Conjugating the Cosmos: Dr. Leroy Little Bear and Blackfoot Metaphysics
Dr. Leroy Little Bear
At a 2016 conference in Calgary, Dr. Leroy Little Bear gave a talk on “Big Thinking Rethinking: Blackfoot Metaphysics Waiting in the Wings.” Ostensibly a comparison of Western and Blackfoot metaphysics, Little Bear’s lecture was principally about the deficiencies of Western metaphysics and thought and the superiority of Blackfoot metaphysics and ways of thinking. Likening contemporary humankind to being in a mid-life crisis, Little Bear asked:“Has Western metaphysics made us any happier?”
For Little Bear, metaphysics “are the things that are the foundational basis of our thinking.” In Little Bear’s usage, metaphysics is more like a collective worldview whose values and attitudes shape and govern their perceptions and responses to reality from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic..
“Deep in the mind of a western thinker,” said Little Bear, “Is that Creation is stagnant.” If God is perfect, then Creation is perfect. Ergo, our world is perfect and in that perfection it is logically stagnant, or static: it cannot get better than perfection. Paradoxically, to
Little Bear’s thinking, the West tries to modify the world. Little Bear’s premise is that the Western mind acts in existential and nihilistic folly because the alteration of Nature has led to the destruction of Nature.
Providing a brief history of Western metaphysics, Little Bear dated its conception to 400-500 years ago with the dawn of the Age of Reason. Ironically, Little Bear sees the Western concept of Time as problematic in the way he sees all measurement as problematic: it allowed the West to objectify Nature. Little Bear, like anyone, needs the measurement of time to have historical understanding. Little Bear makes several such contradictions in a way that is reminiscent of New Age doctrines in which the propositions survive more by generous credulity than credibility.
For instance, after telling the audience that Western thought perceives reality as “paradoxical,” Little Bear then states: “In native metaphysics, it’s either all cause or all.effect ”
The essential flaw of Western metaphysics, as Little Bear sees it, is that it seeks to objectify reality. Using the scientific method as an example of applied Western metaphysics, Little Bear argued that, although the scientific method may have brought great material gains, in being a system of measuring, the scientific method “sees everything as inanimate except, of course, you and I.” In Blackfoot metaphysics, “everything is animate.” Little Bear’s implied premise is that since Western thought sees everything as inanimate, it doesn’t see Nature as a living thing and therefore doesn’t treat Nature like a living thing and thereby destroys Nature. “Native science (‘science’ and ‘metaphysics’ are interchangeable in Little Bear’s discourse) is really directed at sustainability.”
“Native metaphysics is about flux, constant motion. In other words, (it’s) about quantum physics,” stated Little Bear. “One of the foundational bases of Western thought is a stagnant world.” Ironically, Little Bear mentioned Evolution which in itself suffices to disprove his assumption but it’s a point worth considering further. Does the Western mind see the world and the physical universe as stagnant or static?
If the Bible can be considered as a foundational basis for Western intellectual development, does it tell us that everything is stagnant perfection? Far from it. The Bible stresses the opposite: the natural state of existence is dynamic uncertainty. In the opening chapters of Genesis, for example, the reader is presented with two accounts of Creation. Without referring to subsequent exegesis, it is enough to point to how the fact of two accounts confronts the reader with a formidable point of cognitive dissonance. If the reader assumes the perfection of God, why is there more than one account of Creation?
Similarly, while the Bible is generally regarded as an argument of monotheism, it makes the case for a supreme God out of a pre-existing state of henotheism, a struggle between gods. Lost to antiquity, the Book of the Wars of The Lord (Numbers 21:13-14) suggests a cosmogony of turbulent conflict far from any inherent stasis. The frequent narrative element of apocalypse, beginning with the Fall from Grace, reinforces the perception that all can be overturned.
Little Bear tells us that in Blackfoot metaphysics, “We see chaos and try to draw order out of it.” That is a general human insight and response. The whole point of the Age of Reason and the scientific method was to arrive at a shareable objective understanding of our physical existence so that we might increase the duration of our physical existence. Little Bear tends to be contemptuous of humanism, remarking at one point that in the stagnant worldview of the Western mind, “Justice is simply interpreted as equality.”
