The Wayfinders (22 page)

THESE LECTURES SET OUT
to ask “why ancient wisdom matters in the modern
world.” The phrase is somewhat flawed, implying if it does that these many
remarkable peoples we have encountered are somehow vestigial, archaic voices
stranded in time, having at best a vague advisory role to play in
contemporary life. In truth, all the cultures I have referenced in these
lectures — the Tibetans and the San, the Arhuacos, Wiwas and Kogi, the
Kiowa, Barasana, Makuna, Penan, Rendille, Tahltan, Gitxsan, Wet’suwet’en,
Haida, Inuit, and all the peoples of Polynesia — are very much alive and
fighting not only for their cultural survival but also to take part in a
global dialogue that will define the future of life on earth. There are
currently 1,500 languages gathered around the campfire of the Internet and
the number is increasing by the week. Why should their voices be heard?
There are scores of reasons, many of which I have alluded to at least
implicitly in these lectures. But to sum up, two words will do.
Climate
change
. There is no serious scientist alive who questions the
severity and implications of this crisis, or the factors, decisions, and
priorities that caused it to occur. It has come about because of the
consequences of a particular world view. We have for three centuries now, as
Thom Hartmann has written, consumed the ancient sunlight of the world. Our
economic models are projections and arrows when they should be circles. To
define perpetual growth on a finite planet as the sole measure of economic
well-being is to engage in a form of slow collective suicide. To deny or
exclude from the calculus of governance and economy the costs of violating
the biological support systems of life is the logic of delusion.

These voices matter because they can still be
heard to remind us that there are indeed alternatives, other ways of
orienting human beings in social, spiritual, and ecological space. This is
not to suggest naively that we abandon everything and attempt to mimic the
ways of non-industrial societies, or that any culture be asked to forfeit
its right to benefit from the genius of technology. It is rather to draw
inspiration and comfort from the fact that the path we have taken is not the
only one available, that our destiny therefore is not indelibly written in a
set of choices that demonstrably and scientifically have proven not to be
wise. By their very existence the diverse cultures of the world bear witness
to the folly of those who say that we cannot change, as we all know we must,
the fundamental manner in which we inhabit this planet. A climbing friend of
mine once told me that the most amazing thing about summiting Everest was
the realization that there was a place on earth where you could get up in
the morning, tie on your boots, and under your own power walk in a single
day into a zone where the air was so thin that humans could not survive. It
was for him a revelation, a completely new perspective on the delicacy of
this thin veil of atmosphere that allows life to exist on earth.

SOME YEARS AGO I
travelled north from Timbuktu 1,000 kilometres
into the Sahara to reach the ancient salt mine of Taoudenni. With a number
of friends and colleagues, including Canadian photographer Chris Rainier,
who had made the journey several times, I followed the route of the camel
caravans that once defined commerce in West Africa. Until the Portuguese
found a way to sail across the Bight of Benin and the Spaniards discovered
and sacked the wealth of the Americas, two-thirds of Europe’s gold moved
overland from Ghana and the African coast, fifty-two days by land across the
Sahara to Morocco. Timbuktu, located in Mali, a day’s travel north of the
great bend in the Niger River, became the most important port on the great
sea of sand that was the western desert. At a time when Paris and London
were small medieval towns, Timbuktu was a thriving centre of 100,000 people,
with 150 schools and universities, and some 25,000 students studying
astronomy and mathematics, medicine, botany, philosophy, and religion.
Rivalling Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo, it was one of the great centres of
Islamic culture and learning. The knowledge of the ancient Greeks survived
to inspire the Renaissance only because it had been recorded and preserved
by great Islamic scholars such as Avicenna, whose writings informed St.
Thomas of the existence and philosophy of Aristotle. In Timbuktu I held in
my hand a document embossed in gold and copied in the thirteenth century
from an Avicenna manuscript written in the year 1037.

