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Castellanos's third characteristic of indigenous knowledge is that it is
experiential, and what's important about this characteristic is that experiencing
knowledge through your senses, is much more powerful than being told Something,
or reading it in a book, say. So, one of the reasons that so much of
indigenous knowledge is something that a person experiences, is that, it relates
back to that personal charcteristic. It's something that, that body has
experienced. That, that body has gone through, and so
the understanding is that person's alone. Now, other people who go through similar
experiences pick up similar knowledge and then there's a possibility certain for
relating to one another about that experience.
But until someone goes through that experience themselves, they can't really
know that knowledge. And it's important to think about some of
the indigenous languages actually have different verb forms for knowledge that is
gained through one's own experience, or one's own senses, and knowledge that is
gained through someone, relating the knowledge to that person.
So you would actually have a different verb form,[FOREIGN] to describe, That you
heard John is sick, rather than saw that John is sick for yourself.
So when you're describing it to someone else the verb form that you use
demonstrates your certainty based on how you experienced that knowledge.
So the experiential component is so important that it's part of the ways that
we use language to talk about it. The way the language the linguistic verbs.
So that's, that's just how important the experience is.
Another example, going back to that, that story of the elder I, I told in the
earlier characteristic there is an example of someone who heard that the land is
alive and that they wanted to experience that.
And so they went to an elder and said, I want to understand what is meant by this
notion that the land is alive, can you tell me.
And the elder said, well, come with me. And took the, proceeded to take the person
on walks through the forest you know, through the bush and you know, coming back
to their, their cabin each time. And after a few days of this, the person
thought, well I wonder if he's ready to share this knowledge yet, and he said are
you ready to tell me what. What is meant by the land is alive and the
elders said, obviously you need a few more days and we kept walking with them.
So, again, he wasn't going to tell them what it meant but he had to experience it
himself through his own senses and so, a number of the you know, the key knowledge
gaining opportunities or ceremonies have to do with one being exposed to an
opportunity, to experience something for themselves.
And again people won't talk about other people's experiences in a, a traditional
knowledge setting or way those ones who are still.
Very embedded in indigenous cultural ways of, of knowing and relating, can only
speak for themselves. And there's that famous example that,
Caslano recounts of the Cree testimony during the Great Whale Project and
discussing the environmental damage that was being done by the dams construction
and the person was asked to, Tell, they were asked to provide, to, to do the oath
in court. And they were, they had to translate in
Cree what was meant by, "The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth".
And the translation. Was you know, something that holds for all
people. That's true.
And the person said, well I can't tell you that, but I can tell you what I know.
So again, that sense of one's experience being what one can know, and that the
relationship to truth is, there is no one truth But there, there's no universal
truth. But there's multiple truths based on
multiple personal experiences. And that's one of the big connotations of
the experiential characteriscic of the indiginous knowledge.
Jean-Paul RestouleAssociate Professor
