Indigenous knowledge

“ But it is curious to note in this nineteenth century the lingering traces of the old sentiment; and to see men of science still finding it difficult to emancipate themselves from the idea that this continent is so essentially another world, that it is inconceivable to them that the races by which it is peopled should bear any affinity to themselves or to others of the Old World. American ethnologists long clung to the idea of an essentially distinct indigenous race ”

“ The foreign elements intermingled with the native culture in sections of the Eastern hemisphere produced an abnormal condition of society, where the arts of civilized life were remolded to the aptitudes and wants of savages and barbarians.476 Tribes strictly nomadic have also social peculiarities, growing out of their exceptional mode of life, which are not well understood. Through influences, derived from the higher races, the indigenous culture of many tribes has been arrested, and so far adulterated as to change the natural flow of their progress. ”

“ But in the New World the inaptitude of the native race for useful serfdom largely contributed to the introduction there of other and very diverse races from Africa and Asia; so that now within a well-defined North American area, indigenous populations of the three continents of the Old World are displacing its native races. ”

“ The core values of life, death, nature, the cosmos, the divine and the sacred are harmoniously and intimately shared by all the so-called "indigenous" peoples of the American continent. What bonds and identifies peoples with indigenous roots is the philosophical-cultural matrix that gives us structure us and not the alleged "Latinity" (“Latin ethnicity”) which was invented by Napoleon III to seize the non-Anglo Saxon America in the 19th century or the "Hispanic ethnicity” with which English speakers catalogue us in the 20th century. ”

“ To be sure, some of the wealthy, who in early childhood were sent to England to be educated there, and who spent there perhaps the greater part of their lives, may have preserved the native vigor of their race; but I refer to the multitude born on West Indian soil, and their children who had continually inhabited it. Have they not become a race, if possible, as miserable as that mixed element which is acknowledged as the indigenous one of the American tropics? You will find that fact confirmed by every intelligent traveller. ”

“ For, as in the Pacific and other regions, so in India, civilisation is bringing about a radical change in indigenous manners and customs, and mode of life. It has, in this connection, been well said that "there will be plenty of money and people available for anthropological research, when there are no more aborigines. ”

“ This is well, for all these things teach us what manner of men made up the indigenous race, what were their powers, their aspirations, their mental grasp. But closer to very self, to thought and being, are the connected expressions of men in their own tongues. ”

“ We are just, indeed, beginning to comprehend the true character of the indigenous Indian civilisation of the era of the discovery. These remarks are sufficient to show how feebly the obligations of letters and Christianity have been performed, with respect to the red men, by the colonists of those types of the early European civilisation, who rested themselves on feudal tenures, military renown, and an ecclesiastical system of empty ceremonies. ”

“ Where these tribes have come so much in contact with other peoples, and even with well-meaning white enterprise on their behalf, that they have attempted to substitute for their old ways a method and mode of living indigenous neither to the climate nor to their own physique, they have invariably degenerated. ”

“ Ask it of one of our English anatomists. His answer is as follows:—“Let us attend now to the greatest of all experiments ever made in respect of the transfer of a population indigenous to one continent, and attempting by emigration to take possession of another; to cultivate it with their own hands; to colonize it; to persuade the world, in time, that they are the natives of the newly occupied land. Northern America and Australia furnished the fields of this, the greatest of experiments. Already has the horse, the sheep, the ox, become as it were indigenous to these lands. ”

“ It is however true that we have a western heritage, but we have to analyze that, on the one hand we have a "Mother Culture", the indigenous or anahuaca; it gave us a way of feeling and interacting with human beings, nature, the universe and the divine and sacred. ”

“ This thin distinction between what is right and what is not—so thin that men of the cold north cannot make it out—comes under the category of those indigenous peculiarities which surpass all understanding. ”

“ The custom, as observed by the most ancient amongst the peoples of the earth, is, and was some thousands of years ago, a religious rite, and differs altogether from the practice of the blacks, who in this merely endeavour to test the powers of endurance of a candidate for admission to a certain rank in the tribe. In considering the effect, however, of this and other practices that are mentioned, one may believe that they are really indigenous, and that they have originated either in consequence of a peculiarity of climate or from the necessity of limiting the population. ”

“ With us those dark hours vanished through the slow growth of indigenous evolution. Here the strong hand of the alien has interposed, and, stretching at present the unbridged chasm of a thousand years, has enforced reform from without. ”

“ It is among these tribes, inhabiting a wild and forbidding country, undisturbed by the march of progress and civilization, that one may find the indigenous races living under the same conditions and maintaining the traditions and customs that prevailed before the coming of the white man to the western world. ”

“ The second is that, for the first time in these five centuries of colonial invasion, indigenous peoples have sought to extend their uprising to other indigenous peoples and are linked with to non-indigenous civil society, as well as giving an international character to their struggle. ”

“ Had the ambition of the chiefs of some of these industrious tribes been turned to the acquisition of wealth, probably we should have seen indigenous civilised nations in the heart of South America similar to those found on the Andes of Peru and Mexico. ”

“ The legitimate children were in the proportion of one to every one hundred and twenty-eight of the ladino population, and one to every forty-one of the Indios. The natural births stand one to each one hundred and eighty-three ladinos, and one to each two hundred and seven Indios,—proportions which speak volumes for the superior morality of the indigenous population. ”

“ I have even seen it doubted whether a race of men can ever become thoroughly naturalized in a locality to which it is not indigenous. To such vagaries it is a sufficient answer that the English are no more indigenous to England than to America. They are indigenous to Central Asia, and as they have survived the first transplantation, they may be safely counted on to survive the second. A more careful survey will teach us that the slow alteration of physique which is going on in this country is only an exaggeration of that which modern civilization is tending to bring about everywhere. ”

