IWCD108: Indigenous Wisdom, Modern Communities & Cultural Amnesia

Happy hump day (Wednesday)!

So yesterday I tweet replied to something that (unexpectedly) resulted in a few newsletter signups and Twitter follows:

It was encouraging to see because this ancestral/indigenous aspect is something I've held close to since animating indigenous myths and legends for Tuvalu more than a decade ago (see Tales From Nanumea).

It's also something I think is missing in the world of online community-building today: wisdom from the [deep] past. The realm of indigenous and ancestral knowledge.

The quote by George Santayana, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it," couldn't be more relevant.

Applying indigenous wisdom to modern communities

Most of what I know about "community" stems from my Polynesian ancestry. And what I learned about my Polynesian culture - at least as I traveled the world - is that it is similar to many other indigenous cultures globally (especially in pre-Christian times).

My hunch has always been that there's deep wisdom that's been lost but could be vital in constructing new digital worlds like the metaverse. And more importantly, the communities that will populate them.

Without such wisdom, we might unwittingly sever our relationship with the physical world. To our own detriment.

It could be argued that we've done this already (in the West) by cutting our personal relationships (e.g. through our cultures and beliefs) with Mother Nature. For when you lose your relationship with a person, place, or thing, you value it less.

Even modern indigenous groups like the Australian Aborigines are suffering from things like cultural amnesia, due to decades of intergenerational trauma.

So what?

Since indigenous cultures are known for their long histories and oral traditions, a lot of which have been lost due to a failure to record or pass on, we have work to do to try and dig deeper into the past. By doing so, we can extract the lessons from centuries - or even millennia - of cultural evolution. With respect. We do not have to reinvent the wheel, only apply the wheel in new ways for modern times.

I believe we all have indigenous ancestry somewhere down the line. Because if you can't find your own indigenous ancestry, where are you truly from?

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