Ideas - Massey at 60: Wade Davis on looking to Indigenous cultures for answers to world crises

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

Anthropologist Wade Davis has spent a lifetime exploring our planet. In his 2009 CBC Massey Lectures, The Wayfinders, he takes the reader and the listener on a journey through the wonders of the natural world, as they are seen and experienced by Indigenous peoples. Davis revisits his lectures in conversation with IDEAS producer Philip Coulter at Massey College.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

Wade Davis has smoked toad, drunk ayahuasca, and figured out the zombie cocktail of drugs that mimic death. One of Canada's leading anthropologists, he's been explorer in residence at the National Geographic Society, where it was his job to figure out new ways to communicate a better understanding of our planet with all its needs and beauty. Across a long career, Wade Davis has done just that. He's been a field researcher, a teacher, filmmaker, and photographer. He's also been the author of 23 books, including the 2009

CBC Massey lectures, The Wayfinders, Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World. If you believe that it's normal for a Jewish girl to find solace in the Buddhist Dharma, if you believe that two mothers can be a good family, if you believe that a man born into a male body can self-identify as a woman, if you believe that every religious aspiration is a legitimate road to the divine, if you believe that the environment has to be seen as a living force on a living planet, all of that is because you're a child of anthropology. In 2023, Massey College in the University of Toronto celebrated its 60th anniversary through a series of conversations and talks about notable past Massey lectures.

Many former Massey lecturers were featured at these events in conversation with Ideas producers. The Wayfinders take the reader and the listener on a journey through the wonders of the natural world as they are seen and experienced by Indigenous peoples. Plants that can heal, plants that can transport us to other realities, a hanging vine that can be a snake, ways to read the oceans and the winds. Wade Davis came to Massey College on the 14th anniversary of his original lecture series to talk with the original producer of the lectures, Philip Coulter. Looking back, what's changed in his thinking? What would he add?

What's still an issue? And what's new in the world that needs to be taken account of? Here's Ideas producer Philip Coulter in conversation with Wade Davis. We're calling this program The Wayfinders Revisited. I want to say first of all what a privilege it is for me to be up here talking to Wade. Wade and I go back a long way, back at least as far as 1996. And I would consider Wade to be a friend, which is to say that if I were being chased by the through the mountains of Columbia, I would call Wade. I'm going to start with a line that actually, Wade, is in these lectures.

You write, if you want to know what happens when the constraints of culture and civilization are lost, merely look around the world. And later on, you write, we live in an age of disintegration. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were 60 nation states, and today there are 190. Can we start just by talking a little bit about the age that we're living in and how you see it? What is this age and how do you categorize the issues that we face? Boy, you know, I think we all came out of, even as children growing up in the wake of the Second World War, with all the specter of nuclear annihilation and all of the clash between ideologies in the Cold War,

I think there was a pulsating sense of possibilities, that things were getting better, and that certainly, even in the turbulent years of the 60s, out of those years came remarkable movements in which women went from the kitchen to the boardroom, people of color from the woodshed to the White House, gay people from the closet to the altar. And, you know, Earth Day 1970, or even earlier, you know, Christmas Eve 1968, when Apollo went around the dark side of the moon and we suddenly saw that incredible image of the earth arising,

all of these things seem to be moving toward such a positive direction, as much as that can happen in history, which is always an ebb and flow of light and darkness and will never defeat the dark. But you think about when we were kids, just getting people to stop throwing garbage out of a car window was an environmental victory. No one spoke about the biosphere. Soon these were words part of the vernacular of schoolchildren. So everything seemed to be kind of moving forward until the last few years, and there seems to be this kind of crescendo that we sometimes indulge in, you know, the almost biblical obsessions with the coming apocalypse. And the way I've gotten through the years is something quite personal. You know, my mother was a lapsed Christian, but she maintained that kind of Christian hope that if we just tried hard enough, good would triumph over evil, the Christ child over the fallen archangel.

And my father, who'd been broken by the war, had no such illusions. He used to say, son, there's good and evil in the world. Take your side and get on with it. And what he was saying is we'll never defeat darkness. And it was the most wise advice because, you know, I came to understand that you just had a choice. And the minute you realize you're not going to win, it means you don't worry if you lose. And then suddenly life becomes more of a pilgrim's path where the goal is not a destination but a state of mind. I simply refuse to indulge pessimism. I find it an insult to the imagination.

I feel despair is itself an indulgence, just like orthodoxy is the enemy of invention. And I think we do a real disservice to youth when we invoke these apocalyptic scenarios, when we all know that the weed will win in the end and the world will go on. You know, what is life but a story? You lose the power of comprehending as you get older. And I think there's nothing more, in a sense, indulgent than an older person saying to a young person, boy, you missed it. It used to be great. Oh my God, Woodstock. If you just look at that damn movie,

you see all you want to do is have a bath after seeing that movie, right? So I really believe, and I embrace optimism because it's the only way. And so that's what, you know, that's a lesson I learned from my father. You know, the goal in life is not a place, it's a state of mind.

As a social anthropologist, a young student at Harvard, I was trained to believe in the primacy of history and culture as the key determinants in human affairs, so it must strike you as unusual that I'm celebrating the revelations of genetics. I was raised, of course, to believe in nurture, if you will, as opposed to nature. Anthropology began as an attempt to decipher the exotic other,

with the ideal hope that by embracing the wonder of distinct and novel cultural possibilities, we might enrich our appreciation and understanding of all human nature, and thus of our own humanity. Very early on, however, the discipline was hijacked by the ideology of its times. As naturalists throughout the 19th century attempted to classify creation, even as a cope with the revelations of Darwin, anthropologists became servants of the crown, agents dispatched to the far reaches of empire with the task of understanding strange tribal peoples and cultures that they might be properly administered and controlled. Evolutionary theory, distilled from the study of bird beaks, beetles, and barnacles,

slipped into social theory in a manner that proved useful to the age. Evolution, of course, suggested change through time, and this, together with the Victorian cult of improvement, implied a progression in the affairs of human beings, a ladder of success that rose from the so-called primitive to the civilized, from the tribal village of Africa to London and the splendor of the Strand. The cultures of the world came to be seen as a living museum in which individual societies represented evolutionary moments captured and mired in time, each one a stage in the imagined ascent to civilization.

I've always been curious about what it is that got you into the field of anthropology, because in many of your writings, you're quite dismissive about the field, certainly as it was when you joined and you became an anthropologist. At one point in the Massey Lectures, you say that anthropologists in the early days were, quote, servants of the colonialist crown. So, on the other hand, this is a field that you got into. Well, you know, the thing is, Philip, if anyone knew the trajectory of my life, they'd go to law school.

Another thing I always tell young people is that life isn't linear. It's based on these serendipitous moments where you have to cultivate an instinct that allows you, by the end of your life, to look back on a list of decisions you've controlled, you've been a part of, and therefore you're the architect of your own life, which is a key to happiness in old age. I mean, I went to Harvard because I used to fight forest fires. And at 15, I was surrounded by these draft dodgers who would tell our bosses to piss off. It was irresistibly charismatic. And one of them had the Life magazine with a Harvard student strike of 1969 on the cover. And I thought, well, that's got to be the college you go to,

to be cool like these people. I go to Cambridge. I get to Logan Airport at the age of 16. I don't know where Harvard is. I see a guy with a Harvard t-shirt. He doesn't know either. I get to Harvard Square. It's a caravansary of madness, SDS, Hare Krishna demonstration. And I drag my trunk through Cambridge until I find a church. I knock on the door, and a pastor takes me in. But he was a war resistor and his basement was full of kids about to flee to Canada. So I was immediately radicalized. I spent my first year not really on campus, about campus making trouble. I should have been charged basically for some of the things that I did. You know, your comment, anthropology in the early days, the first professor of anthropology was Tyler in 1880 or something,

a very young discipline that was following Darwin. And there was this idea that if species evolved, so too did societies. And there was this idea of evolutionary development that, species evolved, so too did societies. And there was this idea of evolutionary development that, of course, invariably went from the savage to the barbarian to the civilized to the strand of London, right? A perfect kind of model for colonialism. And to some extent, anthropologists did serve the crown. I mean, you know, the Congress of Berlin that divided up Africa was 1885,

and suddenly these European powers were inheriting areas the size of Western Europe, and they had to know who lived there. And the critical thing is what happened in North America. Very, very different scenario. And this is all because of Franz Boas. And Franz Boas was a physicist from Germany. And during his PhD research, he noticed that the way light was observed

kind of impacted the outcome. And in the marvelous, eclectic way of 19th century scholarship and the way that insights in one field could drift into another, he began to think of this thing that he called culture. And he was the first person to look seriously at how social perceptions are formed. He coined that concept of culture. And his inspiration was in Canada, which is remarkable. First amongst the Inuit. He was in

Baffin Island, and he got caught in a terrible storm. And anyone who's been in a storm in the Arctic with the Inuit, you know how completely useless you feel and how brilliant they are in being able to survive. I mean, they don't fear the cold. They take advantage of it. And then he went off to the northwest coast, mostly amongst the Kwakwaka'wakw, and he witnessed high civilization in the absence of the cult of the seed. And all these things began to jumble in his mind. to the seed. And all these things began to jumble in his mind. And he attracted to him the most extraordinary group of independent thinkers and contrarians, mostly women. And Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, of course, the inimitable Ruth Benedict, Margaret's lover,

