Jean-Guy A. Gouletin his hands.^7 The elder, who wore a kerchief around his neck, would
look directly at the student, smile at him, and shake his head from left
to right three times. The image would then vanish. The student told
me: “I was so stupid; it took me three nights to understand. He was
looking at me and saying no.” On that basis, we decided to respect
the elder’s answer and not publish an extraordinary account of indig-
enous justice and Native North American self-government.
A growing number of anthropologists incorporate in their ethnog-
raphies experiences such as the one described above. In this account
of interaction with a student, I wish to highlight the challenging task
of reconciling contrasting experiences of oneself in two original life-
worlds. In many respects, the dominant culture in the world one has
grown up in as a child and the dominant culture in the world of oth-
ers one enters in adulthood as an anthropologist (the world in which
they are at home) differ dramatically. These worlds are nevertheless
two human worlds, two among so many other versions of dynamic
meaningful coexistence created by humans, over time, all over the
world—all of them open to understanding, each one of them a par-
tial expression of the human potential.
From that vantage point, it is eminently reasonable to welcome the
teaching of Dene Tha elders and community members. Acting on the
basis of knowledge acquired among the Dene Tha is exactly what I
did when I responded to the student’s objection that he could not con-
sult a Cree elder who had passed away with the injunction: “Ask him
anyway!” I knew this was possible on the basis not of book knowl-
edge but of experiences lived with the Dene Tha. To speak otherwise
would have undermined the integrity of our similar experiences among
the Dene Tha and the Cree. The epistemological position we took is
fully consistent with the aboriginal view expressed by Buckley ( 2002 ,
90 ): “A person does not come to ‘believe in’ his discovery; he makes
them or not, knows them by experience or remains ignorant of them,
acts them out in what he does or knows nothing.”
From an anthropological viewpoint, the interaction with the student
also demonstrates that “communication across cultural boundaries cre-
ates a problem of identity” (Fabian 2000 , 278 ). This problem is expe-
rienced not only when in the field, in the midst of “strangers,” in their