291 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
  2. Sep 2024
  3. Aug 2024
    1. Last summer, as I reflected on how unconscious bias can creep into the kitchen, I realized that I should start cooking by considering what the recipe creator is offering — not by imposing myself on the recipe. By inserting my known likes and dislikes, I miss the opportunity to get to know another person, to see (and taste) her history and culture through her perspective. I want to experience a dish through the person most intimate with it.

      naturally this presumes that the author has some experience which can actually come through a recipe, many of which have become commoditized in a corporate way (think cook books full of recipes which were not fully or never tested).

    2. And my hope is that this form of cooking with empathy, if enough people adopt it, can lead to greater unity and understanding even beyond the kitchen.

      cooking with empathy - following a recipe closely without improvisation or substitutions to appreciate the original chef/author's point of view as a means of appreciating other cultures and backgrounds

    3. Home cooks often tweak dishes, but hewing tightly to instructions can help us better understand others and their cuisines and cultures.
  4. Jul 2024
    1. Tlaxcala, an indigenous city-state in Central America, was a democracy with a strongly egalitarian ethos. People appointed to their city council had to go through a gruelling initiation process aimed at instilling an attitude of self-deprecation and subordination to the will of the citizens they served.

      for - governance - indigenous - training in humbleness - needed today!

  5. May 2024
    1. 07:30 At the root of cybernetics and Chris his research lies the question of communication. This combines his interests of mnemonics, orality, cybernetics, et al. (literacy, indigenous people)

      08:12 Even music and dance can be used to transmit information from one generation to the other.

  6. Apr 2024
  7. Mar 2024
    1. The best-known, most recent version of the story is the 1995 WaltDisney animated film. Strikingly beautiful, unnervingly buxom, and morelike a pop culture diva than a member of the Tsenacommacah tribe,Disney’s Pocahontas fabulously communes with nature, befriending araccoon, talking to a tree;
  8. Feb 2024
    1. Byington shared her uncle’s interest in and support for indigenousculture and language, serving as President of the Stockbridge branch of theIndian Rights Association, and on the Education Committee for the Women’sNational Indian Associatio

      Support for

    2. But it was her uncle, the RevdCyrus Byington, who had the greatest influence on her life and interests. Hehad been a missionary with the Brewer sisters’ father to the Choctaw NativeAmerican Communities at the old mission station in Stockbridge; he hadtranslated the Bible into Choctaw, and wrote a grammar and dictionary of thelanguage.
    3. Tribes of the Extreme Northwest by the American naturalist WilliamDall was another important book on the indigenous peoples and languages ofAlaska, western Washington, and north-western Oregon
    4. Over thetwenty-three years that Minor had sent in slips to the Scriptorium, he mainlyread travellers’ tales and medical texts from the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies. It was the travellers’ tales that interested me because they broughtthousands of words from indigenous languages around the world into theEnglish language.
    1. Sarah is a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics, and Director of the Dictionary Lab at Oxford. She specializes in lexicography, endangered languages, language revitalization, the history of dictionaries, and the interface of technology with the Social Sciences and Humanities (digital humanities). Her research includes work on Australian Aboriginal and American Indian languages, especially relating to language documentation and revitalization. She is the Director of the new MSc in Digital Scholarship.

      What a fascinating set of areas she's working in... I want to do this...

    1. We have, as a bedrock value in our society, long agreed on thevalue of open access to information, and recognize the problems thatarise with attempts to restrict access to and development of knowledge.

      Many academics and modern people may think this way, but it is far from a "bedrock value".

      In many indigenous cultures knowledge was carefully sectioned and cordoned off.

      And as we know that knowledge itself is power (ipsa scientia potestas est - Francis Bacon) many people have frequently cordoned off access to information.

  9. Jan 2024
  10. Nov 2023
    1. the andaman islands have become the most popular destination 00:11:09 for india's new middle class the ruling nationalist bjp party is denying the jarwa the right to self-determination something that jarawa say is unacceptable 00:11:26 we don't your we're happy together we have no worries
      • for: Jawara - right to self-determination - indigneous people

      • comment

      • education: self determination
        • there is a need to translate to lay people terms what the saliance of this
    2. the jarrow have even worse things to tell us they're offering us tobacco and they want to show us how to chew it 00:07:28 it's not good for us they give us alcohol we don't want that either but they still try and make us drink it we don't want any it's bad
      • for: example - cultural destruction - Jawara - cigarettes and alcohol, example - indigenous genocide, example - forced addiction

