The Medicine Wheel and Humanism
Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson
President of The New Enlightenment Project
Lloyd is a registered doctoral psychologist with competencies in counselling psychology, educational psychology (including ability assessments) and human resource development. He also has also published on residential school syndrome, the structure of the aboriginal self, the application of memes to self-understanding, the evolution of spirituality and religion, prior learning assessment and recognition, the treatment of suicide ideation and attention deficit disorder.
Flowing from the Enlightenment humanism recognizes human agency in the development of knowledge about reality. Such knowledge is separate from that which is said to be divinely given and takes into account subjectivities. In this article I argue that the methods of science and reason that makes such a naturalistic understanding possible are compatible with traditional aboriginal worldviews: The Medicine Wheel Revisited: Reflections on Indigenization in Counseling and Education (sagepub.com)
Enlightenment humanism seeks universal values common to the human condition. For example, in humanism the dignity of the person is valued regardless of the race, creed, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity or geographic location of that person. Similarly, empirical scientific truth will apply to all individuals, irrespective of divinely given alternate “realities” that are subjectively held. In this article I argue that the methods of science and reason that makes such a naturalistic understanding possible are compatible with traditional aboriginal worldviews, but that each culture must ground the Enlightenment to its traditions for that culture to participate equally in the scientific revolution. I call this process of adapting new technologies to local cultures “indigenization.” I recommend a secular approach to indigenization relating modern conceptual thought to traditional cultures in a way that is consistent with traditional constructs. In this article, I use the ancient medicine wheels found on the Great Plains of North America to illustrate how this could be done.
This article is peer reviewed and was first published by SAGE Open as “open access.” It may be referenced: Robertson, LH. (2021) The Medicine Wheel Revisited: reflections on indigenization in counselling and education, Sage Open, 11(2) 1-11 DOI: 10.1177/21582440211015202