While Creator made the four sacred elements and placed on the earth the four layers of creation, it is also said that within these entities the only constant that humans can rely on is change and our ability to adapt with the change.
To help us adapt to this constancy of change, Creator bestowed onto humans the free will to invent and re-invent traditions as needed.
Since the time that culture began to shape who we are as human beings, cultural knowledge has been shared, borrowed, and exchanged within and between cultures. Indeed, cultural knowledge is a multi-directional fluid phenomenon that moves across both time and space.
In the process of inventing and re-inventing culture, cultural symbols and icons are birthed. These cultural entities are shared, borrowed, exchanged, and unfortunately sometimes appropriated within and between cultures. As a result, when interpreting the meaning inherent in cultural symbols and icons, the process involves reading their shape and colour as well as reading their particular context and location – geographic and elsewhere, on the body for example. In this way, a cultural symbol/icon has several parameters, or layers, and contexts of meaning that requires interpretation. A change in one parameter, such as colour, brings about new meaning.
No Hegemony is Free From Human Agency
Said another way, no cultural entity is void of the fluid nature of knowledge − no cultural hegemony is ever complete and frozen in time. This is the case even in the context of political tyranny. Ultimately, natural law rules. That said, in the context of cultural borrowing moral codes are crucial.
This blog was in part inspired by Aaron Paquette's facebook May 2014:
https://www.facebook.com/AaronPaquetteArt/posts/10152398982863754?pnref=story
Additional resources that may help decipher this knowledge in this blog:
http://www.ontario-canada-travel.com/petroglyphs-provincial-park.html
http://www.lynngehl.com/black-face-blogging/anishinaabeg-concept-symbol-of-truth-debwewin-adopted-by-mtis-as-nations-flag
http://kisikew.blogspot.ca/2012/12/medicine-wheel-teaching-hoax.html
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