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Goethe’s science, radical in its approach, starts to stretch the boundaries of what is and what is not science, and alter the values and attitudes that we bring to science. A yet more radical questioning comes from the work of David Peat, who in his book Blackfoot Physics brings his study over many years of the cultures of Indigenous American people to bear on the whole question of how we understand and relate to the world around us. He argues that these peoples have systematic and sophisticated ways of doing this, which have as much claim as our own methods to be called "science," if by that we mean a "connected body of demonstrated truths" (Oxford English Dictionary).

Peat’s book constitutes a far-reaching demolition of the notion that science is a discovery of pre-existent "facts," independent of the cultural patterns of the surrounding society. His discussion makes it clear that the Western concept of science—investigating only things that are independent of particular human subjectivity, independent of human values and meaning—is itself a highly culturally-specific enterprise. This kind of detachment from human concerns is specifically characteristic of Western thought from 1600 almost to the present day, and it is even now coming to an end. In Blackfoot Physics we have a picture of an alternative, in which human concerns, emotions and senses are not seen as irrelevant distractions, to be screened out, but as essential parts of a dynamic universe, aspects of our humanness that are to be trained and perfected in the growth of wisdom in order to perceive the full truth.

Before we can approach this alternative way of doing science, we need a radical change in our worldview. It is not a matter simply of modifying in a peripheral way our conventional picture. To illustrate this, David Peat describes how, in a discussion between indigenous and western people at the Fetzer institute, "the discussion came round to the Mic Maq worldview and the question was asked ‘Why does ice heal?’ When a hole has been made in the ice for fishing, sometime later the ice will be found to have healed over ...... [W]hen faced with the question of the ice that heals we had to begin to let go of everything we had read and had been taught about Western physics ... I had to allow my mind to move into another world, a world with totally different approaches and insights ... only then could I respect how complete and meaningful it was." ⁽⁴³⁾ So his book encourages us to "move into another world."

Once we have started to move into this world, we realise that each element of what we think of as science could change, starting with the concept of knowledge, which is central to our conception of science. Science, for us, is about heaping up this stuff called knowledge, adding increasingly many bricks to the edifice of knowledge until the building is complete. The view of Indigenous societies is, however, totally different. "Knowledge, to a native person, cannot be accumulated like money stored in a bank; rather, it is an ongoing process better represented by the activity of coming-to-knowing than by a static noun." ⁽⁵⁵⁾ In some respects "Polyani’s tacit knowledge comes close to the Native American’s vision of coming-to-knowing" ⁽⁶⁶⁾, but it is more consciously articulated that this. Knowledge is something that is explicitly valued and developed; it is a process that very tangibly present in the stories and songs of the society.

The knowledge of Indigenous science must be passed from one generation to the next, but it is not given from one to the next. "You cannot ‘give’ a person knowledge in the way that a doctor gives a person a shot for measles." ⁽⁵⁹⁾ Instead, "In a traditional society children learn by watching and hanging around rather than through structured teaching, questioning, or experiment." ⁽⁷¹⁾ Moreover, this sort of coming-to-knowing is not abstracted, but rooted in the society itself and (a crucial but difficult concept) rooted in the landscape surrounding that society. "Knowledge in the traditional world is not a dead collection of facts. It is alive, has spirit, and dwells in specific places." ⁽⁶⁵⁾ For example,

"The skills necessary to build an Algonquin canoe are tied to a particular landscape, to the trees that grow there, to the game that can be trapped," ⁽⁶²⁾

This concrete rootedness is bound up with the way in which story is used as the main way of articulating and preserving this form of knowledge. Peat stresses that "The stories told by traditional people come out of their direct experience and are ways of teaching that are very different from the simple imparting of facts." In a meeting of a local school board, for example, the way the local was working was brought out when one man present simply told a story from his own childhood. "The old man had no need to analyze the philosophy of the local school board or discuss the relative value of different worldviews. He simply told a story, and, in the context of that school board meeting, the story brought into focus some of the things that people were sensing and feeling about the school’s affect on their community." ⁽⁵⁷⁾ As David Abram (1997) has noted, it is no mere accident that such stories are specific to the place where they occurred. Drawing on material from Basso, he describes how the Apache stories used for advising on socially cohesive behaviour are always finished with the tag-line "It happened at ...", concluding with a place-name which, in their language, was always evocatively descriptive of the landscape at that point. In this way, Abram claims, "a topographic place becomes the guarantor of corrected behaviour, the visible presence that reminds one of past foibles and that ensures one’s subsequent attentiveness."⁽¹⁵⁹⁾

There is thus a fundamental difference between Western knowledge systems, where the knowledge is a static body of theories that are abstracted from their specific concrete occurrence, projected into a Platonic realm of pure ideas, and the Indigenous knowledge systems where knowledge is not only dynamic, but is inseparable from the concrete. As Brown (1982) puts it when talking about the symbolism of the purification lodge, "It is important to note that to the Plains Indian the material form of the symbol is not thought of as representing some other and higher reality, but is that reality in an image." ⁽⁴³⁾

