Indian from the inside: Native American philosophy and Cultural Renewal by McPherson and Rabb
This is a revised version of a book review of McPherson and Rabb’s Indian From the Inside: Native American Philosophy and Cultural Renewal submitted for a course, Native Worldviews, in the Indigenous Learning Program at Lakehead University in the fall of 2014.
Incommensurability and Restoring the Hermeneutic Circle within Native American Cultures
The discussion of incommensurability and the hermeneutic circle flow from the authors consideration of the values of respect for animals and the land, non-interference and polycentrism. They note favourably, as one example, Michael Ignatieff’s recognition of Indigenous influence in Canada in the willingness, as normal and healthy, to live with incompatible stories without the need to reconcile them.[1]
In a sense, while incommensurability is a problem, Native philosophy contains within itself a hermeneutic solution to this problem. However, colonial societies with their assimilative cultural agendas are not typically well suited to take advantage or even understand this solution without transforming their fundamental colonial driving force.
The McPherson/Rabb discussion of the incommensurability problem flows from their understanding of worldviews and the pre-contact, traditional, accordion-like social organization of Indigenous peoples, such as the Ojibwa, which they see as making Native cultures resistant to assimilation.[2]
Even if only a relative few families are continuing to teach and practice Native values, traditional ways can always be re-established.[3]
The authors believe that pre-contact Native values such as non-interference, respect, polycentrism and cooperativeness could have survived more than five hundred years of oppression and attempted assimilation, despite every effort by the colonial society to assimilate or eradicate Native culture, based upon Native social organization and philosophy.
While acknowledging the cross-cultural differences between Native cultures, the authors emphasize their mutual difference with Western worldviews. Going beyond the simple problem of translation, the problem of incommensurability between radically different worldviews involves learning how to perceive and reason in the style of another worldview. This undertaking requires discovering the “network of inferential associations” which embodies the worldview as a style of perception, reason and social being.
Social organization facilitated Native societies dealing with cross-cultural differences. Exogamy, or marrying outside the group, and adoption, meant Native societies often incorporated members from other cultures as a way of seeding shared understandings and worldviews implicit in ceremonies and traditions. This polycentrism the authors see as inherent in Native philosophies and cultures.[4]
The authors take issue with the eradication or assimilationist view of Native society as being pre-scientific and as not being able to survive the encounter with Western science and culture. Even when assimilated tribal members have lost touch with their relation to the land and place, and have adopted a Western perspective of the land as a resource or commodity exploited for economic gain, the community, as a whole, still has the ability to reproduce from its more traditional members the Native worldview. At the heart of this understanding is the fundamental characteristic of Native philosophy as “transformative”.[5]
The spiritual path of the vision quest is a fundamentally transformative one. Understanding requires transformation on the part of the participant, before intelligibility can take place. Native philosophy supports this path insofar as it recognizes that the spiritual basis of understanding is the recognition that all things are related, that everything is “one continuous spirit”.
The inability to understand this on the part of Western society leads the authors to the role of written language as central to the incommensurability problem in the European-Native encounter. The inability of the Westerner to engage the “gestalt shift” from one style of perception and reasoning to another, the authors see as ground in the ancient shift from oral to literate language. The authors argue, with Abrams, that the shift to the phonetic alphabet of written language and its attendant shift of worldview involved a profound alienation from the oral perceptual encounter and the meaningful, animate, more-than-human world in which it was embedded.[6] Not the land, but the written word became the carrier of the cultural wisdom from generation to generation.
