Lessons from the Indians

Loren Eiseley, in his book, “The Invisible Pyramid,” notes that many anthropologists have commented on the lack of interest on the part of many primitive people including the Indians toward technology and innovation. One researcher was quite surprised at how little an Indian tribe he was studying regarded his gifts, including fine, woolen blankets. He would find these things casually discarded. It wasn’t that the Indians didn’t understand that the modern products were better than their own, but they didn’t care. They were content with what they had.

So, if this man had given the tribe a compound bow (which wasn’t available then), would the Indians have been overjoyed? Now they could kill a bison from twice as far away. Would they have eagerly accepted this advantage? Probably not: bows had always been made of aspen with twisted sinews for string, and that’s the way they were supposed to be made. And the traditional bow worked perfectly well. True, the hunter didn’t always kill the bison, but he killed enough. If you were a white chauvinist you could justifiably say, “These people have no desire to improve themselves.”

They didn’t: they lived at a subsistence level, in harmony with their environment and were perfectly satisfied.

This lack of initiative seems so alien to us and yet, ask any teacher if they have ever seen the same thing in an American classroom. Are math, history and English — all absolutely indispensable to success in our modern world — eagerly embraced by the typical teenager?

While a student might admit that these things could indeed be valuable, they have no practical interest in them because they are alien to their own tribal culture, that is, the society of their peers. And the teacher cries, “These kids have no desire to improve themselves.”

This is not the lesson you anticipated, is it? And I’m not even sure it is the right lesson. After all, are we happier than the Indians? The Indians’ culture survived for a thousand years; can we say the same for ours?

The real question is, “Is progress good?” If you live in a developed, Western country it is indispensable. But if you live in an isolated tribe (and can manage to stay isolated) it is a catastrophe. Progress inevitably marks the death of the tribe. Tribes are always ruled by old men and they may not know much, but they know that innovation is lethal. An innovator is promptly killed or kicked out.

So, which policy is better? I don’t know but the novelist Patrick O’Brian says that the Spanish used to have a phrase for saying goodbye: “May you meet no new thing.”

Willis Cook is a retired electrical engineer who was born in New Orleans and grew up in the Mississippi Delta. He lives on Varner Road in Franklin County.