A Different Way of Life, or a Different Way of Living?

The other day the United Nations in New York City decided to celebrate indigenous peoples, and we were treated to pictures on our TV of people dressed in native American Indian garb of all sorts, from Peru to Seattle, chanting songs in the grand meeting chamber. It was an event designed to bring to the forefront the plight of those indigenous people world wide who have been crowded off their land, alienated, and killed, for generations.

This is good. But we must not miss the point.

Surely it's not just indigenous people who are at risk today, it's indigenous living. Sometimes when people are assimilated by other cultures what is lost is not just the identity of those people but something else. It's their whole attitude to life. Let's put it this way; anyone who decides not to join the dominant culture becomes, to some extent an endangered species, too. This wouldn't matter quite so much if it weren't that so many people are opting out of the madness that characterizes so much of our current dominant culture. If I decide not to carry a cellphone/blackberry/ipod/etc, and if I opt out of the rat-race (as I have to some extent), and if I choose not to join in the madness of those who run around Wall Street then I am a member of a minority culture.

Those who live today as Native American Indians are not different because they are physically different, they are different because they are choosing to stand up for values and beliefs that are not respected by the majority of the population. Yet they have lessons the rest of us could really use; lessons about living in harmony with nature, about how to live a full life of appreciation, and about how to face death. By marginalizing them we reject even the possibility that they may have, for example, some ideas that could help save our planet from the mess the 'dominant culture' has so energetically created.

Let us embrace diversity. That's a buzz word and a cliche. But let us also be humble enough to turn to those we have mistreated shamelessly and ask their advice, because they are wiling to give it - if we're ready to listen. Let us admit that there are other ways of living, and that many of them have more to offer us than just bargains at Walmart.