Note: A Wise Man Speaks is a collection of papers and speeches presented to various organizations at different times by Wilfred Peltier. A Wise Man Speaks was published by Ammerindianization Program Pedagogical Services, Department of Indian Affairs, 1985.

Finding myself up here in front of you talking about society as I have experienced it since moving off the Reserve and coming back to it again, and being able to weigh one agains the other, I find that I am discovering more and more about myself as I begin saying words which express how I feel about our society and about our humanity. I want you to know that I will be talking about myself - about my perceptions, my experience and the world I have lived in.

I might like to emphasize here that although I suspect this talk will have indications that the whole problem is based solely upon education, all the problems are because of the educational system. It probably will appear this way because most people have isolated education as separate from self. This is, that I am speaking about education in terms of an abstract, and we might well see it this way, but education, like religion or like economics or anything else is not separate from, but is total, is a part of the whole, it is what you are and it is from this point of view I would like to take off on my discussions about education as I see it personally and as I have experienced it through Western European institutions and also through mine.

I believe probably one of the largest problems that threaten the world today arises from ignorance, and when I say this I mean that we have the possession of technological means which have a tremendous destructive potential, and the threat then of ignorance arises. In that this is in the hands of a people or humanity which is totally ignorant in the sense of survival.

So I guess what I am saying is that today's education should be education for survival and of course which is not the case at present. When I say education for survival, I'm talking about the fact that education is not new. It has existed in all facets of life, not just the human element, and has been successful in passing down the means of survival through its own processes which is not the same as today's text-book-organized process. When we began to organize education, that is separate from the rest of life - isolate it by creating techniques and methods and having teachers to transmit knowledge the old traditional way of learning has suffered a change of direction, and when I say the old way, what I really mean is it is not old, its always been this way and it still is in spite of the system we have created. So that the thing we are talking about - education and surviving today is really creating objects - taking human raw material and creating some kind of functional object to create some usefulness to the establishment, which we have also created. When I have experienced in talking to many friends and through my observations and hearing that the whole of technology has created most of the world or most of the people in the world, to see everything all over the worlds as parts and objects, rather than as living things.

So that I think that at this point we should begin to think about what education can be and what it ought to be. I think by looking at what education has been we can learn a great deal from this. And what education has done or have been doing to human beings.

One of the things hat has resulted in the treatment of human beings as objects is that an assumption grows which tends more and more to regard each object as the same as any other object. In other words, if you should have a certain number of children in your classroom and you begin thinking about these children as being all the same, and you fail to see them as they really are. I guess the whole idea is to look at all these objects from the classroom in terms of their usefulness as objects rather than to discover what each of these pupils really are, as living beings. To try to bring out in each case the unique set of built-in factors or conditions of that person to his fullest potential.

Now I really don't want to go into the whole business of what takes place in this process of so-called education as it affects the human being, but I would like to make a couple of points, and one is that it certainly destroys the confidence and the belief in self for all those people who don't measure up in terms of performance on the academic level but more than that it destroys the people who do perform of this level as well because they are filled with the idea over and over again that they are better or worthwhile persons only in the sense of their usefulness to the establishment. In other words, their usefulness as a machine part destroys their chance of ever really looking at themselves for totally what they are, but rather what it does is encourage them to work very hard to develop certain specialties, certain clever abilities which, in turn, create some kind of lop-sided person - a cripple (a crippled kind of individual because he is extremely developed) - highly developed in one particular direction to the detriment of his totality, for what he is!

Another destructive thing which this kind of education does to people, and which certainly should be talked about and brought out is that not only does it make objects out of pupils but it also fragments them and isolates them as individuals. As an individual object, they are continuously being tested to find out which is the best and which is the worst, so it is a real kind of competitive thing where rivalry is very high and this creates an isolation of each individual and in most cases finds all these pupils very, very much alone.

