Boroditsky, Lera. How Language Shapes the Way We Think. Streaming Video. TED | TEDWomen 2017, 2017. https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shapes_the_way_we_think.

See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKK7wGAYP6k

Kuuk Thaayorre language (Australia) orients everything with respect to cardinal directions or is mapped onto their terrain/land. Even their perception of time (chronology) is mapped onto the land with respect to their bodies.

Map of Content Vizualized (VMOC)

a start of thinking on the space of converging written and visual thinking, but not as advanced as even Raymond Llull or indigenous ways of knowing which more naturally merge these modes of thinking.

Western though is just missing so much... sigh

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnwelsh/comments/10acr9j/sut_i_ddweud_i_memorized_yn_gymraeg/

Fascinating that the Welsh language doesn't seem to have a direct translatable word/verb for "to memorize". The closest are dysgu (to learn, to teach) and cofio (to remember).

Related phrase: yn dysgu cerddi ar gof (to learn poems by heart), though this last is likely a more direct translation of an English concept back into Welsh.

Is this lack of a seemingly basic word for such a practice a hidden indicator of the anthropology of their way of knowing?

If to learn something means that one fully memorizes it from the start, then one needn't sub-specify, right?

Read in juxtaposition with the knowledge of orality and along with Graeber & Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, one could certainly argue that there are other ways of knowing which provide potentially better pathways to democracy.

Further, the simple fact of basic literacy doesn't necessarily encourage democracy. Take a look at the January 6th (2021) insurrectionists who were likely broadly literate, but who acted more like a damaged oral society and actively subverted democracy.

Literacy plus "other things" are certainly necessary for democracy. How do we define these other things, and then once we have, is literacy still part of the equation for democracy?

There's an interesting parallel to the knowledge that Cecil Sharp collected the song from Mrs. Combs in Knott County Kentucky in 1908 and the same sorts of citations given by indigenous peoples who often indicate where they learned a piece of knowledge.

Stemming from British history, but often applied in other areas including the history of science, whig history is a historiography that presents history as a path from an oppressive, backward, and wretched past to a glorious present. The term was coined by British Historian Herbert Butterfield in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). It stems from the British Whig party that advocated for the power of Parliament as opposed to the Tories who favored the power of the King.

It would seem to be an unfortunate twist of fate for indigenous science and knowledge that it was almost completely dismissed when the West began to dominate indigenous cultures during the Enlightenment which was still heavily imbued with the influence of scholasticism. Had religion not played such a heavy role in science, we may have had more respect and patience to see and understand the value of indigenous ways of knowing.

Link this to notes from The Dawn of Everything.

American children aren't encouraged to as attentive imitators as their foreign counterparts and this can effect their learning processes.

Western cultures describe people's position in the world with them as the center, while Indigenous cultures, like those of the Warlpiri Aboriginal language of Central Australia, embed the person as part of the world and describe their position with respect to it using the cardinal directions.

When reviewing back over at the end, ask:

Did the book show that Indigenous ways of knowing do contain "science"? What evidence is presented here?

The phrase "ways of knowing" is fascinating and seems to have a particular meaning across multiple contexts.

I'd like to collect examples of its use and come up with a more concrete definition for Western audiences.

How close is it to the idea of ways (or methods) of learning and understanding? How is it bound up in the idea of pedagogy? How does it relate to orality and memory contrasted with literacy? Though it may not subsume the idea of scientific method, the use, evolution, and refinement of these methods over time may generally equate it with the scientific method.

Could such an oral package be considered a learning management system? How might we compare and contrast these for drawing potential equivalencies of these systems to put them on more equal footing from a variety of cultural perspectives? One is not necessarily better than another, but we should be able to better appreciate what each brings to the table of world knowledge.

https://amzn.to/3wapIZt

The First Astronomers: How Indigenous Elders read the stars by Duane Hamacher, with Elders and Knowledge Holders

https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/academic-professional/cultural-studies/The-First-Astronomers-Duane-Hamacher-with-Elders-and-Knowledge-Holders-9781760877200

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>LynneKelly</span> in Un-Stupiding Myself - a Memory Training Journal - Memory Training Journals - Art of Memory Forum (<time class='dt-published'>03/14/2022 18:43:38</time>)</cite></small>

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-02-09/riverside-sohcahtoa-teacher-viral-video-mocked-native-americans-fired

Riverside teacher who dressed up and mocked Native Americans for a trigonometry lesson involving a mnemonic using SOH CAH TOA in Riverside, CA is fired.

There is a right way to teach mnemonic techniques and a wrong way. This one took the advice to be big and provocative went way overboard. The children are unlikely to forget the many lessons (particularly the social one) contained here.

It's unfortunate that this could have potentially been a chance to bring indigenous memory methods into a classroom for a far better pedagogical and cultural outcome. Sad that the methods are so widely unknown that media missed a good teaching moment here.

referenced video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu4fulKVv2c

A snippet at the end of the video has the teacher talking to rocks and a "rock god", but it's extremely unlikely that she was doing so using indigenous methods or for indigenous reasons.

read: 7:00 AM

The problem with capitalism is that in times of fecundity things can seem to magically work so incredibly well because so much of the system is hidden, yet when problems arise so much becomes much more obvious.

Unseen during fecundity is the amount of waste and damage done to our environments and places we live. Unseen are the interconnections and the reliances we make on our environment and each other.

There is certainly a longer essay hiding in this idea.