On Being Indigenous As A Process

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Commentary

Human Development 2013;56:106–112


DOI: 10.1159/000346771

‘On Being Indigenous’ as a Process


Commentary on Chandler

Andrew Dayton Barbara Rogoff


University of California, Santa Cruz, Calif., USA

Key Words
Cultural change · Cultural identity · Indigenous people

What, exactly, goes into actually experiencing


one’s self as a Squamish or Mohawk person (or
as a First Nations or indigenous person more
generally), and what is the likely fate of such an
identity as time and urbanization and global-
ization pile on? [Chandler, this issue]

What does being Indigenous or being French, or Japanese, or Armenian mean?


And what, in particular for Indigenous people of the Americas, can it mean to experi-
ence a personal or group sense of continuous identity in the face of the destruction of
prior ways of life? Chandler [this issue] has provided us with a thoughtful and impor-
tant essay pointing out some challenges in conceiving of cultural identity and offering
a focus on process – ways of being and thinking – as a solution to those challenges. In
our comments, we discuss his ideas and point to some further challenges: especially,
how to characterize Indigenous processes.

An Ongoing Challenge in Thinking about Cultural Identity

A central challenge for the study of human development is how to understand


cultural aspects of development. For many years, cultural variation was little noticed.
Highly schooled European-heritage researchers studied their neighbors’ children and
assumed that their findings automatically generalize to all children. When it came to
their notice that there was variation in how people around the world think, act, and
develop, cultural ‘factors’ – usually static, given-at-birth ethnic or racial labels –

© 2013 S. Karger AG, Basel Barbara Rogoff


0018–716X/13/0562–0106$38.00/0 Psychology Department, UC Santa Cruz
E-Mail karger@karger.com 1156 High Street
www.karger.com/hde Santa Cruz, CA 95064 (USA)
E-Mail brogoff @ ucsc.edu
sometimes got added onto what was still regarded as generic human development
[see also Rogoff, 2011; Rogoff & Angelillo, 2002].
Now the field is at the point of needing to get beyond these static characteriza-
tions of individuals. Chandler quickly dismisses self-ascription and ascription of
identity by others as options for understanding culture.
Chandler further critiques an approach that focuses on ‘cultural contents’ –
constituent objects or customs such as feathers or coup-sticks or specific holidays
separated from the lifeways that give them meaning. An object such as a Crow
coup-stick can and has become separate from the referential ecology in which it
was originally devised and used [Lear, 2006].
As Chandler suggests, cultural artifacts often have a ‘shelf-life,’ or specific his-
torical horizon beyond which their use has no meaningful contextual relevance. This
principle applies not only to objects that held meaning in the past for Indigenous
people, but also to objects and other cultural contents of the present for all peoples.
Witness the continual change of living languages such as English as well as Indige-
nous languages [Baugh & Cable, 1978; Mantica, 2003]. With equal rigor, the same
principles can be meaningfully, although probably less comfortably, applied to other
cultural artifacts, such as schools, teaching methods, or even broad scientific research
programs themselves.
Chandler particularly argues that for Indigenous people of Canada and else-
where, many of the ‘contents’ of their cultural ways have lost meaning because so
much of their recent lifeways has been destroyed by the colonization of their lands
and forced ‘acculturation’ of generations. Cultural contents may be nostalgic remind-
ers of times past, but they do not always represent continuing meaning in the present
or for the future.
This situation, Chandler argues, is different than for many cultural communities
in diaspora, when people move to a different locale but can refer to a homeland that
continues to exist. For Indigenous Canadians, and many Indigenous people through-
out the Americas, the homeland no longer exists and self-determination of their com-
munities was destroyed by forced removals from ancestral lands and by foreign gov-
ernment and missionary inroads to force changes in Indian lifeways and values. Many
cultural contents have thus been stripped of their cultural meaning.
In addition to this stripping of many cultural contents from the meaning of their
lifeways, cultural communities everywhere continue to transform with successive
generations. For example, the Cherokee Nation newspaper The Cherokee Phoenix was
for some part of its 184 years typeset and published in the Cherokee syllabary. The
newspaper has transformed over successive generations to publications typeset in
English, to online versions in English, and to online versions in English and Chero-
kee – in an ongoing process of cultural change.
Chandler argues that some cultural contents such as coup-sticks and buckskin
can lose cultural meaning other than for nostalgic purposes. Still, Indigenous people
are Indigenous. So, asks Chandler, what makes people Indigenous when they speak
English as their only language, take part in the same national institutions as their non-
Indigenous neighbors, and use the Internet to communicate? (See also James Clif-
ford’s [1988] telling article on Indigenous identity as it was contested in a court land
claim case in Mashpee, ‘Cape Cod’s Indian Town,’ to determine whether a group re-
ferring to itself as the Mashpee Tribe was actually an Indian tribe descended from the
same tribe that had lost its lands in the mid 1800s.)

