The Nature of Knowledge: Calibrating Discourses across Cultures and Finding Common Disciplinary Ground

This essay approaches the relationship that J. Edward Chamberlin posits between stories and land from the standpoint of First Nations narrative and reflects on the process by which outsiders may come to understand how Native storytellers construct meaning and reflect on their present-day social and political circumstances. Such storytellers often employ traditional stories to establish cultural continuity and provide templates for contemporary reflexivity. Examples are drawn from more than four decades of fieldwork as a linguistic anthropologist, primarily among Plains Cree and Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe) peoples. Some proposals are made for establishing respectful relationships and transcending cross-cultural mis-communication. The essay both articulates and employs First Nations pedagogical principles drawn from oral tradition. It attempts to establish effective conversations across traditional academic disciplines of the humanities and social sciences as well as between Native and non-Native discourses. Because cross-cultural differences in meaning-making are deeply grounded in social practice as well as language in the narrow sense, careful attention to the underlying relational quality of philosophical thought in specific Native traditions is required to calibrate narrative practices and the appropriate forms of interaction entailed by them. The stories themselves are the tip of a complex iceberg and effective storytellers invite hearers or readers to interpret their words in terms of rich social and aesthetic conventions that differ greatly from those of mainstream Canadian society. “Common ground” is about traditional land in a literal sense but it is also about the potential for discursive common ground.