Ellen Parsons, and men, Kroeber and everything. And they set out to rule the world. You know that great quote from Margaret Mead that says, never doubt that a single person could change the world because that's all that ever does. We always think of that as either naive, given her image from Samoa, or aspirational at best. No, it was a simple statement of fact because they did change the world. You live today in the social realm of their dreams. Think about it this way. It's an exercise that a wonderful writer

in a book called The Reinvention of Culture, he does a thought experiment. Consider the world of your great-grandparents, what they thought about gender, the environment, work, women. There is not a single thought that they had or belief that they held or conviction that drove them that you would agree with. In fact, almost everything they believe you would believe to be morally wrong and ethically

reprehensible. If you believe that it's normal for a Jewish girl to find solace in the Buddhist Dharma, for a Chinese boy to be in love with a Scottish girl, if you believe that two mothers can be a good family, if you believe that a man born into a male body can self-identify as a woman, if you believe that every religious aspiration is a legitimate road to the divine. If you believe that the environment has to be seen as a living force on a living planet, all of that is because you're a child of anthropology. They were the ones who brought in

the possibility of that change. Social movements, the women's movement, gay movement, environmental movement, can come about through political action, but they can only begin if sparked by an idea, by a flash of inspiration that shifts the dialogue completely. And that's what those people did, and that's what they gave us. That's why Boas ranks with Freud, Einstein, and Darwin as the four great intellectual pillars of modernity. And even though we herald them today, in their time,

they were pilloried for their beliefs, persecuted for the subversive character which they really had, denied tenure, you know, and yet they're the ones who gave us the modern world in which we live. And that's the ultimate gift of anthropology. And that's the ultimate gift of anthropology. Together, the myriad of cultures of the world make up an intellectual and a spiritual web of life that envelops the planet and is every bit as important to the well-being of the planet as is the biological web of life that you know as a biosphere.

being of the planet as is a biological web of life that you know as a biosphere. And you could think of this social web of life as being an ethnosphere. And you could define the ethnosphere, perhaps most appropriately, as a sum total of all thoughts and intuitions, myths and beliefs, ideas and inspirations brought into being by the human consciousness since the dawn of our existence. The ethnosphere is humanity's greatest legacy. It is the product of our dreams, the embodiment of our hopes, and the symbol of all that we have created as a wildly imaginative and creative species. And just as the biosphere, the biological matrix of life, is being severely eroded by the destruction of habitat

and the resultant loss of plant and animal life, so too is the ethnosphere, only at a far greater rate. From the back of the lectures, the part that nobody ever reads, the footnotes, here's something I did want to read, which hopefully gives us a little bit of insight into how your thinking developed. You say, 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. Yeah, you know, we preserve jam, not culture. You know, every culture is dancing with new possibilities of life. You know, this is one of the conceits we have, that these indigenous cultures under threat are somehow delicate and frail as if destined to fade away, as if they're failed attempts of being modern. Nothing could be further from the truth. In every

case, these are dynamic living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces, ideological, industrial, political. And that's actually an optimistic observation because if human beings are the agents of cultural destruction, we can be the facilitators of cultural survival. The issue isn't the traditional versus the modern. It's the rights of free people to choose the conditions of their lives. It's not about sequestering people in time like some kind of zoological specimen, but rather finding ways that all people can engage in all the attributes of modernity,

if you will, or science, medicine, without that engagement demanding the death of who they are as a people. And this gets back, Philip, to your very first point. And the reason for this is that culture is not trivial. Culture is not decorative. It's not the songs we sing, the prayers we utter, the clothes we wear, let alone the rituals we celebrate. Culture is about a body of moral and ethical values

that we wrap around the individual in every culture to keep at bay the barbaric heart that history teaches us lies within every human being. It is culture that moderates the human spirit. It is culture that allows us to make sense out of sensation, find order and meaning in the universe, hopefully to do what Lincoln said, to seek the better angels of our nature. And when that constraint of culture is removed, we see the barbaric heart that pops up all around the world.

Every point of crisis in the world is a story of culture. You're listening to The Wayfinders Revisited. Anthropologist Wade Davis, You're listening to The Wayfinders Revisited. Anthropologist Wade Davis in conversation with producer Philip Coulter about ideas in his 2009 CBC Massey lectures, The Wayfinders, Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World. You can hear ideas on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. We're also on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on US Public Radio and Sirius XM,

in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and, most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes, I just want to know more. I want to go deeper.

