"Keepers of the Wisdom - Local Cultures: Global Perspectives"

This exhibition, sponsored by Canon, presents photographers
Gary Langston, Mary Ellen Mark and Chris Rainier

Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does does not destroy a culture. All societies are constantly evolving. Indeed a culture survives when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo. Indigenous cultures only disappear when they are overwhelmed by external forces, and when drastic conditions imposed upon them from the outside render them incapable of adapting to new possibilities for life. A Kiowa does not stop being a Kiowa when he gives up the bow and arrow, any more than an American stops being an American when he ceases the use of a horse and buggy.
We are not, after all, speaking merely about the fate of small populations of indigenous peoples, isolated in the natural refuges of the world. We are talking about how we as human beings can discover ways to live together in pluralistic societies in a polychromatic world of diversity.
If diversity is a source of wonder, its opposite – the ubiquitous condensation to some blandly amorphous and singularly generic modern culture that takes for granted an impoverished environment – is a source of d i s m a y. There is indeed, a fire burning over the earth, taking with it plants and animals, cultures, languages, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. Quelling this flame, and reinventing the poetry of diversity is perhaps the most important challenge of our times.

WADE DAVIS
Author and Anthropologist