Today Timbuktu is a mostly forgettable place, dry
and dusty, impossibly hot. In 1914, when the French took control of the
city, they confiscated the ancient manuscripts, threatened the scholars with
jail, and taught the children that their ancestors were not Arab or Berber,
Tamashek or Tuareg, but Gaul. They also went after the salt trade, flooding
the market with cheap sea salt from Marseilles, not out of economic rivalry
but because of the symbolic importance of the traditional trade. The salt of
Taoudenni was the gold of the Sahara, valued throughout West Africa for its
curative properties, and the culture of movement that grew up around its
exchange defined the people. Until an Arab boy endured thirst and privation
and crossed the desert, twenty days each way by camel, he could not marry or
be considered a man. An old professor in Timbuktu, Salem Ould, described the
journey as a test of strength, a physical and spiritual transformation that
left the child a master of his senses. “In the endless ocean of sand,” he
said, “the young man realizes that there is something greater than himself,
that he is but a small particle in the universe and that there is a higher
being regulating the world. Thus is awakened a thirst for seeking. As they
travel to the salt, they evoke the blessed names of God. The desert hones
their devotion.”

Our guide on the journey was a venerable elder,
Baba Oumar, famous for having located a lost party of Legionnaires simply
from their description over the radio of the scent and colour of the sand at
their position. This story did not surprise Professor Ould. “They know the
desert as a sailor knows the sea. When the wind blows they know what kind of
wind. When a cloud gathers they can smell the rain. If thirsty they can
sense the scent of water. With the camels there is a trust built on two
thousand years. They know that they can close their eyes and the camels will
lead them home. The Sahara has a science that is known to those who have
crossed it for centuries.”

We travelled north by Jeep, with Baba at times
rather frantically pointing this way and that as our drivers raced over the
flat pans of hard white ground. When we slowed to manoeuvre through soft
sand, or take on water at a well, he took notice of the orientation of the
dunes, the colour and texture of the sand, the patterns the wind made in the
lee of desert plants. He carried an old French military compass, and from
time to time lay spread-eagled taking a bearing. His true compass, however,
was clearly within. Asked if he had ever been lost, he replied that
orientation in the desert was a gift given to few and that if he ever was
uncertain, he simply sat still and waited for a sign from Allah.

Two exceptional events unfolded over the next
days. The mine itself was a biblical scene, mounds of excavated dirt piled
for kilometres across the flat horizon of an ancient lakebed. Men stripped
to the waist, skin cracked by salt, chipped away slabs of it with picks in
the cave-like crevasses of underground pits. Our Tuareg companion Isa
Mohammed took one look and said, “I would not bring my wife to this place.”
When I asked a group of men their nationalities, they replied, “There are no
countries here.”

On our last day at the mine, we met a man trapped
in shame, beholden to debt, whose body though younger than mine had been
broken by twenty-five years in the pits. He lived alone in a tiny room built
of blocks of crude salt. His only possessions were a rusted oil drum and his
tattered burnoose, a cloak of coarse wool with a hood that sheltered and
shadowed his face. He had the eyes of a gazelle. In the entire 800-year
history of the seasonal mine, he was the only person known to have spent a
summer at the site. He survived by working at night, and slipping away
before dawn to walk to a distant well, where he sat alone all day in
temperatures that can melt sand. His debt, for which he had suffered so
long, an obligation that had kept him from his family for two decades, was
less than the cost of a dinner at an upscale restaurant in Toronto. Chris
and I gave him the money, very discreetly. He simply said,
God be
blessed
. As we left his hovel, a sandstorm blew across the mine,
enveloping him like a veil. We never knew if the story was true, or if he
had been beaten and robbed, or perchance actually had bought his way to
freedom.

On our way back to Timbuktu, we came upon a
caravan that we had passed on our way north. The freak thunderstorm that had
pounded our camp with rain the night we arrived at Taoudenni had apparently
swept the entire country. If the salt gets wet, it crumbles and loses all
value, so the young men had been forced to stop in the desert to dry out the
slabs in the sun. They lost three critical days, and by the time we ran into
them they were down to their last quart or two of water. The six men were
150 kilometres from the nearest well, with a precious consignment of cargo
and twenty or more camels that represented the entire wealth of their
family. There was no sign of panic. As we pulled up I saw one of their mates
with one camel shimmering as a mirage on the horizon to the east. Apparently
they knew of a depression in the ground, some 25 kilometres distant, that if
excavated to a sufficient depth might yield water.

Without food a body can live for weeks; without
water, mere days. In the desert in the absence of water, delirium comes in
an evening, and by morning one’s mouth is open to the wind and sand, even as
the eyes sink into another reality and strange chants echo from the lungs.
The truck smugglers of the Sahara say that the good thing about brake fluid
is that it keeps you away from the battery acid.

While we waited for their friend to return,
Mohamed, the leader of the party, kindled a twig fire and with their last
reserves of water offered us tea. It is said in the Sahara that if a
stranger turns up at your tent, you will slaughter the last goat that
provides the only milk for your children to feast your guest. One never
knows when you will be that stranger turning up in the night, cold and
hungry, thirsty and in need of shelter. As I watched Mohamed pour me a cup
of tea, I thought to myself, these are the moments that allow us all to
hope.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

WHEN INITIALLY APPROACHED
to present the Massey Lectures I felt both deeply
honoured and somewhat hesitant, for I had already published a short book,
Light at the Edge of the World
(Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2007;
originally published as a book of photographs in 2001), which was both the
ideal length for the Masseys, and a manifesto on the very issues and themes
that attracted the CBC to my work. The proverbial well, I feared, might be
dry. As it turned out, the challenge was ideal, for it obliged me to rethink
old ideas, even as it provided a platform to explore much that was new in my
experience.

I first wrote of language loss in a collection of
essays,
The Clouded Leopard
, which Douglas & McIntyre published
in 1998. This led to an article, “Vanishing Cultures,” which appeared in
National Geographic
in August 1999. In 2000 I was invited to join the
National Geographic Society as Explorer-in-Residence, with the mandate of
helping the Society change the way the world viewed and valued culture. I
had coined the term
ethnosphere
to inspire a new way of thinking about this
extraordinary matrix of cultures that envelops the planet. But how could we
actually make a difference? When biologists identify a region of critical
importance in terms of biodiversity, they create a protected area. One
cannot designate a rainforest park of the mind. As an anthropologist fully
aware of the dynamic, ever-changing nature of culture, I had no interest in
preserving anything. I just believed — as my mentor at Harvard, David
Maybury-Lewis, once said — that all peoples ought to have the right to
choose the components of their lives.

Recognizing that polemics are rarely persuasive,
but with the hope that storytellers can change the world, I set out through
the medium of film to take the global audience of
National
Geographic
, literally hundreds of millions of people in 165
countries, to points in the ethnosphere where the beliefs, practices, and
intuitions are so dazzling that one cannot help but come away with a new
appreciation of the wonder of the human imagination made manifest in
culture. My goal was not to document the exotic other, but rather to
identify stories that had deep metaphorical resonance, something universal
to tell us about the nature of being alive. We did not enter communities
only as filmmakers and ethnographers; we were welcomed as collaborators,
building on networks of relationships and friendships that often reached
back for three decades or more. Our fundamental goal was to provide a
platform for indigenous voices, even as our lens revealed inner horizons of
thought, spirit, and adaptation that might inspire, in the words of Father
Thomas Berry, entirely new dreams of the earth.