Further to this, the pupil is being tested and evaluated in some longer term sense about his usefulness to society; that is, whether society is willing to invest in him in the sense of further education and the incentive to him that some day as he gets older that he will eventually end up relatively near the top of the ladder- the top of the heap- or else he will obtain some kind of power or else larger salary and so on. I think the most important aspect we must realize here is that the whole process is one of giving the student a self-concept which is that of a completely isolated individual, isolated from other individuals, and isolated from all other forms of life. This process makes it almost impossible for him to think of self and of life in ecological terms, in terms of totality which are essential to survival.

What we want to know about modern education as it is presently is being carried on is what is the child really learning. What we need to do then is to examine the assumption that when the class is concerned, say, with mathematics or geography is that that is what the children are learning, which in a very small part may be true. But what we don't know is what they are really learning? The totality of their experience, for instance, what does it do for a child simply to be in a classroom where math or geography or whatever is being taught, the way things are presently being taught? Is it just the experience of being in school? It is what the child is really learning that determines the kind of world we live in, a kind of society on which we base all our hopes for tomorrow's society. This unknown area - what is the child really learning?

As I see it at present time, all of our educational institutions are nothing but manufacturing plants to create functional replacements for the establishment. I would just like to go back to the thought that education has been to survive or for survival. Also, let's define education for a moment as learning: now, when you do this it is quite obvious. Learning, after all, is as old as life, and schools are only recent additions to instruction; books are only as old as printing itself - just over 400 years. Before there was widespread literacy in the world, which today we equate with education, there was always a process of education. The fact that we are here, that we have survived, is evidence enough of this.

I suspect that a long time ago people were concerned with education, but not in the same sense as we are, that is, it was not laid on. In fact they were probably not aware that they were being educated at all; what they were probably aware of was that they were concerned in learning things which has some bearing on their survival.

One of the facts that really concerns me and that I think I see in the present education system is that it has degenerated into a compulsory means of control, and certainly demonstrates (at least to me) the urgent need for a rediscovery of the way life really learns. And certainly, this is what I think I see happening in the present educational system, where more and more people are becoming enchanted with the possibility of controlling human behaviour. Because the geography has changed, it certainly has had some impact on learning, as now we are all involved in global learning, as opposed to the area my people were concerned with at one time.

In the community where I grew up, some of the old people there still do not read or write, and they are very highly educated people, not in the global sense but certainly in that area of their own way of life, which is survival to them. They are not only a part of community, they are community. What I mean here is the individuality is not one of being isolated but is inclusive with all the other individuals in the community. This makes him a total kind of person in his inter-relationship and inter-dependency with everyone else. The kind of process that seemed to create this kind of community was one where you could be explorative, that is, where people allow you to make your own discoveries about everything. This process continued through all life and there was no time when this terminated. It created a kind of ecological human being rather than an economic human being.

