HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW ?

=| Barren red sandstone hills

... of the Flaming Mountains mark the edge of the greater Tian Shan Mountain range near the northern rim of the Taklamakan Desert in Xinjiang, the Uighar Autonomous Region of western China. Two decades ago, east of the city of Turpan indigenous farmers unearthed an ancient boneyard. It has since revealed more than 2500 Gushi-culture tombs, among them one of a Shaman. It contained medicine bundles, including a leather bag within which was a wooden bowl holding a 789-gram pack of vegetative matter assumed to be coriander. It subsequently proved to be cannabis, and a chemical profile clearly established that it had been psychoactive. Radiocarbon dating placed its age at 2700bp. Alas, the seed material did not germinate.

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* Russo, et al. "Phytochemical and Genetic Analyses of Ancient Cannabis from Central Asia." 59 Journal of Experimental Botany 15 (2008) at 4171-4182.
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The age of such herbal cannabis, and its apparent use as a psychoactive / medicinal agent does not surprise the Chumash Ethnobotanist. "Uh huh," he nods. "Yup." The Silence is his. He can steer the discourse Upstream through his own People's ethnobotanic traditions or the Lakota, among who he has also lived, or Downstream through the mechanics of birthing his own native Farmacy and shepherding it through a DEA siege.

Instead he launches on the Value of creating Social Capital, exemplified by what has happened in California over the last decade. "These people are Heroes!" He's talking about Dennis Peron and Ed Rosenthal, among others. Many others. "They're moral exemplars, inspired by and functionally equivalent to Dr. King. What Dennis did with his motor scooters and Ed is doing with his refusal to take the path of Least Resistance .... " I'm thinking of Bob Randall and Mae Nutt.

On the low table beside where I sleep is a wood tray for preparing my medications, and upon it several small engraved glass disks. words like RISK and COURAGE and CREATE ...

Ethnobotanist's riff expands on Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone" argument that Social Networks have Value, and that Social Contacts can improve Productivity of both individuals and groups. Seamlessly stitching this to Richard Florida's 'creative classes' & 'cool cities' formulations, followed by a furious upstream digression thru Pierre Bourdieu and obligatory offerings of Vine DeLoria, both coming & going, before settling into a carefully composed plea for Localized, Green economies of Scale and Purpose and for the appropriate roles of Bands and Individuals within their own socio-political nets, it's quite a presentation for a backyard BBQ. This isn't the kind of stuff you hear from a buncha guys wearing Bears shirts ...

He is wearing an AIM shirt, and a floppy black hat with discrete banding. His dark hair flows, and the tattoo on his chin indicates his Chumash nationality, if not his Doctorate. I tap some 'shake' from a Zuni ceremonial flask and roll a tight little offering, wondering about the concentric circles of my life, of any life, well led ... how Old Truth & New Understanding are so often the same. This man is a Friend. We share similar professional backgrounds and political engagements. I know his wife, his sons (some of them), his dogs, his history (some of it).

Tis a Long Strange Trip indeed, and I suspect entering the most interesting of its Time.

Of his Chumash Ways (and of the Paiute and Dine whose Lands I also find myself moving), I Know Nothing. What I do know is that the more familiar Anishinaabeg of the Upper Great Lakes seem less constrained, more 'open-source' in their exchanges with Others. those like me from outside their cultural mainstream. Yes, there are things which are not Spoken, certain sorts of Names remain unvoiced, there is Knowledge not to be shared ... sometimes the hematite turtle I wear at my throat to honor another Friend almost burns sometimes, it seems so infused with his Mystery ... But Western aboriginals seem have more Sacred things not to be spoken of to Others, or to be dealt with only in appropriate, private contexts.

"We Know Nothing !" my 'Great Good Friend & Teacher,' an Odawa of the Turtle dodem, would shout at me, scowling, finger wagging. He didn't mean we were airheads, just that we rational scientific types ~ and as a pharmaceutical chemist, he did mean "we" ~ just weren't very good at understanding anybody else's cultural footing, much less at formulating anything approaching a Universal Truth. There is so much going on around us of which we are unaware. "We Know Nothing!" In many respects the most learned man I have ever known, the Turtle never gave me a straight answer to any question I ever asked. Never led me astray or told me anything I now know to be Not True, either. Nothing. He had a Dream Name he never revealed to anyone, far as I know; he certainly had Medicine.

Ethnobotanist has at Dream Name as well, which I do know, but remains His to divulge. The fact he told me his Dream Name at all was something of a shock. I was in the Coastals among his friends & family that afternoon, moving about with a camera as we ate and talked and made music in his walled yard. Late in the day we drove a short distance to a stable around the other side of a citrus grove. There, moving comfortably among almost thirty fine Arabians in corrals he had helped build, we talked earnestly, privately, about business matters. I mentioned something ethnic, quite esoteric, regarding a small piece of remote nDn Country far from California, not even near a road. He knew the place I described; it was where he had been given his Dream Name, which he then revealed and explained to me. It makes perfect sense of the context of his Life, as I know it.


Convergences of the sort suggest what Turtle called the "Great Mystery." Such things - Revelations, Crossings, the Obvious Becoming Evident, the Relevance of Lessons brought to us ~ are done for Purposes however imperfectly understood. There really is no such 'thing' as Coincidence, Really, there isn't, except in the most literal of meanings ~ certainly not in the idiomatic sense, the way we bandy the word about.

Fellow humanists and others of the modern, euro-centric worldview can say what they want about such things, about what Turtle introduced to me as 'thinking in Indian.' Rationalists might translate aboriginal sacred-privacy norms as equivalent to a modern hybrid of our so-called "medical ethics" and a traditional church (pick one) liturgy. Close enough, clearly, to be honored ... and I'm really tired of fucking up. Forgive me, my Dine friends especially.

To explain as best I can, Ethnobotanist's Dream Name indicates that his life's Mission ought best be to expressed as service as the 'vessel' through which Spirit may be expressed. I hear this sort of credo expressed by a lot of people from the Arts, or from spiritually-motivated christians to whom it means and entirely different sort of thing, far more metaphoric.

I have no reason to doubt this is so. Why would anyone?

He is Singing his Song.

I gotta go for it.


= 22 Nov 08