As modern world has lost sustainable access to life on Earth, the presence of the indigenous people and their inheritance of life through millenniums has invaluable significance for the future of the life on Earth.

Indigenous and tribal people “are not only a social category, but with the modern crisis the humanity is facing”, “their life is a message for the world”. (B.K. Roy Burman, interview, Delhi 25.3.2004)

How can we change the modern structures of understanding to allow such access to life, land and identity, which is able to preserve Earth’s life as the indigenous inheritance has done?

How can the categorical structures of perception and conceiving be changed to remove those modern reservations, which cancel or merely consume the non-literal indigenous significance of life and intentions?

What is objectively perceivable as ‘real’, is constituted as negation of significance of all what could be sensed in some sense as not the proper literal sense of what is happening by categorical factuality ‘in nature’.

How can the categorical structures of conceiving be changed to remove these modern reservations, which consume the non-literal indigenous significance of life and intentions to become disqualified into non-realizable in sense?

“How you make assessment of the ontological status of modern categories” and literal significance from the viewpoint of indigenous sensibility of significance, should be looked through the “autonomy of spaces and communities” of indigenous and tribal life. (Suresh Sharma, interview on Delhi 19.3.2004)

“Categories and perceptions are bound by a relationship of intimate distance”, which “marks out the flow of access to a certain range of significance” distinguishable and thus “orients attention” by the “selective nature of… observation and memory …the capacity to discern and discriminate”.

“Certain definitive narrowing of attention” constitutes always the placement of perceivable so that “in the very act of noticing, certain things are overlooked” (Suresh Sharma; “Tribal Identity and the Modern World”, pages 53 and 73). Such overlooking affects the instance or moment of the unic intimate identifiability of things as what is ultimately own to them, by shifting dimensions of its content into non-perceivable.

As such “cognitive shifts do happen” thus also in what it means to be a same, and as “each category lineates amidst the paronymia of references the nature of attention”, there is few means often to even recognize clearly such shift in a sameness of the sense of signified. Thus “such shifts may linger unnoticed for long periods” in appearing as same signified. (Suresh Sharma; “Tribal Identity and the Modern World”, pages 73-74).

Shifting senses of being a same continue their unnoticed arrival like originating from metaphors, “like life… the flow and latent power of what may abide unintended and unperceived. Reality is etched in memory … also as marks of distance”; as “what subsists as clear and conscious remembrance, as also that, which subsists barely perceptible and nearly forgotten”.

“Perceptibility of absence” is in this way however also linked to “distance as fluid contact and latent intimation”. “The sense of something lost in observation or historical remembrance is… an inchoate and exceedingly fragile intimation of the unsaid and unintended perceptible in what one sees and can reach out”. (Suresh Sharma; “Tribal Identity and the Modern World” Tokyo, 1994, pages 53- 55)

In “structure of immediate attention” lives thus distance as “the enduring primal spaces of hearing” for echoing absence among the shifting senses of being a same as what is. These shifts of re-appropriating fluidity of what is a same identifiable on its most own, “acquire a presence in relation to intricate strands of receptivity.... as the available ‘hearing space’”. (Suresh Sharma; “Tribal Identity and the Modern World”, page 74.)

In surrounding space of hearing with respect to categories, “the assessment of the ontological status really depends on the kind of justice you want to do to the possibility of life and on the time scale”; can you make it possible for all for eternity more or less in the same way? (Suresh Sharma, interview 19.3.2004 and a presentation 29.3.2004, Delhi).

Sense of “exalted primal space” of “distances… as the precondition of survival”, guides tribal contiguity of land by “fluid demarcations” of the distances in formation of identity, faced like “the vanished in what survives… to make absences perceptible”. (Suresh Sharma; “Tribal Identity and the Modern World”, pages 53 and 197).

“Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some… event in days long vanished.

Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people”. (Chief Sealth, 1854)

Land as identity of surrounding environment, happens as re-livability of what has taken place upon the earth; clearing scenery for all identifiable as presently surrounding perceptibility of what is to take place upon the earth.

What takes place upon the earth is more same as what is than only real what happens in objectivity of Nature as a way of sameness. Being as real, what happens only objectively (or ‘in Nature’) is same what is, only without happening more as same what takes place upon the Earth.

