Krupnik goes on to show how native knowledge is based on principles quite different from modern meteorological science:
Scientific…weather observation…is based on following the temperature and pressure curves, and on recording their current trends. Unlike scientific monitoring, the Yupik watch is focused upon specific signs that signal shifts from one phenomenon, condition, or weather and ice regime to a different one that can be defined by a different term.
So what makes a Yupik such a skilled weather forecaster? In Krupnik’s view, “The more words (and combinations) one knows, the more precise one’s observation and forecast can be.” Now that Yupik is shifting and giving way to English, the environmental knowledge and ability to forecast weather are being degraded:
As the use of Yupik words for specific weather patterns of ice and weather by younger people declines and the Yupik terms are replaced by English words, with a different (and often much more simplistic) meaning, the hunter’s overall awareness of his environment fades away. That is why the Yupik elders are very proud of, and so keen on passing on to younger people, their extended Native terminology of ice and weather conditions.
Nor does their complexity end with ice. As it turns out, the Yupik also know names for different winds. Chester Noongwook, a Yupik elder, says: “We have several kinds of winds here in Savoonga. Aywaa (Aywaapik) is a direct north wind from the sea. Nakaghya is a northeasterly wind, it comes from Nome. Kenvaq is a northwesterly wind; this is the old name, and we now call this wind Naayghiinaq (“that from Siberia”). There is also another northerly wind, Quutfaq, that can come from anywhere between northwest and northeast. Asivaq is a direct east wind,” and so on.
Besides winds, they have specialized names for many kinds of ocean currents, stars and constellations, and all manner of seasonal phenomena. All this information feeds into a sophisticated weather forecasting ability honed over a lifetime of careful observation. Its profound depth cannot be compared to what American snowboarders know about snow, not even in the slightest. And it should be of deep and urgent interest to all branches of science, not only linguistics but also biology, climatology, anthropology, and others. We are losing one of the finest, most sensitive systems ever devised to detect weather patterns and climate change. And the system can survive only in its original form, in the heads of local Yupik experts who apply it to local conditions.
Is it science? Is it systematic, falsifiable, and reliable in the way we expect the scientific method to be? Or is it just haphazard, unreliable cultural intuition that we can replace with our better science? I’ll give Dr. Krupnik, the Smithsonian’s Arctic expert, the last word:
Native observers…have their own ways of memorizing and documenting such events. They look for certain and, often, very specific indicators that are meaningful to them, both culturally and individually. To a scientific observer, the resulting story may seem “intuitive” and even eclectic, but it is no less solid, since it is based on the very same practical indicators followed over many years…. Despite a popular perception that Native knowledge is generally intuitive and holistic, Yupik ice and weather watch is not scanning for every environmental signal possible. It is very well organized around a few key factors—such as wind, current or ice movement—and it focuses first and foremost upon conditions for maritime hunting and the related behavior of critical game species. Therefore, Native experts usually have a very coherent—one may say, “fully scientific”—vision of the annual sequence of weather and ice regimes, the migration patterns of major maritime animals, and how these two cycles are related.10
To sum up, the Yupik elders are the premier Arctic observers and experts, and they possess a knowledge that is scientific in its attention to detail and ability to remember patterns, and a language that has encoded all this knowledge in complex ways in hundreds of specialized and highly descriptive words. The snow debunkers should observe the uses of these words in their native context, relying on the accounts of the Yupik elders, before blithely claiming that there is no such thing as complex snow and ice terminology, and that even if there is, it is of no interest to science. What the Yupik know about ice and snow is part of our common human patrimony. As an unparalleled repository of expertise on Arctic weather conditions, it may contain clues that could help us understand and adapt to the current radical patterns of global warming that disproportionately affect northern latitudes. We ignore Yupik snow and ice knowledge at our peril, and we stand to profit greatly from acknowledging its complexity and its antiquity.
