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Moving Beyond Culturally Bound Ethical Guidelines
From that perspective, I can listen attentively to colleagues who
claim the following: You did not know what the elder wanted. Con-
trary to what Cree and Dene Tha may think, the dream of the Cree
elder was not to be taken as an apparition of someone addressing
you from beyond the grave. To think so when you are awake is to de-
lude yourselves. Once awake, you ought to set aside immediately ab-
surd notions of nightly communication with those who have passed
away. Moreover, in your day-to-day life, you ought to at least keep in
mind that the injunction to “say the right words” that governs Dene
social interaction also ought to shape your interaction with fellow
professionals.
These colleagues may enjoin me also to follow in the footsteps of
great anthropologists, such as Robert Lowie, who carefully kept from
his peers and from the public at large the many experiences of dreams
and visions that so helped him in his work with Native Americans.
The accounts of these experiences became known after only his death
when his wife published them posthumously in Current Anthropol-
ogy ( 1966 ).
To these admonitions I reply that the practice followed by Lowie
and many others undermines the integrity of the ethnographic re-
cord and postpones indefinitely the public, scholarly exploration of
such experiences. On the basis of personal experiences and firsthand
accounts of numerous credible colleagues, I maintain that I am most
comfortable with the proposition that our capacity to communicate
with each other is also expressed in dreams and visions. In some in-
stances, dreams or visions enable us to respond to events occurring
in an intersubjective world in a most appropriate manner. I have de-
scribed elsewhere how, in the middle of a Cree ceremony, I had a vi-
sion of myself fanning a fire with my hat, which was exactly how the
action was to be performed (Goulet 1998 , 231 – 242 ). Cree and Dene
elders with whom I shared my experience were not surprised, for they
know that this is how one is instructed in the midst of their ceremo-
nies. They simply say, sindít’ah edahdí, “with my mind I know.” The
experience reported by Gardner in this book is of the same order. Time
after time he correctly guessed in which hand participants in a hand