      • comment

      • example - cultural destruction
      • example - indigenous genocide
      • example: forced addiction
        • Growing up in Canada in an indigenous community, this struck a nerve.In my childhood, I experience how the Haida first nations people of the Queen Charlotte Islands were reduced from a once proud and self-reliant culture to a dependent one living in government housing, the land they lived on denied to them and forced to live on small parcels of "Indian Reservations", their dignity stripped, and made dependent on alcohol and cigarettes.
        • It seems that modernity is simply an arrogant and corrupting force on indigeneity.
        • We see the beginning of indigenous genocide by the attempted infection by ignorant modern citizens who interact with the Jawara by attempting to hook them on the extremely destructive and addictive substances of our culture, alcohol and cigarettes
    1. we don't have anybody in Canada 00:51:56 who's serious about how would you help a whole society that doesn't even understand the depth to which it is modern come to terms of the fact it has no future as a modern culture 00:52:10 and how would you help them understand that in a way that doesn't terrify them and see that as an adventure so we could replace the Alberta Advantage which is about low taxes and money in your pocket 00:52:22 to the Alberta Adventure week Alberta could be earn a reputation at least it could I mean we do have enough Mavericks and things we have the possibility of 00:52:34 earning a global reputation of becoming the most extraordinary place in the world that is taking this work seriously
      • for: perspective shift - modernity to "neo-indigenous"

      • question

        • how do you transform fear of the perceived great loss of modernity to the gains of neo-indigenous civilization?
        • we would have to feature the many potential benefits of doing this
        • it can't be just a big loss, but the pros must outweigh the cons
    1. here is the human 00:50:39 journey the big arrows indicate the way that it in fact developed in history the small errors indicate that of the seven point seven billion of us on the planet people are moving in every direction 00:50:52 from each of those phases and some in each of those phases want to hang on to those phases are not move that's what those great black circles are the little black circles our people who want to 00:51:04 just hang on to what they've got and not move but others are on the move and what's more they're on the move in every possible direction
      • for: cultural evolution - diverse movements, cultural transition - diverse movements

      • summary

        • Bill Reese and Rubin Nelson believe that the dynamic / relational quadrant of indigenous culture is the most viable futures
    1. Humboldt represents the road not taken. He was a scientist who saw everything as interconnected. He called for good global stewardship and objected to the careless exploitation of resources. His warnings weren’t heeded.

      Given Alexander von Humboldt's time period (1769-1859), might he have been the recipient of indigenous knowledge during the Renaissance the same way that Graeber/Wengrow demonstrate others were around that same time frame?

    1. People of all cultures utilize symbolism found in their various religions and spiritual practices to cope with health problems. NA healing ceremonies rely heavily on a combination of traditional and Christian religious symbols, icons, and ritualistic objects. These symbols cue bio-psycho-social-spiritual healing responses by restoring the harmony necessary for health. Symbolism, whether associated with ceremonies or church services, can be incorporated into their treatment plan to create a powerful healing synergy.

      .

    2. NA ceremonies involve the patient, the family, and the community in the healing process. Ceremonial gatherings may last for days or weeks; the more people that are present, the greater the healing energy. Through their participation in songs, prayer, music, and dance, the family and community contribute healing energy to the patient.

      .

    3. Native diets, ceremonies that greet the seasons and the harvests, and the use of native plants for healing purposes have been used to live to promote health by living in harmony with the earth

      .

    4. Native Americans in Arizona run each day to greet the dawn, a practice that not only conditions their bodies but also nourishes their spiritual wellbeing. Stories and legends are used to teach positive behaviors as well as the consequences of failing to observe the laws of nature. Herbs, manipulative therapies, ceremonies, and prayer are used in various combinations to prevent and treat illness.1

      .

  11. Oct 2023
    1. Revise, Nicolas. “Tech Breathes New Life into Endangered Native American Languages.” News. Phys.org, October 19, 2023. https://phys.org/news/2023-10-tech-life-endangered-native-american.html.

    2. According to TLC, 143 out of 219 languages are in danger of extinction in the United States, while 75 of 94 are at similar risk in Canada.
    3. The RWC was developed by The Language Conservancy (TLC), an NGO dedicated to protecting around 50 Indigenous languages around the world, in order to churn out such dictionaries at super-speed. TLC, which has a $3 million budget, regularly teams up linguists with Native American language teachers to work on these dictionaries.
    4. International Conference on Indigenous Language Documentation, Education and Revitalization (ICILDER) last weekend at the University of Indiana.
    1. During the establishment of the covenant between Yahweh and Israel, the people were commanded to destroy the sacred stones of the Canaanites, “You must demolish them and break their sacred stones (masseboth) to pieces” (Exodus 23:24).

      In neighboring cultures in which both have oral practices relating to massebah, one is not just destroying "sacred stones" to stamp out their religion, but it's also destroying their culture and cultural memory as well as likely their laws and other valuable memories for the function of their society.

      View this in light also of the people of Israel keeping their own sacred stones (Hosea 10:1) as well as the destruction of pillars dedicated to Baal in 2 Kings 18:4 and 2 Kings 23:14.

      (Link and) Compare this to the British fencing off the land in Australia and thereby destroying Songlines and access to them and the impact this had on Indigenous Australians.

      It's also somewhat similar to the colonialization activity of stamping out of Indigenous Americans and First Nations' language in North America, though the decimation of their language wasn't viewed in as reciprocal way as it might be viewed now. (Did colonizers of the time know about the tremendous damage of language destruction, or was it just a power over function?)

  12. Sep 2023
    1. Professor Lehman, who is also the University of Tasmania’s Pro Vice-Chancellor Aboriginal Leadership and Palawa cultural historian, emphasised the importance of academic collaboration with Indigenous scholars and that scientific validation of oral traditions reinforces, rather than supersedes, the authority of Indigenous knowledge.