Little Bear cheapens the profound humanism of the Age of Reason which is the proposition that anything that is knowable can be known by anyone. That is why epistemology matters. How does the Blackfoot metaphysicist know what he says he knows? He doesn’t and must rely on faith. As Little Bear relates, “(Blackfoot) perform ceremonies for renewal. In native science, we repeat our stories. That’s how they become embodied in the students and the people” The stories remain exactly as they were always told so the ceremonies can be performed exactly the same and thus maintain the natural order of things.
Ritualized ceremony isn’t agency, it’s a substitute for agency because the tribe has no objective means of influencing their environment. Because Blackfoot reality is subjective, it is existentially static. While Little Bear is critical of how Western thinkers try to make science predictive, trying to renew the world through ceremony is also a predictive effort to achieve a desired outcome.
A common theme in ‘indigenous science’ (such qualification has to prompt doubts about the science itself) transposed to a Blackfoot style by Little Bear is that native metaphysics sees everything as connected. The slogan, ‘All my relations,’ is a scientific statement about relative existence on the quantum plane. Little Bear referred to this holistic belief as “ecologically relative networks.” If Western thought excepts human existence against the rest of Nature, Blackfoot metaphysics relativizes human existence; there is no hierarchy in Nature. This is supposed to mean that seeing rocks, plants and animals as relatives results in treating rocks, plants and animals humanely as kin and thus preserving Nature in its pristine state. The use of buffalo jumps to indiscriminately slaughter masses of bison is hard to square with that holistic philosophy. If humans are equal to the bison, can humans be treated like the bison? In this system of flattened existential value, it is virtually impossible to conceive of individual rights or even a moral code that transcends the law of the jungle..
Little Bear is intellectually dishonest in his generous borrowing of things he, or any of us, can only be aware of through the aggregated and applied knowledge of science. The epistemological problem with what Little Bear says about Blackfoot metaphysics corresponding to what we know of quantum physics is that everything he says about the understanding of quantum physics embedded in Blackfoot metaphysics comes after these things were known to all. There is no way to know that the Blackfoot knew about quantum physics before the West did except to presume the oral stories and ceremonies contain such knowledge. We have no way of knowing if the Blackfoot knew anything about subatomic particles, for instance, other than by the proposition of superstitious repetition: Perform the ceremonies exactly or risk disturbing the natural equilibrium. In his talk, Little Bear did not offer an example of a Blackfoot story or ceremony that described any law of physics.
Little Bear inadvertently illustrated this epistemic deficiency with an anecdote. An Elder was asked, what happened to the dinosaurs? The Elder replied, maybe they stopped doing their ceremonies. Did the Blackfoot know about dinosaurs? Living in Alberta, it is possible that some Blackfoot may have found fossilized dinosaur bones but did they know they were seeing the bones of dinosaurs (there is no Blackfoot word for ‘dinosaur’)?
If Taoism, for one, can intuit the synergistic realities of a quantum universe, then theoretically so can the Blackfoot. If Little Bear could intuit that the Higgs field existed before it was formally theorized, how can we know beyond his saying so? Whatever else may be said about Western thought, it developed systems of literacy and numeracy that could be left to posterity to understand and improve upon. Even if oral stories could be faithfully transmitted through the millennia, whatever science they carry cannot be improved upon because there is no alphabet or arithmetic to formulate, experiment and record.
In his concept of Blackfoot metaphysics, Little Bear alluded to a popular belief that Pre-Contact Indigenous people understood ecology because the natural world had remained pristine in North America for millennia. The natural world remained more or less the same in North America for millennia because other than hunting a species to extinction, Indigenous people had negligible means of objectively interacting with their physical environment, a lack of agency implicit in a totally subjective relationship to Nature. Notably, the Pre-Contact Indigenous empires of Central and South America had systems of writing and calendars.
