The Secret Wisdom Of Indigenous Peoples

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer, I’m your happiness expert, and this week, I want to talk to you about happiness from kind of a different angle. You know, I generally try to talk about positive psychology, in the foundation of positive psychology tools that make us happier, but of course, being happy is also a function of reducing suffering. I was struck by something that came up in the news this week about a woman named Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, and she’s a rather celebrated academic, former judge in the Canadian political sociological space, and she has been met with increasing controversy until kind of there’s been this day of reckoning where people have proven her to be a fraud.

Here’s the thing, she has presented herself throughout her adult life as a child of an indigenous parent, and that she has leaned on indigenous traditions to kind of take on this aura of authority to speak about indigenous issues, child welfare issues, and academic legitimacy because she claims that she comes from this community, and it turns out, she’s a fraud. She’s an older woman now, so she has spent her entire adult life living this fraud. What’s interesting about this is that it doesn’t make the work that she did through all these years unworthy, or lacking sophistication, or inherently containing its own wisdom. She was celebrated for a reason, not just by claiming to having indigenous heritage.

The whole question that I want to explore this week is how is it that we steal symbols and rituals from other cultures and yet sometimes fail to get what we’re really after, which is the wisdom that comes from those cultures? In particular, when it comes to indigenous people, there’s something that we intuitively know that these traditional peoples come from a place where they’re in communion with land and nature, and there’s something fundamentally wrong and causing great suffering in our current societies because of the absence of that connection with nature, and that’s what this video is kind of about, so stay tuned.

As international public speakers and best-selling authors, stay tuned to hear Paul and Jackson teach the practical science behind happiness and success. Yeah, so what is this that’s hurting us and preventing us from being happy based on the way that we look at the world, and why is it that indigenous cultural qualities have become so attractive?

Well, it’s not that complicated to think about, but the first thing we need to say is that it’s not about the symbolism and the rituals. When we steal symbolic artifacts or when we conduct certain rituals, they’re often absent the underlying wisdom and meaning that we intend to get from them. When people in progressive communities do smudging exercises to cleanse their aura of the defilements that exist in our society, there’s nothing wrong with it. In fact, the symbolism may in fact carry some of that wisdom, and there may be qualities of the burned smoke that actually are provocative, and cleansing, and healthy in their own ways. But we get confused when we take on these qualities and traditions, and rituals and new symbols because we so quickly, or never along the way, actually understand the underlying wisdom.

Let’s just take for example our current dominant culture, the culture that exists throughout almost all of the world that is about domination of nature. Where we have more or less enslaved plants and animals in service of humans, and we’ve created societies that are very separate and apart from nature. Instead, we look at nature as something that we go out and conquer or revisit periodically to fish or, heaven forbid, we bomb around in our ATVs. Whereas, by contrast, traditional indigenous cultures saw themselves as part of nature, and that nature was clearly all around them all of the time, and there was a spiritual connection.

That spiritual connection amongst the humans themselves also was about being in connection, and being in a community that has a unified purpose. Our collective well-being mattered, and our collective well-being as humans couldn’t be separate and apart from the well-being of the natural landscape that we lived in. This interweaving was so seamless and effortless that people were just a part of nature, literally just a part of nature, as we are humans today, even in the dominant culture, except we refuse to accept that and acknowledge that.

Here’s the really interesting point of this, there’s so much suffering in our society today, and we know scientifically what some of that is about. It’s about the disconnection, the isolation we have from one another. So we can be living in cities of millions of people but have no one around that we consider a best friend, or a family member that we can count on when we’re in times of trouble. In addition, we’re also isolated from the natural environment that we, in fact, from an evolutionary perspective, are a product of.

So, I am not suggesting that people need to culturally appropriate indigenous traditions, not for a moment. But can we look at the underlying wisdom that informs those traditions, rituals, and symbols, and say what is it that we need in our own lives? Can we reduce our own suffering by consciously seeking to undo our isolation, become connected to the community, and genuinely become a part of nature? When we’re out in nature, it’s not so that we can get the two miles running, or that we can buy our new deer, or climb the 4×4 up a new hill, but rather, actually sit in nature and be a part of it.

Have you ever sat long enough in one spot where the animals start to see you as not a threat, and they start to come close? And that you can start to soak in the feeling of nature in a way that’s just profoundly different than when we’re out there trying to conquer nature? Well, maybe this video is an invitation to do all of those things, to spend time in nature, to understand our own natural connection to the world that we live in, and not the concrete jungles that we have created.

Used as a way to dominate the natural settings that properly belong to us. More than anything, go out there and be close to family and friends, and reduce our isolation so that we create that sense of community and unified purpose that humans throughout the Earth fundamentally just do have. Even if that sounds overly profound for a Sunday morning video, thanks for watching. If you like this kind of content, click the like button, share it with friends and family, and we will see you again next week. Bye for now.