One of many areas I see where the present system has affected the Indian way of life (because it is compulsory in all our communities) is that it has diminished the whole learning process as an individual in a community, that is, in terms of self in the community. The survival patterns which existed are now becoming very difficult because the system, like in Western society, is also segmenting our way of life as the young people adapt to the different values. The dependency on one another has turned to be aggressive trespasses for survival. What does exist to a great degree in many of our communities yet are the rituals which were very important to survival. Because these are coming back, and because there are some Indian people rejecting Western society totally, who have gone back to the old way of learning and living, there certainly seems to me to be a great deal of hope for all mankind in the Americas. The kind of person in my remembrance is that our system created a kind of ecological human being rather than an economic human being. I find it very difficult to describe here exactly what I mean although sometimes I find myself in this kind of flow which has a sort of universal concept but I would just flow unconsciously. I guess what I'm leading up to here is something called feeling and I don't know if you understand this, but it's not like setting a goal through life, but feeling your way through life and certainly this has a lot to do with ceremonies. Because it was a given kind of thing and we could fell together as a group which sort of created a whole type of community. Not like to-days system where goals are set, and you give each person a road map to follow, where everything is laid out for you and which prohibits discovery. It seems to me then, one of the tasks facing our educators, and maybe everyone, is changing our ideas about what education is and just allowing children to grow if we can. Whether we can produce a climate whereby we can just allow our children to grow is possible or not, I don't know. Certainly, it is possible to have the resources available to all people and just not children whereby they can use these resources for their own means. Like, if at the age of 9 or 19 a person wants to learn to read or write, then this should be available to them or if they want to study engineering or whatever, the resources should be there. I guess what this would mean is that we would have no objectives for the child: in other words, we would just let them mature and develop in whatever direction they want to go, and it would totally be none of our goddamn business what the child turns out to be, and it would be impossible for anyone including the child to know what this would be. I don't know what would turn out or what the process would be, that process that they could create, etc. it seems that what it might mean at least to some of us - we would have to proceed on faith - we have to be able to look at any child and have the faith to say, "Look, I don't care what you turn out to be - that is, you turn out to be a mechanic or an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer, and, like, I won't tie myself to any targets which can't be mine anyway, and I'm just discouraging you from tying yourself to targets and goals and just grow". Now this is the kind of sort of maturity we have to come into somehow. Schools to some of you, may be turned into fields where we are going to allow things to grow because we just aren't going to do this unless we ourselves are able to grow because we just aren't going to do this unless we ourselves are able to grow and become a little more mature or at least mature enough to allow that process to happen without pegging it and saying that is what's happening because we really don't know what's happening anyway. And what we've got to do is remove all those structures that we have placed upon the young human beings. I think because when you look around, all life, like the flower, that chose to be that particular flower or that tree that chose to be that particular kind of tree or the grass or the turtle or the deer or the wolf, the bear and so on with the human being. Because we are all animals of the earth. I don't really know what might happen where people just naturally find themselves quite naturally being - certainly I realize that one of the things is that in my observation of children, if you allow them just to be, one of the things is that they are very curious - and they play or they do some kind of exploration that we have labelled play. I really don't know if that is where are learning is in just playing but this very well may be true and we've just categorized and divided all things in terms of how we feel about them or somebody did that to us and told us which was good or bad. Now we don't allow at this moment for people just to explore - like we certainly don't allow it in the classroom - we never did when I went to school. I guess what I'm trying to say is within our classroom structure we don't allow curiosity. I guess I won't expand on my ideas about the probable direction that the young human beings might begin to develop in terms of exploration but certainly I think what will really command their attention most will be their exploring of self.
What I see happening here in Western society is that someone defines a particular direction and says that is how it is done and so sets the pattern for conformity or the control of behaviour. So everyone does it the same way and anyone doing it differently is just not allowed and so they kill that whole exploration concept or curiosity within the various individuals.

Now, I guess I've been throwing a lot of the blame here on technology and society as I have experienced it since moving off the reserve and going back to my community on and off, and being able to weigh one against the other - maybe this is kind of deficiency within me. Something that I have to come to terms with, myself I might just like to mention here that one of the things I believe will happen, and I say this because of my observation of children, is that what will take place if we allow exploration is that the child will begin to play with the possibilities of self and of environment and I think that this exploration will develop as long as the child doesn't have to contend with any authority or any authority figure. In other words, there won't be any adult person saying to him over and over again, "Look, there is no need for you to discover anything - it's all been done for you" and "the authority for this is so and so and the authority of that is so and so" because the child himself will be the authority. The only authority - that I suspect which I have talked about before which happens in many Indian communities - is that the child will be making discoveries like we made discoveries, which may be hundreds of thousands of human beings have made before him, and there is always that possibility that he might discover something that hasn't yet been discovered.

One of the things I would like to raise at this time is my experience in western culture, certainly in your educational institutions, where two of the most important areas that were out of bounds (at least in my day and age) was sex and religion. Now these are the two most important aspects of life. Now it's rather difficult for me to use words here when talking about my areas of self - these areas of self which are out of bounds. I would like to say that sex certainly is the centre and core of creation, in personal experience and in the world we hedge about this because it has all kinds of taboos, so even if a person does succeed in an intellectual sense to educated himself about sex in his lifetime, he is still so physiologically conditioned by the attitudes which he experienced all through his childhood towards sex hat there isn't much likelihood that he will ever be able to make a free and worthwhile exploration of the whole sexual aspect of like and come out of this with a rewarding discovery which would be his and which without he could never be a whole person.

