Submitted by Mugwort on Mon, 04/05/2004 - 6:42pm.
The book "Standing Ground: Yurok Indian Spirtuality, 1850-1990" by Thomas Buckley, in chapter 4 "Seeing With Their Own Eyes," talks about the difference between academic style of learning and the learning process in Native American cultures:
Thinking is a personal obligation for someone seeking knowledge. “I can’t learn for you can I?” Harry Roberts (a Yurok Medicine man) used to ask.
While mainstream academic training stresses didactic explanation- teachers telling students what to think- trained native people and people in training tend to view explanation as a mode of interference with another’s purpose in life, comparable to theft, “stealing a person’s opportunity to learn.” For this reason, (Native American) people tend to see asking questions in a demanding way as both impolite and unproductive of real understanding.
Traditionally (a person) seeking knowledge from elders have been expected to simply pay close attention to what the other is doing... letting it sink in slowly. Sometimes direct teaching is appropriate, but it often comes as a story or a fragment of an old myth, without explanation.
Kroeber (an Anthropologist) tended to see such counterdidacticism and refusal to explain things as evidence of Yurok deficiencies in intellectualism (1976:441). Robert Spott (A Yurok medicine man), on the other hand, told Harry Roberts that he “tried and tried to teach Kroeber, But he just couldn’t learn.”
...I've never liked it when teachers tried to tell me what to think anyway!
Blessings
~Berkana
Get a taste of religion.
Lick a Witch!