A consequence of this embodiedness of coming-to-knowing is the way in which the knowing has effect on the person. In the West, knowledge is imagined to stand apart from the knower, with no personal implications. "Within a traditional society, however, knowledge is a process that transforms and brings with it obligations and responsibilities... [K]nowledge for them is profoundly different. It is a living thing that has existence independent of human beings. A person comes to knowing by entering into a relationship with the living spirit of that knowledge." ^(66-7)

There is also a profound difference in the way this knowledge is articulated, which bound up with the structures of Indigenous languages. The rootedness of the knowledge is reflected in the rootedness of language in the sounds of the natural world, so that "[w]hen my Haida friend Woody Morrison speaks in his native tongue he tells me to listen to the sounds of the ocean, to the waves breaking on the shore, and for the cries of birds and the calls of animals."⁽⁸⁵⁾ As a result, language is structured so as to reflect the experiences of the world of the Indigenous societies, a different experiential world from ours. As we have already noted in the case of "knowledge" versus "knowing", "... European languages are noun-oriented ... Many Native American languages do not work this way. They are verb-based." ⁽¹²⁸⁾ Thus our science is full of abstract (noun) entities: electrons, fields, states and so on, where as Indigenous science deals with processes. Peat illustrates this in discussing the translation of a phrase describing a healing by means of song. Conventional translations would say that the healer (noun, subject) is singing. But "[w]hat is really happening is ‘singing’—the action, the process. The healer cannot really say that it is ‘he’ who is singing; rather the process of singing is going on....The image that began to emerge from that phrase was of a sick person and a healer and a process of singing taking place. The singing is the primary reality, for it did not originate with either person, nor was the healing something that passed in a transitive way from one to the other. The singing sings itself. The healing heals." ^(144-5)

We thus start to have a quite different metaphysics of action in the world. Instead of entities that impinge mechanically on each other, we have emerging processes. This in turn is reflected in a different emphasis in the handling of time, which Peat illustrates by reference to the Indigenous Australian concept of The Dreaming.

"To the Australian Aborigine the Dream Time or the Dreaming, when the ancestors walked the land and created the landscape, is not a historical "time past" but a living time that has not passed away, one in which a person can still participate through dreams, visions and ceremonies....

To the Native mind time is alive, and, if it must be pictured as a flowing river, then it is a river in which the mind is free to swim and move. Time does not exist apart from, and independent of, the spirits of nature and the lives of the people; its processes must be constantly acknowledged and renewed." ⁽¹⁹⁹⁾ "[I was led] to speculate that the very nature of time, within Indigenous science, is different from what we in the West normally experience. Or, to put it more precisely, that Indigenous people have access to dimensions within the spirit of time that we have forgotten."⁽²⁰³⁾

Peat ⁽²³⁵⁾ discusses how the expression of this in language was identified some time ago by Whorf, who pointed out that in the Hopi language the tenses that we use to express time are replaced by a distinction between what Whorf called the manifesting and the manifested. Importantly, the manifesting "comprises all that we call future, but not merely this: it includes equally and indistinguishably all that we call mental—everything that appears or exists in the mind, or, as the Hopi would prefer to say, in the heart, not only in the heart of man, but in the heart of animals, plants and things, and behind and within all the forms and appearances of nature, in the heart of nature [itself] ..." (quoted by Abram, 1997¹⁹²). If Whorf was correct (and this is a disputed area), it means that in this different metaphysic of emergent processes, the mental is inextricably bound up with the physical, to the extent that there is little meaning in differentiating the two.

The centrality of language to this aspect of Indigenous Science poses the same sort of difficulty as the centrality of mathematics to Western Physics. We are not dealing, as Chomsky maintained, with universal human ideas that can be expressed indifferently in various languages. Rather "Within Indigenous science, thoughts are inseparable from language. The language that is spoken is not simply a medium, or a vehicle for communication, rather it is a living thing, an actual physical power within the universe." ⁽²²⁴⁾ Not merely is the structure of language crucial, but its very sounds (rooted, as we have already seen, in the sounds of nature) are essential. Peat recounts how, when getting into a deep question with a Native friend, "he will remark, ‘Well, in Blackfoot we say ...’ and produce a pattern of sound for me. Or he may pause and sing to himself very softly as he tries to discover a way of putting the vibrations, and all that they convey, into the particular linguistic structure demanded by English." ⁽²²²⁾

Despite this, there are suggestive parallels between this Indigenous metaphysic and ideas in quantum physics, particularly in its quantum logic form, though in view of the integrity of the Indigenous worldview Peat is more cautious here than in his earlier books. I was particularly struck be the way in which the "manifesting" is so like the quantum state, which in quantum logic is defined as the pure potentiality that is bound up in the current state of affairs, the range of incompatible and cohabiting possibilities that first are given order by establishing a particular context, and then are selected from in actual manifestation. On this view, the distinctive feature of quantum mechanics is the way in which context (technically, the "observable") enters in determining the frame of reference within which manifesting takes place Peat’s account reflects this exactly, while adding crucial differences concerning the involvement of the human person, when he writes:

"Within Indigenous science, context is always important. Nothing is abstract since all things happen within a landscape and by virtue of a web of interrelationships. The tendency to collect things into categories does not exist within the thought and language of, for example, Algonquin speakers.

