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15. Traditional Knowledge and Belief
- University of Iowa Press
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15 TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND BELIEF The title of this chapter is a gross exaggeration. The chapter barely touches on what Dene culture holds and once held as measures of meaning and understanding. Here I attend only to ‘‘three understandings’’ and ‘‘four legends.’’ I selected them because they are salient features of Dene cultural holdings and because I have had occasion to think about them. Of the three understandings, ‘‘power’’ is by far the most deeply embedded in the traditional Dene worldview. It has implications for the understandings about blood and femaleness and about nakan and suffuses three of the four legends. three understandings power Only late in my research on the Dene of the North did I explicitly concern myself with the concept of what in English is usually called ‘‘medicine’’ but what is better expressed as ‘‘power.’’ The root term in Slavey and Dogrib is ink’on; Chipewyan adds a diminutive , ink’onaze. The months at Jean Marie River, my first field site, were not evocative of material on medicine power. In part this was due to my lack of grounding in the topic, in part the shared incapacity of those who could not well handle one another’s language to exchange understandings, and in part because, as Louis Norwegian indicated, there was not much said about power at Jean Marie River. One can often pick up on the concept of power through legends, magical stories, narrations of personal experiences, and other kinds of talk. Little of this went on at Jean Marie River, at least with the two ethnologists. Since I had no good grasp of what one might learn, when I came to explicate my field notes I fell back on the terminology of the anthropology of that period, ‘‘guardian spirit’’ and ‘‘shaman.’’ These terms I came to eschew. I now find that my efforts to comprehend what was known at Jean Marie River are not at variance with those fuller understandings that later I reached with Dogrib friends. In fact, however, I did not attend to ink’on in the material that Dogribs provided through the years until I took up the topic of the three prophets who arose among the Dogribs at the end of the 1960s. To understand the prophets and their understandings, I had to attend to the meanings and manifestations of ink’on, ‘‘power.’’ The concept was entwined with the people’s comprehension of the qualities of the three prophets (see my Prophecy and Power among the Dogrib Indians [1994]). Franz Boas (1910:336) characterized ‘‘the fundamental concept bearing on the religious life of the individual’’ in aboriginal North America as ‘‘the belief in the existence of magic power, which may influence the life of man, and which in turn may be influenced by human activity. In this sense magic power must be understood as the wonderful qualities which are believed to exist in objects, animals, men, spirits, or deities, and which are superior to the natural qualities of man.’’ Before the coming of the missionaries, the Dene had no institution of church, congregation, or priest. But the people shared understandings about power. The affirmation of that knowledge for the individual comes through personal experience: one’s dreams (as Louis describes below) are evidence, as well as the experience of persons cured by power and game taken through power. (Goulet [1994] and Rushforth [1992] provide rich discussions of the relationship of personal experience to knowledge among the Dene.) This section starts at Jean Marie River (Helm 1961), where I was to gain some understanding of ink’on from Louis Norwegian. In several conversations, Louis Norwegian, who at that time (1951–52) was forty-five years old, provided these understandings of power: in the old days, everybody, men and sometimes women, had medicine. It was good for curing, just like a white doctor’s medicine. It was good for the hunt, too. With medicine you just think about the kind of animal you want to kill. It’s pretty easy then to do so. A man would dream that someone came and told him where to find medicine, what kind of plant was good medicine. When the man awoke, he would see an animal going away from him. That animal was the person who had talked to him in the dream. That person would come back at other times, too—like when a man was using his medicine for curing—and tell the man what to do. The animal that...