Living in one of the harshest environments on Earth, with an acuity driven by survival, the Yupik identify and name at least 99 distinct sea ice formations. Here are a few ice descriptions from Watching Ice and Weather Our Way:
Qenu
Newly forming slush ice. It forms when it first gets cold.
Pequ
Ice that was bubbled up by pressure ridging.[The] bulb cracks and falls down, and when it breaks, the water shows up. It is then covered by new ice or snow and it is very dangerous to walk on. So, when this happens, you better detour it….
Nutemtaq
Old ice floes that are thick and appear to have had a snow bank on them for a long period of time. Good to work on.
Nuyileq
Crushed ice beginning to spread out; dangerous to walk on. The ice is dissolving, but still has not dispersed in water, although it is vulnerable for one to fall through and to sink. Sometimes seals can even surface on this ice because the water is starting to appear.11
Notice all the information encapsulated in these definitions: the dynamic conditions that cause the ice to form; its appearance, texture, solidity, and (in)suitability for walking on; the season or time of year; the usefulness for hunting; and the possibility of finding sustenance.
How many hours and days, in a lifetime of Arctic hunting and foraging, would an elder have devoted to learning the smallest nuances of ice and weather patterns? Igor Krupnik, who helped collect the sea ice terms, describes how ice-watching is “a lifelong and twenty-four-hour passion, since there is always someone checking weather, sea and ice at any given moment. In a critical time—when men go out hunting, during the spring whaling season, or when the weather is shifting rapidly, several people spend hours scanning the horizon and discussing signals (indicators) related to the status of weather and ice.”
The Yupik science of weather has a very different foundation than modern meteorology. Our focus is on temperature and barometric pressure, indicators that are little regarded by the Yupik. Their science relies on “an extremely sophisticated system of wind terminology that identifies some ten or twelve (or more) types of winds by specific direction and other features.” The system of information packaging that links wind types to weather outcomes has a payoff, Krupnik notes: “Each wind is known to bring a certain type of weather, snow, or ice movement. By identifying…its Yupik name, an observer can make a quick judgment and even make a basic forecast of upcoming conditions.”12
This knowledge is of immense value, both cultural and cognitive. The Yupik cataloging of local conditions gives them a sophisticated understanding of a topic that modern science is still trying to codify. Such specific knowledge extends far beyond Arctic ice, though. If we are willing to explore the margins of the world’s many peoples, we find many other bodies of knowledge that are of immense potential value to humanity, all rapidly vanishing. Among them is crucial knowledge of healing.
A PLANT FOR EVERY AILMENT
The Bolivian Altiplano (high plain) is one of the most desolate landscapes on the planet. It features mostly loose clay and rocks, with scrubby vegetation growing here and there. Being a lowlander, I found it very hard to breathe at 12,000 feet above sea level. Even climbing a short flight of steps left me winded. Despite the dryness and severity of the landscape, the Altiplano is rich in culture and in biodiversity, especially animals found nowhere else (alpacas, vicuñas) and a wealth of healing plants.
I went to Bolivia in 2007, along with
my fellow linguist Greg Anderson and a crew of three filmmakers, drawn by the prospect of encountering one of the smallest and most unusual languages on Earth.
We landed in El Alto, at a dizzying elevation of 13,600 feet, then descended into the deep bowl that is La Paz. Taking Diamox to prevent altitude sickness, we needed several days to adapt. During that time, we met local scholars and a group of intrepid students at the University of La Paz who were translating Windows software into Aymara, the major indigenous language (with over four million speakers) of Bolivia.
As soon we could, we headed up and out of town, in a convoy of two Land Rovers. Our destination was the mountain redoubt of Chary, where we hoped to meet the mysterious Kallawaya medicine men (los medicos). These famed healers of the Andes not only possessed unparalleled secret knowledge of medicinal plants but also had developed a secret language to protect that knowledge. Handed down for at least four centuries, since the collapse of the Inca empire, the knowledge has been fiercely guarded, in part, by allowing only young male initiates to learn the language.
