The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

The San or Saan, who are sometimes referred to as Kalahari Bushmen, are a hunter-gatherer group of various Khoisan-speaking indigenous peoples who inhabit several nations of Southern Africa. Davis uses the San to exemplify a people who are as genetically and geographically close as science can come to humanity before it migrated out of Africa, though he acknowledges that such one-to-one equivocation of a modern culture with an ancient one is full of pitfalls. This is the first culture Davis presents to illustrate how adaptations to specific landscapes create and come to define culture, through description of the San’s seasonal calendar and the hunt’s central importance to their way of life.

Mentioned only briefly but inhabiting an important position in the history of modern cultural anthropology, Franz Boas (1858-1942) was a German-born American anthropologist. Boas is sometimes called the father of American anthropology. Boas pioneered a conceptual relationship to ethnographic study that still drives anthropology, the idea that the anthropologist’s goal is to truly understand the studied subject’s view of the world and relation to life. Boas realized that the superstitions of so-called primitive people were actually important cultural adaptations that helped them survive, and he considered such communities just as intelligent as people living in modernized civilizations. As Davis recounts him writing:

“I often ask myself what advantages our good society possesses over that of the ‘savages’ and find, the more I see of their customs, that we have no right to look down on them. […] We have no right to blame them for their forms and superstitions which may seem ridiculous to us. We highly educated people are much worse, relatively speaking” (69).

Several different Polynesian wayfinders are mentioned in Davis text, including Ka’iulani, Nainoa Thompson, Mau, and Tupaia. Through them Davis constructs a lineage of this incredible navigational practice. Tupaia lived during the initial colonial action in Polynesia. This navigator, befriended by Captain Cook, could draw a map from memory “of every major island group in Polynesia” (41) and indicate the exact direction to Tahiti throughout a 13,000 kilometer sea voyage.

Jumping forward in time, Mau was Nainoa Thompson’s teacher, and his biography gives examples of the incredible lifelong dedication to navigation that wayfinders undertake. Mau’s grandfather was a navigator, and “at the age of one Mau was selected to inherit the ancestral teaching” (53). As a child he spent hours standing in tide pools, being dragged behind canoes, and at 14 had his testicles tied to the rigging of a vessel “to more carefully sense the movement of the canoe through the water” (53). Mau became a highly skilled navigator, able to sense deep sea swells and multiple current directions from the hull of a canoe.

Nainoa Thompson is the student of Mau, a personal friend of Davis, and the navigator of the Hokule’a at the time of the book’s publication. As the navigator of this revivalist vessel, Thompson is a cultural hero in Hawaii. A highly skilled navigator, he passes his ancestral knowledge down to his own protégé Ka’iulani, who navigated the voyage on the Hokule’a that Davis attended with Thompson.

The Barasana are one of several Amazonian tribes that share a communal cosmology. The Barasana and the other peoples of the Amazon exemplify how a cultural mythology can form highly complex and effective geographic adaptations. The Barasana use their mythology to structure a land-management plan that avoids damage to the ecosystem, ensuring the maintenance of both the community and their sacred landscape. They do so by imbuing their surroundings with layers of metaphorical and ancestral meaning that completely opposes scientific reductionism yet remains more effective as an adaptation tool.

A personal friend of Davis, Martin Von Hildebrand is also a heroic figure in the cultural revival of the indigenous peoples of Colombia. Appointed by Colombian President Virgilio Barco to “do something for the Indian peoples” (99), Hildebrand was crucial in securing legal land rights to 250,000 square kilometers of the Amazon, divided into 162 Resguardos, for the indigenous peoples there. This land title, coupled with strife elsewhere in Colombia, allowed the indigenous of the Amazon to revive their culture from the remnants left by centuries of colonialism and missionary work. This event was a victory of cultural preservation.

The Kogi, Arhuacos, and Wiwa, numbering roughly 30,000 today, are descendants of an ancient South American civilization known as the Tairona. Today living 6,000 meters above the coastal plain of Colombia in the Southern Andes, these people revived their culture in seclusion from colonial forces. Developing “an utterly new dream of the earth” (141), they live in intense stewardship of their local landscape. Witnessing the ecological destruction of industry, they also formally called on their “little brothers” to cease actions that cause climate catastrophe. They stand in the text as an idealized picture of the possibilities for human harmony with the earth as well as a reminder of the continued agency of indigenous peoples in modern issues that affect them.