The Wayfinders (The CBC Massey Lectures)

by Wade Davis

The Kula also provided the context for the display of prestige and status upon which the authority of the hereditary chiefs was based.

Kula implied, if nothing else, commitment.

rivers are not just routes of communication, they are the veins of the earth, the link between the living and the dead, the paths along which the ancestors travelled at the beginning of time.

For his people, the past is the present, and the sacred sites are to this day inhabited by mythic beings.

The water both recalls the primordial act of creation, the river journey of the Anaconda and Mythical Heroes, and foreshadows the inevitable moment of decay and rebirth.

At the same time, everything is more than it appears, for the visible world is only one level of perception.

White people, Ricardo told me, see with their eyes, but the Barasana see with their minds.

they celebrate their most profound cultural insight, the realization that animals and plants are only people in another dimension of reality.

What matters is the potency of a belief, the manner in which a conviction plays out in the day-to-day lives of a people, for in a very real sense this determines the ecological footprint of a culture, the impact that any society has on its environment.

But every time the Spaniards planted a cross or built a church on top of a demolished shrine they simply affirmed in the eyes of the people the inherent sacredness of the place. For it was not a building that the Indians worshipped, it was the land itself:

Five hundred years after the Spanish Conquest, these ancient notions of sacred geography continue to define and nurture social existence, to link the living with the dead, the past with the future, just as they did in the time of the Inca.

What is important, what has ultimate value, what gives life purpose is not what is measured and seen but what exists in the realm of aluna, the abstract dimension of meaning.

Every element of nature is imbued with higher significance, such that even the most modest of creatures can be seen as a teacher, and the smallest grain of sand is a mirror of the universe.

the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is a world in balance and harmony — exactly, the Indians maintain, as the Great Mother intended it to be.

For the first time in his life he sees the world not as an abstraction but as it actually exists in all its stunning beauty. The message is clear: It is his to protect.

ONE’S INCLINATION UPON HEARING such an account is to dismiss it as being hopelessly naive or so impossibly beautiful as to be untrue. This, sadly, has too often been our response to cultures we encounter but do not understand, whose profound complexities are so dazzling as to overwhelm.

The goal of the individual, as Otto taught me, is not to follow the Songline from beginning to end, but to honour the ancestors at the points of power and memory that mark the passage of a Songline through one’s particular clan territory.

There is no notion of linear progression, no goal of improvement, no idealization of the possibility of change. To the contrary, the entire logos of the Dreaming is stasis, constancy, balance, and consistency. The entire purpose of humanity is not to improve anything. It is to engage in the ritual and ceremonial activities deemed to be essential for the maintenance of the world precisely as it was at the moment of creation.

The Dreaming, as he wrote, “defined what was, determined what is, embodied all that can be.”

Aborigines, as Stanner understood, were not a people without a history. They were, he wrote, a civilization that in a sense had defeated history.

The Dreaming answered both the questions how and why. It dictated the way a person must live. Man’s obligation was not to improve upon nature, but to sustain the world.

all with the goal of revealing to the living that everyone and everything are equal, that human beings are not exceptional, that nothing in this world is permanent.

We are speaking about a waterfall of destruction unprecedented in the history of our species. In our lifetime half of the voices of humanity are being silenced.

It is neither change nor technology that threatens the integrity of culture. It is power, the crude face of domination. We have this idea that these indigenous peoples, these distant others, quaint and colourful though they may be, are somehow destined to fade away, as if by natural law, as if they are failed attempts at being modern, failed attempts at being us.

Modernity provides the rationale for disenfranchisement, with the real goal too often being the extraction of natural resources on an industrial scale from territories occupied for generations by indigenous peoples whose ongoing presence on the land proves to be an inconvenience.

The hornbill has fled with the pheasants, and as the trees continue to fall, a unique way of life, morally inspired, inherently right, and effortlessly pursued for centuries, has collapsed in a single generation.

“Anyone who thinks they alone can change the world,” Peter Matthiessen once wrote, “is both wrong and dangerous.”