      The scientific validation of oral traditions aids in creating a third archive which fuses the value of Indigenous knowledges and Western ways of knowing.

    1. Your success in reading it is determined by the extent to which you receive everything the writer intended to com­municate.

      The difficult thing to pick apart here is the writer's intention and the reader's reception and base of knowledge.

      In particular a lot of imaginative literature is based on having a common level of shared context to get a potentially wider set of references and implied meanings which are almost never apparent in a surface reading. As a result literature may use phrases from other unmentioned sources which the author has read/knows, but which the reader is unaware. Those who read Western literature without any grounding in the stories within the Bible will often obviously be left out of the conversation which is happening, but which they won't know exists.

      Indigenous knowledge bases have this same feature despite the fact that they're based on orality instead of literacy.

  13. Aug 2023
    1. Indigenous Storytelling: Our Smallest Warriors, Our Strongest Medicine. Hopkins at Home. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 2021. Indigenous Storytelling: Our Smallest Warriors, Our Strongest Medicine. Hopkins at Home. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 2021. https://hopkinsathome.vhx.tv/humanities/videos/indigenous-storytelling. .

    2. Storytelling functions as a tool to heal from and protect against historical trauma and ongoing challenges Indigenous communities experience. "It is medicine." —Beltran & Begun, 2013 (quoted in @Okeefe2021 video at 10:41)

      Basic knowledge and understanding for me, but nice to have a source for it in particular.

    1. In general the professors of the humanities and the socialsciences and history, fascinated by the marvels of experi-mental natural science, were overpowered by the idea thatsimilar marvels could be produced in their own fields by theuse of the same methods. They also seemed convinced thatany results obtained in these fields by any other methods werenot worth achieving. This automatically ruled out writerspreviously thought great who had had the misfortune to livebefore the method of empirical natural science had reachedits present predominance and who had never thought ofapplying it to problems and subject matters outside the rangeof empirical natural science.

      Hutchins indicates that part of the fall of the humanities was the result of the rise of the scientific method and experimental science. In wanting fields from the humanities—like social sciences and history—to be a part of this new scientific paradigm, professors completely reframed their paradigms in a more scientific mode and thereby erased the progenitors and ideas in these fields for newer material which replaced the old which was now viewed as "less than" in the new paradigms. This same sort of erasure of Indigenous knowledges was also similarly effected as they were also seen as "less than" from the perspective of the new scientific regime.

      One might also suggest that some of it was the result of the acceleration of life brought on by the invention of writing, literacy, and the spread of the printing press making for larger swaths of knowledge to be more immediately available.

    2. Behind these tariff walls the professors who hadmany of the great writers and much of the liberal arts intheir charge contentedly sat, oblivious of the fact that theywere depriving the rising generation of an important part oftheir cultural heritage and the training needed to understandit, and oblivious also of the fact that they were deprivingthemselves of the reason for their existence.

      It can be easy to deprive a generation of important pieces of their cultural heritage by omitting any focus on it.

      • shiboleth
      • philology
      • disinterest
      • overwhelm

      Compare the loss of classical education and cultural heritage by "internal decay" as described by Hutchins in the early 1900s and the forced loss of cultural heritage of Indigenous Americans by the U.S. Government in roughly the same period by re-education and stamping out Indigenous language.

      Certainly one was loss through lack of exposure, but the other was outright erasure due to the natures of orality and literacy.

    3. Undoubtedly the first task of the statesman in such countriesis to raise the standard of living to such a point that thepeople may be freed from economic slavery and given thetime to get the education appropriate to free men.

      A bulk of America was stuck in a form of economic slavery in the 1950s. See description of rural Texans in Robert Caro's LBJ biography for additional context --- washing/scrubbing, carrying water, farming, etc. without electricity in comparison to their fellow Americans who did have it.

      In the 21st century there is a different form of economic slavery imposed by working to live and a culture of consumption and living on overextended credit.

      Consider also the comedic story of the capitalist and the rural fisherman and the ways they chose to live their lives.

  14. Jul 2023
    1. Such efforts to protect data privacy go beyond the abilities of the technology involved to also encompass the design process. Some Indigenous communities have created codes of use that people must follow to get access to community data. And most tech platforms created by or with an Indigenous community follow that group’s specific data principles. Āhau, for example, adheres to the Te Mana Raraunga principles of Māori data sovereignty. These include giving Māori communities authority over their information and acknowledging the relationships they have with it; recognizing the obligations that come with managing data; ensuring information is used for the collective benefit of communities; practicing reciprocity in terms of respect and consent; and exercising guardianship when accessing and using data. Meanwhile Our Data Indigenous is committed to the First Nations principles of ownership, control, access and possession (OCAP). “First Nations communities are setting their own agenda in terms of what kinds of information they want to collect,” especially around health and well-being, economic development, and cultural and language revitalization, among others, Lorenz says. “Even when giving surveys, they’re practicing and honoring local protocols of community interaction.”

