Castellanos's third characteristic of indigenous knowledge is that it is experiential, and what's important about this characteristic is that experiencing knowledge through your senses, is much more powerful than being told Something, or reading it in a book, say. So, one of the reasons that so much of indigenous knowledge is something that a person experiences, is that, it relates back to that personal charcteristic. It's something that, that body has experienced. That, that body has gone through, and so the understanding is that person's alone. Now, other people who go through similar experiences pick up similar knowledge and then there's a possibility certain for relating to one another about that experience. But until someone goes through that experience themselves, they can't really know that knowledge. And it's important to think about some of the indigenous languages actually have different verb forms for knowledge that is gained through one's own experience, or one's own senses, and knowledge that is gained through someone, relating the knowledge to that person. So you would actually have a different verb form,[FOREIGN] to describe, That you heard John is sick, rather than saw that John is sick for yourself. So when you're describing it to someone else the verb form that you use demonstrates your certainty based on how you experienced that knowledge. So the experiential component is so important that it's part of the ways that we use language to talk about it. The way the language the linguistic verbs. So that's, that's just how important the experience is. Another example, going back to that, that story of the elder I, I told in the earlier characteristic there is an example of someone who heard that the land is alive and that they wanted to experience that. And so they went to an elder and said, I want to understand what is meant by this notion that the land is alive, can you tell me. And the elder said, well, come with me. And took the, proceeded to take the person on walks through the forest you know, through the bush and you know, coming back to their, their cabin each time. And after a few days of this, the person thought, well I wonder if he's ready to share this knowledge yet, and he said are you ready to tell me what. What is meant by the land is alive and the elders said, obviously you need a few more days and we kept walking with them. So, again, he wasn't going to tell them what it meant but he had to experience it himself through his own senses and so, a number of the you know, the key knowledge gaining opportunities or ceremonies have to do with one being exposed to an opportunity, to experience something for themselves. And again people won't talk about other people's experiences in a, a traditional knowledge setting or way those ones who are still. Very embedded in indigenous cultural ways of, of knowing and relating, can only speak for themselves. And there's that famous example that, Caslano recounts of the Cree testimony during the Great Whale Project and discussing the environmental damage that was being done by the dams construction and the person was asked to, Tell, they were asked to provide, to, to do the oath in court. And they were, they had to translate in Cree what was meant by, "The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth". And the translation. Was you know, something that holds for all people. That's true. And the person said, well I can't tell you that, but I can tell you what I know. So again, that sense of one's experience being what one can know, and that the relationship to truth is, there is no one truth But there, there's no universal truth. But there's multiple truths based on multiple personal experiences. And that's one of the big connotations of the experiential characteriscic of the indiginous knowledge.
