Native Intelligence
A native is a man or creature or plant indigenous to a limited geographical area-a space boundaried by mountains,
rivers, or coastline (not by latitudes, longitudes, or state and county lines), with its own peculiar mixture of weeds, trees,
bugs, birds, flowers, streams, hills, rocks, and critters (including people), its own nuances of rain, wind, and seasonal change.
Native intelligence develops through an unspoken or soft-spoken relationship with these interwoven things:
it evolves as the native involves himself in his region. A non-native awakes in the morning
in a body in a bed in a room in a building on a street in a county in a state in a nation. A native awakes in the center
of a little cosmos-or a big one, if his intelligence is vast-and he wears this cosmos like a robe, senses the barely perceptible
shiftings, migrations, moods, and machinations of its creatures, its growing green things, its earth and sky. (Duncan 72-73)
“When reason denies the validity of intuitive or visionary knowledge or when moral obedience is fostered at the expense of the will, strength, or intelligence, the creative interplay of contraries is short-circuited and Man is alienated from Himself.”