      Colonized groups such as these indigenous people have urgency to avoid colonization of their data and are doing something about it

  15. Jun 2023
  16. May 2023
    1. Map of Content Vizualized (VMOC)

      a start of thinking on the space of converging written and visual thinking, but not as advanced as even Raymond Llull or indigenous ways of knowing which more naturally merge these modes of thinking.

      Western though is just missing so much... sigh

  17. Apr 2023
    1. We could saythat he was the first progressive educator not simply because he encouraged hiscontemporaries and successors to think about the child as a special kind oflearner, but also because of his views on education’s role in helping to developan open, liberal polity. A political system, he said, needs people who are fair,open-minded, and think for themselves; it doesn’t want people who aresubservient to authority.

      We could say first, though I highly suspect that his ideas came from somewhere else...

  18. Mar 2023
    1. Being is a spiritual proposition. Gaining is a material act. Traditionally, American Indians have always attempted to be the best people they could. Part of that spiritual process was and is to give away wealth, to discard wealth in order not to gain. Material gain is an indicator of false status among traditional people, while it is "proof that the system works" to Europeans.
      • Quote
      • Being is a spiritual proposition. Gaining is a material act.

      • Traditionally, American Indians have always attempted to be the best people they could. Part of that spiritual process was and is to give away wealth, to discard wealth in order not to gain.

      • Contrasting worldviews

      • Material gain is an indicator of false status among traditional people,
      • while it is "proof that the system works" to Europeans.
  19. Feb 2023
    1. Aesopian language is a means of communication with the intent to convey a concealed meaning to informed members of a conspiracy or underground movement, whilst simultaneously maintaining the guise of an innocent meaning to outsiders.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesopian_language

      Parents often use variations of double entendre to communicate between each other with out children understanding while present.

      It's also likely that Indigenous elders may use this sort of communication with uninitiated members nearby.

    1. Logging some keywords here for later cross referencing.

    2. If you ask an elder about the work’s meaning, you may quickly find yourself enrolledin what Wardaman law man Yidumduma Bill Harney calls “Bush University”.
    3. Zugubal Mabaig (astronomers - literally translated to “Star Man“ or “ConstellationMan”
    4. the cosmos and Islanders’ cultural identity is the reason a star is featured at the centre ofthe Torres Strait Islander flag, designed by Bernard Namok in 1992.

      The close connection between

    5. Traditions about Usal and the Zugubals are based on the story of Thoegay, a fiercewarrior, Zogo Le, and skilled navigator who commanded a ship crew of thirteen: a firstmate named Kang and a crew of twelve men, called the Zugubals. The group embarkedon a long expedition at sea on a hot day. Before long, the crew began consuming theirrations in zest. They were warned by Kang to conserve their supplies, but before longthey had consumed the water for the entire trip, including Thoegay’s. When Thoegayrealised this, he flew into a fit of rage and killed the 12 men. Because the Zugubals werealso spiritual beings, they could not die, so Thoegay cast them into the sky as two groupsof six stars: Usal (the six brightest stars of the Pleiades) and Utimal (the six brightest starsof Orion’s belt and scabbard). Thoegay then ascended into the opposite side of the sky,taking Kang and his canoe with him. He can be seen as a large constellation holding aspear in his left hand (the Southern Cross) and a Eugenia fruit in his right hand (theconstellation Corvus), standing at the bow of his celestial canoe (Scorpius) with Kang(Antares; Alpha Scorpii) sitting at the stern (Robinson 2016a).

      This is a great story, but interestingly, without the appropriate art to explicitly map the idea onto, it's much harder to remember or to help those unaccustomed to these ideas. Presumably the audience of this book doesn't/wouldn't.

      A simple drawing here or an overlay onto an existing image would be immensely helpful. Perhaps the Robinson reference has one? (it doesn't)

    6. The linocut medium is especially prevalent in the Torres Strait,where a handful of pioneering artists have mastered the art of printmaking (Robinson2001)
    7. The story on canvassymbolises the importance of traditional law, explains the transmutation of the Moon,and exposes the raw power of human emotion. T

      Notice how in the story of Garnkiny, the Moon Man, and Dawool, that the power of emotion is used as a means of strengthening not only the story, but the memory of the other associated elements.

    8. As in any science class, you learn how tointerpret and apply what you observe. Elders refer to this process as “reading the stars.”

      This idea is closely related to "talking rocks" and seems a very apt parallel.

    9. Art is often focused on aesthetic, but more importantly, it is avisual embodiment of knowledge.
    10. And yes, it is also very pretty.

      understated quote of the day

    11. Hamacher, Duane W. “The Art of Star Knowledge.” In 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, edited by Judith Ryan and Marcia Langton. Melbourne, Australia: University of Melbourne Press, 2023. https://www.academia.edu/96537139/The_Art_of_Star_Knowledge.

