Gregory Cajete

Gregory Cajete spoke on our campus today about Indigenous Science. The Indigenous Studies department brought him in, and he was their big speaker of the term (& even with his visit already planned they were really supportive of Daniel's visit).

I ate nothing but almonds all morning, so by 12:30 the inside of my mouth felt like a wood chipper and I wasn't at all sure I didn't want a sandwich more than a lecture.

Yet as always I'm really glad I went -- the talk was profoundly intellectually enlivening, even for someone in my state of mid-term demoralization.

Cajete presented us with a brief visual survey of Indigenous scientific knowledge, mostly astronomical, and its material evidence. What was most stirring was the profoundly unfamiliar-to-me way of thinking about recording, retrieving and using information -- in three dimensions, in the real world.

I sent a bunch of garbled notes to the work co-conspirator afterwards (n.b.f.f. he was there at the talk -- I just needed to debrief.) I share it with you now in case you have comments/insights/experiences of your own you'd like to offer.

This is the sort of ridiculous email you get sooner or later if you work with me:

SUBJECT: Reasons that was cool

• I teach that orature situates knowledge/philosophy in mnemonic relationship to landscape – like memory palace, etc.
  
  • Ex. see poplar tree; remember “The Shivering Tree” & its lessons
  • Relation is of speaker to story to listener to land, memory to imagination
• Cajete is talking about representing knowledge as a relation between memory and a visual-spatial artifact
• Representing / anchoring knowledge in the physical, multipurpose object
• The object both records the knowledge and performs the function or even other functions
  
  • Ex. star-viewing mound is also house
  • Ex. the Hokulei’a, Polynesian wayfinding vessel, *is* itself a navigational device – the stern is square so you can orient it east/west at sunrise/sunset and marks along the sides of the vessel correspond to the star compass
  • So you don’t have a chart you ARE a chart and you’re IN a chart¹
• Also layering of knowledge on top of other knowledge
  
  • Ex. the correspondences in the medicine wheel being referents for other bodies of knowledge, not “just” symbolic alignments

Just this way of thinking of representing knowledge in a spatial/visual way rather than through writing but still representing and recording relationships of bodies of knowledge

Is COOL

 
Although it makes it more and more unlikely that I’m qualified to talk about any of it

{rf}

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1. Of course you can also have a chart.