Literacy And The Underdevelopment Of Knowledge

by Shirley Roburn

Indigenous knowledge is in rapid decline in Canada and across the world. But as the languages, histories and skills of First Nations peoples are disappearing from common use, "literate" industrial society is experiencing an unprecedented, exponential growth in knowledge. The interaction between oral-based, indigenous knowledge and "Western" literacy-based knowledge has undoubtedly favored industrial society; an underdevelopment of aboriginal knowledge has parallelled the economic underdevelopment of aboriginal communities within Canada.

In a special issue on indigenous perspectives on international development, the Akwe;kon Journal defined economic underdeveloping as "the process by which the economy both loses wealth and undergoes the structural transformation which accentuates and institutionalizes this process". Substituting "knowledge" for "economy" creates a way to discuss literacy's impact on First Peoples. Western approaches to knowledge are embedded in the structure of our schools, corporations, governments, and popular culture, forming a set of institutionalized practices. This set of practices is materially destroying the land base of indigenous peoples and, with it, their capacity to continue traditional ways of life (hunting, fishing, etc). The erosion of indigenous knowledge has much to do with our practices of knowledge within our (largely non-indigenous) communities. We continue to `mine' indigenous knowledge, i.e.. to take the elements we find useful (such as herbal medicines and agricultural techniques), much as we mine from indigenous lands the forests we require to produce newspapers, magazines, novels and phone books.

Western tradition views literacy as a practice which develops and expands knowledge rather than underdevelops it. The perspective of literacy as liberating, as increasing our access to ideas and discourses and establishing a critical consciousness is clearly located within an industrial world view.

Paulo Freire prefaces his discussion of `liberation' literacy by observing:

The dimensionality of time is one of the fundamental discoveries in the history of human culture. In illiterate cultures, the "weight" of apparently limitless time hindered people from reaching that consciousness of temporality, and thereby achieving a sense of their historical nature.

But if work in industrial society is guided by manuals and machines, work in the bush is oriented by seasons, and cycles of wildlife, plants and water; while literacy is often necessary to read food labels, an equally crucial text for daily reference can be animal tracks, or the leaf patterns of edible plants.

If we view knowledge as primarily valid in literate forms, aboriginal cultures will be underdeveloped for years to come; entire bodies of indigenous knowledge are not textualized, and not structured to be easily rendered into `literate' forms.

There is a tendency to describe oral cultures as "pre-literate" and to treat the orality/literacy intersection as a unidirectional progression towards literate society. This outlook devalues orality, but also limits literacy; rather than many literacies, with a variety of purposes and areas of knowledge, there is only one literacy, or one path for the evolution of knowledge. Scholars are finding that there is a plurality of literacies. Western literacy separates us from the natural world, giving us dominion over it; it negates many values underlying indigenous knowledge (such as a cyclical perception of time, and a belief in a reciprocal relationship between humanity and nature).

One clear example of this conflict is the `mining' of Kayapo knowledge of flora and fauna. Half of the world's pharmaceutical drugs come from plants; in Amazonia 85% of gathered medicinal products come from ten forest islands inhabited by the Kayapo. Representatives of large American pharmaceutical companies come to collect information on plants and their medicinal properties from the Kayapo, hoping to discover cures for diseases, while the Kayapo die of the flu, tuberculosis and other illnesses easily preventable/treatable with drugs the pharmaceutical companies produce.

Our approach to knowledge devalues the Kayapo by viewing text, rather than people, as the keeper of knowledge; it allows the Kayapo to die because there is no inherent reciprocity in the written form. Orality involves an ethic of teaching where the people are the knowledge, and knowledge is passed on from adult to child. This structure reinforces the reciprocal relations characterizing an indigenous worldview.

Consider the problem of a language that is disappearing as its native speakers die. A literate approach is to record the grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of the language; when the last speaker dies, the language is preserved. But what is preserved is not the living, dynamic practice of the language; the language is dead. The bias of literacy is towards documentation, rather than experience.

Martha Johnson, a scholar, recently noted regarding the decline of aboriginal knowledge:

The first and most urgent problem is the rapid disappearance of Dene Traditional Environmental Knowledge (TEK) due to the death of elders and the lack of resources available to document it. It is only through documentation that the usefulness of Dene TEK can become apparent.

In clearcutting one billion trees annually, we are destroying the knowledge base of the earth. Our stripping of the forest cover erodes knowledge by depleting the biological wealth of our planet and destroying the communities of its inhabitants. As hunting territories are clearcut, and as fish become inedible due to dioxin and organochloride pollution from pulp mills, First Nations people are unable to exercise their traditional knowledge and thus keep it alive. Having already caused innumerable plant and animal species to disappear, our industrial/literate practices result in the extinction of one nation (or group, or tribe) or indigenous people every year.

Canada, the producer of 23% of the world's pulp in 1987, is especially culpable in the destruction of indigenous knowledge and indigenous communities. The clearcutting of Canadian forests, particularily Canadian boreal forests, has been accelerating since the early 1980's. Numerous cases of provincial governments awarding cutting rights for aboriginal lands to large corporations have met with great resistance in Canadian First Nations communities. In recent years, in British Columbia alone, road blockades have been initiated at Meares Island by the Nunchalnuth, in Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands), and in the Whistler/Pemberton area by the Lil'wat. The longest continuous road blockade in Canadian history, ongoing in Canoe Lake, Saskatchewan, is a conflict between members of the Cree community and logging interests. The removal of forests is debilitating and divisive for the communities of its inhabitants.

We must address these problems responsibly by putting an end to clearcutting on large tracts of forest, ceasing the chlorine bleaching of pulp, and addressing the land and resource issues at the core of native-non-native relations in North America. Undertaking these actions will contribute to the promotion of indigenous knowledge. It is through land claims settlements and awarding First Nation Peoples control of First Nation communities that Cree, Inuktituk and Ojibway have become the aboriginal languages in Canada with the best prognoses for survival.

Such a shift in our practices entails a shift in thinking, and would change the current relationships between literacy and orality. The main reason that the Gitk'san and Wet'suwet'en land claim in northern British Columbia remains unsolved is because the text given by Gitk'san and Wet'suwet'en as evidence was judged `unreliable'. Gitk'san elders had, over the course of weeks, told the court their entire oral history, and explained how it was recorded in ayuks (Gitksan crests) expressed in ada'ox (verbal tellings) and limx'ooy (songs) and practiced as formal recitals at feasts. While there is little doubt that the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en people had resided on the land in question for several generations before the arrival of Europeans, it was ruled that aboriginal rights had been extinguished by the colonial government near the end of the nineteenth century. Resolving land claims means an end within our legal system to the hegemonic authority of the written word over other texts, and over other social and legal traditions.

As we shift approaches, the biases we now treat as inherent in literacy will change. For example, one solution to reducing paper production is to recycle more paper. This move into a cyclical mode of production creates a more cyclical, though literate, form of knowledge.

Literacy implies linearity; some theorists argue that the decontextualization of knowledge brought about by literacy is the basis of all scientific thinking. But literacy alone does not lead to 1000-year-old trees being pulped and made into phone books; we ought to be able to change these practices and move away from the exploitation and dominance characterizing literat society. We must incorporate indigenous values and thinking into our literate practices, instead of only applying our literate practices to indigenous knowledge. In this way, we will begin to decelerate, and perhaps eventually stop, the underdevelopment of indigenous knowledge.

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