The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

The Spatsizi Wilderness of British Columbia houses the headwaters of “three of Canada’s most important salmon rivers” (116). The geography of these rivers is central to the economy and religion of several First Nations cultures. Despite their sacredness, these rivers have recently been opened to the mining industry by the Canadian government. Against the formal protests of the local First Nations peoples, the proposed endeavors will destroy thousands of kilometers of the landscape and deposit toxic chemicals into the water supplies of indigenous communities. Such ecologically and culturally destructive action for the sake of profit is a foundation of our resource-driven economy. It is the “manner in which we have reduced our planet to a commodity, a raw resource to be consumed at our whim” (119).

The Western relationship to resource dates back to the Age of Enlightenment, an intellectual and philosophical movement that began in 17th-century Europe. Scientists and philosophers of the era argued “phenomena that could not be positively observed and measured could not exist” (120). This reduced all aspects of existence to the material. Land lost agency, animals lost souls, and all biological activity was viewed as mechanical.

In his youth Davis worked in forestry, where he was indoctrinated into a belief that forests exist to be cut. A Kwakwaka’wakw youth of Vancouver would look at forests as ancient forces that form the settings to their rites of passage—as something integrally tied to their own human identity. Ultimately, the actual meaning of the forest is irrelevant: “what matters is the potency of a belief, the manner in which a conviction plays out in the day-to-day lives of a people, for in a very real sense this determines the ecological footprint of a culture” (122).

Many indigenous belief structures uphold stewardship of landscape as core tenets. The coca leaf is known as the “Divine Leaf of Immortality” (124) to the Inca of the Andes. Cocaine, derived from the plant and originally brought into medicine in 1855, is still our most powerful topical anesthetic. However, by 1940 the eradication of traditional Incan coca fields was well underway, and a UN priority. Use of the plant was blamed for social ills attributed to Incan groups. Studies in 1975 that Davis assisted, however, showed no toxicity to the chewing of the plant; in fact, they found that the leaves contained “more calcium than any plant ever studied by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which made it ideal for a diet that traditionally lacked a dairy product” (126).

To the 6 million Incan people who live in Colombia and Bolivia, the land they live off of is sacred. When people meet, they pause and ritually exchange coca, an act that affirms their social and ecological connectivity. The ritual of mujonomiento, running the boundaries, in which the men of the village run 30 kilometers over mountains in a pilgrimage race, affirms peoples’ relationship to each other and their communal geography. To the Inca, sacred landmarks do not contain spirits but are themselves alive. At Sinkara, the site of massive yearly pilgrimage, the Inca people dance and perform rituals for three days in reverence and propitiation to the mountains and jungle. The very architecture of Machu Picchu, aligned with the passage of celestial bodies, the orientation of mountains, and the movement of rivers, is a testament to the Incas’ deep connection to their landscape.

At high altitude in the Andean Cordillera of South America, the Kogi, Arhuacos, and Wiwa people have lived undisturbed for 500 years. Their world is a perfect microcosm of ecological stewardship and balance. Central to their mythology is the Great Mother’s creation of the world through weaving, and today their motions over their landscape are “threads […] [their] community lays down a protective cloak upon the earth” (144). These three tribes conceptualize the people of the lower world as younger brothers, and they see the industrial destruction of the Andean landscape and the recession of the polar caps as a single sign of the folly of the younger brothers, “harbingers of the end of the world” (146). Despite industrial encroachment and the violence of paramilitary groups, these peoples remain pacifistic and continue to publicly demand the righting of the world through ecological communion.

The aboriginal people of Australia never attempted to “improve upon the natural world, to tame the rhythm of the wild” (148). They lived in their ecosystem as it was, traveling it while singing, then dreaming of the next day’s activities as they slept. Their routes through their landscape are known as the “songlines” (148). Walking these lines allows the Aborigines to enter Dreamtime, the realm of the ancestors, where “past, future, and present merge into one” (149). To walk these lines “is to become part of the ongoing creation of the world,” and “everything on earth is held together by Songlines” (149).

When Europeans arrived, they had no concept of such action and saw aboriginal ways as savage and backward, against Western notions of progress. Asserting Aborigines were not human, Europeans massacred them. Both aboriginal population and language were almost fully destroyed and are still disappearing.

The Aborigines were one of the first people to leave Africa, and they slowly grew to inhabit every corner of the Australian continent. A complex sphere of kin relationships and accompanying rights and obligations unites the hundreds of bands living as separate communities over this landscape. Spending time with a family from one of these communities, Davis realized the aboriginal peoples are not truly nomadic but live within the territories delineated by their ancestors. They honor their ancestors by walking the portion of the songlines that pass through their clan territory.

In all of their original dialects, the Aborigines have no word for time. There is no notion of linear progress—the Dreamtime occurs now as it did at the beginning of the world. Davis observes, “The entire purpose of humanity is not to improve anything. It is to engage in the ritual and ceremonial activities deemed to be essential for the maintenance of the world precisely as it was at the moment of creation” (158). Their culture, as W.E.H. Stanner wrote, “defeated history” (159).

The people of the Sacred Headwaters in British Columbia have formally called for the end of all industrial action there. They aim to protect this place for the sake of “generations as yet unborn” (160) who have always had “greatest claim to ownership of the valley” (160). Like the Aborigines of Australia and the tribes of the Andean Cordillera, they call for balance and stewardship, and work to educate the younger brothers.