  20. Jan 2023
    1. since 1948 when the U.N Declaration on the rights of uh on human 00:32:06 on human beings was adopted the U.N declaration uh 12 million indigenous peoples have been murdered since 1948 40 million dispossessed of their 00:32:20 traditional lands in our lifetime

      !- atrocities since 1948 : 12 million indigenous people murder, 40 million dispossessed

    2. the first things that I think is important to understand from our perspective we've been taught Through the Ages that every life form on the face of the planet has its proper place as divinely ordained by our Almighty 00:31:03 Creator when one looks to the human body and the complexities every so has an importance and Chief Seattle taught us that all things are connected what we do 00:31:15 to the Earth we do to ourselves we are but one strand in a very complex Web of Life and our ancestors also foretold of a Day of Reckoning and we are in that 00:31:27 Day of Reckoning right now

      !- Indigenous Wisdom : all living beings are sacred - we are in a time of reckoning

    3. embedding indigenous knowledge in the conservation and restoration of Landscapes and one of the highlights of this report talks about how indigenous people are one of the best stewards of 00:29:43 nature they represent five percent of humanity but they actually protect eighty percent of Earth's biodiversity one third of all Earth's territories are owned or governed by indigenous communities 00:29:56 and locals and 91 of this land are actually in good or Fair ecological condition

      !- indigenous peoples : best stewards of earth !- quotable : 5 % of population protect 85% of earth’s biodiversity

    1. Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, "Brief Mention," American Journal of Philology 20.1 (1899) 108-113 (at 108): With all our advance in scientific astronomy, the average modern man is not so familiar with the sky as was his antique brother, and some of the blunders in modern works of fiction that are scored from time to time in scientific journals would hardly have been possible for a ploughman of antiquity, not to say a sailor. The world needs every now and then a reminder that the modern head holds different things from the ancient brain-pan, not necessarily more.

      How painfully true this may have been in 1899, it's now much worse in 2023!


      Specialization of knowledge tends to fit the lifeways of the people who hold and maintain it. Changing lifeways means one must lose one or more domains and begin using or curating different domains of knowledge.

      In a global world of specialization, humans who specialize are forced to rely more heavily on the experience and veracity of those around them who have also specialized. One may be able to have a Ph.D. in astrophysics, but their knowledge of the state of the art in anthropology or economic policy may be therefore utterly undeveloped. As a result they will need to rely on the knowledge and help of others in maintaining those domains.

      This knowledge specialization means that politicians will need to be more open about what they think and say, yet instead politicians seem to be some of the least knowledge about almost anything.

      This is just the start of a somewhat well-formed thesis I've developed elsewhere, but not previously written out... more to come...

    1. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/01/18/1139783203/what-makes-songs-swing-physicists-unravel-jazz-mystery

      Spaces in both language, text, and music help to create the texture of what is being communicated (and/or not).


      Link to Edward Tufte's latest book in section entitled "Spacing enhances complex meaning, encourages slow, thoughtful reading":

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>KevinMarks</span> in #meta 2023-01-19 (<time class='dt-published'>01/19/2023 11:32:19</time>)</cite></small>


      Link to Indigenous astronomy example of negative spaces (like the Great Emu)

    1. High Country News, Rebecca Nagle reported that for every dollar the U.S. government spent on eradicating Native languages in past centuries, it has spent less than 7 cents on revitalizing them in the 21st century. 

      !- United States indigenous language : ststistic - US Govt spent less than 7 cents for every dolloar spent eradicating indigenous language in the past - Citation : report by Rebecca Nagle in the High Country News: https://www.hcn.org/issues/51.21-22/indigenous-affairs-the-u-s-has-spent-more-money-erasing-native-languages-than-saving-them

    2. Australian government won’t stop trying to infiltrate these communities with English. Disguised as “education,” the imposition of English is an attempt to reduce the already dismal number of 13 Indigenous languages spoken by children in Australia (from 300-700 languages before the U.K. colonized Australia, in 1788),

      !- Australian language genocide - 300 to 700 indigenous Australian languages before colonization in 1788 - now there are 13

    3. Learning a New Language Can Help Us Escape Climate Catastrophe

      !- Title : Learning a New Language Can Help Us Escape Climate Catastrophe !- Author : Nylan Burton !- comment : summary - while I agree with the analysis, the futures-related question I ask is this: what does a desirable hybridized linguistic landscape look like that integrates English, evolved into a post-colonialist lingua franca and reconstituted indigenous languages with their rich bio-cultural heritage?

    1. If it interests you, GPC lists phrases like dysgu ar gof. This page then gives the example, "Yn yr hen ddyddiau byddai pobl yn dysgu cerddi ar gof" - like saying "to learn by heart" in English.

      https://www.reddit.com/r/learnwelsh/comments/10acr9j/sut_i_ddweud_i_memorized_yn_gymraeg/

      Fascinating that the Welsh language doesn't seem to have a direct translatable word/verb for "to memorize". The closest are dysgu (to learn, to teach) and cofio (to remember).

      Related phrase: yn dysgu cerddi ar gof (to learn poems by heart), though this last is likely a more direct translation of an English concept back into Welsh.

      Is this lack of a seemingly basic word for such a practice a hidden indicator of the anthropology of their way of knowing?

      If to learn something means that one fully memorizes it from the start, then one needn't sub-specify, right?