To happen in Nature or only as ‘real’, is considered to be in modern world total or absolute happening as the only or most happening way to happen. But to take place upon the Earth may happen in a wider or more intensively happening way, than to happen only ‘in Nature’, as real. (They are same by ‘saming’ both only on their own way or direction of being same as what is.)

To take place upon the Earth opens further space for being same as what is; it ‘sames’ entities into world into another way of being same than to happen in objective reality of Nature:

Same what is to happen in real objective Nature consists of continuance of the presented of what is, that happens in real presence as re-presented.

Same what is to take place upon the Earth consists of continuance of livability of what is, that takes place upon the Earth as re-livable.

Stones, waiting “along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours”. (Chief Sealth, 1854)

“Tied to the land by our umbilical cords and the dust of our ancestors”, whose voice is the indigenous language, “we are the land and the land is us”. (Kimberley Declaration International Indigenous Peoples Summit on Sustainable Development, Khoi-San Territory 28 August 2002).

Land’s indigenous dwellers are to relive themselves as the opening surrounding environment as the appropriation of the inheritance of what the life of the land is - as life which is own also to each of them.

Land is clearing what is own to place what life signifies. A clearing into life of what surrounds as shared intentional opening upon that how earth is there as what has earlier happened. Space to live reflects “the sense of doing things in a way in which there is exhausted all way of life”, “far away from you … beyond the reach” of your lifetime inside your intimacy “to ensure that it... can still be carried on 500 years from now... or 2000 years from now” (Suresh Sharma, interview on Delhi 19.3.2004).

As “space that creates consciousness” to take place, “land… provides a means of belonging to a place and to a distinctive community” upon the earth and “defines them as a “tribe”, being “fundamental to… identity” also in wider sense.

“The notion of self does not end with their flesh, but continues with the reach of their senses into the land”, into its local inter-generational entitlement and significance by the language of the land. (UN-report “Indigenous peoples and their relationship to land”, paragraphs 13-14 and 19-20)

To relive what the land is, is placed to open further senses for what surrounds - as that, what it is for such land to take place upon the earth in its continuance -; its re-livability as direction of arriving further own sameness as land, as re-livable by its life.

“People belong to the land and forest, on which they live” (Adivasi Juen Shastri in Ekta Parishad tour / Chhattisgarh 28.1.2004). In Adivasis’ co-existence with their surroundings, the “self-sense and everyday rhythms were oriented to both the existential territorial space… and some shared memory of origin”. “In this web of proximities”, capacities existed “to secure and enhance the quality of the shared existential space”, where “in the entire cosmos, there is not a thing that does not have a place, all its own” as described by Gunia. (Suresh Sharma; “Tribal Identity and the Modern World” Tokyo, 1994, pages 130 and 181).

While in Nature, to happen is only an attribute of what happens, so instead, to happen into the world by taking place upon the earth, is not merely an attribute of what happened. To happen only in nature or only in fact does not thus extend to that what it is to be what takes place.

In what it is to take place upon the earth, takes place not only a thing, which happened, but also, what (and how) it is, that what happens to take place, happens upon the earth.

With “activity to clear and create spaces that would never have been”, the “pre-colonial proximity” with surrounding life “allowed… spaces for redefinition and restructuring of concepts” (to face “eternal… boundless variability of natural and social” and its “distance... not... as threatening”). (Suresh Sharma; “Tribal Identity and the Modern World”, pages 56, 96 and 119.)

How people would sense the perceivable of what surrounds as land in their own way, directs their life to survive as life of that land.

Land is thus their own as a way to take place in senses of surrounding perceptibility of life upon the earth. Land is what is right as a perceptibility of an access to fields, vegetation, waters, etc., to take place as subsistence of life upon the earth as the arriving sense - perceptibility and conceivability of surroundings. As earth’s living scenery of inheritance how significance arrives as re-livable to take place upon the earth.

What is right as surrounding perceptibility is land as inter-generational justice for which the spirit of our life works on land’s happening as the surroundance of life.

Land opens surroundings into intentional clearing as scenery echo of the wideness of life to take place upon the earth.

