Surviving in an efficient age

I’ve written before about my old friend and now-retired colleague, Pierre Odier. He has written a book titled “Some Last People,” which is all about vanishing tribes of Bhutan, China, Mexico, Mongolia and Siberia.

In past years he has lived among each of these tribes, documenting their stories, their customs and traditions, their religions — and relating their tenuous existence in a world that inexorably encroaches on their existence.

In the introduction to his book, he writes, “It is man’s inner self that remains both the central enigma and the greatest challenge of existence. As long as we consciously suppress differences and systematically eliminate civilizations and cultures because of these differences, we diminish our own understanding of ourselves. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, takes us further away from knowing who and what we are.”

Pierre has spent the better part of his life exploring the remote corners of the globe.

In his book he asks a question that does not enter into public discourse in this country, or any other for that matter: What is lost, if anything, when indigenous people vanish from the Earth?

It’s an easy answer for those who consider native populations to be primitive and unworthy of anything more than a footnote in an anthropology text or perhaps a feature in National Geographic. Of what use are the quaint customs and archaic ways of some “last people” to a modern world on hyper-speed into the future?

The book addresses that question right from the outset. It was written in the spirit that others might join in recognizing a cause of about 200 million people worldwide who struggle to maintain a place in this world. Whether it involves tribes living on the margin of existence, a people relegated to “reserved territories,” or whether it is the increasing invisibility of indigenous people in places where the unremitting message to all is, “Join the mainstream or die,” the result is the same. To many, the threat is not so much physical destruction as it is cultural oblivion.

I put this dilemma to a highly respected colleague, Semanthe Kadar, who is a lecturer at Cal State Northridge in the geography department. This is how she responded: