How Indigenous Knowledge Was Appropriated and Spiritualized
The House: A Metaphor for Knowledge
Imagine a house whose beams, windows, and carved doorframes are admired across the world. Its architecture shapes thought, inspires design, and teaches lessons about living well. Yet the people who built it are removed, dispossessed from the knowledge they created, erased from the picture. The architects, the engineers, the designers, the families, and community are now placed in an isolation, often locked out of the house they built.
This is the story of Indigenous knowledge in the modern world: political systems, governance, and relational practices borrowed, abstracted, and universalized by colonial societies. Pieces of the house, its doors, windows, and beams, are carried away and admired elsewhere. Philosophers, scholars, and spiritual seekers study them, teach them, and integrate them into new systems. Yet the builders themselves are driven into invisibility. They still exist, they still carry the knowledge of the whole house in every aspect from materials to finish.
Imagine entering someone else’s house
You haven’t been invited in. You tried the door and learned it wasn’t locked so you decided to enter. Maybe it was curiosity, or maybe it was admiration. It was likely a bit of both. Either way, you enter the house and begin to explore.
You notice immediately that it has been careful built. The rooms are arranged with purpose. Windows are placed to catch the morning light, the design floods the house with illumination all day without overheating, and welcomes sunset, storms, every moment with a framed beauty. The kitchen is organized in a way that suggests generations of practice. It is built to host, built to share, built for intimacy of family, and complexity of the most elaborate feasts.
You admire the craftsmanship which stands in a tradition beyond trend. The beams are strong, the doorframes beautifully carved, the placement of each room deliberate. Whoever built this house understood something about living well in this place. It is strong, integral to place and space, has its own subtleties of movement and design. It is an ecosystem for living wrapped in elegance and beauty.
It is not just a shelter. It is a system of knowledge.
So you begin taking pieces of it. Whether it is out of some sense of admiration, or a desire to know more, or an outright theft because it is something you do not possess, you start to dismantle the house. You remove a window that captures sunrise, you take a beam from the roof, and you remove a carved doorway that seems to carry a depth of older wisdom about design and usage. Piece by piece, you remove features and elements of the house.
You carry these pieces away and use them to build something new somewhere else. You aren’t sure of their assembly or specific significance. Both the physical and the social uses of these are not within your scope. You have no idea why they were designed this way and the purpose they played in the house other than some vague assumptions made upon viewing. When people admire your construction, you tell them that these designs represent timeless human knowledge. You tell them perhaps some lineage but mostly claim the pieces as your own. You state that the house gives ancient insights about how to live.
The house they came from is rarely mentioned in any reference to the dismembered pieces. The beams, windows, and doorways begin to appear everywhere. Architects reference them. Designers celebrate their elegance. Workshops teach the principles behind them. Books describe them as universal wisdom discovered by humanity. Frankenhouses begin to dot the landscape as the designs become normalized across many structures and the original meanings and usages are lost.
Meanwhile the original house still stands. But the original builders, engineers, architects, families, and communities are no longer recognized. Genius design and concepts get grafted from other houses, the original works becoming less and less about purpose, values, and realities that designed them. The longer the the concepts are used, the more they are twisted into the facility of the appropriators as they try to place unique spins and twists on the original concepts in attempts to build capital through individualistic novelty.
Something like this has happened repeatedly in the intellectual history of the modern world. For several centuries, colonial societies have encountered complex Indigenous systems of governance, philosophy, and spirituality. They have studied them, borrowed from them, admired them, and appropriated and repurposed their ideas. In this process of theft, the living political realities and traditions that produced these ideas have been quietly erased from the story.
What remains are dismembered conceptual and practiced fragments: beautiful, intriguing, and widely circulated.
Philosophical concepts. Anthropological theories. Spiritual practices. Wellness rituals. All of these as pieces of a previous integral home.
This analogy is not just a cautionary tale. It is a reality that follows a path from early encounters between Europeans and Indigenous political systems in North America, through Enlightenment philosophy and nineteenth-century anthropology, and finally into the modern world of spiritual self-help and wellness culture.
Along the way, Indigenous knowledge was repeatedly translated, abstracted, and universalized. The ideas traveled widely. The peoples who developed them became increasingly erased. The cultures were often made illegal, the traditions maligned and persecuted. The bodies of the original architects, designers, builders, the families and communities are subjected to repeated genocides and erasures by a colonial culture that preaches individual peace and tranquility while it practices atrocities and violence.
First Encounters
European colonists – invaders – did not arrive to find empty land or unorganized peoples. This idea of Terra Nullius (land determined legally empty or uninhabited) simply didn’t exist. Terra Nullius is a concept related to the Doctrine of Discovery which is a whole other series of writing that I will post at some point.
