Learning from indigenous values

Learning from traditional values

Description

Learning from indigenous values involves actively integrating traditional knowledge, community-based practices, and respect for natural systems into contemporary problem-solving. This strategy addresses issues such as environmental degradation, social fragmentation, and unsustainable development by applying indigenous principles of stewardship, reciprocity, and collective responsibility. Its practical intent is to foster resilience, sustainability, and social cohesion by remedying the disconnect between modern systems and the holistic, place-based wisdom of indigenous cultures.

Context

There are approximately 250 million indigenous people in over seventy countries. In most of these countries, their way of life is threatened. Many of them view nature distinctly differently from conventional perceptions by seeing land not as a commodity to be bought and sold in impersonal markets, but as a substance endowed with sacred meaning, embedded in social relations, and fundamental to the understanding of the group's existence and identity. These views are consistently and fundamentally centred upon sustainability, something that is considered the conventional world necessarily has to learn or relearn in order to achieve global sustainability.