We spend all of our lifetimes trying to live to be a hundred without losing our hair or teeth. The Buddhist spends his lifetime trying to understand the nature of existence. Billboards in European cities celebrate teenagers in underwear. The Tibetan billboard is the mani wall, mantras carved into stone, prayers for the well being of all sentient beings.”

The goal was not to escape the world, but to escape being enslaved by it. The purpose of practice was not the elimination of self, but the annihilation of ignorance, and the unmasking of the true Buddha nature, which like a buried jewel shines bright within every human being, waiting to be revealed. The Buddha’s transmission, in short, offered nothing less than a road map to enlightenment.

They remind us that all life grows old and that all possessions decay. Every moment is precious and we all have a choice, to continue on the spinning carousel of delusion, or to step off into a new realm of spiritual possibilities. They offer an alternative that is not a dogma but a path, long and difficult but in so many ways irresistible.

Caught between worlds, unable to go back, and with no clear path forward, they scratch for a living in the streets of Nairobi and swell the sea of misery that surrounds the Kenyan capital.

“They must hold onto tradition,” Father George told me. “Ultimately it is what will save them. It’s all they have. They are Rendille and must stay Rendille.”

Modern industrial society as we know it is scarcely 300 years old. This shallow history should not suggest to any of us that we have all the answers for all of the challenges that will confront us as a species in the coming millennia. The goal is not to freeze people in time. One cannot make a rainforest park of the mind. Cultures are not museum pieces; they are communities of real people with real needs. The question, as Hugh Brody has written, is not the traditional versus the modern, but the right of free peoples to choose the components of their lives. The point is not to deny access, but rather to ensure that all peoples are able to benefit from the genius of modernity on their own terms, and without that engagement demanding the death of their ethnicity.

And it is certainly not the true and only pulse of history. It is merely a constellation of beliefs, convictions, economic paradigms that represent one way of doing things, of going about the complex process of organizing human activities.

Once we look through the anthropological lens and see, perhaps for the first time, that all cultures have unique attributes that reflect choices made over generations, it becomes absolutely clear that there is no universal progression in the lives and destiny of human beings.

In reality, development for the vast majority of the peoples of the world has been a process in which the individual is torn from his past, propelled into an uncertain future, only to secure a place on the bottom rung of an economic ladder that goes nowhere.

As cultures wither away, individuals remain, often shadows of their former selves, caught in time, unable to return to the past, yet denied any real possibility of securing a place in a world whose values they seek to emulate and whose wealth they long to acquire.

Were I to distill a single message from these Massey Lectures it would be that culture is not trivial. It is not decoration or artifice, the songs we sing or even the prayers we chant. It is a blanket of comfort that gives meaning to lives. It is a body of knowledge that allows the individual to make sense out of the infinite sensations of consciousness, to find meaning and order in a universe that ultimately has neither. Culture is a body of laws and traditions, a moral and ethical code that insulates a people from the barbaric heart that history suggests lies just beneath the surface of all human societies and indeed all human beings. Culture alone allows us to reach, as Abraham Lincoln said, for the better angels of our nature.

Outside of the major industrial nations, globalization has not brought integration and harmony, but rather a firestorm of change that has swept away languages and cultures, ancient skills and visionary wisdom.

To acknowledge the wonder of other cultures is not to denigrate our way of life but rather to recognize with some humility that other peoples, flawed as they too may be, nevertheless contribute to our collective heritage, the human repertoire of ideas, beliefs, and adaptations that have historically allowed us as a species to thrive.

To lose a culture is to lose something of our selves.

Their cultural survival does not undermine the nation-state; it serves to enrich it, if the state is willing to embrace diversity. These cultures do not represent failed attempts at modernity, marginal peoples who somehow missed the technological train of history. On the contrary, these peoples, with their dreams and prayers, their myths and memories, teach us that there are indeed other ways of being, alternative visions of life, birth, death, and creation itself.

“In the endless ocean of sand,” he said, “the young man realizes that there is something greater than himself, that he is but a small particle in the universe and that there is a higher being regulating the world. Thus is awakened a thirst for seeking.