Gregory Cajete

[radiantfracture]

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}

  - - - - -

1. Of course you can also have a chart.

Comments

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Among my favorites is Odinani, the Igbo sacred science. Another is Native American permaculture with its food forests and the Three Sisters.

Re: Yes ...

[radiantfracture]

Thanks for the links! Yes, of course, the Three Sisters would be agricultural science.

[oracne]

Coooooooooooool.

[katuah]

Cajete is great.

My rabbit hole is the idea of knowledge and sacredness enmeshed in a landscape / sacred landscape

Chacoan great roads

(forced removal to reservations = destroying cultural knowledge)

this is goooood brain and soul food.

[radiantfracture]

I am embarrassed to say I knew nothing about him before this -- and yet he has some books on pedagogy I'm sure would be useful in my work. Hopefully I can read them during my next research term.

And then also figure out how to teach academic writing properly.


(forced removal to reservations = destroying cultural knowledge)

Yeah. The place is the knowledge.

[twistedchick]

This is fascinating! Thank you!

I have seen the twig wave maps made by traditional Hawaiians as an aid to telling where they are on the ocean -- the shapes correspond to the way waves behave, not just to where islands are.

[radiantfracture]

twig wave maps

Did not know about these! I need to be making a list of examples. Maybe get students to investigate them.

[twistedchick]

I don't know the actual name, sorry. They were maps made from lengths of twig or grass, tied together, that showed where the big waves were, when you were going from one place to another. I saw them briefly during the Smithsonian Folk Festival a number of years ago when there were Hawaiian navigators there teaching how traditional navigation worked.

[radiantfracture]

Is it this sort of thing?

https://manoa.hawaii.edu/exploringourfluidearth/node/34

[twistedchick]

Yes! That's it!

There was a lot more to the navigation -- they were setting stones at various points in a circle and showing how one would steer -- but yes, that's what I was thinking of.

[juushika]

The title of this made me think of Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, which was my introduction to Native cultural practice as agricultural and environmental knowledge; I wasn't expecting astronomical knowledge, but honestly all that indicates is the problem with my own assumptions! Braiding Sweetgrass makes what I think are similar arguments re: the relationship between culture, action, and knowledge; but less emphasis, as far as I recall, on spacial/visual records.

Thank you for the links! This is something I should learn more about.

[radiantfracture]

I have Braiding Sweetgrass! I haven't read it all, but the parts I have read I love. Do you have a favorite chapter or chapters?

[juushika]

"Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teaching of Grass" is about Native sweet grass harvesting traditions, whether human harvesting of a plant can benefit its growth, and studying the topic through Western science. It does some of the best work in the book of pulling together all the themes of the effect of racism and sexism (on individuals, science, and sweet grass populations), Native cultural practice as scientific knowledge, and the limitations of the dominant paradigm. Far and above my favorite chapter.

"Asters and Goldenrod" has beautiful language. "The Honorable Harvest" is where the text can get more preachy re: consumerism and the issues of where to go from here, which isn't, I think, a question that Kimmerer adequately answers; but its look at the complexity of reciprocity is ambiguous and more successful. The study of the fur trapper worked particularly well for me, because I went in with the same knee-jerk presumptions as Kimmerer and it was productive to have them challenged. "Learning the Grammar of Animacy" is particularly affecting, and relevant here for its arguments about how language forms/reveals social values and knowledge.