‘On Being Indigenous’ as a Process Human Development 2013;56:106–112 107


DOI: 10.1159/000346771
Cultural Processes as a Solution

Chandler’s proposal is to focus on the processes rather than the contents of cul-
ture: ‘ “software” trumps “hardware.” ’ Focus on how people do things, rather than on
what things they do: ‘those distinctive ways of knowing and being, and those ideals
and standards of excellence, that have traditionally accompanied being members of
just such an Indigenous community’.
This proposal resonates with many other proposals in social sciences that argue
for examining people’s cultural practices [e.g., Goodnow & Kessel, 1995; Lave, 1988;
Rogoff, 2003]. The recent book, Developing Destinies: A Mayan Midwife and Town
[Rogoff, 2011], argues that cultural changes and continuities can be understood by
historical cultural analyses of people’s activities across generations. The ideas are il-
lustrated with research in a Guatemalan Mayan community where childbirth and
childrearing practices in some ways continue to echo the practices of 500 years ago
and, at the same time, reflect local inventions and the influence of Western schooling,
Western medicine, and Western missions.
Chandler’s process approach, like that of Rogoff [2011], brings attention to the
historical dimension of cultural identity: Cultural communities continually remake
themselves as they re-instantiate the ways of prior generations, take on ways of other
communities, invent new approaches to handle new conditions, and adapt to forced
changes.
This historical-cultural approach is also consistent with other work that has fol-
lowed on Vygotsky’s approach. For example, Sylvia Scribner [1985] built on Vy-
gotsky’s distinctions between microgenetic, ontogenetic, sociohistorical develop-
ment, and phylogenetic development, pointing out that culture is not in opposition
to individual development or to biological aspects of development. Rather, these four
views of development are simply different grains of analysis of any particular phe-
nomenon. Scribner offers some ways to describe the continual regeneration of culture
by its constituent participants within an intergenerational historical context.
Taking a process approach requires a paradigm shift to get beyond either/or
thinking (e.g., nature vs. nurture, culture vs. biology, individual vs. community, and
other binary oppositions or polarities). This paradigm shift has been seen in other
scholarly approaches. For example, Dewey [1938] called for getting beyond either/or
thinking and instead focus on what he called experience. Pepper [1967] distinguished
the contextual worldview from mechanist, formalist, and organicist worldviews.
Chandler discusses related ideas of Rorty, Bruner, and Kuhn.
Interestingly, to make the paradigm shift to thinking of culture in terms of pro-
cess requires the same kind of understanding that is involved in apprehending some
of the central distinguishing cultural ways of thinking of Indigenous people of Can-
ada and elsewhere. Unfortunately, ‘staunch defenders of culturally mainstream views
are not particularly inclined to make way for competing alternatives but, instead,
work assiduously to rule them all out of court’ [Chandler, this issue; see also Kuhn,
1962]. This, we contend, is true in both the realms of normal science and of under-
standing Indigenous ways of thinking.
For example, a feature common in mainstream theoretical traditions is the view
that cultural change and persistence are nothing more than adaptation to linearly im-
proving technology and institutions; some new paradigms in social sciences – as well
as Indigenous ways of thinking about process – tend to militate against this view.