Many of the themes addressed in these lectures,
as well as the experiences described, grew from these film projects —
fifteen documentaries altogether, shot with various colleagues over the last
seven years. In the series
Light at the Edge of the World
, I
travelled to Hawaii, the Marquesas, Rapanui, and Tahiti to make
The
Wayfinders
; to Greenland and Nunavut, to document the impact of
climate change on the Inuit world in
Hunters of the Northern Ice
;
to the Himalaya to reflect on Tibetan Buddhism and the
Science of the
Mind
; and to Peru to examine the meaning and significance of
notions of
Sacred Geography
. A second four films gave voice to the
Arhuacos and the Elder Brothers in
The Magic Mountain
, celebrated
the pastoral nomads of Mongolia in
The Windhorse
, explored the
philosophy of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia in
Keepers of the
Dream
, and visited the homeland of the Barasana in
Heart of the
Amazon
. Other film projects led to the Sahara, the rain forests of
Ecuador, the mountains of Oaxaca, the depths of the Grand Canyon and the
homeland of Havasupai and Hualapai, Zuni, Hopi, Paiute, and Navajo.
Light at the Edge of the World
, the first four of these films,
is available on DVD from Smithsonian Networks. The second four hours will be
available in due course from National Geographic Channel.

Chapter One: Season of the Brown Hyena

There is a large and growing literature on
language loss and revitalization. Whereas estimates of species loss
invariably provoke controversy and a range of opinions among biologists,
linguists seem universally to recognize that half of the world’s languages
are at risk and may disappear within our lifetime. This academic consensus
is itself haunting. Among recent books are: Andrew Dalby,
Language in Danger
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003);
David Crystal,
Language Death
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); K.
David Harrison,
When Languages Die
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Leanne
Hinton and Ken Hale, eds.,
The Green Book of Language Revitalization in
Practice
(San Diego: Academic Press, 2001); Joshua
Fishman, ed.,
Can Threatened Languages Be Saved
?
Reversing Language Shift, Revisited: A 21st
Century Perspective
(Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters, 2001);
Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine,
Vanishing Voices
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and
Nicholas Ostler,
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the
World
(New York: HarperCollins, 2005).

For catalogues of known languages, see: Raymond
G. Gordon, Jr., ed.,
Ethnologue : Languages of the World
, 15th ed. (Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics
International, 2005), and David Crystal,
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of
Language
, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
For the links among language, landscape, knowledge, and environment, see:
Luisa Maffi, ed.,
On Biocultural Diversity
(Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, 2001).

My understanding of the revelations of population
genetics is deeply indebted to Spencer Wells, author of
Deep Ancestry: Inside the Genographic Project
(Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Books,
2006), and
The Journey of Man
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2002), a wonderful book that grew out of a PBS film of the same name. I was
first exposed to the Kalahari Bushman as a young student of Irven DeVore at
Harvard in the early 1970s. No one at that time could have imagined that one
day science would reveal the San to be the very trunk of our family tree,
the oldest culture on earth. It would have seemed as preposterous as a claim
to have identified the actual site of the Garden of Eden. But even this
primordial point of origin has effectively been found, as indeed has been
discovered with some precision the gate of departure of our species from
Africa. The first to anticipate this extraordinary avenue of research was
Spencer’s mentor, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, author of
Genes, Peoples, and Languages
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

For the classic ethnographic works on the San,
see: Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, eds.,
Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1976) and Richard B. Lee,
The !Kung San
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
For two engaging travel accounts see: Laurens van der Post,
The Lost World of the Kalahari
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977), and Rupert
Isaacson,
The Healing Land
(New York: Grove Press, 2001). There are many
fine illustrated books, but one of the best is Alf Wannenburgh’s
The Bushmen
(Cape Town: Struik Publishers, 1979),
photographed by Peter Johnson and Anthony Bannister.