    1. Bacon, Bennett, Azadeh Khatiri, James Palmer, Tony Freeth, Paul Pettitt, and Robert Kentridge. “An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-Writing System and Phenological Calendar.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal, January 5, 2023, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774322000415.

      https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/an-upper-palaeolithic-protowriting-system-and-phenological-calendar/6F2AD8A705888F2226FE857840B4FE19

      There may be questions as to whether or not this represents written language, but, if true, this certainly represents one of the oldest examples of annotation in human history!

      cc: @remikalir

    2. Finally, statistics should reinforce the fact that any patterning found cannot be explained as accidental.

      It is possible that the variations in patterning may tell us about the relative timing of the data. Perhaps the earliest data points may have been anecdotal evidence that was improved over time.

      Of course it could be the case that migrations, births, etc. may have shifted somewhat over time.

      What does the general climate data from these areas and this time period show? Is there variability in this time period?

    3. We appreciate this is a long span of time, and were concerned why any specific artificial memory system should last for so long.

      I suspect that artificial memory systems, particularly those that make some sort of logical sense, will indeed be long lasting ones.

      Given the long, unchanging history of the Acheulean hand axe, as an example, these sorts of ideas and practices were handed down from generation to generation.

      Given their ties to human survival, they're even more likely to persist.

      Indigenous memory systems in Aboriginal settings date to 65,000 years and also provide an example of long-lived systems.

    1. I think the point is somewhat different. Luhmann was an academic writing for other academics and wrote technically due to fears of misunderstanding by those with a different educational background, as was a quite reasonable fear at the time.

      Was Luhmann's obtuse style, in part, a means of publicly sharing content, but doing so in a way as to restrict the knowledge to those who had an increased level of context for understanding it? How similar is this to the pattern of restricted knowledge in some Indigenous cultures where people passed along knowledge in restricted ways?

      Is there a word or phrase to synopsize this sort of hard to understand academic-speak?

  21. Dec 2022
    1. The intercalary month or epagomenal days[1] of the ancient Egyptian, Coptic, and Ethiopian calendars are a period of five days in common years and six days in leap years in addition to those calendars' 12 standard months, sometimes reckoned as their thirteenth month. They originated as a periodic measure to ensure that the heliacal rising of Sirius would occur in the 12th month of the Egyptian lunar calendar but became a regular feature of the civil calendar and its descendants. Coptic and Ethiopian leap days occur in the year preceding Julian and Gregorian leap years.
  22. Nov 2022
    1. The Zettelkasten Method is based on this experience: One cannot think without writing - at least not in demanding contexts that anticipate selective access to memory. This also means: without notching differences one cannot think.

      Sönke Ahrens roughly quoted this passage or one like it (check the reference), but I criticized it for not being inclusive of indigenous people or oral methods. Luhmann, however, went further and was at least passively more inclusive by saying that one needs to be able to "notch differences" to be able to think, and this is a much better framing.

  23. Oct 2022
    1. Rousseau’sheretical view was that anything which was outside children’s experience wouldbe meaningless to them, much as Plato, Comenius, and others had warned. Hisinsights had condensed principally out of the prevailing intellectual atmosphereat the time—empiricism, explicated by philosophers such as John Locke. We’lllook at Locke and Rousseau in more detail in Chapter 2.

      Just as the ideas of liberty and freedom were gifted to us by Indigenous North Americans as is shown by Graeber and Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything, is it possible that the same sorts of ideas but within the educational sphere were being transmitted by Indigenous intellectuals to Europe in the same way? Is Rousseau's 18th century book Emile, or On Education of this sort?

      What other sorts of philosophies invaded Western thought at this time?

    2. ‘Nothing should be taught to theyoung...unless it is not only permitted, but actually demanded by their age andmental strength.’

      —Comenius (1592-1670) in Didactica magna

      This is broadly similar to the spirit of much of Indigenous pedagogy, particularly in societies in which staged oral learning was a privilege.

    1. This effort, which Americans have supported almostfrom the beginning of the national existence and which is oneof the cornerstones of our democratic way of life, has hadremarkable results.

      Read in juxtaposition with the knowledge of orality and along with Graeber & Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, one could certainly argue that there are other ways of knowing which provide potentially better pathways to democracy.

      Further, the simple fact of basic literacy doesn't necessarily encourage democracy. Take a look at the January 6th (2021) insurrectionists who were likely broadly literate, but who acted more like a damaged oral society and actively subverted democracy.

      Literacy plus "other things" are certainly necessary for democracy. How do we define these other things, and then once we have, is literacy still part of the equation for democracy?

  24. Sep 2022
    1. It is a region marked by historicallylow wages paid to farm laborers and their families.

      It would seem that most of the large swaths of rural poverty in America are those with historical roots of slavery, colonization, and exploitation. These include: the Deep South and Mississippi Delta region where slavery, share cropping, and cotton plantations abounded; Appalachia (esp. West Virginia and Kentucky) where the coal mining industry disappeared; Texas-Mexico border where the Latinx populations have long been exploited; the Southwest and Northern Plains (including Alaska) with Native Americans who live on reservations after having been exploited, dealt with broken treaties and general decimation of their people and communities; central corridor of California with high numbers of exploited immigrant farm laborers.