This leads to a profoundly different way of approaching and thinking about the world. For, in the absence of categories, each thing is mentally experienced on its own merits, and for what it actually is. Rather than indulging in comparison or judgement, Indigenous speakers attempt to enter into relationship with them." ⁽²³³⁾

The question that arises from all this for me is, how far has David Peat demonstrated that the Indigenous societies have a science, as opposed to a body of culture-specific practical wisdom? Yet this question un-asks itself as soon as it is examined closely. As I remarked at the start of this review, Western science is arguably just as culture-specific in its structure and focus as Indigenous science. And the distinction between "pure knowledge" and "practical wisdom" is a Western dichotomy which Indigenous peoples would not recognise. I want to enlarge on this second point in the light of Peat’s discussion of healing, before returning to his general analysis of the sense in which there can be said to be an Indigenous science.

To take the example of healing and medicine, the ideal for us is represented as the acquisition of pure knowledge, which is then applied to the construction of specific remedies for specific diseases. We see here the separation of knowledge and practice, thinking in terms of nouns (remedies) rather than processes and contexts, and categorisation in terms of diseases separated from social context. All these are alien to Indigenous thought. Peat argues that the coming-to-knowing of Indigenous science, as an active process of relationship between society and the world, in itself has a healing effect. Reflecting on the way in which "[w]ithin a relatively short period of time after the arrival of the first Europeans, between 90 and 95 percent of the population of the New World was wiped out," ⁽¹²¹⁾ he writes "The vision of a garden of Eden has, to some extent, been confirmed by the work of scientists who have examined the skeletons of early peoples. Evidence points to the fact that, before contact with Europeans, The People were remarkably free from diseases. Indeed epidemics seem to have arrived when Western civilization began to encroach upon the Americas. ... Why were they so free from disease? Could it perhaps have been something to do with their beliefs, science, society and way of life? ...In a very real sense, human beings create the conditions for their own illness, out of their dreams, beliefs, values, social structures, and thought." ^{(110, 115)}

Our categorisation of a remedy in terms of a context-independent ‘thing’ is again alien to their thought. "A Native medicine may contain the same biologically active molecule [as a Western medicine] and yet, as far as I understand it, Native healers would not consider these two medicines to be identical..." ⁽¹³¹⁾ This is because "Spirit is part of the ontological existence of medicine. When medicine is passed around the circle there is an exchange of the spirit , with some people giving spirit to it and others taking spirit." And he goes on to show how striking is this context-dependence when it comes to the preparation of a remedy: "Suppose a non-Native person spends several hours searching for a particular rare plant and finally spots one. His or her natural inclination would be to pick it at once, but the Native person will pass it by. It is only when they discover the third such plant that they will feel able to take it...This third plant is a gift from Mother Earth and, as with all gifts, if a person is to take it, it can only be as part of an exchange, The spirit of the plant must be acknowledged, for the medicine person seeks to come into a relationship with its power. ..." The Medicine chapter of this book illustrates the way in which echoes of these ideas have always have an implicit place in conventional medicine, despite its idea of a base of pure knowledge, a place that is now becoming more explicit.

The penultimate chapter of the book gives a point by point analysis of the sense in which Indigenous science is similar to, and different from, Western science, in the context of a classification of their different aspects. His scheme is worth reproducing in detail as a summary of the argument:

David Peat’s commentary on these points raises a series of fascinating issues regarding the way in which our own science could change in order to serve us in the ecological and social crises that now face us. For example, on the question of experimentation, he notes that although indigenous science does not set constraints on nature in the way that is essential to much of Western science, "there may be a sort of experimentation that is of an inward nature—an experimentation of the mind, so to speak. In a holistic world in which each part enfolds the whole, it becomes possible to enter into the inscape of the smallest insect, plant, or leaf and zoom outward into the whole universe. Sa’ke’j Henderson has suggested that the People’s relationship with plants, animals, rocks, and trees serves them as a sort of electron microscope." ⁽²⁵¹⁾We have here a totally new way of knowing, only occasionally touched on in Western science (as in Barbara McClintocks’s work referred to in the feminist scientific critique of E Fox Keller, 1985), a way of knowing that carries with it a moral involvement with what is known.

There has rightly been a great wave of interest in Indigenous American wisdom as a guide to the human predicament. Peat’s book is vital in showing us the way in which this wisdom impinges on our own scientific practice, and in showing us how to approach it with the openness and willingness to be transformed, which is the essential precondition to its understanding. It is a landmark book in our quest to enlarge the scope of science for the new millennium.

Abram, David (1997) The spell of the sensuous, Vintage

Brown, William Epes (1982) The spiritual legacy of the American Indian, Crossroad

Clarke, Chris (1996) Reality through the looking glass, Floris