Littlebear tries to present this existential subjectivity as an intentional process of natural renewal through exact recitation of stories and performance of ceremony. Because the tribe has to memorize and practice these ‘formulas’, they are interacting with their physical environment. It’s not developmental stagnation that preserves the natural world in its pristine state, it is their wilful attention to ceremonial detail. Consequently, language becomes critical because of its formative properties.
“All of the metaphysics is caught in the language. The language acts as a repository for all that knowledge. If you want to change ways of thinking,” says Little Bear, “You have to change ways of thought and the best way to change thought process is to think in a different language.” As Little Bear stated it simply later on, “Think Blackfoot.”
Besides being naked ethnic chauvinism, saying Blackfoot language has metaphysical agency sounds like a bowdlerized version of gematria, the concept that letters of an alphabet (generally Hebrew) correspond to states and processes of energy. The best example of Western gematria is the Kabbalah of Jewish mysticism. The Kabbalah can be thought of as an attempt to understand all physics in an unified field in which the force of consciousness is factored in.
The concept of gematria dates at least to antiquity. Although the Book of Revelations was written by a Greek (John of Patmos), the concept of gematria is starkly broached with the statement, ostensibly by God, that “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end,” (Rev. 22-13). Rather than what one might suppose of an infinite God, God is describing itself in finite terms as a set. Not only is God saying that it is finite, it says it is like an alphabet, an alphabet humans use. The alphabet metaphor suggests that God is knowable and that God’s ways are accessible. In being finite, God is potentially surpassable; the henotheistic antecedent of our cosmos endures. The profoundly humanistic implication is that we live in a gematriatic universe and it is for us to conjugate.
‘The Mystical Alphabets’ from “The Key of Solomon the King”
But what happens if you have no alphabet in your culture? You have words as formulations but no link as to how those formulations work, so you repeat verbatim the oral texts as best you can. If one is totally subjective to their physical environment, can one even be metaphysical about it? Repeating a ceremony exactly isn’t being conscious of why the ceremony works and the point of metaphysics is the influence of consciousness upon the physical universe.
Little Bear tries to make Paleolithic stasis sound like metaphysics by comparing the West’s concept of time (which isn’t just Western) to the Blackfoot’s atemporal point of view: “It just is.” It’s puzzling how Little Bear could mention the West’s fondness of time and still say the West sees the world as stagnant: the concept of time implies motion. Little Bear negatively characterizes the West to prove the superiority of native ways of knowing but everything he negatively says about the West is an inversion of what is true about Blackfoot metaphysics. If there is a schema, it is only known by rote and consciousness stagnates in the blind necessity to repeat the ancient lore rather than understand it in a way that imparts individual agency.
As a last word: the fact that a goy in Winnipeg who dropped out of high school could buy a copy of Carlos Suares’ seminal work on Kabbalah, The Sepher Yetsira (1976, Shambhala), is a statement about the individual agency allowed by Canada’s example of the universalist heritage of Western thought: anything that is knowable can be known by anyone. Western objectivity makes an authorship of existence possible. In Little Bear’s system, individuation is suppressed with individual agency limited to the ability to remember. The challenge for contemporary humanism is to defend its universalist heritage against indigenous exceptionalism.
Reading Little Bear’s various theories is a little like listening to Putin’s version of history. The words seem to make sense when they first hit you, but even the tiniest bit of scrutiny makes it clear that one is listening to a nonsensical mishmash. Indigenous people deserve to be listened to just as non-indigenous do. However, a speaker’s words should be judged on merit, and not on the race or ethnic background of the speaker
Thank you Michael for taking a stab at analyzing Leroy Little Bear's metaphysics. Although one is tempted to dismiss this as made up nonsense, Little Bear has had tremendous influence over Native American Studies at the University of Lethbridge and we are just beginning to understand the far reaching implications that this has had for studying indigenous-non-indigenous relations in Canada. If one wants to understand "western metaphysics", Greek philosophy is the starting point. The Blackfoot language, on the other hand, was pre-literate, and therefore would not have the concepts that Little Bear relies upon to discuss this subject. The language also had no numbers (only such concepts as one, few and many) and therefore the Blackfoot speaking tribes would not have had any understanding of physics.