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Does the light go out when you close the door?

You know that little light that is on whenever you open your fridge door? Do you believe it really goes out when you close the door again? Why? How do you know the light isn’t on all the time, a plot by the manufacturer to make you replace those cost
You know that little light that is on whenever you open your fridge door?

Do you believe it really goes out when you close the door again? Why?

How do you know the light isn’t on all the time, a plot by the manufacturer to make you replace those costly little bulbs more often?

The amount of information people accept at face value in our society is mind-boggling. And our trust in what others tell us is starting to tarnish.

There’s an old saying that we shouldn’t “assume” too much because that can make an “ass” out of “u” and “me”. But in our daily lives we take a lot of things for granted, which often results in some very rude awakenings.

Take our food supply, for example. It wasn’t until I stumbled across the information buried in a magazine article that I learned that farmers pump cattle, pigs, and other livestock full of antibiotics. I never dreamed that the animals we eat are so drugged up. Could this be why doctors almost need a court order to prescribe patients penicillin these days – because we are ingesting so much medicine through our food supply that we are in danger of developing immunity to it?

After a stabbing at a Toronto high school, politicians started calling for a “zero-tolerance policy” against guns in the city’s schools.

The newspaper I was reading almost hit the ceiling – “You mean there hasn’t always been one?” I bellowed at no-one in particular. I suddenly had this vision of student lockers equipped with holsters and ammo drawers.

See what I mean about making assumptions?

We tend to trust some information sources more than others – especially ideas and opinions that appear on a printed page. That’s why you never want to have your name in a newspaper for being charged with a criminal offence – your neighbours will convict and hang you before you even come before a magistrate.

Then there are those slippery publications that inform me at the A&P checkout that Angelina Jolie has been impregnated by a space alien and is soon to give birth to triplets.

The harder a publication’s cover, the more weight its words seem to carry with a gullible public, and there is nothing more rigid than the jacket of a scientific textbook.

I’m in a Native-issues workshop with teachers from the Near North District School Board, and can see doubt cloud some faces when an Elder is talking about the Anishinabek creation story, the one that says our ancestors did NOT put on their galoshes and hike across a temporary land bridge from Siberia 12,000 years ago.

I try to convince them by pointing out some other instances where scholars have proven to be less than infallible.

“Scientists often draw weighty conclusions from the flimsiest evidence,” I argue. “They find a tooth or shard of pottery and next thing you know they’re drawing your family tree showing a bunch of monkeys as your uncles.”

I tell them that my high school chemistry teacher swore to us there were only 87 elements known to mankind. Today the periodic table is up to 118… and counting.

Last year my faith in formal education was shattered when an astrologer claimed that Pluto isn’t really a planet – whereupon the scientific community promptly reduced the official number of heavenly bodies orbiting the sun from nine to eight. That's like telling your kids there isn't really a Santa Claus.

Surely these shortcomings in accepted Western wisdom would make Native teachings seem at least plausible, I reasoned.

For a second I thought I detected a faint flicker of belief on the faces of some of the skeptics in our circle –did the little light in their brains just click on?

Or would it go out again as soon as they closed the meeting-room door behind them?

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Maurice Switzer is a citizen of the Mississaugas of Alderville First Nation. He is director of communications for the Union of Ontario Indians in North Bay and editor of the Anishinabek News.