Restoring the Kinship Worldview (2022) by Wahinkpe Topa and Darcia Narvaez
I saw this title on the always-wonderful University of California, Berkeley’s The Greater Good Science Center site and was intrigued (https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/can_the_indigenous_worldview_build_a_better_future?_ga=2.232959710.1321401351.1669667825-1489903705.1660343467), having a profound interest in Native American perspectives, ancient and contemporary. Restoring the Kinship Worldview combines both to champion the ideology of kincentrism to restore place-based knowledge and return to an Earth-based consciousness in this Anthropocene era. Whatever version of a “god” one wants to believe in, through this ideological lens they all get rebranded as Nature. Sadly, “western” culture has nearly separated life from every corner of Nature, and thus we have created our own hell (p. 128). We collectively need to re-embrace a Nature-as-god, Earth-as-fragile-home mindset, if not as religion. Freud called this an “oceanic feeling”; to Maslow it was “peak experience”, and, to Sagan it was the romantic association of us being “made from stardust”. Beautiful, romantic, poetic.
Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) speaks of a pet theory he has, where:
“ . . . starting with Hinduism, all of the organized religions have a foundation that relates to original Indigenous worldview. I propose that the enlightened founders, all the way up through Jesus Christ, saw the devolution of human civilization and created ideas for returning to our original loving nature. My theory is that religions are an effort to rectify the horrors of hierarchy and the loss of egalitarianism and Nature-based thinking. Indigenous worldview is thus prevention oriented, knowing about the potential but not experiencing life based on greed and division. Over time, the teachings of the religious founders were modified by the political and social mores of the times to create orthodoxy that weakened the original intent. Post-contact efforts became conventional for maintaining the religion itself.
If generosity is learned by observing the natural world and our place in it, as I believe it is, Indigenous worldview is a necessity for returning to life based on generosity, it seems” (pp. 162-3).
While my opinion couldn’t mean any less, I agree with him, even if I choose to ignore the “spiritual” or sentient nature of Nature. Lovelock and Margulis’s Gaia Hypothesis/Paradigm works well for me. The Indigenous worldview aligns with so much of “paganism”, Buddhism, Wiccan, druidic, and Transcendentalist perspectives too. This is an incredibly OLD way of looking at the world and understanding our humble place within in, and one I embrace wholeheartedly, but I’m nowhere near perfect yet. This is not a peace-on-earth perspective, though sometimes the readings feel that way. On the one hand, it is our <i>relationship</i> with and to Nature that needs to drastically metamorphose, and on the other it is our relationship to one another that needs to be dynamically reorganized. This all needs to be done quickly too. Time is not on our side here. Humankind needs to endure some growing pains in this transformation, but ultimately it will lead to greater reward for all life on Earth, finding balance and equilibrium, and nurturing a symbiotic relationship to Gaia.
If you haven’t yet seen the doc film The Year the Earth Changed on Apple TV, hosted by Sir David Attenborough, please do so. The COVID-19 pandemic was a monstrous occurrence (still ongoing) that’s severity could have easily been avoided if morons (beholden solely to their financial portfolios over human lives) weren’t in charge of half the world. One of the only good things the pandemic did was convincingly illustrate how when humankind slows down its consumption, traffic, pollution, and waste, the Earth and its biosystems can vigorously heal. This film is a teaching moment for tectonic change and shows that when humanity is encouraged to act differently, truly incredible things can happen, growing pains included.
Change is happening of course, but it is both equally small and yet equally significant, from nuclear fusion to quantum computing, from reversible-rust batteries to the growing use of solar panels and wind turbines, from “green concrete” to the proliferation of backyard gardens, discussions about “the future of work”, and the surging e-bike movement across the globe. Momentum, investment, and mind-shifts are required from everyone on the planet. We need to accomplish more with less. We need to consume less, waste less, breed less, and crave less. Replacing the mining of oil with the mining of lithium with the mining of cobalt won’t help. Listening to the voices of the global Indigenous community can lead us into a better future, but we must turn our ears and open our minds to what they have to say. This book is a fantastic starting point, and the sources they cite will help empower every reader to pursue the Indigenous worldview more purposefully. I’ll include my list below to make it easier on folks, but there are plenty more mentioned in the text (I’ve already read several of them, such as Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta). Here’s to a better, more peaceful, inclusive, and humanistic-driven future.
Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath: The Twinned Cosmos of Indigenous America by Barbara Alice Mann (2016)
Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture, and Wisdom by Darcia Narvaez (2014)
Mother Earth Spirituality: Native American Paths to Healing Ourselves and Our World by Ed McGaa (2011)
Unlearning the Language of Conquest: Scholars Expose Anti-Indianism in America by Four Arrows (Don Trent Jacobs) (2010)
Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism by Jack Forbes (2008)
Concentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship by Enrique Salmon (2000)
The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram (1997)
Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior by Marimba Ani (1994)
Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples by Jack Forbes (1993)