Video archives of the presentations are now available for an extraordinary recent conference called Sustainable Wisdom: Integrating Indigenous Know-how for Global Flourishing. Hosted by the Pokagon Band of the Potawatomi along with a broad arrayof ND departments and Institutes, the conference featured Native American and First Nation scholars from across the continent to explore what we can learn from native cultures to help us address today's global ecological challenges.
Speakers included internationally acclaimed author, orator and activist Winona LaDuke and Rebecca Adamson, a Cherokee economist and Founder and President of First Peoples Worldwide as well as many others; the full list can be seen here.
Conference organizer Professor Darcia Narvaez of Notre Dame's Psychology Department explained that the inspiration for the conference is captured by the words of Paul Shephard in his landmark book Coming Home to the Pleistocene, in which he writes that "A journey to our primal world may bring answers to our ecological dilemmas…White European/Americans cannot become Hopis or Kalahari Bushmen or Magdalenian bison hunters, but elements in those cultures can be recovered or re-created because they fit the heritage and predilection of the human genome everywhere, a genome tracing back to a common ancestor that Anglos share with Hopis and Bushmen and all the rest of Homo sapiens."