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Why Indigenous Worldview? |
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Tapestry was founded to operate within Indigenous worldview because we cannot achieve our organizational goals within the dominant contemporary worldview. We know. We've tried. And the bottom line is that to learn the wisdom of the Land, from the Land, one must step into a worldview that is based on the Land. Indigenous worldview is.
Tapestry's founder and vision-keeper, a Choctaw Indian, scientist, and educator, tried for 30 years to achieve the goals that have become Tapestry's mission from within contemporary modern culture -- in positions on university faculties, national professional committees, research review panels, and even as the head of a regional education initiative. She learned first-hand that modern contemporary worldview simply shapes the playing field so extensively that it's not possible "to get there from here." Even things like a group's seating arrangement or the structure of a committee reinforce modern cultural worldview in ways that make it impossible for a group of people who really want to learn Indigenous wisdom to do so. This comes as no surprise to most Indigenous persons, though it is not widely known or understood by people in the dominant cultural worldview. So she founded Tapestry to operate within Indigenous worldview as a baseline position, to make her work possible.
One of the most important ways the difference between modern and Indigenous worldview plays out in our mission is that educational programs structured within modern worldview often teach "about" the Land, intellectually. This both reflects and reinforces the separation from the natural world that people of contemporary culture already feel. Even many "experiential" land-learning experiences in contemporary culture assume that such a separation exists; they are structured along adversarial "survival" lines. Because it is exactly this sense of separation that needs to be healed by reconnection, its assumption in any baseline of learning "about" the land will automatically make reconnection almost impossible.
Within Indigenous worldview, on the other hand, it is possible to create a space in which people can learn from the Land for themselves. We help them reconnect to the land by simply putting them in an environment where no separation exists between humans and nature. Once the self-imposed separation between people and nature is gone, human hearts and the land itself take over.
Tapestry's role in this process is (1) to create the kinds of environments where this sort of encounter can take place between people and the land; (2) to provide the support people often need to move into and out of the Indigenous worldview that makes it possible; and (3) to provide resources that help people understand the things they learn during the process. You can get an idea of how we accomplish this, in practical terms, by exploring our guidelines for how to get the most from your participation in one of our programs.
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