AMERICANS in search of spiritual nourishment turned their gaze in the 1990s to the Indigenous. To judge by first impressions, F. David Peat’s Blackfoot Physics is the modern version of The Tao of Physics, with Blackfoot metaphysics as the more spiritually mature system against which Western physics is to be referred and compared. Like Fritjof Capra, Peat argues that during this century physicists have been discovering a picture of reality that has remarkable resonances with what other cultures have been saying for thousands of years. Here the “other” is the “First Peoples of Turtle Island” – indigenous Americans’ description of themselves and their continent.
Yet Peat’s book is of a somewhat different stripe. While Capra used the parallels with Taoism to make physics more palatable, Peat uses his to plead for a more serious consideration of “indigenous science”. That is the heart of this book. It is not that Peat himself believes that Native American knowledge needs to be justified in Western terms, but rather, as he poignantly points out, that in the current intellectual climate it is difficult for indigenous people to get a serious hearing for their epistemological and metaphysical systems.
A theoretical physicist and the author of a dozen previous books on subjects such as quantum reality and chaos, for the past decade Peat has immersed himself in the indigenous cultures of America and has been organising dialogues between Western scientists and Native American elders. He was reluctant to write this book at all, because indigenous knowledge is so embedded in land, language, and lived experience that it does not lend itself easily to written explication.
For the Blackfoot and their cousins, knowledge is not something to be rashly bandied about but is an active power whose careless invocation could have unwanted repercussions. But Peat was finally convinced to write because so many Native American youth are turning away from their culture. Knowing that their traditional knowledge has parallels with physics, he was told by a tribal elder, might help to revitalise their pride in their own heritage.
Throughout these pages, we gain tantalising glimpses of an elusive alternative to the thing we know as “science”. Just as Peat has had to learn by sitting quietly and observing over long periods of time, so the reader is led gently into another world and asked to simply sit and observe. There are sections on “sacred mathematics”, on the concept of “a map in the head” and a fine chapter on languages and how they encode wildly different world pictures.
My appetite was whetted. I wanted to know more about the specifics of indigenous science&colon; how is sacred mathematics used? In what way is time cyclic? But these are Western questions, and that is the problem. When confronted with wholly other ways of knowing it is not so much the answers that differ as the modes of inquiry. Above all, Peat’s book is an eloquent plea for a fair go for the modes of enquiry of other cultures.