Ancient And Indigenous Wisdom Traditions In The Americas

This book brings attention to the understudied and often overlooked question of how curricula and classroom practices might inadvertently reproduce exclusionary discourses and narratives that omit or negate particular cultures, histories, and wisdom traditions. With a focus on representations and classroom practices related especially to ancient and Indigenous wisdom traditions and cultures, it includes unique contributions from scholars studying these questions in various contexts. The book offers a range of important studies from various contexts across the Americas, including Canada, the various member nations of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), Puerto Rico, and the United States. The various chapter contributions address and discuss nuances of each of the contexts under study. The contributions also help highlight some key commonalities across these contexts, including how dominant discourses and various forces have historically shaped—and continue to shape and reproduce— such omissions, misrepresentations, and marginalization. In addition to seeking to reconcile with some of these ancient and Indigenous wisdom traditions and cultures, the book charts a path forward toward more holistic analytical frameworks as well as more inclusive and balanced representations and classroom practices in these aforementioned geographic contexts and beyond. It will appeal to scholars, researchers, undergraduate, and graduate students with interests in Indigenous education, curriculum studies, citizenship education, history of education, religion, and educational policy.

This book brings attention to the understudied and often overlooked question of how curricula and classroom practices might inadvertently reproduce exclusionary discourses and narratives that omit or negate particular cultures, histories, and wisdom traditions. With a focus on representations and classroom practices related especially to ancient and Indigenous wisdom traditions and cultures, it includes unique contributions from scholars studying these questions in various contexts. The book offers a range of important studies from various contexts across the Americas, including Canada, the various member nations of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), Puerto Rico, and the United States. The various chapter contributions address and discuss nuances of each of the contexts under study. The contributions also help highlight some key commonalities across these contexts, including how dominant discourses and various forces have historically shaped--and continue to shape and reproduce-- such omissions, misrepresentations, and marginalization. In addition to seeking to reconcile with some of these ancient and Indigenous wisdom traditions and cultures, the book charts a path forward towards more holistic analytical frameworks as well as more inclusive and balanced representations and classroom practices in these aforementioned geographic contexts and beyond. It will appeal to scholars, researchers, undergraduate, and graduate students with interests in Indigenous education, curriculum studies, citizenship education, history of education, religion, and educational policy.

This book brings attention to the understudied and often overlooked question of how curricula and classroom practices might inadvertently reproduce exclusionary discourses and narratives that omit or negate particular cultures, histories, and wisdom traditions. With a focus on representations and classroom practices related especially to ancient and Indigenous wisdom traditions and cultures, it includes unique contributions from scholars studying these questions in various contexts. The book offers a range of important studies from key African and Euro-Asian contexts, including Afghanistan, Albania, Greece, Iran, South Africa, Sweden, Türkiye, and Zimbabwe. The various chapter contributions address and discuss nuances of each of the contexts under study. The contributions also help highlight some key commonalities across these contexts, including how dominant discourses and various forces have historically shaped—and continue to shape and reproduce—such omissions, misrepresentations, and marginalization. In addition to seeking to reconcile with some of these ancient and Indigenous wisdom traditions and cultures, the book charts a path forward towards more holistic analytical frameworks as well as more inclusive and balanced representations and classroom practices in these aforementioned geographic contexts and beyond. It will appeal to scholars, researchers, undergraduate, and graduate students with interests in Indigenous education, curriculum studies, citizenship education, history of education, religion, and educational policy.

A “profound and inspiring” collection of ancient indigenous wisdom for “anyone wanting the healing of self, society, and of our shared planet” (Peter Levine, author of Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma). A Penobscot Indian draws on the experiences and wisdom of the First Nations to address environmental justice, water protection, generational trauma, and more. Drawing from ancestral knowledge, as well as her experience as an attorney and activist, Sherri Mitchell addresses some of the most crucial issues of our day—including indigenous land rights, environmental justice, and our collective human survival. Sharing the gifts she has received from the elders of her tribe, the Penobscot Nation, she asks us to look deeply into the illusions we have labeled as truth and which separate us from our higher mind and from one another. Sacred Instructions explains how our traditional stories set the framework for our belief systems and urges us to decolonize our language and our stories. It reveals how the removal of women from our stories has impacted our thinking and disrupted the natural balance within our communities. For all those who seek to create change, this book lays out an ancient world view and set of cultural values that provide a way of life that is balanced and humane, that can heal Mother Earth, and that will preserve our communities for future generations.

In The Knowledge Seeker, Blair Stonechild shares his sixty-year journey of learning-from residential school to PhD and beyond-while trying to find a place for Indigenous spirituality in the classroom. Encouraged by an Elder who insisted sacred information be written down, Stonechild explores the underlying philosophy of his people's teachings to demonstrate that Indigenous spirituality can speak to our urgent, contemporary concerns.

