Indigenous Intelligence

By

Stephanie Mines, Ph.D.

Copyright 12/11

  

Prenates, infants, young children and children with special needs have indigenous intelligence. We tend to relate to them as we do to most indigenous people as if they were primitive and had not yet achieved the adult intelligence that we consider superior.

Indigenous intelligence is sensory and implicit. This makes it pure and transparent. These qualities frequently get translated by the adult mind as unrefined, reckless, naïve and simpleminded. Adults often take a conciliatory approach to children and to children with special needs that can be blind sighted to the child's innate sensibility.

I believe we can and must transform how adults see children and children with special needs by awakening them to the wisdom of innate intelligence that is becoming endangered by sensory overload, poor nutrition, lack of exposure to the natural world and the deficit in appropriate neurological stimulation through eye to eye contact with individuals.

Our children's innate intelligence is endangered because we cannot advocate for it until we recognize it. This is within our control. We can wake ourselves up to what is right before our very eyes. The choice is ours. This is not because of what "they" are doing to us. It's like the emperor's new clothes. We can see what is really there or we can see what everyone is telling us is there. What do you choose?

Margaret Mead in Samoa

Parents and caregivers can change the environment of ignorance about who children really are by taking more of an anthropological stance. I have been reading Margaret Mead's autobiography, Blackberry Winter. I am struck by the unadulterated (the perfect word!) nature of her observations of the Samoan people. She attributes this to how little preparation she had from her renowned teachers Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. They did not prepare her, she posited, because this would allow her to really see indigenous people for who they are. Free of all suppositions she discovered that "one must see what is before one's eyes as fresh and distinctive. If, for instance, you see a house as bigger or smaller, grander or meaner, more or less watertight than some other kind of house, you are cut off from discovering what this house is in the minds of those who live in it."

Imagine if even once we looked at our children without comparing them to other children or without knowing what children should or should not do or be? Do you have the courage to do this? It is within your power!

We can learn what our children are telling us through their expression, their behavior, their symptoms, their healthcare needs, their responses to others, by looking in their eyes, by their dietary choices, their words or their lack of words, their postural stances, and by observing them, as if for the first time, as they play and interact with others of all ages.

Our children are telling us how to save childhood from extinction through the wisdom of their untainted indigenous communiqués sent from the transmitters of their own bodies while we are looking at our cell phones.