    1. In 1991, the earliest known roundel was found in Germany, also corresponding to the Stroked Pottery culture. Called the Goseck Circle, it is 246 feet (75 m) in diameter and had a double wooden palisade and three entrances. Because two of the entrances correspond with sunrise and sunset during the winter and summer solstices, one interpretation of the Goseck Circle is that it functioned as an observatory or calendar of sorts, according to a 2012 study in the journal Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association (opens in new tab).

      Sounds like this shares many of the potential features of Stonehenge, stone and timber circles, and menhirs that fit into Lynne Kelly's thesis on mnemonic devices.

    1. “I think it’s such a fascinating story,” Martin said. He also appreciated collecting in an area where there wasn’t a huge amount of established scholarship. “It’s fun to have something to study, to try to understand, to apply your critical eye to without any outside pressure,” he added. “There’s not a lot of promotion about [these] artists. You just have to find it out yourself.”

      Reading and studying it all without any regard to the Indigenous culture. Steve Martin is using Western perspectives to attempt to understand non-Western art which has a different basis.

    1. One of the most well-known of Aberdeenshire songs, I got this from the singing of Sam Kelly, who recorded 'The Bonnie Lass of Fyvie' on his album titled “Pretty Peggy”.

      In addition to tracing the roots of the song Bonnie Lass of Fyvie, Iona Fyfe credits her direct source Sam Kelly.

    2. 'Pretty Peggy O' was collected by Cecil Sharp from Mrs Combs, Knott County Kentucky in 1908.

      There's an interesting parallel to the knowledge that Cecil Sharp collected the song from Mrs. Combs in Knott County Kentucky in 1908 and the same sorts of citations given by indigenous peoples who often indicate where they learned a piece of knowledge.

  25. Aug 2022
    1. Australia’s Indigenous knowledge systems do not separate the secular and the sacred; both are embedded in the idea of Country as an all encompassing term of the materiality of life, landscape and seascape, as well as the spiritual world of the creation ancestors, and the concept of the Jukurrpa, the eternal law/lore of how to live sustainably in accordance with how the world works, which in turn has shaped human social organisation and kinship systems.
    2. The strongest clash in values between Indigenous knowledge systems and Western knowledge systems lies in who ‘owns’ the knowledge, who has the right to ‘transmit’ it and who has the right to ‘receive’ it.
    3. Our First Nations people came together in 2017 to look for a path forward in shaping their place in Australian society. They issued the Uluru Statement from the Heart, an invitation to the Australian people to enshrine their Voice in our Constitution and to establish a Makarrata Commission for treaties between First Nations peoples and the Government of Australia, and the truth telling about our history.
  26. Jul 2022
  27. bafybeiapea6l2v2aio6hvjs6vywy6nuhiicvmljt43jtjvu3me2v3ghgmi.ipfs.dweb.link bafybeiapea6l2v2aio6hvjs6vywy6nuhiicvmljt43jtjvu3me2v3ghgmi.ipfs.dweb.link
    1. The vast area of the world managed by In-digenous Peoples (at least 25 to 28% of landsurface) (Fig. 4) under various property re-gimes is no exception to these trends. Becauseof their large extent, the fact that nature isoverall better preserved within them (60), andbecause of the diverse stewardship practicescarried within them around the world (Fig. 4,A to I), the fate of nature in these lands hasimportant consequences for wider societyas well as for local livelihoods, health, andknowledge transmission (67).

      The roughly 25% of area that is (better) managed by indigenous people is also under threat from practices beyond their control.

  28. Jun 2022
    1. For Jerome Bruner, the place to begin is clear: “One starts somewhere—where the learner is.”

      One starts education with where the student is. But mustn't we also inventory what tools and attitudes the student brings? What tools beyond basic literacy do they have? (Usually we presume literacy, but rarely go beyond this and the lack of literacy is too often viewed as failure, particularly as students get older.) Do they have motion, orality, song, visualization, memory? How can we focus on also utilizing these tools and modalities for learning.

      Link to the idea that Donald Trump, a person who managed to function as a business owner and president of the United States, was less than literate, yet still managed to function in modern life as an example. In fact, perhaps his focus on oral modes of communication, and the blurrable lines in oral communicative meaning (see [[technobabble]]) was a major strength in his communication style as a means of rising to power?

      Just as the populace has lost non-literacy based learning and teaching techniques so that we now consider the illiterate dumb, stupid, or lesser than, Western culture has done this en masse for entire populations and cultures.

      Even well-meaning educators in the edtech space that are trying to now center care and well-being are completely missing this piece of the picture. There are much older and specifically non-literate teaching methods that we have lost in our educational toolbelts that would seem wholly odd and out of place in a modern college classroom. How can we center these "missing tools" as educational technology in a modern age? How might we frame Indigenous pedagogical methods as part of the emerging third archive?

