what the Occupy Movement is waiting for, too. This is all-encompassing.

I must explain who I am to make these claims. My name is Jamie Webber, I am studying degrees in Neuroscience and in Music Composition at McGill University in Montreal. I am 23 years old. I'm an intellectual anarchist, a free-thinker, and someone who feels a deep need to challenge the status-quo.  My intent is to be as diverse and plural in my approach as possible, to really see the world from all angles. By studying both the cutting edge of science and the timeless traditions of art I have have found similiar problems, intriguing alignments and frustrating incompatibilities that the people who specialize in a single domain will never recognize. As I searched more and more I began to find resonances in my own language with that of the First Nations people. Therefore, I recently acquired a copy of a book called Native Science by Gregory Cajete. The book explains the ways that traditional native cultures gathered knowledge about the world and made new discoveries. I found that it aligned perfectly with the complex argument I have been building against the edifice of Science, the hegemony of the modern world.

Our society needs now to understand and appreciate holism and oral culture and all that they can do for us. What I hope to explain... in my life, I guess, is that this will allow us to see spirituality as applied intuition and to appreciate certain amazing behaviours of the brain and of the universe that exist but are fundamentally inaccessible to scientific inquiry. These systems exhibit qualities that emerge from the interactions of the whole network, qualities that cannot be quantified or detected by only studying smaller brain areas or reduced components of whatever the object of investigation. The new ideas will bring to science a greater understanding of the work of artists and show that in certain elegant and highly elusive states, miraculous things can happen. New ideas are often uncomfortable. The First Nations have traditions that can inform us greatly and help our entire society work in a way that is more harmonious with itself and where creativity flows much more freely. After centuries of assimilation, it is time for us to be assimilated by them in return.

Next post - Why Anti-Galileo?
After that - Why do they always talk about the land? (or, Towards a Cognitive Neuroscience of Spirituality)


post-word

I want to make a declaration of ignorance. I am trying to explain something that I don't yet understand. I've only really been learning about the First Nations for a few months now and I'm afraid that I'm almost definitely projecting my ideas onto theirs. I'm sure this blog will be full of all of my youth and that I will take steps off the path and make claims that are unsubstantiated. It is certainly a dangerous game to try to make statements about another's culture, but the impetus that I feel is of having a voice that can say things that are not yet heard. I feel that the time to speak up is immediately, and this blog will be a learning process.

Sources:

http://www.amazon.ca/Native-Science-Natural-Laws-Interdependence/dp/1574160419/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1357362069&sr=1-1

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2013/01/04/pol-idle-no-more-friday.html