The planet needs a good dose of Indigenous Realism.  As we witness a planet marked by an increasing impoverishment of life, both human and other-than-human, it is time to seriously examine indigenous ideas found among the First Nations of North America that can benefit all humankind and the balance of life beyond our own species.  These ideas and their attendant life-enhancing practices constitute a set of practical knowledges that most Americans are unfamiliar with and a good number of Native people have had taken from them: knowledges which emerged through hundreds and often thousands of years of interaction with ecosystems and larger environments – a nature-culture nexus (NCN) - embodied in indigenous tribal life-ways residing within a spiritual cosmos. 

Results/Conclusions

This paper and brief presentation will give specific examples of ingenuity or more properly the indigenous ingenuity - indigenuity - of tribal peoples life-ways embody knowing as doing: a practical knowledge about living well brought about by a life-time of attentiveness to something other than our own human produced culture.