Indigenous people are appropriated to relive themselves as the surrounding environment by their heritage as land. They do not thus need to aim to win all what surrounds them under the controlable concept of scientific or biological ‘Nature’.

Land belongs for “full liberation of all living beings” (Adivasi in WSF on 20.1.2004, Mumbai), from that, how they are consumed to be non-relivable by the grasp of the scientificly perceivable objectivity and objective conceivability as Nature.

The same in reliving of what is to be a being that takes place upon the Earth, is how its re-living signifies again what it relives as what has happened upon the Earth.

But the same in objective presentation of what is to be a being, that happens as real in Nature, is how presented signifies again what it is to be that being, independently from its being re-presentedly lived.

Indigenous dwelling is placed on land in reliving what the land is as responsible to this relived
(what land has signified) for reliving it into right direction of its being as same what is, by giving their significance for it.

Objective perceiving of Nature re-present again presence of what surrounds, how it is merely given for perceivers who consume sense from its perceptibility into their senses; without responsibility of giving from their senses to it any maintenance of significance for its intergenerational continuance, of being re-livable.

From the use and life of modern categories and from the way how they shape happening in space and time, it should be assessed : “Can we keep doing it indefinitely? That would be the traditional tribal way of question... that whatever you do, can you keep doing it” ? Can you make it possible for all for eternity more or less in the same way. “That is also seen as a… non-progress” where “the best that is possible is done”

But in modernity, “in the interest of progress you have the autonomy of the individual” (Suresh Sharma, interview on Delhi 19.3.2004).

All sense what is perceivably got, is ordered to be got from the perceived (to be enjoyed by the senses of the perceivers) and no significance is got into what the surrounding perceivable is, from what lives and enjoys its perceiving in senses of perceivers. All what surrounds, objectivity demands to be given for senses of the perceivers (in clarifying realizable significance, enjoyable by sheer receiving for senses), without the perceivable, what surrounds, getting anything (in significance) from the perceivers’ senses, which live the perception. Objective senses thus live again the perceived as merely received enjoyable, giving from this reliving thus nothing in significance for what the surrounding perceivable is.

Within the tribal and indigenous life, “the autonomies are not on the individual; they are of the communities and their spaces”.(Suresh Sharma, interview on Delhi 19.3.2004). Identities of lands, living surroundings and people are recognized and directed, not so much by representation, but are directed into being on their own, as necessity of being re-livable; as lands to become right as the aboriginal own means of subsistence.

Access to fields, forests, waters, etc. “furnishes the vital clue to the manifest capacity of tribal social cohesions to survive as distinct entities”, whose “proximities and… locus of legitimacy and power textured interaction and living marked by a near absence of distance within”. (Suresh Sharma; “Tribal Identity and the Modern World”, page 197)

The restoration of Adivasi land “has to seek out terms and the sense of significance that approximate to a cognitive locus grounded in the world of shifting cultivation”. (Also the imperial officiers “believed that in transforming the landscape and Nature itself, the sense of oneself and the world would irrevocably change”). (Suresh Sharma; “Tribal Identity and the Modern World”, pages 115 and 147.

How could we change our categories to allow space for our inheritance of indigenous access to life on Earth ?

How should we face the indigenous inheritance to contribute for the survival of life on Earth? “What is the economy of permanence… which subscribes to the moral law is enduring and sustainable in Creation ? What is that inner urge and energy whereby a society opens itself up, historic energy and richness restored, outward greed and plunder replaced by festivity which is celebrated in interaction of social relationships ? What is the celebration and festivity of equality and reciprocity?”(Narendra Bastar, who lived with hill-Madia adivasis for 3 years)

Do things take place for indigenous people only if a thing is, what it is, why it is ?

“How does one answer these questions? The questions carry a certain ‘exactitude’. May be a question inherently seeks an exactitude, a replica of itself in the form of an answer. How can an answer be exact? An answer can only be proximate, a reduced distance between itself and its original (the question), likeness and correspondence, of exactitude. Commonly speaking, a reduced distance is only a reduced ambiguity, a relative clarity and certain objectivity. In itself an answer as such is a radical departure from the questions, the ‘is’. The legitimacy of an answer as such depends on the cognitive/non-cognitive distance it travels from the question, thus unsettling the very discourse that the question represents. Answers may also mean departures, not necessarily affirmations always”.

