Indigenous guidance pairs with the science of perception to reveal unseen life

Evidence

A Cheyenne elder of my acquaintance once told me that the best way to find something is not to go looking for it. This is a hard concept for a scientist. But he said to watch out of the corner of your eye, open to possibility, and what you seek will be revealed. The revelation of suddenly seeing what I was blind to only moments before is a sublime experience for me. I can revisit those moments and still feel the surge of expansion. The boundaries between my world and the world of another being get pushed back with sudden clarity, an experience both humbling and joyful. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 70

Categorization

• XREF: The Cheyenne elder’s advice braids Indigenous knowledge with Western mechanism — exactly the Kimmerer bridge the whole polyad is built on. — connects to: Indigenous knowledge and Western science can coexist as complementary polycultures — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 487; Looking and being seen form ‘ecologies of looking’ where nature dominates the optics — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 518; Full understanding requires both scientific and indigenous ways of knowing — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 37 (+2 more)
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source

Broader Connections

• Deep attention fuses species identity into its habitat context #expands (0.78) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 524
• Extracting indigenous knowledge changes nothing in the extractors’ worldview #complicates (0.75) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2207