All of us are descendents of men and women who lived in indigenous communities. Experts knowledgeabe of the local environment follow the rythmic cycles of nature. The indigenous people have lived for thousands of years, integrated to the rythms of their natural environment, next to the earth, learning from her. Their oral cultures teach about plants, rythms, traditions, and about ways of living in harmony with the land. Their elderly often are living libraries, custodians of immemorial traditions. As African writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ says: "When an elder dies, it is as if a library is burned". Each one of these people is the carrier and guardian of a cultural and linguistic treasure.

In the vast majority of cases, indigenous communities have lived in a sustainable way in their envionment for thousands of years. It is nessesary that we supplement the abstract knowledge of modern science with the local cultivated and treasured knowledge of the indigenous peoples. If we truly want to learn how to live in a sustainable way, it is worthwhile that we pay attention to the wisdom of these people. They can help us to rediscover the sense of belonging to the place where we live and to reconnect with the cycles and rythms of nature.

Modern science brings us a prodigious and precise knowledge, but reduces the world to a sum of governed elements for the mechanical laws. There are other ways to understand the marvelous and harmonious order of nature that is preserved in the ancestral wisdom of the indigenous peopls. We need a new vision of the world that does not exclude the fact that science can listen to the land.

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Index of the Monograph

Ancient Wisdom

Indigenous peoples, key peoples
Indigenous people today
Teachers in sustainability
Biodiversity and cultural diversity
Declaration about the rights of the indigenous peopls
A world where many worlds fit
Original abundance and economic solidarity
People without a state
The voice of indigenous grandmothers
Decolonize the imagination
A world of relations
A call to the conscientious
Feeling a part of nature
We are all indigenous
Scientific knowledge vs. Indigenous knowledge
The homework of survival and of other indian organizations
Films about Indigenous themes
Investigation about the oppression of the indigenous peopls
Bibliography and internet resources

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