148 Before Agriculture
Preserving and Restoring Language, Culture, and Land
Community efforts
The Yoeme example clearly shows how, for local peoples, the struggle for main-
taining or restoring the integrity of their cultures, languages and environments
configures itself as one interrelated goal. This holistic approach is increasingly evi-
dent in the grassroots efforts that are being made around the world. As an example,
Native Californians are engaging in integrated biocultural conservation efforts.
The linguistic and cultural revival activities in which they are involved go hand in
hand with advocacy for environmental restoration on their lands and the renewed
use of native plants for traditional handicrafts, such as basket-weaving, and for
other purposes.
On the other hand, if acculturation has such measurably negative effects on
traditional knowledge and languages, as in the case of the Piaroa, should local
peoples reject the framework of modernity altogether, including the Western
schooling that brings about dominant languages and cultural patterns – or, for that
matter, the biomedical care that undermines the prestige of traditional medicine,
and other similar cultural change? Some indigenous groups, such as certain Ama-
zonian tribes, have made this choice, taking refuge deeper into the forest. Others
have chosen to integrate aspects of the two worlds, for instance by combining for-
mal schooling with curricula based on their own cultural traditions and formu-
lated in their native languages. The Hawaiians and Maori have been at the forefront
of the latter kind of approach. In still other cases, educational efforts have been
aimed at marking the distinction between formal Western-type learning and tradi-
tional informal learning. In Australia, several Aboriginal groups use an approach
whereby they separate ‘white knowledge’ (literacy, numeracy, etc.), taught by
monolingual English-speakers, with White-Australian content and structure, from
their own Aboriginal knowledge. Their own knowledge is ‘lived’ rather than taught
in schools.^14
The need for choices
Whatever choices local peoples may make – and as we have seen, they make a
variety of them – what matters is that there be choices. As in the case of language
learning (acquisition of a majority language does not have to be subtractive; it can
and should be additive), it does not have to be a matter of either–or between dif-
ferent cultural frameworks (as it is far too often purported to be by dominant
cultures). Local peoples must simply remain free to consciously choose if and how
much of either framework – the traditional and the exogenous – they may wish to
maintain or adopt. Some groups, as in the Amazonian case, may indeed choose
isolation. But others, perhaps most, will probably choose some form of integration
between, or parallel adoption of, frameworks. And in so doing, after all, they will
not be doing anything different – if done in freedom and not under pressure –