When I talk about religion as being taboo, as being about the exploration or religion, I mean in terms of the sense of the right to explore yourself. This has been replaced with the same kind or rigid indifference which is anything but scientific and which the scientists (or the people who think of themselves as scientists) have so far chosen to dissociated themselves from completely. Like, what I'm really trying to imply is the child must not be shut off from the right to explore religion in the exploration of self because this is religion. This is also the most meaningful definition that exists of education. Maybe I'm not just expressing myself clearly here and what I'm trying to say is that your entire experience of your life is religion. It's the only meaningful sense of the word "religion", and our very living of life: this very kind of living of life is a kind of religion and you should be allowed to explore within yourself.

One of the difficulties that has been created in western society, which exists in the behaviour of my people is something in regards to what we call play. It's a kind of activity which has sort of fallen into disrepute because even the words leisure and pleasure have about them bad connotations, at least in the protestant ethic, so that many people in their thinking about play see that it's almost sort of a sinful thing to do. Something that has any regard to leisure time. So I think that there is a great need here for a different kind of outlook to take place in regard to this kind of leisure time, especially in terms of the kind of attitudes that the Native people of this country had in relation to something called play.

One of the things I would like to raise here is the consciousness or the unconsciousness of all life and that is to talk about to what degree the individual is conscious and is aware. Now I'm inclined to assume or I think that most educators are inclined to assume that this is the way a person is all the time; well, I don't think this is true. I think that awareness is very much like. say, an aperture on a camera where anything whatever might threaten any individual would result in that aperture closing almost to the point where it would exclude all experiences and he is then almost completely blocked off from experiencing and being aware of any kinds of things being around him, but if the person is in the right kind of environment and things are sympathetic to him then I think that the aperture opens up and he is receptive in the widest possible sense so that the person does not remain constant. In other words, the consciousness is something that opens and closes - the conscious awareness of all individuals - that is my feeling anyway. I mentioned this because of my particular experience with Indian people where I think that a this kind of consciousness and awareness comes out in the find of self concept or the self image that most Indian people have in a sense of the own individuality and identity, and in my experience as I look about in Western culture I see that self image and that individuality...their identity is almost an unknown thing, that there is a real search for this because of being so isolated, where as within a community such as an Indian community, people are not as isolated so that, therefore, the aperture of their awareness or consciousness opens up upon the world as well as within. One of the things I would like to raise here about what has been happening to our young children in the Northern part of the country is that they are taking those children and removing them from their homes to stick them into some kind of educational institution.

The point I want to raise here is the fact that whoever has that authority certainly doesn't have any realization of what it does just to remove that Indian child from his home, nor do they realize that the home to that Indian child is nor just a family situation but it's also the community in a much more realistic sense than it is for a white child; that is, that child is situated in an inclusive kind of environment and they are taken from that inclusiveness and brought out to a segmented/isolated type of society where it tears that child to pieces.

One other thing I would like to mention here is the fact that we have equated education, or study and learning, as being something intellectual and that is being performed by the brain or something we have designated as the brain and I believe that this is not what happens. I believe that any kind of learning process affects all parts of the entire organism, the whole human body, in terms of any kind of learning situation that the person is in. It certainly affects his eyes, his ears, his feelings and certainly all other parts- the very environment that is conditioning him- that he is flowing in and that it's not some kind of unchanging statistic or catalogue of parts and objects or bits and pieces that we sort organize into some kind of thing like some automobile.

