By Randolph Langstieh
“If ‘cutting trees into parts’ epitomises the modernist epistemology, ‘talking with trees,’ I argue, epitomises animistic epistemology.”
— Andreas Weber
Epistemology, the theory of knowledge that weighs the methods, validity and scope of justified belief, sits predominantly within Western or Eurocentric paradigms. Knowledge production is counted as progress in modern society — a by-product of colonial frameworks embedded in pedagogical practice through our educational institutions. Even where postcolonial discourse takes up indigenous knowledge systems as its subject matter, the approach to learning them remains lodged in colonial binaries: organic and inorganic, natural and unnatural, animate and inanimate. In the indigenous worldview, belief and knowledge are not two separate entities. All things are animate and have a spirit; the Khasi know them as ki ksuid ki khrei. The belief in ki ’suid um ki ’suid wah is knowledge in itself, where water bodies and their spirits are inseparable.
U maw (stone), ka um (water), ka lyer (wind), u slap (rain) are not inanimate in the Khasi worldview; we interact and communicate with them. A young man from Mawdulop village in the Wah Umngot area, speaking in a short documentary by U Nongsain Hima, said that the Umngot is like a woman to us — a mother who feeds and nourishes, ka nongai buiñ-aithiang, who takes care of the fishes, the trees, the medicinal plants. The river has a life of her own. It corresponds to the Whanganui River in New Zealand (Aotearoa), granted legal personhood by an Act of Parliament in 2017 within a framework that recognises the community as custodians and incorporates the physical and the metaphysical alike. In the Eurocentric worldview, such recognition is reduced to a term long fastened upon indigenous cultures — animism. Andreas Weber puts it appropriately: animism is the cosmology of indigenous peoples, a worldview whose practices and knowledge can be of crucial guidance for the multiple crises of our time. For the Khasi, likewise, our cosmology has been delimited to a religious practice, a belief unverified by Western standards.
What does this colonial web do on the ground? Consider a finding from my own research at Nongnah and its neighbouring villages. Generations of Khasi readers have learnt from the printed page that Ka Shnong Ka Ïawpaw — U Lum Ka Ïawpaw near Nongnah — is the village of the dead, the land of departed spirits. The earliest written record of that description dates back to 1906, in the Khasi-English Dictionary of U Nissor Singh. Text after text has carried the description since, and across more than a century of schooling it became true without ever being verified. Yet the knowledge holders of Nongnah, Khatarshnong and other parts of the Khasi-Jaiñtia Hills, whose learning lives in oral transmission, make no association between Ka Ïawpaw and the spirits of the dead at all.
My conversations in the Lngam areas point to how the error likely crept in. For the Lngam people, any association with the departed belongs to the spirit of Ïawaw — the gateway through whom the spirits pass on their way to U Lum Pyndengru. Given the geographical proximity of these communities and the phonological closeness of the two names, it is most plausible that Ïawaw was conflated with Ïawpaw by the early codifiers. In my analysis of the lore, Ka Blei Ïawpaw is nothing of the graveyard: she is Ka Mei-Ramew, the spirit of Mother Earth — the nourisher, the caretaker, the custodian of beings animate and inanimate, ka Syiem ki ksuid whom even the malevolent spirits respect. The consequences of the codified error are not academic. It has wrapped U Lum Ka Ïawpaw in fear and eeriness, keeping people away from a hill whose own custodians revere it as the seat of the Earth’s guardian spirit. One dictionary entry, set down in the shadow of the colonial classroom, has overwhelmed an oral discourse for over a hundred years.
The tradition, by contrast, carries an ecological ethic that our textbooks never recorded. An elder from Nongktieh locality in Nongnah once scolded a young companion for slashing shrubs on the way to fetch firewood: “Don’t slash the shrubs; Ka Ïawpaw will punish you. Cut only what is necessary.” Ka Ïawpaw teaches us to be careful with Mother Earth. In the lore, she is an ecological force balancing the survival of all beings, punishing when the boundaries between them are broken, whether the violation is human or non-human. At a time when we speak the borrowed languages of climate crisis and sustainability, here is a home-grown jurisprudence of restraint — dismissed for a century as the superstition of a haunted hill.
This is what Linda Tuhiwai Smith, the Maori scholar, means when she writes that “writing has been viewed as the mark of a superior civilization and other societies have been judged, by this view, to be incapable of thinking critically and objectively.” For Khasi society, writing is a product of colonisation, and the codification of our knowledge systems must consider careful strides. Codification tends toward rigidity; the written text is static and archival, while orality is in motion with the flux of the cosmos, interacting and reacting with all beings. And as Ka Ïawpaw shows, an archived mistake becomes curriculum.
The colonial science of discovery has its own creation stories. Studying U Lum Sohpetbneng from an anthropocentric point of view merely approximates us as first settlers, reduced to a hypothetical age. The first-settler narrative is a colonial perspective — a Christopher Columbus syndrome, I call it, after a “discovery” that owed no due diligence to the peoples of Turtle Island, the original inhabitants of what the Europeans named America. Their worldview carries connotations similar to ours. For the indigenous, creation is continuity, as the Blackfoot scholar Leroy Little Bear reminds us; we are part of a perpetual flux within the cosmos and in relation to it. Our own story of u sohpetbneng and u sohpet blei is not a dated event sealed in the past but the cycle of birth and life, witnessed by all of creation.
None of this is a plea against method. My encounter with a traditional healer offers a glimpse of indigenous knowledge at work. Asked how he knew the herb that treats a snake bite, he narrated his discovery: in the forest he saw a rat bitten by a snake, followed it in curiosity, and learnt of the plant the rat sought out to feed on — the cure. By colonial standards, this is naturalistic observation, the most ethical form of research with life-forms. Indigenous knowledge is not the absence of method; it is method embedded in relation.
The sun does not rise in the east nor set in the west; it is only within human perception that it does. Mihngi and sepngi — the sun appears and disappears — sit closer to that reality. Yet in elementary education, the rising and setting sun is marked correct and true, just as the village of the dead was marked correct for a hundred years. If we do not gather indigenous knowledge from its own epistemological and ontological premise, we will only lend more credibility to the colonial science of discovery and exploration as the only legitimate knowledge. Revisiting and reconstructing our knowledge systems along an indigenous paradigmatic frame will pave the way to deeper insight — and to a reality more considerate of a heritage at crossroads.
(The writer researches Indigenous knowledge systems and paradigms. Email: [email protected])
