Natural Intelligence: Recognizing the Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity of Indian People

Indian people have many secrets that we don’t tell you. We learn differently, think differently, and we look at the world differently. We do not see ourselves as inferior; we do not see ourselves as “savages” or “hostiles.” And we often witness things that are unconstructive and even damaging to society — things that are otherwise considered “normal” — and we shake our heads.

Yet one of the most common misperceptions about American Indians is that we as a group are somehow deficient as intellectuals — that we do not have the capacity for the constructs of intelligence as set down by the dominant society. In history books and in Hollywood Westerns, we are categorized through words and visual images as “savage,” “isolated,” “hostile,” and “uncivilized” — descriptors that have etched themselves into the collective consciousness so that they have become accepted.

A type of intellectual racism runs throughout society, so that the low expectations of educators and employers become self-fulfilling prophesies that reinforce and perpetuate stereotypes of Indian people from cradle to grave.  Our nation’s tribal colleges, however, are reversing this centuries-old pattern.  They are at the forefront of a revolution that prides itself on building curriculums using the languages, cultures, traditions, and histories of Indian people that have been purged from educational systems for so long.  By taking control of their own higher educational systems, tribes are instilling respect for the old ways while laying the groundwork for their local economies in health care, teacher training, technology, tribal government, and business development.

The wisdom, intelligence, and creativity of Indian people are evident in the great societies and civilizations that were on this continent long before the Europeans “discovered” America. We know that Indian people have a remarkable capacity for learning and erudition through our stories and oral traditions.  There is great truth in the axiom that “the conquerors write the history.” The unfortunate side effect is that the winners also establish the standards for evaluating intelligence. In the “winners’ history,” the achievements of Native people — great by any standard — are belittled as being the exception to the rule.

We, however, have our own standards. The ancient structures and cities built by Natives on this continent, for example, illustrate an advanced knowledge of mathematics, physics, engineering, astronomy, architecture, and urban planning that rivaled — and in some cases surpassed — those in Europe, Asia, and Africa. In fact, the Mayans pioneered zero as a numeric value, which is considered one of the great mathematical achievements in history and was used thousands of years ahead of the Europeans.

The political structure of the great Iroquois Confederacy served as a model for democracy among the founding fathers, who wrote the Constitution based on “we the people,” something unheard of in the aristocratic, feudal societies of Europe. In fact, there is no word for “I” in any American Indian language, which was a profound concept to the framers who closely studied the tribes’ customs, government, and culture.

And though Mendel is credited with “discovering” the concept of genetics, the Indians of the Americas had perfected the science of hybridization thousands of years before, with scientific experimentation and sophisticated production methods that are studied by agricultural experts worldwide to this day.

Sequoyah, a thinker and intellectual genius, perfected an alphabet for the Cherokee because he believed in the intelligence of Indian people. Within weeks of its introduction, the entire nation learned to read and write in Cherokee, disproving the European notion that Indians were on the same level as animals in comprehending written language. The Cherokee people consequently had a higher rate of literacy than their white counterparts and kept it for generations.

Another example of the natural intelligence of Indian people is native taxonomy, which is centered around environmental relationships. European taxonomy, on the other hand, features a linear construct of likenesses — kingdom, phylum, genus, species, and so on. Today, less importance is placed on linear taxonomy than on understanding the complex relationships in our environment, something our people have known and practiced for thousands of years.

Even with these enormous achievements, the Europeans nevertheless insisted that the Indians were unintelligent savages – a perception that persists to this day. We know that the Europeans who first came here were described by Indians as unskilled and uneducated and often perished as a result of their inefficiency and naive arrogance. But as the invaders grew in number, they transferred their inadequate feelings onto Indian people. This ego-alien-impulse, defined as projecting one’s own negative attributes onto another, may help explain their need to subsume and dominate the “inferior” culture.

Indeed, Indian people have a different worldview and way of learning, which was rejected by the newcomers once they assumed power. The European methods of memorization and categorization became the measure of excellence and education. As these alien methods were forced on Indian people, their educational attainment levels and self-esteem began to plummet. It is therefore puzzling, given the scope of public education in this country, with all its testing and measuring and “progress reports,” that there is so much misinformation about Indian culture in America. We are forced to know everything about white society and what it deems “intelligence,” but the average American knows very little about Indian people.

And so it continues. Our people, who have contributed much to the world, keep our secrets in the hope that someday society will learn that our ways weren’t so savage after all.

Richard Williams (Oglala Lakota) is the executive director of the American Indian College Fund, an historian, educator, and the founder of the Upward Bound Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder.