I’m going to use the Lakota people as an example because I have traveled to Pine Ridge reservation yearly, sometimes living there for months at a time, to work on permaculture projects, so I got to experience the dynamics of that culture from multiple directions.
The history of the Lakota people offers a deep lesson in the importance of culture. They are traditionally strong people with traditions and viewpoints about life that allowed them to thrive in harsh conditions.
When Europeans moved into the area, many of them had the viewpoint that the Lakota culture was inferior and they must be taught to live and think like Europeans. Thus, children were forced to go to boarding schools where they were forbidden to speak the Lakota language, or practice any spiritual or cultural aspect of their way of life. They wore European clothing, learned English and were schooled in European tradition and history.
In order to conquer the Lakota, who were consummate warriors and continued to win battles, the US government had to adopt a strategy of killing off as many buffalo as they could find, knowing that this was their main food supply. The people starved as a result, and surrendered so they could eat. They were fed poor diets at the fort, and then given the least productive land in the area to live in. Treaties and agreements that were made were repeatedly broken.
I’ve farmed on the Pine Ridge reservation, and it is challenging!
A 3-4 month growing season, hail in July, it can freeze in June or September, windstorms, drought, locusts, 70 degree changes in temperature in a day. The Pine Ridge reservation encompasses the Badlands and the harsh western prairies, similar to the steppes of Central Asia. Wild edibles are few and far between.
Cultures in these climates usually focus on raising or hunting meat, like yaks, or buffalo which is why killing the buffalo had such a devastating impact on the culture.
The people were each individually given a plot of land, and tribal members were deliberately spread far from each other over 2 million acres of reservation to break up their cultural habits of working and living together as a tribe.
Children were put into boarding schools, separated from their elders, and forbidden to speak the language or practice Lakota culture in any way. Some people believed they were well-meaning within their own cultural context; they believed the Lakota couldn’t survive or adapt to European culture unless they forgot their own.
What was missing was an observation of the benefits of Lakota culture which had allowed them to live in harmony with the land they were on, and with each other, experiencing the abundance of it.
Scientists and others who study indigenous cultures continue to discover just how much many indigenous people understood, on deep levels, about long term survival in harmony with drastically different ecosystems. Much of permaculture is based on the indigenous wisdom that Mollison observed in his attempts to seek out the laws of permanent agriculture and permanent cultures.
Systematically destroying every aspect of the culture that helped the people survive in this harsh environment harmed their spirits and will to survive on a deep level. Meaning in life disappeared. Their context, their tools, their language which reflected the land they lived on, and their relationship to each other and the land, were all destroyed.
What replaced the culture was not very well suited to creating a supportive community or surviving on the land they were on.
Bigotry and oppression continued to impact the reservation and still does to some degree. For instance, drugs and alcohol have been brought into the reservation by outsiders. White cattle ranchers, leasing tribal lands, overgrazed it drastically, causing further degradation or even desertification in some areas. Other white people tricked some Lakota who had the best farmland on the reservation into selling the land.
The people responded with alcoholism and drug addiction, one of the highest suicide rates in the world, and rampant heart disease and diabetes because of bad diets (commodity food is mostly low quality sugar, white flour and other processed foods - there was almost no fresh food on the reservation).
This pattern has been repeated in many cultures around the world in different ways. Numerous members of tribal cultures, surviving sustainably for hundreds or thousands of years have ended up in cities, addicted to drugs, or in gangs, or living in cardboard shacks in ghettos, working long hours to make ends meet. Cultural destruction often plays a role.
The assumption that modern lifestyles or European lifestyles are best for everybody is an adventurous assumption when looking at the results of imposing or even just simply offering the lifestyle to other cultures.
Because this degradation of different cultures has happened many times, in many settings, it may be worthwhile to ask - what about culture is important?
Going back to the definition of culture, the essence of it brings people together. People have patterns of behavior and belief together that strengthen bonds, cooperation, trust, and resilience. Each culture has co-created what those patterns are, for that culture.
One advantage of a multicultural world is that each of us has some choice about which cultural aspects we feel is most healthy for us, or even create our own versions, and we can learn by observing strengths and challenges of different cultures. All of them have both strengths, and challenges.