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Moving Beyond Culturally Bound Ethical Guidelines
visions?”—literally, “things appear before our eyes.” Alexis Senian-
tha thus led me once again directly into the consideration of the na-
ture of beings, human and non-human, of the role of spiritual enti-
ties who manifest themselves in the land and lives of the Dene Tha,
and of the reality of the inner life of human beings whose very soul
or spirit dwells in the body when it is not on journeys of its own to
explore the other world.
In the course of this conversation, I had the impression that Alexis
Seniantha was still astonished as he recollected how his own life had
been shaped by a series of extraordinary experiences. He obviously
knew the traditional answer to the question he was asking. Yet I
thought that he was not asking that question solely for rhetorical
purposes. As he spoke, Alexis Seniantha knew what every Dene Tha
knows: that in one’s sleep one’s soul wanders away from the body, ac-
quires information about this world and the other world, and returns
to the body with new experiences and knowledge; that death does not
establish a barrier to interpersonal communication between the per-
son who passes away to the other world and the ones left behind in
this world to grieve; that interpersonal communication between here
and the beyond takes on various forms including that of dreams and/
or visions; that animals are sentient, intelligent, and powerful beings
in their own right who give themselves as prey to human beings who
show them respect, and who manifest themselves to chosen ones to
become their animal helper, giving humans access to a font of knowl-
edge and power to use to better their own lives and that of others in
need of assistance when mentally and/or physically sick.
Knowing all this, Alexis Seniantha was nonetheless still asking: “Why
is all of this unfolding as it is?” Despite all the traditional knowledge
at hand to account for these experiences, Alexis Seniantha was still in
awe of it all. His was an attitude of respect of the experiential dimen-
sion of his life. He does not attempt to explain and reminds me that
explanation must remain secondary to the immediacy of lived expe-
rience. This is a challenge for anthropologists immersed in many ab-
original cultures. How is one to learn to know with a minimum of ex-
planation? Buckley quotes Kroeber who saw this aboriginal refusal
to explain things “as evidence of Yurok deficiencies in intellectualiza-