I remember when I went to school, there were many things that I objected to. I think probably one of them might have been English history, which I certainly have used in my life up to this time but I was told by my teacher that I should take English history anyway because it would develop my brain. I have wondered about this ever since because I certainly don't think the brain is like a muscle- a muscle in your body that you can develop in that kind of sense- and certainly we know that it's made up of millions of cells and I don't think that there is that much that really known about just how the brain functions. Certainly, one of the things we do know is we only function at about 5% or less of our brain's abilities and capacities. I think that we also function at about the same percentage in terms of our physical abilities but I think that the indication, certainly by school teachers, and certainly at the time I went to school, and by what I see happening now, is that there is some kind of thought that some children are equipped with the better brains than other children and that some are brighter than others or some have a larger mental capacity than other children and I just think that this is all just Bullshit! I think that maybe apart from children with brain damage or children that are born retarded (which means the same thing), regardless of whose head they happen to be in, all children have the same capacity to produce manifestations of genius.

So that I think what we've got to begin looking at- in terms of education as it now exists within the system- is what is it and what rationale is it that we're using that we begin to think that some children appear to be brighter that others. Certainly it is my belief that the whole method that is being used is certainly the cause for our teachers to come up with some rationale to do this and probably part of this reflects on their own abilities or capacities as teachers.

Finally, one of the things that I would like to expand on is the whole concept, as I see it anyway, that the magistrate, the police, wardens of the prisons, preachers and teachers are all in the same league. That is that they are all in the business of controlling human behaviour by some means of frightening people. Now the preacher attempts to frighten people with the threat of damnation, the police frighten people with the threat of apprehending them and summonsing them. The magistrate threatens people with his authority to send them to prison and the teacher frightens children with the threat of failure and of course parents are no different because they resist all this and go along with it and applaud the efforts of all those dignitaries and officials to control human behaviour and of course they apply their own coercive techniques at home, controlling behaviour and some of this is really very sad. I guess the other thing is the average person in society continues to go to work every day because he is afraid he may be derived of his economic rights. The average person obeys the law and dishonours his instincts and so on because he is afraid that if he doesn't he will be sent to prison. I guess most people are in some degree affected by the priest or preacher in their behaviour and in some degree controlled by the church in their fear of damnation or, lacking that, their fear of condemnation and certainly children proceed through school and turn in a kind of performance they do because of recognition and approval they can get in a life.

I suspect that the so-called bright people decide to continue to go to university and again because he is afraid that if he doesn't get a diploma , he won't be secure enough. It is probably true that the child at the foot of the class remains there because he is afraid to take a chance on giving any answer, afraid to succeed, because staying down where he is a lot more comfortable and less threatening and less painful and those children that remain in the centre of this, neither at the top or the bottom are drop-outs or so-called drop-outs in this society, and I think that the dropping out really begins in grade 1 and the first thing that they begin to do is to drop out of the limelight and they continue to drop out this way, neither being too progressive nor staying down in the bottom of the class somewhere, but just staying out of sight of everyone and by the time the get to grade 9 or 10 they drop out of school.

I guess what needs to be said here is that most of the European immigrants who came to America, came with the intention of conquering it. The nature of their conquests has been such as to reduce the last remaining Garden of Eden to the garbage dump. Most, if not all, of their acts were done by supposedly well-educated people. People who must have been so deficient as to not notice the raping of America. Oh yes! They conquered America all right. Or did they? Today there are two hundred million human animals using this continent. That is really not very many for a land so vast and rich. Yet with their technological energies and profit motivation they have made it unfit for any other forms of animal or vegetable and they can now see that the time is at hand when they too will soon choke to death on their own garbage. There is hardly anyone in white society any longer who has confidence in White leadership. What a joke! The sons of the frontiersmen no longer have any hope in themselves.

But it's not too late for them to listen to the one voice which has always stated the answers. A Voice that has been trying to be heard for over 400 years. To those survivors who did not die or go insane and who have faithfully tended the fire of life under unbelievable persecution.

The Native people of America do not need to hear any more words of wisdom or of guidance on culture and education or religious matters.

Nor do they need his advice on real estate or agriculture or wild life conservation or pollution. Remember- this is America, not Western Europe. Learning to survive can only come from the land. It cannot be imported. Survival is the land- everything comes from it and also must return to it.

That voice that has been waiting for over 400 years might sound something like this:

"We cannot teach you but if you watch the way we do it, you may in time catch on. And then you will be able to do it, too".