And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. In his lectures, Wade Davis writes that for Indigenous people, quote, the entire natural world is saturated with meaning and cosmological significance. Every rock and waterfall embodies a story. Plants and animals are but distinct physical manifestations of the same essential spiritual essence.

It's a worldview that understands the interconnectedness of all things, and not just on the physical level. Our world is in trouble. The planet is burning. We're losing wildlife, and we're losing languages, ways of understanding the world. For Wade Davis, that's an important insight, and one that we can all learn from. So we need to pay attention to the mysteries of the world, and to the people who seem to understand something of those mysteries. The reduction of the world to a mechanism with nature but an obstacle to overcome, a resource to be exploited, has in good measure determined the very way in which our cultural tradition has interacted with a living planet. As a young man growing up in British Columbia on the coast, I was led to believe that the rainforest

of home existed to be cut. That was the essence of the ideology of scientific forestry that I learned in school and that I practiced in the woods as a logger. The rotation cycle, the rate at which forests were to be felled across the province, and thus the very foundation of this notion of sustained yield forestry, was based on the assumption that all the old-growth timber would be cut and replaced with tree farms. The intrinsic value of these rare and remarkable old-growth rainforests, like the inherent worth of the sacred headwaters, its meadows, and its mountains, had no place in the calculus of the planning process. Now, this cultural perspective was profoundly different from that of the First

Nations, those living on Vancouver Island at the time of European contact and still thriving to this day. If I was sent into the forest to cut it down, a Kwakwaka'wakw youth of similar age was traditionally dispatched during his Hamatza initiation into those same forests to confront Hukuk and the crooked beak of heaven and the cannibal spirits that dwelt at the north end of the world that he might be able to bring back the wisdom of the wild into the collective in the potlatch to inspire all of the living and to revitalize the people with the very energy of the natural world.

I want to pick up on some of the ideas that you've been touching on there, specifically to get to the model of the world as you see it. And here and there in your writing, you talk a bit about how the Darwinian model of evolution works in the biological sciences, but maybe doesn't work in culture. It doesn't work at all in culture. And on page two of your lectures, like right off out of the bat, you're setting the stage for things you say. Together, the myriad of cultures makes up an intellectual and spiritual web of life that envelops the planet and is every bit as important to the well-being of the planet as the biological

web of life that we know as a biosphere. You're talking about a web of connectivity here. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about how that web works. Well, it happens. I mean, it works, Philip, because every culture is a unique voice. Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question. What does it mean to be human and alive? And when asked that question, the people's world answer in 7,000 voices, and those answers and those voices become our human repertoire. You know, one of the things to bear in mind is issues like the biodiversity of the climate crisis have become humanity's problems, but they weren't caused by humanity. They're caused by a very narrow subset of humanity with a particular ideology and worldview, which is actually ubiquitous and

all-powerful, but that shouldn't suggest it's the norm. It's highly anomalous. And there's a root to that way of thinking, and it's called the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment brought us great things, allopathic medicine, the scientific inquiry, but it also had consequences. So in our desperate need to liberate ourselves in Europe from the tyranny of absolute faith, we threw out all notions of myth, magic, mysticism,

but critically metaphor. And so when Descartes said that all that exists is mind and matter, in a single phrase, he deanimated the world. The world became a stage set upon which only the human drama unfolded. The idea that the flight of a bird could have meaning, that a mountain could be a deity, was just ridiculed. As Saul Bellows said, science made a house cleaning a belief. And we created out of that a kind of extractive model. I mean, if you believe, as I was raised to believe, that a forest is just bored feet and a mountain is just rock, well, you treat both appropriately.

bored feet and a mountain's just rock, well, you treat both appropriately. But if you're raised to believe, as my godchildren are in Peru, that a mountain is an apu deity that will direct their destiny, or if you go to Alert Bay in British Columbia and the Kwakwaka'wakw who believe that the forest is the abode of hukuk and the crooked beak of heaven and the cannibal spirits that have to be embraced in the Hamas initiation to reaffirm the moral order of the universe, you have a different relationship to those. And that's what metaphor is all about. You know, it's not whether it's true that a mountain is a deity or true that a mountain is rock.