      Link to: - educational article by Tyson Yunkaporta about medical school songlines - Scott Young article "You should pay for Tutors"


      aside on serendipity

      As I was writing this note I had a toaster pop up notification in my email client with the arrival of an email by Scott Young with the title "You should pay for Tutors" which prompted me to add a link to this note. It reminds me of a related idea that Indigenous cultures likely used information and knowledge transfer as a means of payment (Lynne Kelly, Knowledge and Power). I have commented previously on the serendipity of things like auto correct or sparks of ideas while reading as a means of interlinking knowledge, but I don't recall experiencing this sort of serendipity leading to combinatorial creativity as a means of linking ideas,

    2. From the classroom, to the street, to the Internet, Eric’s voice carried, and carried within it the possibility of a kind of education–amplified with digital technologies– that enables other human beings to become conscious, to become responsible, to learn.

      Sadly, we seem to have othered orality and cultural practices which don't fit into the Western literate cultural box. This prevents us from moving forward as a society and a diverse culture.

      In the 90's rap was culturally appropriated by some because of its perception as "cool" within the culture. Can this coolness be leveraged as a reintroduction of oral methods in our culture without the baggage of the appropriation? Can it be added to enhance the evolving third archive? As a legitimate teaching tool?

    3. listen deeply to Eric’s story

      Beyond Eric's words here, I'm struck by the fact that he's able to do this "feat" orally in a way that I certainly cannot. Perhaps he spent ages slowly building it up and writing it down in a literal fashion, but I suspect that part of it is not and that it is raw oral poetry in a way which requires culture and oral practice that I wholly lack, but wish I had.

      How can we better teach this?! Center this.

      Link to: - Eminem's stacking ammo

    4. Maxine Greene for example, begins by writing that “We are convinced that the movement towards educational technology is irreversible and that our obligation as educators is to learn how to deal with it,” but then she turns that resignation into resistance by adding, “how, if you like, to live with it as fully conscious human beings working to enable other human beings to become conscious, to become responsible, to learn.”

      If it's true that the movement toward technology is inevitable, how might we deal with it?

      Compare this with the solution(s) that nomadic hunter-gatherers had to face when changing from a lifestyle built on movement to one of settling down to a life of agriculture. Instead of attaching their knowledge and memories to their landscape as before, they built structures (like Stonehenge) to form these functions.

      Part of moving forward may involve moving back historically to better understand these ideas and methods and regaining them so that we might then reattach them to a digital substrate. How can we leverage the modalities of the digital for art, song, dance, music, and even the voice into digital spaces (if we must?). All digital or only digital certainly isn't the encompassing answer, but if we're going to do it, why not leverage the ability to do this?

      As an example, Hypothes.is allows for annotating text to insert photos, emoji, audio (for music and voice), and even video. Videos might include dance and movement related cues that students might recreate physically. These could all be parts of creating digital songlines through digital spaces that students can more easily retrace to store their learnings for easier recall and to build upon in the future.

    5. Groups in arts education rail against the loss of music, dance, and art in schools and indicate that it's important to a balanced education.

      Why has no one embedded these learning tools, for yes they can be just that, into other spaces within classrooms? Indigenous educators over the millennia have done just this in passing on their societal and cultural knowledge. Why have we lost these teaching methods? Why don't we reintroduce them? How can classrooms and the tools within them become mnemonic media to assist both teachers and learners?

      Perhaps we need to bring back examples of how to do these things at the higher levels? I've seen excercises in my daughter's grade school classrooms that bring art and manipulatives into the classroom as a base level, but are they being done specifically for these mnemonic reasons?

      Michael Nielsen and Andy Matuschak have been working at creating a mnemonic medium for areas like quantum mechanics relying in part on spaced repetition. Why don't they go further and add in dance, movement, art, and music to aid in the process. This can be particularly useful for creating better neurodiverse outcomes as well. Education should be more multi-modal, more oral, and cease it's unending reliance on only literacy as it's sole tool.

      How and where can we create a set of example exercises at various grade levels (similar to rites of knowledge initiation in Indigenous cultures, for lack of specific Western language) that embed all of these methods

      Link to: - Ideas in The Extended Brain about movement, space, etc. - Nielsen/Matuschak mnemonic media work

    1. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/native-american-language-preservation-rcna31396

      Should outsiders attempting to preserve Indigenous knowledge, histories, or language be allowed to make money off of their work?

    2. But the copyright on the materials still gives the organization control over how the information is used, which is what some tribal leaders find objectionable.

      Oral cultures treat information dramatically different than literate cultures, and particularly Western literate cultures within capitalism-based economies.

    3. “No matter how it was collected, where it was collected, when it was collected, our language belongs to us. Our stories belong to us. Our songs belong to us,” Taken Alive, who teaches Lakota to elementary school students, told the tribal council in April. 
    1. It is a fact that lands have been sold for five shillings, which were worth one hundred pounds: if sheriffs, thus immediately under the eye of our state legislature and judiciary, have dared to commit these outrages, what would they not have done if their masters had been at Philadelphia or New York?

      This is almost hilarious in light of how the U.S. Government has since repeatedly dispossessed Indigenous Americans of their lands for far less than "five shillings."

  29. May 2022
    1. https://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/blog/article/865/

      Re: Junior Atlas of Indigenous Australia

    2. The decision not to refer primary school children to online language resources such as AustLang and the Gambay map was appropriate as it would create difficulties for both those readers and their teachers. Those resources are usually used by Indigenous language speakers and experts with a sound training in linguistics.