We Broke the Vessel: Wisdom You Can’t Reprint
My grandmother knew which plants would heal stomach pain, which phase of the moon was best for planting rice, how to read weather patterns in the behavior of insects. This knowledge—passed down through thousands of years—died with her generation because we were busy learning chemistry and meteorology and modern medicine.
We replaced indigenous wisdom with industrial systems, then discovered that indigenous wisdom was often more sophisticated, more sustainable, more attuned to local conditions than our technological substitutes. We traded knowledge that worked for knowledge that merely seemed more advanced.
The weight isn’t just what we’ve lost, but what we destroyed while losing it. Indigenous communities didn’t just possess information—they embodied ways of knowing that integrated human life with natural cycles, that saw intelligence in systems we barely understand.
Now we’re desperately trying to reverse-engineer traditional ecological knowledge while the elders who carried it are gone and the ecosystems that sustained it are damaged beyond recovery. We’re trying to learn from books what people once learned from the land itself.
We discover that traditional agriculture was actually more productive than industrial monocultures, that indigenous fire management prevented the catastrophic wildfires our suppression policies created, that traditional medicine identified compounds our pharmaceuticals now try to synthesize.
But we can’t simply retrieve this knowledge like books from a library. It was inseparable from ways of life, from relationships with place, from cultural practices that colonialism systematically dismantled. We broke the vessels and now we’re surprised the knowledge leaked out.
The tragedy isn’t just practical—it’s moral. We didn’t just lose solutions to problems we now face; we destroyed entire ways of being human that might have taught us how to live as part of the natural world instead of against it.
What we call progress required the systematic elimination of people who knew how to live sustainably on the earth. Now that our unsustainable systems are failing, we realize what we threw away.
