Learning by doing: orality and action

• 10 years ago
• Posted in:Orality and Literacy, Re: Module 2, Uncategorized
• 3
• Author: morrissey

I just completed a Wilderness First Aid course by The Red Cross. It was a total of 24 hours long, over two evenings and all this weekend. After so much listening, talking, watching and most significantly, doing, I feel much more prepared to take action in a medical emergency, in or out of the wilderness. I could have passed the exam without looking at one written word. We had a compact reference guide, but rarely referred to it. This experience relates, for me, directly to Ong’s book Orality and Literacy. The most important aspects of living are not reflected in our literacy or our literature.  The most important aspects of our being here may be in what we do, how we do it, and how life unfolds in relation to the people we love, know, or simply encounter.  How we do.
Our literature expresses, and records layers of human experience, and for that I am grateful to be a literate person who did an undergraduate degree in Literature. However, being a member of a typographic and chirographic culture doesn’t necessarily result in having, or being able to acquire more knowledge.
I think it may be impossible to suppose how it would be to live in an oral culture. But, I also feel that the intelligence and richness of experience and activity in oral cultures is something we are missing, and trying to recover.
“Oral cultures know few statistics or facts divorced from human or quasi-human activity.” (Ong, p.43)
I don’t agree with this statement at all, but don’t feel compelled to argue against it, but rather point to it, and wonder if he meant something else here that I am totally missing? Oral cultures observe the world around them, and often know much more about the world than literate cultures do. And, in this I am not referring to only the “average person” from that culture, but also to specialists and scientists from literate cultures.
Recently, there has been research by a professor at The University of Victoria on underwater discoveries of signs of human activity in and around Haida Gwai that points to people living there about 17,000 years ago. In the oral history of the Haida there are stories about this time. Which also brings to mind the Inuit stories of the Franklin Expedition, and how their accounts of where Franklin’s ship was located, turned out to be very accurate. Their stories are accurate and scientific, and oral.
Literate cultures tend to be highly sceptical of oral cultures and of their intelligence, accuracy, and credibility.
Which makes me think of a story from a First Nations Elder in the Yukon:

Ida Calmegan, a Tlingit elder from the Deisheetaan Beaver Clan, in the Yukon Territory, told this story to a class of Canadian adult immigrant students from a variety of countries. I was present as a teacher, and on this day, definitely as a student too.

“Doctor Neumann was of German heritage. He was a humble man, and he respected us and seemed interested in our ways. When my grandmother and her sister made medicine, he took notes and asked them questions. He tried to learn our language. He had a good ear for our language and could make small talk. It made my Grandmother laugh, and she seemed pleased by his boy-like enthusiasm for her medicines.

One day, a hunter from our community was mauled by a bear. He was in rough shape. His companions had quickly made a stretcher and hauled him into my grandmother’s house. Dr. Neumann saw the hunter on the stretcher, with a face so bloody you could not see his features, pass by his house. He grabbed his medical bag, and was greeted by my aunt at the door of grandmother’s house.

There was a high probability the hunter would die from his wounds. They needed to stop the bleeding and make sure he did not suffer more from going deeper into shock. Grandmother had everyone working for her, and they knew what to do. Dr. Neumann wanted to start stitching up the hunter’s face. It had been shredded by the bear’s massive claws. This man’s skin was in strips, some were hanging off his body, he barely looked like a human. It was surprising that he was still alive.

It was decided that Dr. Neumann would work on the entire left side of the man’s body, and my grandmother and her sister would work on the right side. They all worked with quick, skilled hands. They got the bleeding under control and pieced the hunter back together again as if he were a kind of human quilt. The bloodied skin was swelling and his breathing was low. Dr. Neumann barely spoke, while he stitched the man with a needle and thread, a tireless, deft tailor. Grandmother and Auntie used tree pitch to adhere the hunter’s torn flesh back together. Dr. Neumann and Grandmother had agreed to do it their own ways, and as quickly as possible in hopes of keeping the man alive.

Finally, the hunter was stitched and pitched, and looked like nothing I had ever seen before or since.

There was a liquid medicine that Grandmother had slowly been putting in the man’s mouth, drop by drop. Dr. Neumann listened to the hunter’s heart, and lungs. The man was alive, now it was a matter of time to see if he would continue to breath. Everyone was hopeful.

Time went by, and he lived. Dr. Neumann visited the hunter everyday. He was surprised at the man’s recovery. It was quick and he was getting stronger and stronger, faster than expected. After a couple of weeks, Dr. Neumann removed the stitches from the man’s face and body. The pitch that Grandmother had applied slowly dissolved. The skin was pink and delicate where the cuts had been, but the colour was returning to normal as more days went by. The stitches Dr. Neumann removed left permanent marks like little bridges that crossed the lines that looked like rivers where the cuts had been. The doctor was shocked by the effectiveness of the pitch. As time went by, the hunter’s skin was perfect again on the right side. His left side was forever scarred by the technique used by Dr. Neumann.

The doctor thought he knew the only and the best way to put the hunter back together again. He learned that there was another way of doing things.

For me, this true account acts as a metaphor for what many White Europeans have done through the history of contact in the Americas. They may have done a lot of intentional wrongs, but they have also done a lot of things that they thought were right, were the only and best way. In their ignorance, they were blind to see that the people who already lived here, had successfully lived here for thousands of years, and did not want outsiders telling them how to live or what they could or couldn’t do. The hunter in this story has healing from his own people, which leaves him perfect again. But, the good intentions of the white doctor with his medicine, leave him with permanent scarring.   The doctor learns, but is not a part of the thousands of years of learning, so he cannot know all there is to know. He tries to help, and he does help, but the results of his help are visible and will always be visible. I don’t think it is too much of a leap to compare this story to that of residential schools,( or simply of the presence of Europeans in Canada). The residential schools and the intentions of these schools were believe it or not, “good” but with absolutely no understanding of anything that seems remotely sane or human, these schools were generational nightmares and had horrific consequences for all aboriginal families who experienced them. Even if someone was not abused in a residential school, they were still taken from their families and culture and all that they knew.   The schools actually killed children because they got sick, they were stolen, and many simply died. It is heartbreaking and unjust. The scars left on the hunters face could represent the “white man’s” ignorance and racism. Dr. Neumann was not a bad man, he just believed his ways were the best ways because he did not know another way. Sometimes it is this kind of ignorance that we do not think is dangerous, but it can be. Dr. Neumann learned a lot from the Tlingit people. When individuals learn and gain wisdom, it helps in the healing process and in the fight against the system that perpetuates injustices. This man had severe scars on one side of his body, but he was still alive.

I don’t think I want to come to any quick conclusions about how to proceed as a person from a literate culture.  But, somewhere within me, I have always felt a loss and a desire to have more “oral intelligence” and that means for me to think on my feet and speak clearly and intelligently without having to rely on notes, to be able to tell stories and to sing and play musical instruments.  I cannot do the last two, and those two abilities elude me and sometimes even haunt me, so to make up for that loss, I have tried to be competent at the other oral intelligences.

I am happy to be aware of my ignorance, and try to understand more about the world from other “ways of seeing” it, and of being in it.  At times, I think that our society is developing as such that in the future we will be, in some ways, a more oral culture.  People are/will express themselves in video type formats, but it time will show us how.  I think there are many problems with who and how information is disseminated and gathered.