Jean-Guy A. Gouletmay believe in Native North American propositions at the first three
levels of belief, but not at the deeper levels where they would inform
their day-to-day lives. Dene Tha recognize this much when they in-
sist that it is only through personal experience that one truly knows.
Dene Tha acknowledge also that the juxtaposition of traditional and
scientific propositions poses a special challenge. A Dene Tha young
man in his early thirties, for instance, told me about the day he came
back home from school to tell his father that the Earth was revolv-
ing around the sun, and not the sun around the Earth. The father re-
plied: “How come then the bear snared the sun one day? Unless the
sun went somewhere, it would not have its path.” The man then asked
his son: “If that story [about the bear snaring the sun] was not true,
how could you be here now?” The young man understood his father
to say: “Why create a new school of thought, why reinvent the wheel,
when there is already a school of thought that works?” (Goulet 1998 ,
86 ). In a sense, the father is reminding the son that the province of sci-
ence is not the only province of meaning accessible to human beings.
He is inviting his son to move out of the realm of scientific knowledge
to reconnect with the realm of traditional Dene knowledge on the ba-
sis of which his parents and ancestors had lived since time immemo-
rial. It is in interaction with aboriginal peoples, in their world, that
the kinds of ethical issues discussed in this paper arise.
Spiro’s conceptualization of belief applies also to the anthropol-
ogist. For instance, the proposition that one ought to conduct field-
work as the basis of one’s anthropological research is a belief. Accord-
ing to Spiro, one may know about fieldwork, intellectually grasp its
meaning, and believe the statement to be true without ever engaging
in fieldwork or ever really wanting to do so. The proposition about
fieldwork is then held to be true at the first three levels of belief with-
out being a genuine belief. For more than a century, however, anthro-
pologists have engaged in fieldwork and truly valued the qualities of
human coexistence and cooperation it generates. The proposition
that fieldwork constitutes an integral part of research may be held by
some anthropologists as true, or believed, at all five levels. Similarly,
the proposition that one may consult deceased elders or that one may
be visited by them is also a belief that can be accepted at various lev-
els. This may be a proposition that one knows about and understands