It doesn't matter. The belief system has an impact. And if you look around the world, almost all cultures base their relationships with the natural world on reciprocity, not extraction. Some basic iteration of the idea that the earth owes its bounty to people. People can never be the problem because only through our consciousness that the earth can become manifest, but we also owe our fidelity to the earth, right? I mean the most profound notion of the Bada-Sana of the Northwest, is that plants and animals are people in another dimension of reality. The Kogi and the Arawakos in the Sierra Nevada

de Santa Marta in Colombia, I was just with them five days ago for a month, and they believe that their prayers literally maintain the cosmic balance of the world. You know, the training for the priesthood is 18 years in effective isolation, during which time the acolyte is told how beautiful the world is, told it's his responsibility to protect. And after 18 years, not in the darkness, but in the environs of the sacred center, the person is led on the first journey to the heart of the world. This great pilgrimage from the sea to the ice, from the ice back to the sea, the whole time the priest who has trained him, a sun priest, descendant of the Tyrona, is saying, you see, I've promised you all these years.

It's that beautiful. It's yours to protect. You must protect it. And the whole culture speaks in those terms, right? So I think it's not that we should go and mimic any of these societies, but the very existence of all these myriad ways of thinking differently about the earth puts a lie to those of us in our own culture who say that we cannot change, as we all know we must change, the fundamental way we interact with the planet. And I, incidentally, totally reject the use of the word indigenous. I have a new book coming out of essays. I did an op-ed in Globe and Mail. It said

we should get rid of the word indigenous. It's ridiculous. I mean, I know why we have it. It's a term white anthropologists made up because it improved on words like savage and primitive in their discourse. But indigenous implies that some of us are and some of us aren't, which is not the message we want to send to our children. What's more, the idea of indigenous perpetrates colonial stereotypes, including that kind of weird dichotomy. There's 6,500 cultures that by academic conceit and definition would be indigenous.

But these people aren't lost in a sea, anonymous sea of indigeneity. These are nations. And the Nenets, reindeer herders of Siberia, and the Dogon and the Bandigata escarpment of Mali, and the Waurani in the forests of Ecuador have no more in common than the Chinese and the Russians and the Americans.

It's like calling us industrial peoples. It makes no point whatsoever. And it perpetrates a false dichotomy between if there are some who are indigenous and there are some who aren't. And that's not really much different than the odious notion of the civilized and the savage that colored 19th century literature. These peoples aren't anonymous. They're nations. They're nations.

I'm 70. There are 100 countries in the United Nations younger than me. The Taltan Territory in British Columbia is bigger than 17 countries in the United Nations, including Austria, Israel, and Kuwait. Haida have lived in Haida Gwaii for 6,000 years at least. So maybe we can expand our notion of nation or at least give these societies the legitimacy they've earned and deserved by calling them by their names, not indigenous. I mean, the Inuit population in Canada alone is greater in numbers than seven U.S. nations, right? So nations are whatever we declare them to be. It's nothing to do with population size or geographical extent. And most

of them are just carved out of the detritus and wreckage of 19th century colonialism anyway. I recently spent a month in France in the Dordogne with my friend Clayton Eshelman, the poet, who has been studying the cave art for more than 30 years, ever since the fateful morning in the spring of 1974 when he abandoned, as he put it,

the world of birdsong and blue sky for a realm of constricted darkness that filled his being with mystical enthusiasm. Like so many observers before him, Clayton was dazzled yet perplexed not just by what he saw, but how he felt in the sensory isolation of the caves, his imagination suspended between consciousness and the soul of an all-devouring earth, a living and fathomless reservoir, as he put it, of psychic force. He paid attention not only to what was depicted on the rock,

but also to what was missing, the bison and the horse being the most commonly portrayed animals, with carnivores represented the least. The images float in isolation. There are no backgrounds and no ground lines. Depictions of people are few and there are no displays of fighting, no scenes of hunting, no representations of physical conflict. Northrop Frye struggled himself in vain to assign purpose to these remarkable works of art from the upper Paleolithic. Fry saw the animals portrayed as a kind of extension of human consciousness and power

into the objects of greatest energy and strength humans could see in the world around them. It was as if in painting these forms onto rock, the artist was somehow assimilating the energy, the beauty, the elusive glory latent in nature to his observing mind. We look at the animal forms with human eyes, he said, and suspect that what we were really seeing is that of a sorcerer or a shaman who has identified himself with the animal by putting on its skin. He felt that the art paid homage to that moment when human beings through consciousness separated themselves from the animal realm, emerging as a unique entity that we now know ourselves to be. Viewed in this light, the art may be seen almost as postcards of nostalgia, laments for a lost time when animals and people were one.

One of the things I find most inspiring about your work and writings is how positive it is. And rereading the lectures the other day, I was struck in the anecdote that you tell about going to visit the caves of the Dordogne and looking at the cave drawings there, and you make the point that those drawings represent a moment in human history where there's a kind of split taking place, where we're moving away from an era in which humankind and animalkind, for want of a better term, are inextricably linked, and then they start to separate,

and you refer to those drawings in the caves of the Dardan as being, as you say, postcards of nostalgia. Well, you know, one of the things you can get away with as a writer is a bit of lyrical indulgence and license, you know, that you can in the academic world. But, you know, has anyone been into those caves? You know, Northrop Frye tried to describe them and doesn't really get it. It's not hunting magic. But the most remarkable thing about it is that the basic aesthetic, the basic materials, the use of curvature, the darkness of space, the flicker of tallow lamps, all of that is consistent

from, for example, Chauvet in 32,000 years ago to Lascaux 17,000 years ago. Wow, that's pretty interesting. A single aesthetic art form lasting that long. Five times the chronological distance that separates us from the building of the Great Pyramids of Giza, right? So what was going on? Well, at one point, we were of an animal nature by definition and at

some point we weren't and whether it was a growth the size of the brain or the invention of language or some other evolutionary catalyst we suddenly became who we are and and that became the origin of our discontent and ever since then the entire human experience has come down to two words, how and why. And religion attempts to answer the question why, and science tries to answer the question how. But at some point, it happened, right? And I like to think that that art form is kind of like an attempt more to reach back to almost in nostalgia for a moment when we were of an animal nature across an inexorable divide created by consciousness.

And I like to think that, you know, if they were postcards of nostalgia, ours was a very long farewell. To get to the question I was hoping to get to, how do we get back there? I mean, if in a way, as I read you, not to kind of oversimplify it, but the Enlightenment is a stone that we tripped over in a way. Well, I think we are getting back to it. You know, we're so impatient with the pace of history and we indulge.

People have an almost pornographic obsession with doom and gloom, you know, or at least a biblical obsession with it. I mean, you have to simply be not a student of history to really believe that we're going through a worse period of time than ever before. It simply is not the case. You know, how about my father? How about my grandfather? My grandfather was a surgeon on the Western Front for four years and four months of the war.

Do you know what that was like? Arthur Somerville walked out the first morning of the Somme as a surgeon. There were two surgeons, six to a casualty clearing hospital station, two to an eight-hour shift. They were told to expect 1,000 casualties within the first week of the battle. He walks out at 11 o'clock

with one other doctor surrounded by six acres of dying boys. And he's got to decide who's going to live and who's going to die. 65% of the casualties in the first war weren't bayonets or bullets, simply innocent boys clinging in terror to the mud of a trench as a rain of steel and fire fell from the sky. These men, I so admire that generation.

You know, they're these incredible, you know, they're the same men who went to Everest, you know, like Mallory and his cohort. And they were, you know, I described them as men of discretion and decorum who weren't prepared to yield their feelings to analysis, had no interest in littering the world with themselves, and yet were so confident in their masculinity

that they could speak of love between men without shame, collect butterflies in the dawn for the British Museum, paint watercolors before lunch, and discuss Keats and Shelley and Shakespeare over lunch, and still be prepared to assault the German line at 5 o'clock or the flanks of Everest. You know, and they're the kind of man that will just never know again in this culture obscenely obsessed with self,

in which every opinion matters, in which if I believe it, it's true, in which the truth itself has become fluid. They're the kind of man we'll just never know again, and the thing that I find so just overwhelmingly moving is that they were grandfathers. White people, Ricardo told me, see with their eyes, but the Barasana see with their minds.

They journey both to the dawn of time and into the future, visiting every sacred site, paying homage to every creature as they celebrate their most profound cultural insight, the realization that animals and plants are only people in another dimension of reality. This is the essence of the Badassana philosophy. Consider for a moment what this implies, and what it tells us about the culture and its place in history. It is a tradition based on knowledge acquired through time and intense priestly study and initiation.

acquired through time and intense priestly study and initiation. Status accrues to the man of wisdom, not to the warrior. Their malokas rival in grandeur the great architectural creations of humanity. They have a complex understanding of astronomy, solar calendars, intensely complex notions of hierarchy and specialization. Their wealth is vested in ritual regalia as elegant as that of a medieval court. Their systems of exchange, infinitely complex, facilitate peace, not war. Their struggle to bring order to the universe, to maintain the energetic flows of life, The struggle to bring order to the universe, to maintain the energetic flows of life,

and the specificity of their beliefs and adaptations, leave open the very remarkable possibility that the Barasana are the survivors of a world that once existed, the lost civilizations of the Amazon. Perhaps in the adaptation and cultural survival of the Barasana and Makuna and all the peoples of the Anaconda, we can glimpse something of the beliefs and convictions that once allowed untold millions of people to live along the banks of the world's greatest river. When the Barasana today engage in ritual and take Yahé, this astonishing preparation, engage in ritual, and take Yahweh, this astonishing preparation, and say that they travel through multiple dimensions, reliving the journey of the Iowa, alighting on the sacred sites,

