How Indigenous Forms of Governance Can Improve Our Modern World

Ardoch Algonquin Chief Robert Lovelace helps us re-imagine society’s relationship to nature

Indigenous cultures are complex knowledge systems that utilize energy, food security, transportation and communications in balance with natural systems. Understanding how indigenous economies, as well as social and cultural systems work can help bend the curve against the prospects of social, environmental and economic failure.

Present governance structures conform little to environmental or ecosystem realities. For the most part, political boundaries were created to serve colonial settlement, resource extraction and industrial manufacturing while denaturing ecosystems and limiting environmentally appropriate governance. Faced with overexploitation of resources, ecosystem degradation, contamination of soils and water and climate change, the people of North America need to re-imagine how we connect to the earth. Ecosystem appropriate governance is a step in the right direction. We also need to ensure economic, social and cultural practices work with natural replenishment cycles rather than against them.

Language is the “signature” of culture. How we speak to one another, how we describe and discuss the world in which we live, determines our success in relating to the world. Indigenous knowledge systems are reflections of empirical interaction with the earth, rational discovery, symbolic imagery and social reinforcement, directed toward a deep understanding of the local. Indigenous languages are verb-based rather than using nouns as the foundation for communication as we do in English. If we simply want to acquire “things,” then the structure of our present language works fine. If we want to relate with the world, make appropriate ecological choices, and rebuild collapsing environments then we need to learn, think and create in action words. We need to live within dynamic eco-natural processes to live well together.

– ROBERT LOVELACE

Professor Robert Lovelace, retired Chief of the Ardoch Algonquin First Nation, has decoded elements of aboriginal governance that are key to re-indigenizing the commons. Lovelace presented part of his work at the Great Lakes Commons Gathering. Excerpted from “Kosmos magazine.”

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.