traditional knowledge conference 2008 te tatau pounamu

all the elders together, we have the opportunity to create a united nations of indigenous peoples of theAmericas.”This was a monster project. In the evolvement of this gathering, I started to work with the elders ondrafting the organizational papers for an organization, a confederation. A Confederation of IndigenousElders and Priests of America is what I wound up calling it. Then, I did all the paperwork necessary forit to be incorporated. When the elders finally came together, they met for 10 days, fulfilled the prophecyand did the necessary prayers. But when it came down to creating the confederation, the same old thinghappened. Every elder wanted it to be in his part of the world, everybody wanted to be in control of it;they started disputing as to who were going to be the representatives, how and where it was going tomeet, and how often. Everybody then went home and there was no Confederation of Indigenous Eldersand Priests of America.I still believe in that dream. I still think that no tribe should ever face a government or a multinationalcorporation alone. I am planting this seed here, today. Please pick it up! I cannot do it anymore;I am spent. It took six years, three quarters of a million dollars, total financial ruin. My life, my homelife is a shambles. But I still believe it can be done. And I believe it can be done by a group of people;this is what it is going to take. That is why I could not do it. I did not have the support of my own tribe.It is going to take a leader from a tribe that has the support of the tribe. This is what is key because thiscannot be done by one person. It has to be done by a tribe. It has to be a substantial tribe and a tribe thatcan stay together because this task is challenging.Anyway, the Confederation of Indigenous Elders and Priests of America died. Elders that were partof organizations splintered into two; well, first of all they splintered from our group. The NorthAmerican elders splintered from the confederation. They went off and formed their own organization.They tried to take over our funds and all of our documentation. I would end up suing them. PatricioDominguez became persona non grata. He was the evil, wicked man that sued elders. Because I tried toregain all the property of the organization, and I did, I retained it. I incorporated the organization and Iwanted to keep it alive for another tribe but it became impossible. So, the Confederation of IndigenousElders and Priests of America became a non-entity. People despised us because we sued elders. Ichanged the name of the organization twice because, no matter how much I tried to hide, it alwaysturned out to be a problem.Today we are called the Institute of Natural and Traditional Knowledge and we are doing just a finejob of staying out of trouble, me and Flordemayo. And here is a statement from our vision:Our challenge is to take modern societies full circle. From the first years of modernization,modern civilization’s educators believed that they could bring opportunities through theirtechnologies to traditional peoples. But, traditional cultures will now bring the opportunity ofsurvival to the modern civilizations through the traditional knowledge.We are going to turn things around. They thought they were bringing us opportunities; they havebrought us to the brink of destruction. But now we are going to bring them the opportunity of survivalwith our knowledge. We are going to turn it completely around.This is another little statement from our vision: “Secret knowledge is knowledge that has taken thefirst step to extinction.” Five hundred years ago, we did not have secret knowledge. As I said, therewere trade routes. We traded from Chile to Alaska and we shared knowledge and information back andforth. But after, there were governments and educators—the modern civilization’s educators and thatincluded the church system—that decided that our knowledge should be suppressed and eradicated.They started destroying our wisdom keepers and our wisdom. It became dangerous to be a wisdomkeeper and a person with knowledge of our system. Our system of knowledge had to go secret. That ishow it survived, by being secret. Unfortunately, secrets do not get passed on very well. Today, everytime a wisdom keeper dies, the secrets that that wisdom keeper is keeping dies with them. This has gotto stop. Unfortunately, it is difficult because now the process of keeping the wisdom secret has turnedinto a tradition. It is not a tradition, it was not a tradition but, because it is now 500 years old, people56