Remote Cultures, Indigenous Wisdom: "We must work toward preserving their wisdom, intelligence, innovation, and creativity if we want to preserve the beautiful diversity of our world.".

• Author: Saraiya, Sej
• Position: Focus

IN BRITISH COLUMBIA'S Nicola Valley, Sheree, an old medicine woman and a native elder of the Nlaka'pamux tribe, walks through a labyrinth of plants, sharing their names and healing properties. She plans to go into the forest the following day to pick herbs and medicines for the tribe. "You pick the medicine at sundown," she explains. "In the morning, you leave the animals alone because they are berry picking, catching fish. They detoxify their bodies with the berries."

Thus begins my informal learning as I traverse through the remote lands of indigenous nations in both the East and West. Later, as we stand at the kitchen sink, washing the plants and carefully wrapping them in paper napkins so I can bring them back with me to California, she says, "If you are ever alone and need to find a plant in a forest, lay down on Mother Earth, hug her and tell her, 'I need you to help me find such and such plant. Show me; teach me,'--and she will."

For those of us quite removed from our indigenous roots, this way of thinking may seem unrealistic, even dubious. Yet, the Vedic pundits of the Himalayas, the Yanomami elders of the Amazon, the Polynesian wayfarers knew about traveling to different dimensions, navigating lands and waters by observing the stars, birds, and animals--and about galaxies way before science spoke of them.

In the last few years of my research-oriented travels, I have spent time in the remote corners of Northeast India, where the elders still worship the sun and the moon and speak an unscripted language that is rapidly dying; I have stayed with the last remaining head-hunters; visited deep in the heart of the San Jose del Pacifico, where the Mazatec curan-deros still journey beyond Earth with their young sons and daughters; met with the Tana Torajans, who bring their dead back to life in the triennial ritual of Ma'nene; while capturing portraits of cultures on the brink of extinction.

There is a lot to be said about the freedom that comes with living in a country as young as America, made wholly of immigrants who first came from Europe and England. Not hailing from indigenous traditions with rigid structures and firmly established ways of living allowed the inhabitants to create their own paradigms for a fulfilled life, rejecting the tyranny of absolute faith, rejecting myth and mysticism. Yet, in the rejection of it all, we made our living world into an inanimate object to exploit.

It is incredibly freeing not to be forced to follow antiquated paradigms that no longer serve our growth and evolution, to have the freedom to forge one's own path through trial and error and grow as a result; it is the perfect backdrop for human evolution. However, with the growing independent way of thinking and the evolving...