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Reveal or Conceal?
not to be mad, unscientific, or non-objective (in fact, for the Kainai it
is so ordinary it does not bear mention). Nor does it signify that one
has “gone native.” Instead, it is an opportunity to glimpse the moral,
emotional, physical, intuitive, and spiritual realities and experiences
of others firsthand as we take part in the transformations our hosts
experience. Thereafter, we have an obligation to determine what such
experiences may add to our perceptual and conceptual understand-
ing not only of our fieldwork cultures but of all human phenomena,
including ourselves. It is possible to vitalize our ethnographies con-
cerning “others” by including our own ecstatic experiences, which in
any event indirectly acts to validate our host’s ecstatic accounts. To
ignore such experiences, either because they do not meet the require-
ments of our own epistemology or because we fear we will expose too
much of ourselves, is indicative of a fundamental disrespect for the
very people we write about, as it continues to set them apart as “oth-
ers” who are fundamentally irreconcilable with our “ways of know-
ing.” In the end, we owe it to ourselves and to those we try to repre-
sent, to produce an ethnography that makes “sense” not only to us
but to them. If ecstasis provides a tool that facilitates greater verac-
ity in our attempts at “sense making,” we owe it to ourselves and to
those we represent to make use of that which is available to us. To
me, that is the best measure of the quality of a good ethnography—it
should open one’s mind, heart, and behavior to a given lifeworld, in
this instance that of the Kainai.
The traditional Kainai universe is populated with animate, sentient,
and spirit beings existing in a relational order with human beings.
All beings are governed by a constant state of “flux” (Little Bear in
Battiste 2002 , 78 ) understood as the potential for growth or adapta-
tion essential for the continuity and well-being of all. This relational
principle is of utmost importance not merely because all beings ex-
ist “in relation” to one another, but because all beings are inherently
interdependent. Hence, the Blackfoot phrase Okí Ni’itsokowa “all
my relations!” is less a colloquialism than a literal rendering of Kai-
nai “first principles.”
The Kainaiwa orient to reality based on the principles of “relations,”