108 Human Development 2013;56:106–112 Dayton/Rogoff


DOI: 10.1159/000346771
Some Indigenous peoples hold a cyclical view of time and process [Christenson,
2001]. Such a theory of cultural change and continuity was offered by Nicolás Chávez,
a leading Guatemalan Mayan artist, to explain the process by which Mayan people
have fused Mayan and Catholic deities over the past 5 centuries: With the arrival of
the Spanish, he explained, the ancient gods and the earth died, in a process of death
and rebirth of the world that has occurred many times across history, prior to the ar-
rival of the Spanish and currently. Each time that the earth and the gods die, when
they are renewed, the gods again attain their power, along with new gods:
The saints today have Spanish names because the old earth died in the days of the Spanish
conquerors. When the spirit keepers of the world appeared again they were the [Catholic]
saints, but they do the same work that the old gods did anciently. [Chávez, in Christenson,
2001, p. 135]

In Chandler’s terminology, the cultural contents (the specific gods’ names) disap-
pear but the cultural processes (the work the gods do) endure along with some chang-
es. The process is not a linear one of acculturation or ‘progress,’ but rather a cycle.
In fields as diverse as developmental psychology, history, and archaeology, ro-
bust, theoretically progressive research programs focus on cultural processes rather
than their ostensive products or contents [Lakatos & Musgrave, 1970; Lomawaima,
1994; Perdue, 1998; Rogoff, 2011; Wilcox, 2009]. These approaches challenge the lin-
ear, atomistic models that tend to pervade the broader research traditions in which
they are situated. Each seeks to construe cultural processes as dynamic, evolving over
time, and mutually constitutive of the currently evolving human beings who both
participate in and are constrained by them [Rogoff, 2003, 2011; Smith, 1999].
In the words of Marta Navichoc Cotuc, a Tz’utujil Maya from San Pedro la La-
guna, Guatemala:
Many people want to conserve Mayan ways, but they don’t put it into practice, they just talk.
[For example,] if we don’t stick with the [traditional midwives], this practice and knowledge
will be lost. The world is constructed of the acts of each one of us. [quoted in Rogoff, 2011,
p. 286; brackets in the original]

Chandler briefly reviews two well-researched ideas regarding cultural processes


that distinguish the ways of Indigenous people (of Canada and beyond): Indigenous
lifeways and ways of thinking tend to be holistic and relational. Chandler points out
that these two aspects of Indigenous epistemologies are only some of the features that
form an ‘integrated package of mutually interdependent thought processes’. He notes
that ‘whole cadres of Indigenous scholars and knowledge holders’ have contributed
to understanding the package of Indigenous ways of knowing, citing Battiste and
Henderson, Ermine, Gegeo, Meyer, Quanchi, Smith, West, among others.
Chandler argues that ‘procedural ways and means by which endangered groups
have traditionally thought and reasoned (their ways of knowing and chunking and
organizing their world)’, such as Indigenous holistic and relational ways of thinking,
are more resilient in the face of cultural changes than are cultural contents, which
more easily lose their meaning. As an example, he points out that monolingual Eng-
lish-speaking Indigenous Canadians use English in ways that stem from the Indige-
nous languages used by prior generations.
Another example is that mestizo (mixed heritage) populations in Central Amer-
ica may not identify as Indigenous and may use many non-Indigenous ways (such as

‘On Being Indigenous’ as a Process Human Development 2013;56:106–112 109


DOI: 10.1159/000346771
being monolingual in Spanish), but nonetheless carry forward many Indigenous
practices across generations [Rogoff, 2011]. For example, the form of Spanish used
throughout Nicaragua has many features that are adopted from Nahuatl, the Aztec
language that was the lingua franca of the whole region prior to the arrival of the
Spanish, such as the way of forming diminutives and superlatives with repeated syl-
lables (e.g., chiquititito, grandotote) [Mantica, 2003]. Another example is the use
throughout Mexico and Guatemala of gestures emanating from a sign language that
has been in use by both hearing and deaf Indigenous people for over a thousand years
[Fox Tree, 2009].