accomplishing all of these remarkable spiritual deeds, it is because they really do. When we say that the Badassana and their neighbors both echo the ancient pre-Columbian past and point a way forward, embodying a model by which human societies can actually live and thrive in the Amazon basin without laying waste to the forest, it is because they really can. On this theme of finding our way back to something, in the section where you're writing about the Barasana, whom our way back to something, in the section where you're writing about the Barasana,

whom you have referred to already, you write that white people see with their eyes, but the Barasana see with their minds. Can you talk a little bit about that? What does it mean to see with your mind? Well, in the case of the Barasana, their mythology speaks of a time when Rami Kumu, the Earth Mother, gave birth and from her blood emerged the four culture heroes, the four Iowa. And the Iowa

came up the Milk River, the Amazon, and encountered a world that was desolate. And Romikumu turned back over the world and they constructed the world anew. And then they disappeared and then she gave birth to humans. And humans since then have been charged with the duty to maintain the harmonic energies of the world. And that's why the shaman, contrary to folklore, at least for the bodhisattva, is neither a physician nor a priest.

He's more of a diplomat who has to maintain active dialogue with the spirit realm. From time to time, he has to act like a nuclear engineer who goes to the heart of the reactor and reprograms the world. It's a sense of human agency as being active in the maintenance of the harmonic. And that's not hippie ethnography. That's how these cultures think. That is a whole notion of sacred geography in Peru, you know, where you go through a kind of ordeal to reaffirm your loyalty to the earth. So, you know, it's not like we're going to mimic these societies, but they can inspire us to think in different ways. And we already are doing that. You know, the vision of the Earth from space had a tremendous impact.

In 1970, there wasn't a single country in the world with a ministry of the environment. Now there's not one that doesn't have one. And that's why I find the American in particular and the Canadian obsession with race so disturbing, because race is a total fiction. And we're living through a time, actually, where something has unfolded from genetics as powerful as the vision of the Earth from space. And that is the fact that in our lifetimes,

geneticists have proven to be true something we always hope. Humanity is one interconnected family. The genetic endowment of humanity is a continuum. Race is a fiction. We're all cut from the same genetic cloth. We're all descendants of the same roots in Africa, including those of us who walked out of Africa 65,000 years ago and embarked on this incredible 40,000-year journey that carried the human spirit to every corner of the habitable world. But that is such a revelation that race is just a social construct. And yet now we're living through a time where it's actually seriously accepted in universities a pernicious and, frankly, idiotic notion called critical race theory that suggests that my children, because they are white, are inherently racist. Now, in the very moment where the flower of the human heart can

expand to embrace the truth of ourselves being brothers and sisters, and again, not in the spirit of AP ethnography, we have the ideologues of the so-called progressive left, which is neither left, of course, nor progressive, coming along to deny the liberation of our own species in this really hideous way. I find it just appalling. And not only bad science and ideology passing itself off as science, but also just incredibly nihilistic and unhelpful.

And that's the kind of thing that's getting in the way of us taking the next steps. There is one place in South America where the pre-Columbian voice remains direct and pure, unfettered, unfiltered by anything save the slow turning of the world. In a bloodstained continent, the Indians of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta were never fully conquered by the Spanish. were never fully conquered by the Spanish. Descendants of an ancient civilization known as the Tairona, which occupied the entire Caribbean coastal plain of Colombia, the people of the Sierra Nevada today, numbering roughly 30,000,

three major indigenous groups, the Kogi, the Arawakos, and the Wiwas, long ago escaped death and pestilence to settle in this mountain retreat, this paradise that soars 6,000 meters above the Caribbean coastal plain of Colombia. There, over the course of five centuries, they were inspired by an utterly new dream of the earth, a revelation that affirmed the existence of eternal laws

that balance the Baroque potential of the human spirit and mind with all the forces of nature. These three people, Kogi, Arawako, and Wiwa, separated by language but closely related by myth and memory, share a common adaptation and the same fundamental religious convictions. They believe and acknowledge explicitly that they are the guardians of the world and that their rituals maintain the balance of life. For the people of the mountains, what is important, what has ultimate value, what gives life purpose, is not what is measured or seen, but what exists in the realm of aluna, the abstract dimension of meaning.