Thomas Whiffen’s book
The North-West Amazons: Notes on Some Months
Spent Among Cannibal Tribes
was published in London by Constable in 1915. See
also Eugenio Robuchon,
En el Putumayo y sus Afluentes
(Lima: Imprenta la Indústria, 1907), and Michael
Taussig,
Shamanism, Colonialism , and the Wild Man
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). For
Steven Pinker’s quotation, see “My Genome, My Self,”
New York Times Magazine
(January 11, 2009). The two books by Carleton
Coon, cited by Spencer Wells in
The Journey of Man
, are
The Origin of Races
(New York: Knopf, 1962) and
The Living Races of Man
(New York: Knopf, 1965). Lord Curzon is quoted in
James Morris,
Farewell the Trumpets
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), and
Cecil Rhodes in Brian Moynahan’s
The British Century
(New York: Random House, 1997).

Clayton Eshleman and his wife Caryl introduced me
to the art of the Upper Paleolithic and generously shared with me their
notes, which in turn were derived from Clayton’s extraordinary book
Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination and
the Construction of the Underworld
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,
2003). For other sources on the Upper Paleolithic, see: Paul Bahn and Jean
Vertut,
Journey Through the Ice Age
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997); Paul
Bahn,
The Cambridge Illustrated History of
Prehistoric Art
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
Dale Guthrie,
The Nature of Paleolithic Art
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005);
André Leroi-Gourhan,
Treasures of Prehistoric Art
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1967); and Sigfried
Giedion,
The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Art
, Bollingen Series 35, 6.1 (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1962). For Northrop Frye see:
Fearful Symmetry
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1947; reprint, 1969) and
A Study of English Romanticism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).

Chapter Two: The Wayfinders

For the clash of cultures on the Marquesas, see:
Edwin Ferdon,
Early Observations of Marquesan Culture,
1595–1813
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993);
David Porter,
Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean
, 2
vols. (1822; reprint, Upper Saddle River, N.J.: The Gregg Press, 1970); Greg
Dening,
Island and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land,
Marquesas 1774–1880
(Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1980);
Greg Dening, ed.,
The Marquesan
Journal of Edward Robarts,
1797–1824
, Pacific History Series, no. 6 (Honolulu:
University Press of Hawaii, 1974); E. S. Craighill Handy,
The Native Culture in the Marquesas
, Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin
9 (Honolulu: Bernice P. Bishop Museum, 1923);
Nicholas Thomas,
Marquesan Societies: Inequality and Political
Transformation in Eastern Polynesia
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); and Willowdean
Handy,
Forever the Land of Men: An Account of a Visit
to the Marquesas Islands
(New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1965).

For the classic account of the sweet potato, see:
D. E. Yen,
The Sweet Potato and Oceania: An Essay in Ethnobotany
,
Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin 236 (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1974).
For the discovery of chicken bones at the pre-Columbian site of El Arenal,
on the south coast of Chile, see:
Nature
447, 620-621 (June 2007).

For the archaeology of the Pacific, the finest
book is: Patrick Vinton Kirch,
On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological
History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
I find all of Kirch’s work to be extraordinary. See two other books written
by him —
The Evolution of the Polynesian Chiefdoms
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984),
and
The Lapita Peoples: Ancestors of the Oceanic
World
(Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1997) — as
well as the following co-authored works: Patrick Vinton Kirch and Jean-Louis
Rallu, eds.,
The Growth and Collapse of Pacific Island
Societies: Archaeological and Demographic Perspectives
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), and
Patrick Vinton Kirch and Roger Green,
Hawaiki,
Ancestral Polynesia: An Essay in Historical
Anthropology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

For monographs and accounts of Polynesian
navigation, see: David Lewis,
We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of
Landfinding in the Pacific
(Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1972);
David Lewis,
The Voyaging Stars: Secrets of the Pacific
Island Navigators
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1978); Thomas Gladwin,
East is a Big Bird: Navigation and Logic on
Puluwat Atoll
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1970); Stephen Thomas,
The Last Navigator
(New York: Henry Holt, 1987); Richard Feinberg,
Polynesian Seafaring and Navigation: Ocean
Travel in Anutan Culture and Society
(Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1988);
and Richard Feinberg, ed.,
Seafaring in the Contemporary Pacific Islands:
Studies in Continuity and Change
(DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press,
1995).