The ancient Hebrews who became known as the people of the Book " were perhaps the first nation to so thoroughly shift their sensory participation away from the forms of surrounding nature to a purely phonetic set of signs, and so to experience the profound epistemological independence from the natural environment that was made possible by this potent new technology”. This process of alienation from the land and into the realm of “purely human sounds” becomes even more emphatic with the printing press and subsequent widespread literacy. “[T]he Western intellect would increasingly fail to recognize an animate earth and sacred air.” Urbanization has only accentuated this alienation even more.[7] As a result, the task has become, the authors argue, to write language back into the land.[8]
To understand what is at stake, we are asked to take the very long view. The neolithic agricultural revolution created a form of amnesia, a lack of memory, regarding identity and its genuine relation to place which hunter gatherers understood intuitively. The authors see this forgetting in the neolithic revolution as one of the principal roots of the incommensurability problem of Western and Native worldviews. One group is concerned with the problems of space, the other with the problems of time, that is, the distinction between mythological and historical consciousness. Following Martin, they see time and the control of nature as closely related, a matter of timing and the clock.
The Neolithic priest-king as a master of the art of cosmic divination and thus of food production, leads to the linear narrative of written history of royal houses and their mastery of order out of chaos. Christianity is presented as inheriting this historical project as an expanding missionary force of conversion and conquest. The book, the plough and the sword became one in the Christian Neolithic worldview which seeks to conquer time through the historical consciousness of the book and space through the social organization of the clock, the plough and the sword.
It is with this new reflection of language that the authors reconsider the pernicious undertaking of residential schools and the effort to alienate Native languages from the land through writing systems.The authors also take up the challenge of writing language back into the land through the example of the musical composition “Ojibwa Landscapes”.
The above discussion brings us to the role of the hermeneutic circle and the restorative capacity of transformative Native philosophies. The internalized pre-judgements which become transformed through living culture are what need to be re-engaged in Native communities. This means Native control over Native education in order to enable the circle of continuity to realize its transformative potential. This appears to be the essence of the idea of being Indian from the Inside. The transformative course of being requires the cultural continuity of its own pre-judgements engaged in the life process of a community’s being-in-the-world. This can not be accomplished by a controlling culture managing the cultural process from the outside, as was the case in residential schools or any other colonial institution which harbours an inherently assimilative agenda.
But when people within a culture write about their own culture with pre-judgments derived from that very culture, the resulting transformations are healthy and breathe life into the culture keeping it current and alive. To keep their traditions current and alive, Native American peoples must be allowed to assess their own traditions from their own perspectives…the only solution to the crisis in education facing Native American communities today is for those communities to take charge of educating their own people. The solution to this crisis in education must begin with the adults. They in turn can communicate Indigenous values to the younger members of their community, thus, finally, completing the hermeneutic circle, which was so violently broken by misguided government policies of assimilation and the Indian residential school experiences.[9]
Thus the living dialogue with the text (and all its cultural effects) is necessary for a community to engage its own hermeneutic development. The participants and the text (culture) engage in a mutually transformative process, but one which is animated by the generational transmission of pre-judgements at the core of the inner spiritual being of the community. The text is treated as a living entity and not simply as a scientific object investigated from the outside. Rather the text becomes a living being with which one engages, conversationally, from the inside, as a transformative process, both for the participants, as well as for the text or culture being inherited by the community from the ancestors.
This conversation and dialogue, the authors note, includes a healthy respect for difference. Horizons do not fuse through assimilation to a single worldview, but rather engage the differences as enlarging the spiritual conversation and horizons. By contrast the assimilationist policies of colonial societies practiced in residential schools, deny this hermeneutic relationship, forcing Native students to internalize the “oppressor within” and the negative worldview of their own cultures, communities and selves. Many of the dysfunctional symptoms of substance abuse, violence, suicide and broken relationships are attributed to these assimilationist cultural practices.
The authors conclude that education is essential, but it must be the right kind of education.
We are forced to conclude that the only solution to the crisis in education facing Native communities today is for those communities to take charge of educating their own people.[10]
In order for the hermeneutic project of renewal to occur, perception, reason and being must be engaged in an immersive process of oral and written dialogue. The oral dialogue of education requires immersion in the living text of the land. The written text must not be alienated from that original network of associations and pre-judgements which the hermeneutic circle renews and regenerates from generation to generation.