After eight hours on the steep, winding passes, we arrived in the tiny hamlet of Chary. Asking around, we found a man who was a local healer and claimed to speak Kallawaya. We eagerly set up our cameras, microphones, and prepared to interview him. Disappointingly, he turned out to speak only Quechua, one of the most common indigenous tongues of the Andes, and Spanish. We thanked him for his time and pressed on.
On our way back to the decrepit hotel, we passed a man bearing an enormous cloth bundle on his back. He waved us to stop, asking for a ride into town. By sheer luck, he turned out to be Max Chura Mamani, a renowned medicine man, a speaker of Kallawaya, and just the kind of person we were seeking.
As guardian of an ancient knowledge base about healing plants, Max wielded considerable power and authority. People would come from miles away to consult with him, and he was used to being accommodated. Back at the hotel, we agreed to have him perform a ritual for us, and he cast coca leaves to determine a good time and place for it. He scolded us a bit for our haste and eagerness. We gave Max money to make the necessary ritual preparations, and then settled in to wait and drink tea as the fog rolled in. More than a day would pass before Max resurfaced, as we impatiently paced the floor and wondered if we had been fleeced.
Antonio Condori (left), with his son Illarion Ramos Condori (center), both Kallawaya healers, talking with David Harrison (right) in Chary village, northern Bolivia, June 2007.
The Kallawaya have a sophisticated knowledge of pharmacology that they developed through trial and error, a method we can only consider to be scientific. Here are just two of the treasures from their pharmacopoeia that they have discovered and chosen to share with researchers:
Anis del Campo (wild anise). The Kallawaya use it as a carminative for indigestion, stomachaches and colic. It is given to nursing mothers to produce milk, and used with aspirin for colds and flu. For birth delivery, a mate of anise is given to the mother as an oxytocic to promote rapid labor and to help her expel the baby.
Amapola (opium poppy) is prepared in different ways (boiled in water, mixed with pig fat, etc.) to cure a variety of ailments from hemorrhoids to dysentery to insomnia, and boiled with milk to alleviate coughing and hoarseness.13
White poppy is reported by botanists to contain many different alkaloids, a basis for creating analgesics (painkillers). Codeine, one of the alkaloids extracted from the white poppy by pharmaceutical companies, is widely used in cough-suppressing medicines. The Kallawaya knew of beneficial poppy properties long before Western medicine did, using their own process of experimentation.
The Kallawaya healers anticipated the information age by half a millennium. They realized that, although they could not restrict access to the specimens (nor patent the knowledge) of the thousands of medicinal plants they had discovered, they could encode their specialized knowledge in a secret language to be transmitted only within practitioner families and between males (e.g., father to son).
Despite the 400-year-plus interlude since the fall of the Inca empire and the widespread use of the Quechua language in the community, the Kallawaya have preserved their secret language, maintained their elite position as healers that attract a national and international clientele, and achieved the (moral but not legal) protection of being recognized by UNESCO as part of Bolivia’s (and the world’s) intangible cultural heritage. In addition to knowing uses of native plants, they were quick to discover uses for plants introduced by European colonizers, such as the borraja, or “bee plant,” used as a sudorific (a drug that induces sweating) to treat symptoms of measles and smallpox.
Kallawaya poses challenges to our Western notion of intellectual property and copyright. For small languages and the knowledge they contain, Western legal regimes have neglected to provide any protection, because they do not represent ideas that are individually attributable “eurekas,” but rather bodies of collective knowledge worked out and passed down over millennia. Legally unprotected, such bodies of knowledge are vulnerable to “bio-prospecting.” Pharmaceutical companies may swoop in and (legally) steal traditional medicinal knowledge possessed by indigenous peoples, profiting handsomely while paying them no royalties whatsoever. This scenario—which applies to indigenous groups around the world, each with a specialized knowledge base—may partly explain the Kallawaya obsession with secrecy.
