If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound together with mine, let us walk together.
--Lilla Watson, Indigenous Australian visual artist, activist and academic
Living in harmony with nature has been an integral part of the culture, traditions and lifestyles of most indigenous people across the world. Their traditional practices, religious beliefs, rituals, folklore, arts and crafts lead to harmonious inter-relationships among nature, ecology and cosmos. Such a lifestyle sheds light not only on the knowledge systems of the indigenous people but also on their cosmology, ontology and epistemology.
The local communities possess intangible cultural wealth and immense collective moral and cultural capital. To the people, forests, mountains and rivers are a repository of traditional knowledge and wisdom. Sadly, the so-called mainstream has exiled the local people to the fringes of conversations thereby perpetuating the stereotype of the native with no agency.
For thousands of years, the indigenous people have followed a lifestyle and cultural practices, which emphasise what social scientist Shiv Viswanathan calls “everydayness of coping”. Doing more with less is built in their way of surviving on the minimum. This “ethnography of coping”, says Vishwanathan, is a “lesson to us all”. Their life provides us with a compass of everyday knowledge and how the margins survive and safeguard their knowledge systems. A related aspect of such a philosophy, worldview and lifestyle has been a sense of the collective.
Capitalism is a great promoter of individual rights – the right to own, to sell and to keep. The indigenous people, on the contrary, believe in and practice a model that subjugates the rights of the individual to those of peoples, communities and nature. Rather than a source of sustenance, nature is treated by capitalism as a resource to be exploited for profit. The capitalistic developmental model is essentially extractivist. The minerals and other resources are located in the regions where the indigenous communities live. The extraction of these minerals leads to the destruction of local ecology and the ouster and displacement of the indigenous communities. The essence of such a philosophy is that the wellbeing can occur only in a community. The wellbeing is a built-in culturally specific idea of a community living in harmony with nature. In the worldviews of a large number of indigenous people across the world, the central idea, which underpins the meaning of ‘wellbeing’ is the balanced relationship between people and their community and natural surroundings. Real wellbeing is in harmonious co-existence. It is not income-dependent but promotion of people’s livelihood and environment.
This article has a dual focus. It seeks to revisit the epistemology of the indigenous people in the Northeast but it also examines this issu
