Allen Deleary of Bkejwanong (Walpole Island First Nation) speaking recently at a special Indigenous Lifeways Workshop locally. Allen shared teachings and insights from Anishinaabe traditions, exploring how Indigenous lifeways continue to guide relationships with the land, water, and one another. The evening included a community discussion, offering space for reflection, dialogue, and shared understanding:
Allen Deleary of Bkejwanong
And then there are the Elders:
Simon Winchester:
They keep a steady hand upon the tiller. That, in essence, seems to be the greatest and most enduring strength of aboriginal peoples around the world. The frantic pace of modern life, the endless bursts of technological advance, the alarums and excursions, and our various political and military adventures all come and go, but all the while and in the background, keeping their wary and watchful eyes upon us, are the wise ones…
Ever since Buckminster Fuller complained that the problem with the world was that it had come without a good operating manual, the phrase “the original instructions” has gained currency, a reminder that before white people began the slow but ever accelerating process of ruining our planet, men and women who were here long before us had a deep knowledge of how the world operated and should operate and had indeed been in possession of those selfsame original instructions that Mr. Fuller sought.
They may not have been written on clay tablets or inscribed on vellum or printed by Gutenberg or stored in libraries or digitized for our phones, but still they were there, deep in the minds of many. They had been passed down through the ages and in their various forms—songs, poems, dances, rituals, ceremonies—to represent the accumulated wisdom of the peoples marginalized by modernity. It is to the descendants of such peoples that we arrivistes and despoilers should listen, in order to keep our home planet alive and healthy and fully able to sustain us all. They are the Elders, and it is said that they possess great wisdom.
They keep a steady hand upon the tiller. That, in essence, seems to be the greatest and most enduring strength of aboriginal peoples around the world. The frantic pace of modern life, the endless bursts of technological advance, the alarums and excursions, and our various political and military adventures all come and go, but all the while and in the background, keeping their wary and watchful eyes upon us, are the wise ones from Uluru or Rotorua, from Pine Ridge or Yosemite, from Surabaya or Hardwar, Tuktoyaktuk or Chichén Itzá. Whether they are Guaraní or Tuareg or San or Sámi, or were born of uncontacted nomads deep in the jungles of Kalimantan, the wise ones have an unvarying message to those white trespassers who have treated them so ill: the Earth is in peril; moderate your behavior and help maintain it in the condition that we inherited, long before you came. – excerpt from Simon Winchester’s book titled “Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic.”
