Book 2 Post 2

The book I chose to read in my last blog post was The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World by Wade David. The only way I can describe it is amazing. Exploring ancient cultures, societies, and ideologies brings new perspectives to Western ideologies and allows you to fully acknowledge the greatness of humans throughout history. From the Polynesian Wayfinders to the Penan people, we can learn important lessons and apply them to our current life.

It was disheartening and saddening to hear the theory of “accidental drift” or Heyerdahl’s theory that Polynesia was settled from South America. The fact that they discounted the ingenuity and resourcefulness of Polynesians, stripping them of their greatest accomplishment. Yet, hearing about the different resources they used to navigate the ocean is incredible. You wouldn’t think that the shape/size of clouds, the color of the sunset, the halo’s around the moonlight, and animal movement could be used to accurately predict weather and navigate the ocean. I feel like that is one lesson that we need to be reminded of today. With technology all around us, we never have to figure out the weather or directions. I find beauty in being in tune with the environment and navigating it based on instinct.

“We don’t want them running around like animals. No one has the ethical right to deprive the Penan of the right to assimilation into Malaysian society.”

Another society talked about in the book was the Penan. The Penan were a nomadic society. I’ve always thought that nomads moved around chasing resources as they exhausted the ones available to them. Instead, they carefully navigated the forest in cycles to efficiently use resources as they replenished. They placed value on social relations and had no word for “thank you” as sharing was thought of as an obligation. That was until the Malaysian government deforested and forced the “urbanization” of the Penan. In just a single generation, the Penan culture was destroyed. Their way of life was stripped from them. Their identity was stolen. They were forced to work jobs and could no longer live off of the forest they so deeply valued. We destroyed one of the few remaining nomadic cultures remaining. For a minute try to imagine that happening to your culture and society. This is something that nobody should be forced to experience. The countless lessons we could have learned from the beautiful culture were wiped away with no second thoughts. It is important to recognize the value different cultures bring to humanity as a whole. If we all shared a single culture we probably would have been wiped out many centuries ago. Its our diversity that brings us strength, and we can not afford to lose that.