“ In those parts of the country which are in a prosperous condition ideas and manners imported from the coast districts are gradually overcoming and absorbing all aboriginal conceptions, but on the other hand, in jungle-covered and backward lands the colonists are always corrupted by the superstitions of the indigenous races. ”

“ No indigenous civilization exists in America to-day, yet the effects of a former culture are not altogether absent. The descendant of the Aztec, Maya, and Quiché, is still of superior mind and haughtier spirit than his roving brother who boasts of none but a savage ancestry. ”

“ Examples of the modification and possible elevation of ancient indigenous societies by incoming aliens, such as have been seen in Mexico or Peru, India or Japan, Egypt or Barbary, are not in point; for in these cases local civilisations certainly existed long before the foreign influence. We must look to the history of the relations of white and negro, or other savage, races in the homes of the latter, and the results of such inquiries are far from conclusive. Does civilisation so originated grow and thrive? Do even the races thus civilised themselves any longer thrive and grow? ”

“ The traditional norms of indigenous peoples have been and continue to be an essential element for the social regulation of the life of the communities and, consequently, for the maintenance of their cohesion. ”

“ Throughout the whole region of the backwoods, there still exists a sparse population of the indigenous race: dwelling, as their ancestors did, under tents or in the open air; trafficking in small articles of their own manufacture; in short, performing very much the same métier as the Gitanos in Europe. ”

“ The widespread use of Spanish in urban and rural areas, the labour migration of indigenous people to the cities and the partial success of bilingual education programmes have been determining factors in the decreasing vitality of indigenous languages. ”

“ Inform indigenous communities, in their own languages in keeping with the traditions of the indigenous peoples and by adequate means, of their rights, obligations and opportunities in various areas of national life. ”

“ How can we account for an indigenous population, first imagining itself to be immigrant, and then developing a contempt for the rest of the race, equally indigenous with itself, on account of a fictitious difference in origin? Finally, there is the archaeological evidence. The older civilization comes to an abrupt end, and it does so, on the mainland at least, at the very period to which tradition assigns the Dorian migration. ”

“ So far as is known, the primitive culture of the aborigines of North America is fundamentally indigenous, being the reactions of the Indian to his environment, added to whatever rude equipment of body and of mind was possessed by the human beings who at some remote Culture of Indians essentially indigenous. epoch reached the new world from the old, if, indeed, America was not, as Ameghino, on the basis of the discoveries of fossil anthropoids and fossil man in southern South America, maintains, the scene of origin of man himself. ”

“ It is true that assimilative colouration seems to have little modified the colour of indigenous races, even in Africa, if we take a comprehensive view of the whole area. But we must not forget that men have so often migrated from their original birthplaces, and more than that, much mixture has taken place. ”

“ Since we have drawn the distinction between adapted and indigenous folk-song, the question naturally arises whether there exists in America a truly indigenous folk-song at all. It has been agreed that America, having been colonized by Europeans, possesses no native culture whatever, except such as the Indians may have had. The Indian, indeed, has the best claim to the name American, being indigenous, or at least so early a colonizer as to have constituted virtually a native race. ”

“ Now that the idea of their being a separate race of high antiquity has died out, and their earthworks, with the implements and ornaments found among them, are brought into comparison with those of other tribes of the country, they have settled into representatives of one of the most notable stages of the northward drift of culture among the indigenes of America. ”

“ Only this realisation shall lead us to recognise the multifaceted nature of endangered languages and cultures and to make effective contributions to their survival rather than remain silent witnesses of their extinction. ”

“ Indigenous languages have become visible to the Ecuadorian Spanish-speaking society only in the last few decades thanks to the successful positioning of the indigenous movement since the mid 1980s and the principles of plurinationality and interculturality established by the 2008 Constitution. ”

“ By indigines I mean the various sedentary tribes generally called Pueblos as distinguished from the intrusive Utes, Navajos and Apaches, which tribes cames in chiefly for predatory reasons after the indigenous tribes had acquired sufficient property 294to make them desirable prey. This indigenous culture was doubtless composite as to blood and the uniformity developed was the natural result of living for a long period of time under definite uniform environmental conditions. ”

“ As a scheme of life under established institutions, it was a remarkable display of the condition of mankind in two well marked ethnical periods, namely, the Older Period and the Middle Period of barbarism, the first being represented by the Iroquois and the second by the Aztecs, or ancient Mexicans. In no part of the earth were these two conditions of human progress so well represented as by the American Indian tribes. A knowledge of the culture and of the state of the arts of life in these periods is indispensable to a definite conception of the stages of human progress. ”

“ In the first case there are some eight millions of people ultimately derived from various savage tribes in Africa but long since acclimatized, disciplined to labor, raised to civilized life, Christianized, and by the acquisition of the English language brought within a world of ideas inaccessible to their ancestors. ”

“ I have listened to thousands of old Native men of many different tribes in my time, I have heard them speak their inmost thoughts, not through interpreters—who ever learned anything through an interpreter?—I have studied these people in and out of Court, officially and privately, in their kraals and in the veld during many years, and I say that I can find nothing whatever throughout the whole gamut of the Native's conscious life and soul to differentiate him from other human beings in other parts of the world. ”

“ They are to be regarded as the type of aboriginal mind, as the measure of intellectual power of our Sons of the Forest; as speaking their sentiments, their hopes and their fears, whatever they were or are, whether elevated or depressed, whether raising the race or sinking it in the scale of untutored nations. ”