Headlines, Human Rights, Indigenous Rights, North America

/ARTS WEEKLY/BOOKS: Indigenous Innovations Buttress Today’s ‘Knowledge Society’

Marty Logan

MONTREAL, Jan 20 2004 (IPS) - In Ron Wakegijig’s “office” is a cupboard whose many shelves are lined with rows of stacked, stout coffee cans, each containing a quantity of a healing plant.

Most of the plants Wakegijig has gathered himself, in the forests surrounding his home in Wikwemikong, a small native community on Manitoulin Island in the northwest corner of Lake Huron, one of North America’s five Great Lakes.

A former chief of “Wikkie”, as the community is known, Wakegijig figures these herbal remedies – he regularly uses about 50 but has three times that many in his inventory – which he offers to the people who come to him for help have been around for “thousands and thousands” of years.

There were a lot of medicine people on the reserve at one time that I learned from . I was told to keep it as simple as possible, because life is supposed to be that way,” says Wakegijig, sitting at the edge of a fire that burns slowly in a circular stone pit in the centre of the healing lodge that serves as his ‘consulting room’.

A survey of the community’s residents in the mid-1980s found that nearly 80 percent wanted to use natural medicines as part of their health care.

“The use of traditional medicine has grown quite substantially since that point in time because we have a lot of diabetes in the community,” he says, adding that about one-fifth of his patients are non-indigenous residents of Ontario Province in Central Canada.

According to a recent book, indigenous peoples’ remedies for all sorts of common health ailments are now used by physicians throughout the Americas – North, Central and South America and the Caribbean – and beyond.

But “although 200 of the plants that American Indians used as remedies became part of the ‘U.S. Pharmacopoeia’, an official list of all effective medicines, the originators of these remedies often remained unacknowledged”, says ‘American Indian Contributions to the World’.

“Today more than 120 drugs that are prescribed by physicians were first made from plant extracts, and 75 percent of these were derived from examining plants used in traditional indigenous medicine,” add authors Emory Dean Keoke and Kay Marie Porterfield.

That healing knowledge is only a tiny fraction of the inventions and innovations created by indigenous people of the Americas in the past 15,000 years, many of which remain unrecognised, both by dominant societies and by today’s indigenous communities, points out the book.

“Non-Indians need to know this because I think a lot of prejudice is from just not knowing, being taught falsehoods and accepting those falsehoods and stereotypes,” says Porterfield in an interview.

The authors were also animated by a desire to tell young aboriginal people about their ancestors’ accomplishments, when they set out on the book project in the 1990s.

“I wanted them to feel good about who they are, and I wanted them to feel proud,” says Keoke, an Indian who called what he learned about American Indians in school “a sad experience”.

He pointed out that compulsory education is an indigenous concept – first practised by the Aztecs.

Adds Porterfield: “a lot of American Indian students are not aware of their intellectual history. When their grandparents and great-grandparents had been told for hundreds of years, ‘you’re not that smart’, students felt like they could not” study subjects in science and mathematics.

“One purpose of doing the book was so that American Indian students could reclaim their intellectual history.”

That history includes a document that was a model for the U.S. Constitution, which itself has been praised for hundreds of years as the ideal framework for democratic societies.

The Great Law of Peace was created by the Iroquois in what is now called northeastern United States more than 500 years ago, to stop fighting among neighbouring tribes, write Keoke and Porterfield.

“Many scholars believe the Great Law was the longest international constitution until that time . certainly in 15th-century Europe nothing existed to rival this American Indian constitution.”

A printer in the colony of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin, who became one of the “founding fathers” of the United States, became a fan of the Great Law and publicly called on the colonies that joined together to create the nation to adopt many of its provisions, says the book.

“(Another founding father) Thomas Jefferson also acknowledged that he preferred the American Indian concept of liberty over the European monarchy system,” it adds.

“(However, the colonial leaders did not completely agree with the Iroquois provisions for the fair distribution of wealth or participation of women in politics, concepts that would later be adopted by Frederick Engels in his blueprint for communism and socialism.)”

Porterfield says that doing research for the book, which was published by New York-based Facts on File in hardcover in 2002 and softcover last year, impressed on her the contrast between European and indigenous approaches to innovations.

“There’s a difference between sharing and exploiting, and I think that’s what European cultures came in and did – exploited . I see that as something that continues to happen,” by, for example, medical researchers who scour the world’s forests for cures for cancer and other diseases.

The authors are now adapting the encyclopaedia-style volume for the classroom, where it will be used to teach elementary-school pupils. Keoke says he would also like to see a Spanish version published.

“There’s a much broader audience for it than I anticipated,” he adds. ***** +American Indian Science and Engineering Society (http://www.aises.org) +Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (http://www.sacnas.org)