The Next Challenge for Scholarship

Once we accept the importance of cultural processes (rather than static con-
tents), an important challenge becomes deepening our understanding of the implica-
tions of an Indigenous ‘integrated package of mutually interdependent thought pro-
cesses’ [Chandler, this issue] – especially holistic-relational thinking – for theory and
research on human development. How can scholars better understand this way of
thought and use it in research and practice?
This is no small challenge because many research tools are built on the study of
contents and static characteristics. (For example, the ANOVA table assumes separate
factors; research design often tries to ‘control’ for all but a few aspects of whole phe-
nomena; standardized testing tries to isolate individuals from others and from cul-
tural practices.) Such tools are useful, but if they are regarded as the gold standard of
how to understand human development, ‘staunch defenders of culturally mainstream
views’ [Chandler, this issue] can dominate in ways that prevent the use (or publica-
tion) of other methods that are more consistent with understanding whole, relation-
al phenomena.
We would nominate descriptive analyses of patterns as a key method, employing
both numerical analyses across cases and ethnographic analysis of cases [see also An-
gelillo, Rogoff, & Chavajay, 2007]. Indigenous scholars nominate a set of methodolo-
gies that they argue are compatible with Indigenous worldviews, where ontologies of
holism and relationalism are afforded central relevance in phenomena of interest and
methodology [Smith, 1999; Wilcox, 2009]. The current dominant paradigm and its
perspectives on culture and learning could benefit greatly from a perspective of In-
digenous holism and relationalism.
We would love for Chandler and others who are engaged with holistic, relation-
al ways of thinking – especially Indigenous scholars and others who understand this
approach in depth – to help articulate the implications of a process approach for re-
search and for understanding human development. In particular, how can holistic,
relational ways of thinking be understood by people for whom these cultural tradi-
tions are foreign as well as by future generations of Indigenous people?
A combination of insiders and outsiders may be helpful for making use of the
fruitful model provided by Indigenous ways of thinking and learning. Although many
Indigenous people likely use this way of thinking on a minute-by-minute basis, their
understanding may be so commonsense that it is difficult even for Indigenous schol-
ars to articulate. Most people take for granted their own lifeways. The contrast avail-
able to the endeavor from outsiders who try to understand Indigenous ways of think-

110 Human Development 2013;56:106–112 Dayton/Rogoff


DOI: 10.1159/000346771
ing may yield fruitful collaboration with cultural insiders in the effort to articulate this
way of thinking and being. The two of us hope to make use of this tool in our col-
laborations, Barbara as a European-heritage researcher who has studied Mayan life-
ways for many years and Andrew as a Cherokee graduate student who has lived mul-
tiple lifeways.
Articulating this way of thinking and being is important for both cultural insid-
ers and outsiders. On the one hand, it is a key tool in the advancement of research on
human development. Allowing for this way of thinking is also crucial for the identity
of the next generations of Indigenous people, many of whom live in two worlds. Of-
ten, imposition of the dominant society’s way of thinking in institutions such as
schools (as well as more bellicose actions) stifle the use of what Chandler identifies as
Indigenous processes. As Chandler briefly mentions in this article, human develop-
ment is much healthier in Indigenous Canadian communities where engagement
with processes of self-determination is possible. For example, the prevalence of youth
suicide is significantly lower among such Canadian Aboriginal bands [Chandler &
Lalonde, 2008, 2009].
So, we are grateful for Michael Chandler’s contributions to the understanding of
cultural identity, for both the aims of Indigenous people and for making progress in
understanding human development. Questions of identity, Indigenous or otherwise,
we and Chandler argue, must depend at least in part on participation in specific cul-
tural practices, not because these need necessarily to be preserved but because they
make us who we are – and in turn constitute what it could mean to belong to a spe-
cific culture. We hope that Chandler and the rest of us take on the challenge of devel-
oping and articulating a deeper understanding of (sp) specfically what is involved in
Indigenous ways of thinking and being.

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DOI: 10.1159/000346771

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