A landmark 1987 report by the World Commission on Environment and Development, popularly known as the Brundtland Report, boldly addresses the value of indigenous ecological perspectives to many global efforts to deal with ongoing environmental crises. It pleads for the prompt restoration of traditional land and resource rights to the world’s remaining indigenous and tribal peoples, and it calls for a renewed respect for their ecological wisdom.

Their very survival had depended upon their ecological awareness and adaptation. These communities are the repositories of vast accumulations of traditional knowledge and experience that links humanity with its ancient origins. Their disappearance is a loss for the larger society, which could learn a great deal from their traditional skills in sustainability managing very complex ecological systems. It is a terrible irony that as formal development reaches more deeply into rainforests, deserts and other isolated environments, it tends to destroy the only cultures that have proved able to thrive in these environments.

We wholeheartedly concur with the Brundtland Report’s stand on the urgency of protecting native rights, lands and knowledge. Native spiritual and ecological knowledge has intrinsic value and worth, regardless of its resonances with or ‘confirmation’ by modern Western scientific values. As most native authorities would be quick to point out, it is quite capable of existing on its own merits and adapting itself over time to meet modern needs. For it is, after all, a proud, perceptive and extraordinarily adaptive spiritual traditional, every bit as precious, irreplaceable and worthy of respect as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and other great spiritual traditions. In our view, respect for native spirituality and the nature-wisdom embedded within it is inseparable from respect for the dignity, human rights and legitimate land claims of all native peoples.

Seen in this light, native knowledge and spiritual values are not simply ‘natural resources’ (in this case, intellectual ones) for non-natives to mine, manipulate or plunder. They are, and will always be, the precious life-sustaining property of First Peoples: sacred symbols encoding the hidden design of their respective universes: mirrors to their individual and collective identities: and ancient and irreplaceable maps suggesting possible paths to inner as well as ecological equilibrium with the wider, ever-changing world.

– David Suzuki & Peter Knudtson