Max did finally return to us, and he performed a spectacular, five-hour ritual of healing. It involved the spilling of alcohol, burning of many ritual objects (e.g., llama fetuses), and the blood sacrifice of a guinea pig. Throughout the entire ritual, he used secret Kallawaya words, further ensuring their secrecy by mumbling. We were perplexed how anyone could ever learn this cryptic tongue. Max uses the language, along with perhaps 100 other healers, to perform sacred healing rituals in a remote Andean village. No children learn it from birth; rather, it is taught to teenage males who are being initiated into the secret practice.
What we learned, and what had not previously been reported in the scientific literature, is that Kallawaya is also a plain everyday language that can be used to say things like “The llama is eating grass.” In other words, though it is no one’s native language and is passed on in secrecy, it approaches being a full-fledged language in which speakers can talk about almost anything. Although reportedly the exclusive province of men, Max may have secretly passed on the language to his daughter, who stood by his side and assisted during the entire ritual. Kallawaya is so tenaciously guarded, and provides so much of the healers’ livelihood, that it may be perfectly secure, not endangered, despite having so few speakers.
WHO OWNS A LANGUAGE?
So far, we have considered how the theoretical conception of language needs to be expanded, and in turn, how the words of small languages can expand our knowledge of the world around us. Yet Kallawaya also shows that a language’s dynamic function in a people’s culture means they may not want to share its riches. Kallawaya is an excellent example of a language that could be patented for both its form and content, for the economic well-being of the community that invented it, and for protection against predatory pharmaceutical corporations that seek to exploit that knowledge without recompense.
They are not the first group to assert ownership of a language. On August 12, 2005, the leaders of the Mapuche tribe of Chile wrote a letter to Bill Gates accusing him of “intellectual piracy.” Microsoft was creating a version of Windows in Mapudungun, the language of the Mapuche. Since the Windows user interface had already been translated into lesser-known languages like Quechua and Maori, Microsoft no doubt thought it was doing a good thing for the Mapuche.
Mapuche leaders, in an eloquently defiant letter to Bill Gates, took a very different position, however:
From a human rights perspective, we would like to present to you our profound concerns regarding the scope of the agreement between Microsoft and the government of Chile…. Mapudungun represents a fundamental part of our culture and our cultural herit
age. On the basis of our right to self-determination as indigenous people, the Mapuche People is the main custodian and interpreter of its cultural heritage and only the Mapuche People must and can safeguard, maintain, manage, develop and recreate its cultural heritage.
The Mapuche authorities and their traditional institutions are of the firm conviction that our rights to our intangible heritage such as our language, Mapudungun, spirituality and religious beliefs are the last resources that we possess and constitute the essential and fundamental basis of our identity and our collective rights which reside in our minds and our collective consciousness. However, we have observed that these rights are the object of acts of intellectual piracy.
The fact that indigenous peoples have the right to own, control and manage their cultural heritage, deriving from their right to self-determination and to their lands and resources, implies that elements of their cultural heritage cannot be used, transmitted, displayed or managed by other persons without ensuring the free and prior informed consent of the relevant indigenous people. Therefore, the appropriation of our language as fundamental part of our culture by researchers, linguists and public officials constitutes a violation of our inherent and inalienable right to our cultural heritage.14
Word of Mapuche audacity in resisting one of the most powerful companies in the world raced through the blogging community. Most bloggers—despite having no stake in the outcome—expressed vitriolic disdain for the Mapuche leaders. One of the tamer, less blatantly racist comments read: “To those who filed suit: if you wish your language to die, by all means continue your death grip on it.” Another added: “Someone should sue them for using English. What the hell is their problem?” One blogger described the principle of exclusive linguistic ownership as incompatible with freedom of speech. “We can’t dictate who speaks English, so why should the Mapuche be able to dictate who speaks their language? It would be one thing if this was some closely guarded tribal secret, but the fact is Mapuzugun [sic] is a living language.”15
The Last Speakers Page 7