“Whereas the question, by sheer power and repressiveness of its discourse remains ‘legitimate’, the answer, if fetched from another discourse, remains illegitimate and without longevity. Questions, when they confront Adivasi wisdom, carry a certain conceptual apparatus and behavioural infrastructure which by the sheer volume of their implications and affiliations remain overwhelming. So how can one answer the said questions particularly when their object, the Adivasi, seems to carry a certain ambiguity if not obscurity, a certain dimness bereft of the ‘exact’, and a certain indeterminate, inconclusive and unpersuasive inner disposition”.

…How does one share in the Adivasi experience and evolve a consensual discourse? The… apparent, inability to comprehension as such creates distances which in their essential nature seem un-bridgeable…. How does one arrive at consensuality between the ambiguous, obscure and dim on one hand and exactitude of current discourse?” (Narendra Bastar, who lived with hill-Madia adivasis for 3 years, examining their life)

Power by which the distinctness of spaces for things to happen physically in spatial and temporal distances is formed, expands proximity of the spirit as community.

“Cultural sensibilities and modes of livelihood subsist in relationship of intimate distance.”

“Prior to the modern onslaught the rhythm of life in the remotest hamlet was vibrant to the profound sense of its own... intrinsic worth”. But now all this and “the sense of… world are traumatically shaken” in the “destruction of modes of livelihood” (Suresh Sharma; “Tribal Identity and the Modern World” Tokyo, 1994, pages 202)

“We need a deeper and radical rethinking about all that goes into the making of ourselves and the shaping of world around us”. “If… changes require transformation of even the values that enable us, then we are stretching our ‘Knowledge Systems’ too far and over pressing our mandate beyond ourselves”. “The magnitude of crisis in modernity… is now so grave and self-threatening that an alert understanding of our thinking behavior is imperative”, to ensure “that we do not put our hand on that which has given us life”.(Narendra Bastar, 2004)

“We, the Indigenous Peoples from various regions of the world, have come to Seattle to express our great concern over how the World Trade Organization is destroying Mother Earth .. to enable them to buy and own… lands, and to freely displace Indigenous Peoples from their ancestral territories… to… pollute the soil, water, and air in our communities.” (Indigenous Peoples Seattle Declaration” on 3th WTO ministerial 1999)

In “separate origins and separate destinies”, which constitute of modern ‘universality’, “White Chief sends us word that he wishes to buy our land… my people will accept it and will retire to the reservation you offer them. Then we will dwell apart… , for the words of the Great White Chief seem to be the words of nature speaking to my people out of dense darkness”. “Our people are ebbing away like a rapidly receding tide that will never return” but “Our dead never forget this beautiful world that gave them being. They… ever yearn in tender… affection over the lonely hearted living”.

“And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone… the dead are not powerless. Dead, did I say? - There is no death, only a change of worlds”.
(Chief Seattle, 1854. Originally published in the Seattle Sunday Star, Oct. 29 1887.)

More near upon the earth than here sooner than now, not only all are more same than before again.

“Something that we have as a connection to the earth is threat to” the modern white men. (American Indian Tom Goldtooth in WSF-seminar on Adivasi identities on 20.1.2004, Mumbai). The assessment of the ontological status of the categories would consider that “beyond may be 200 years at the most, this beautiful game can not be sustained, it is bound to collapse”. “To make an ontological assessment” about the distance of violence done to mother earth, what does it mean, that “the violence that plowing inflects mother earth is not visible to our senses.” May be “in the case of the mother earth it can not be codified because it is much profounder” violence, perhaps. (Suresh Sharma, interview on Delhi 19.3.2004)

“In the knowledge of science there is immense power. Its shadow is across all the world”. “It is moving very fast. Its power today is above all things. The entire world is in its grip. For us it is not possible to even truly know the extent of its power… And when they would already be far, very far beyond,… something terrible would jolt them. Mind would simply ‘crack up’. …As to what will follow, no one knows”

“Science does not recognize our truth. But that does not negate truth.”

(Gunia, a tribal from Chhattisgarh in Suresh Sharma; “Tribal Identity and the Modern World”, pages 131-132).

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