The nine-layered universe, the nine-tiered temple, the nine months a child spends in its mother's womb are all reflections of divine creation, and each informs the other. Thus, a liana is also a snake, the mountains a model of the cosmos. The hairs on a person's body echo the forest trees that cover the mountain flanks. Every element of nature is imbued with higher significance. They do not speak in metaphor. They believe these ideas to be literally true, such that even the most modest of creatures can be seen as a teacher, and the smallest grain of sand is for them a literal mirror of the universe. I want to go back to the footnotes

at the end. You're talking about some films that you made and you say, 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. Can you talk a little bit about what that might inspire, in the words of Father Thomas Berry, entirely new dreams of the earth. Can you talk a little bit about what that might be? What is that new dream of the earth, as you see it? Well, part of what you're referring to there is, when I was recruited to the National Geographic as part of the Explorer-in-Residence, which was really a conservation mission. It was

Jane Goodall for primates, Sylvia Earle for the oceans, and other people. There were seven of us, and I was a social anthropologist. And my mandate from the society was to use all of its resources to change the way the world viewed and valued culture in a decade. That was literally my contract. For about 10 or 12 years, I was free to go anywhere to tell these stories of culture. Critically, we didn't set out to do the standard kind of ethnographic film

celebrating the exoticism of the other. We very carefully selected stories that would show, not tell, the truth of this fundamental idea that every culture shares the same genius. Because this is actually the important thing about this genetic information, is that if we all share the same genetic endowment, by definition, all cultures share the same genius, right? And that suddenly, you know, that means how they use that genius is just a matter of choice. And that old Victorian idea of an evolutionary ladder to success from the savage to barbarian to the civilized

becomes just sort of ridiculous. And an artifact of the 19th century, as irrelevant to our lives today, is a notion that clergymen had then that the world was just 6,000 years old. So how do you show that? So we deliberately, for example, sailed on the Hokulea with the Polynesians and showed the genius of navigation that allowed 10 centuries before Christ, the Polynesian ancestors, to settle the entire Pacific. Or we went to the Arctic and did a film called The Arctic Art of Survival.

You know, the whole idea that Boaz spoke about, that they don't fear the cold, they take advantage of it. Or we went to Tibet and did The Buddhist Science of the Mind with Mathieu Ricard. And again, every one of these films kind of had a punchline. Like in Polynesia, it was if you took all of the genius that allowed us to put a man on the moon and applied it to the ocean, you got Polynesia. And in Tibet, the punchline, which we didn't really use as a punchline, it was an organizing thing in our heads, was something a monk said to me in Tibet at a monastery. He said, we in Tibet don't believe that you went to the moon, but you did.

You may not believe that we achieve enlightenment in one lifetime, but we do. So all these films were like that. And so we went Sacred Geography in Peru, or The Message of the Elder Brothers, or we did a film, oh, The Dream Time. I mean, that's a perfect example. When the British first went to Australia, they saw people that looked strange,

had a simple material technology, but what really offended the British is the Aboriginal people, the whole civilization, 1900 dialects, 670 languages. No one had any interest in progress. And because progress was the essence of the British model of life in the 19th century, the British in their inimitable way concluded the Australian Aborigines weren't people and they began to shoot them. But what was missing was a British inability to understand a devotional philosophy that was so subtle. And that was the dreaming, which isn't a dream. It's the idea that the world exists, but it's still being born. The world at your feet is unfolding. And the entire ethos in Australia was not improvement, but how do you improve on

something that's still being formed? It's like trying to get your embryo into Harvard. It doesn't make any sense. And the whole model was the opposite of improvement or progress. It was stasis. The entire purpose in life was to do nothing, to change nothing, to keep the world just as it was at the time of the rainbow serpent. It would be like as if all Western thought had gone into pruning the shrubs in the Garden of Eden to keep it just as it was when Adam and Eve had their fateful conversation. And what you were to do was the rituals along the song lines, the song lines being the trajectories walked at the dawn of time by the ancestral beings who sang the world into existence, to do the rituals through your clan territory to maintain the vitality and the rigor of the

songlines. And so the important thing is not who's right and who's wrong. Had we followed that devotional intellectual philosophy, we wouldn't put a man on the moon, but of course we wouldn't be talking about climate change. So 40,000 years from now, which insight, what civilization will be seen to have been the more prudent and the more prescient? A huge joint thank you to Wade Davis. Thank you, Wade. Thank you.

My pleasure. On Ideas, you've been listening to The Wayfinders Revisited. Anthropologist Wade Davis in conversation with producer Philip Coulter about his 2009 CBC Massey lectures, The Wayfinders, Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World. The Wayfinders is published by House of Anansi Press. At Massey College, many thanks to Emily Mockler, Matt Glanfield, and Joe Costa.

The program was produced by Philip Coulter. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the Executive Producer of Ideas And I'm Nala Ayyad