What they did encounter was something that stood outside of their imaginary – vast food forest landscapes with agriculture and living villages, cities, towns, hamlets integrated into an animate world. The depleted, deforested, thoroughly hierarchical, oppressive, and violent world of European peoples could not reconcile this abundance and ecological harmony with the devastation of their own cultures, lands, and nations. They encountered complex political systems, federations, and long-standing governance traditions. The Anishinaabe, the Algonquin, The Mi’kmaq, the Haudenosaunee, the Wendat, likely most Eastern Coastal and Woodland peoples organized multiple nations into a durable alliance with councils, diplomacy, and accountability.
These political traditions did not simply exist alongside European colonial society. They actively commented on it.
Indigenous diplomats, traders, and political leaders observed European institutions closely. They saw monarchies sustained by rigid hierarchies, societies marked by deep poverty alongside extreme wealth, and governments that concentrated authority in the hands of kings and aristocrats. In diplomatic meetings and recorded conversations, Indigenous leaders often expressed astonishment that Europeans tolerated such arrangements.
One of the most famous critics was the Wendat statesman Kondiaronk, whose recorded dialogues with French officials circulated widely in Europe during the early eighteenth century. In these conversations, Kondiaronk challenged the foundations of European social life: the accumulation of private wealth, the coercive authority of the state, and the willingness of Europeans to submit to rulers who governed without consensus.
The story of Kondiaronk made it across the Atlantic through a 2 part publication of New Voyages to North America, by Louis Armand de Lom d’Arce, baron de Lahontan . Published in 1703, this became a wildly popular read about the Algonquin and other peoples from Turtle Island. It included a fictionalized account of Kondiaronk – one of the first published examples of the “Noble Savage” trope in literature.
The writings and records of encounters with Indigenous nations left a deep impression on European intellectuals. Philosophers associated with the Enlightenment, such as Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, began using descriptions of Indigenous societies as mirrors through which to criticize the inequalities and hierarchies of European civilization. The societies learned about across the Atlantic appeared to demonstrate that human communities could organize themselves without kings, without entrenched class systems, and without the relentless accumulation of property that characterized emerging capitalist economies.
Yet through this backwater, fanatical religious, imperial, and oppressively structured European lens, Indigenous governance was increasingly abstracted. Because European thinkers lacked the worldview and lived experiences to build any tangible understanding of the complex and integrated political systems (which include all aspects of Indigenous worldview including spiritualism) metaphors and thought experiments replaced living communities. The architecture of the house was dissected, vivisected, studied; every facet of the community that built the house was erased from view.
Ongoing Theft, and a Frankenhouse is Built
Over the next two centuries this pattern would repeat itself across multiple fields of knowledge, now structured and placed into hierarchical silos of knowledge. Europeans are pretty famous for this sort of thing. Anthropologists would reinterpret Indigenous governance through evolutionary theories of social development. Political theorists would transform communal land relations into abstract models of early human society. Spiritual movements would recast Indigenous cosmologies as universal wisdom traditions available to all seekers. And much like any previous translation of Indigenous worldview, the dismembering and misapplication through appropriation spawned some pretty grotesque new designs. The origins were erased, and European thinker took full credit for their frankentheories of assumptions and mismatched parts of an integral worldview blended with their own lust for world dominance and oppression.
To understand how these transformations occurred and why they persist, we must examine the ideological structures that allow colonial societies to absorb the knowledge of the peoples they displace (read diaspora, genocide through multiple mechanisms).
The insights of several major theorists of colonialism and power become essential:
The Martinican poet and revolutionary Aimé Césaire argued that colonialism did not simply dominate foreign lands; it reshaped the moral imagination of Europe itself, normalizing forms of domination that would eventually return to haunt the colonizing societies. His student, the psychiatrist and anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon, explored how colonial power reorganizes both political reality and psychological identity, producing narratives that justify domination while preserving the colonizer’s sense of moral legitimacy.
At the level of ideology, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser described how institutions and cultural practices reproduce the worldview of a social order even when that order appears to be questioned. Similarly, the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci showed how systems of power maintain themselves through cultural hegemony: by shaping what societies come to regard as common sense.
These insights help explain why colonial societies can simultaneously criticize domination while continuing to reproduce it. The architecture of critique itself can be absorbed into the structures it was meant to challenge.
Later thinkers would extend this analysis further. The philosopher Michel Foucault demonstrated how systems of knowledge and power intertwine, shaping not only political institutions but also the categories through which people understand truth, identity, and history.
Taken together, these thinkers help illuminate a paradox at the heart of modern intellectual history: colonial societies have repeatedly learned through violent appropriation from the peoples they violent displace and oppress, incorporating fragments of Indigenous political thought into philosophy, anthropology, and spirituality, even as the political existence of Indigenous nations was marginalized and erased.
The story that follows traces how that paradox unfolded. It is how ideas that once emerged from living systems of governance were gradually transformed into philosophical concepts, anthropological categories, and eventually spiritual techniques within modern wellness culture.
In other words, it traces what happened to the house after its beams were carried away.
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