Many of us are alarmed by the accelerating rates of extinction of plants and animals. But how many of us know that human cultures are going extinct at an even more shocking rate? While biologists estimate that 18 percent of mammals and 11 percent of birds are threatened, and botanists anticipate the loss of 8 percent of flora, anthropologists predict that fully 50 percent of the 7,000 languages spoken around the world today will disappear within our lifetimes. And languages are merely the canaries in the coal mine: what of the knowledge, stories, songs, and ways of seeing encoded in these voices? In The Wayfinders, Wade Davis offers a gripping and enlightening account of this urgent crisis. He leads us on a fascinating tour through a handful of indigenous cultures, describing the worldviews they represent and reminding us of the encroaching danger to humankind's survival should they vanish.

The indigenous peoples of the Americas have widespread beliefs related to personal guardian spirits. Natives believe that for any success in life there must be protection by a supernatural power. And, in this, they are absolutely correct. The Natives deified guardian spirits since ancient times; and, as it turned out, not in vain because they are directly related to people, to their psyche. All the guardian spirits of the ancient Natives were part of nature. The Natives made animals, plants and so forth their totems, and not in vain, as they really gave people real power and real super abilities, made them powerful, invincible, were able to prevent diseases and heal, as well as “avert troubles.” Beliefs of the ancient Natives were true: kind guardian spirits exist. And, it has been discovered that the relation between natural images and the human psyche is much stronger than it is currently thought. Scientists have found an ancient book, which is much older than the Bible and other sacred books. According to some researchers, it appeared in the 20th century BC. This book has been decrypted in the 80s of the 20th century in Russia by the researcher Andrey Davydov. It is nothing more than a description of 293 models of the human psyche, which are recorded by natural images. And, these images are very similar to those that ancient Natives worshiped. All these images are objects of nature: various plants and animals, luminaries like the sun and the moon, rivers, lakes, swamps, rocks, minerals, metals and so on. Among them there are deities, spirits, and chimeras. Natural images of psyche (soul) cardinally differentiate one person from another, even though every person’s body is designed in the same way. They completely determine a person’s character, habits, life algorithms, preferences, likes, aspirations, desires, and any actions; in other words, by nature every human is original. Any person can get incredible strength and might, get healing, help from personal guardian spirits, which every person has. But, since people do not know their natural images, they are forced to invent artificial images or borrow them from culture, in order to have some kind of basis for existence and functioning. However, inventing artificial images is extremely harmful and dangerous, and also meaningless. Artificial images block human ability, and make a person worthless, weak, helpless, unlucky, and very unhappy. He suffers one defeat after another. They also make people primitive, alike, and unoriginal. Any person can buy information about his/her natural image or images (because each person has not just one, but many, using the language of the ancient Natives, “guardian spirits”). Most of these images are unknown in this civilization. A person can purchase information about one of his/her images, and then go to any artist, a designer who will draw this image. Anyone can use this drawing as they please. For example: for an amulet,a tattoo, interior design (paintings, posters, colors, household items, etc.), as well as for the design of clothes, hairstyles, jewelry, accessories, cars and so on.

Volume 1: The History and Practice of Indigenous Plant Knowledge Volume 2: The Place and Meaning of Plants in Indigenous Cultures and Worldviews Nancy Turner has studied Indigenous peoples' knowledge of plants and environments in northwestern North America for over forty years. In Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge, she integrates her research into a two-volume ethnobotanical tour-de-force. Drawing on information shared by Indigenous botanical experts and collaborators, the ethnographic and historical record, and from linguistics, palaeobotany, archaeology, phytogeography, and other fields, Turner weaves together a complex understanding of the traditions of use and management of plant resources in this vast region. She follows Indigenous inhabitants over time and through space, showing how they actively participated in their environments, managed and cultivated valued plant resources, and maintained key habitats that supported their dynamic cultures for thousands of years, as well as how knowledge was passed on from generation to generation and from one community to another. To understand the values and perspectives that have guided Indigenous ethnobotanical knowledge and practices, Turner looks beyond the details of individual plant species and their uses to determine the overall patterns and processes of their development, application, and adaptation. Volume 1 presents a historical overview of ethnobotanical knowledge in the region before and after European contact. The ways in which Indigenous peoples used and interacted with plants - for nutrition, technologies, and medicine - are examined. Drawing connections between similarities across languages, Turner compares the names of over 250 plant species in more than fifty Indigenous languages and dialects to demonstrate the prominence of certain plants in various cultures and the sharing of goods and ideas between peoples. She also examines the effects that introduced species and colonialism had on the region's Indigenous peoples and their ecologies. Volume 2 provides a sweeping account of how Indigenous organizational systems developed to facilitate the harvesting, use, and cultivation of plants, to establish economic connections across linguistic and cultural borders, and to preserve and manage resources and habitats. Turner describes the worldviews and philosophies that emerged from the interactions between peoples and plants, and how these understandings are expressed through cultures’ stories and narratives. Finally, she explores the ways in which botanical and ecological knowledge can be and are being maintained as living, adaptive systems that promote healthy cultures, environments, and indigenous plant populations. Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge both challenges and contributes to existing knowledge of Indigenous peoples' land stewardship while preserving information that might otherwise have been lost. Providing new and captivating insights into the anthropogenic systems of northwestern North America, it will stand as an authoritative reference work and contribute to a fuller understanding of the interactions between cultures and ecological systems.