April 22, 2013

Worldview Out of the Box

When I saw the word “Aboriginal” in the title of the course offered by the University of Toronto and coursera.org, I jumped at it. This was my opportunity to do some focused learning about the aboriginal people of Canada. It was only once I was immersed in the course that I really took into consideration the rest of the title: “Worldviews and Education”.

The word that impacted me was “worldview”. The second word “education” meant that the course was a wonderful resource for teachers, but not as relevant to my situation.

In sharing what I learned from the course, I have this temptation to compartmentalize my new knowledge. My sense is that I am supposed to stick to the facts of the course and tell you only about that. Not only is that very difficult, because what I learned has melded with my own learning before and after, but it is not at all reflective of an aboriginal worldview.

I did learn details and facts in the course, things like the medicine wheel, the seven sacred teachings, and the historical facts. They all helped me to understand the aboriginal worldview and what it means. But a worldview is a way of looking at life. Details and facts help illustrate a worldview, they don’t tell us what it is.

The view presented in this course is very different from the view espoused by the cultural majority in Canada, the view developed by European settlers. Those of us who grew up learning the predominant non-aboriginal view don’t easily let go of it. It is so entrenched in who we are, that even if we want to change, it takes work and time.

We don’t need to become like our Indigenous friends. We don’t need to participate in and borrow their ceremonies. But we do need to understand their worldview. The predominant one isn’t working. Our land continues to be raped and our people continue to be oppressed. Most of us don’t want it to be that way. We don’t want our environment destroyed. We don’t want our Prime Minister to act like a dictator. We don’t want to feel helpless and boxed in.

We who descend from the settlers have to find a way out of our boxes and lines. We need to do this in a far more expansive way than we normally think of when we use the phrase “out of the box”. Perhaps this quote from an editorial on the Aboriginal Multi-Media Society site, commenting on Idle No More, will go some of the distance toward illustrating what I’m trying to say.

Idle No More is not dead. It lives as a genetic legacy in all who have taken part. It’s in our nerve endings. It’s coursing through our veins. It’s in the memory of our muscles. It lives as a gift to the generations yet unborn, because it has changed us, our perspective, our pride and our confidence. And it will re-emerge in a thousand different ways, some subtle, some overt, because it’s in us now.
http://www.ammsa.com/publications/windspeaker/idle-no-more-will-never-die-editorial

When we who know the “Western worldview” think about Idle No More, we tend to think about the individual elements. We might go on to think about how the different actions and people might interact and have an affect on one another. We might imagine that each group is encouraged by seeing and hearing what others are doing. I know I didn’t think about it in the words of the writer I just quoted. That's a holistic way of looking at life that usually eludes me.

I saw this tweet posted on April 19, 2013 as another illustration of the aboriginal worldview:



I expect the character in my next novel will find a way to to change her or his worldview. That will surely be a test of how well I understand the difference in wordviews.

In this process of preparing for my next novel, I am going through my own changes. I’ve been working towards the development of my novel idea for a few months now, but I don’t have a lot of anything concrete to show for it, other than a long list of bookmarks in my browser and a couple of books I’ve read. Most of the preparation is internal. It’s settling in and becoming a part of me. Somehow, when I get to writing this novel, I don’t think it’ll fit into anyone’s box. And that suits me just fine!

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