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I've had a challenge being of Native ancestry. I probably had to work harder. It was like a handicap but it was good. It sort of forced me to try harder. But when I graduated and came back to serve some of our Native communities, my Elders were very important to me in giving me the guidance when I first started out my career.
They said to me, "You know, Doug, it isn't how much you know. You can study and you can learn and human beings can get smarter and smarter. But if we're so smart, how come the world is in such a hell of a place? So it isn't how much you study and how much you know, it's what you do with that knowledge that's important."
If you come back to our communities and you behave like everybody else and you know everything and tell us what to do, that's not going to further us. The important thing is to actually come from not knowing. That sometimes knowing nothing at all is an advantage. To know it all doesn't necessarily really help us. We feel that if you're trying to create a better world for your children, for our children, for our grandchildren; you have to approach life in a different way.
They said to me, "You know, the Great Spirit, He can hold all of man's knowledge in the palm of His hand." That's what we know. He can hold everything that man knows just in the palm of His hand, and what man knows is definable. What we don't know is also definable. Like I know I can't fly a 747, I know that. So what I don't know is also definable. The Elders said that from the Great Spirit's fingertips to the edge of the Universe is what we don't know, we don't even know. That's what is yet to be discovered. They said that knowledgethat power over your life-isn't really what you know. It's that world out there that you don't know, that you don't even know. That abyss, that void is the place where all creativity occurs-that is the creative world.
Einstein didn't get E=MC2 from what he knew. He was willing to stand on...