Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
water with the same pronouns we use for human beings. There is no “it” in the living
world, everyone is a “subject,” a person, and, thus, deserving of the same respect and
compassion that we extend to the human family.
This grammar reflects a fundamentally different orientation to the natural world,
which would be lost forever if endangered languages, like endangered species, be-
come extinct. Revitalization of language allows us to imagine and potentially imple-
ment different visions of sustainability.
Exercise of Spiritual Responsibility
The cosmologies of many indigenous peoples include what are called Original In-
structions or guidance about how to live in the world. In return for the gift of life on a
generous earth, humans are called to a covenant of spiritual and material reciprocity,
to care for the land and water that care for them. This moral responsibility is manifest
in religion and ceremony as well as in material lifeways, such as subsistence activities
and land management (DeLoria 1992). Ecological restoration provides an opportu-
nity for indigenous people to exercise their spiritual responsibility of caregiving and
reciprocity toward the land and the more-than-human world. A statement from Den-
nis Martinez (1992a) captures this added dimension to restoration, which is absent
from the strictly materialist views of restoration science:
Cultural survival depends on healthy land and a healthy, responsible relation-
ship between humans and the land. The traditional care-giving responsibilities
which maintained healthy land need to be expanded to include ecological res-
toration. Ecological restoration is inseparable from cultural and spiritual resto-
ration, and is inseparable from the spiritual responsibilities of care-giving and
world-renewal. Collectively and individually, these indigenous spiritual values
must be central to the vision of community ecological restoration. Western sci-
ence and technology, is a limited conceptual and methodological tool—the
“head and hands” of restoration implementation. Native spirituality is the
“heart” that guides the head and hands.
Ceremony is a powerful means to articulate moral responsibility, enter into spiri-
tual reciprocity, and promote group cohesion and reinforce shared values. In the wa-
tershed restoration work described by Dennis Martinez (1992b) for the Sinkyone In-
tertribal Project, the restoration began not with shovels in the ground, but with the
restoration of an ancient ceremony to welcome the salmon back home. In the lands
called the “sacred ecosystem,” healing of the spiritual relationship with the salmon
came before engineering of the hydrology and set the stage for the work to follow.
In the indigenous paradigm, it is said that we don't understand a thing until we
understand it with all dimensions of a human person—mind, body, emotion, and
spirit (Cajete 1994); Western scientific education gives privileged status to objective
information only and specifically excludes emotional and spiritual dimensions. Tradi-
tional ecological knowledge recognizes the different strengths of these multiple un-
derstandings and explicitly incorporates the cultural experience of the observer into
