They assume the burdens of leadership with a sense of responsibility to the community from which they seek consensus. They share that predisposition with African traditions, as they have survived in either Africa or America. In the search for communal wisdom there is, especially among our native peoples, traditionally a mix of the spiritual with the worldly. These are not considered opposites, nor at the extremes of a continuum, but rather they are assumed to be integrated in the whole community life. Wisdom is the product not only of the mind, but also of the spirit.
Wisdom is to serve the needs of the body, social as well as individual.
Persons and the community are also indistinguishably intermixed. Neither can live well without the other. We have, to a degree, been successful, for after all we have been dominant and the potential was there. The experiment of assimilation has gone on long enough to prove that when it works it amounts to annihilation. We speak of perhaps one inhabitant in thirty of Canada's huge sub-continent.