Bruce Granville Millerthe work as evidence of mainstream societies’ failure to take indige-
nous lives seriously and to ask the right questions.
In contrast, Fabian ( 2001 ) describes good ethnography as the out-
come of both time spent with collaborators that engages our conscious
senses, and time in which our inner control is relaxed. He argues for
an ethnography that moves beyond passive and contemplative knowl-
edge to active sharing resulting from experience “out of mind.” This
approach might enable anthropologists and other researchers to es-
cape a great variety of problems, some with unexpected political di-
mensions, as revealed in several examples.
Spirituality and/or AtheismMany scholars have observed that members of indigenous communi-
ties may not draw distinctions between the validity of knowledge de-
rived from visions, the intervention of immortal beings, and forces, in-
tuition, dreams, and sensations of various sorts on the one hand, and
knowledge gained in “everyday life” on the other. Both are regarded
as experiential and meaningful. If this is so, one might question what
our indigenous collaborators make of researchers who do not share
this epistemology. A few years ago, a Canadian First Nations intellec-
tual and Coast Salish tribal cultural adviser with whom I work gave
me an account of a time when he was distraught because an anthro-
pologist who formerly worked in his community had unexpectedly an-
nounced that he was an atheist and did not believe in spirits or spirit
helpers. By implication, this anthropologist did not accept any of the
accompanying explanations, and it appeared that there could be no
meaningful discussion or communication about the cultural realm.
The culture adviser felt betrayed because the anthropologist had not
revealed his views earlier and because he felt that, despite the keen
interest the anthropologist showed in the First Nations cultural prac-
tices, they were rendered as “specimens” of something improbable
and fantastical. The gift of knowledge given by the culture adviser ap-
peared to be wasted, unappreciated, and even intentionally slighted.
Even more to the point, the adviser observed that researchers should
have some sense of spirituality. In his words: