Introduction: Thinking Beyond the Next Quarter
How far into the future do we think when we make decisions?
Modern society often rewards short-term thinking. Businesses may focus on the next quarterly report. Governments respond to immediate pressures. Individuals make decisions based on what will happen tomorrow, next month, or next year.
But what if we routinely asked a different question:
What will this decision mean seven generations from now?
Indigenous knowledge systems offer powerful ways of thinking about time, responsibility, sustainability, and relationships. In the Ojibwe language, the concept of aanikoobijigan connects us to both our great-grandparents and our great-grandchildren. The word spans generations in both directions, reminding us that we exist within a much larger human story.
That long view can change the way we think about land, water, language, culture, community, and the future.
We Are Not Separate From the Planet
Consider the scale of human consumption.
If the entire population of the planet adopted the lifestyle and level of consumption associated with the average American, we would require multiple Earths to sustain humanity. That alone should cause us to ask whether the way we live is sustainable over the long term.
There is no way for human beings to be neutral while living on this planet.
Every choice we make has consequences.
How we use land matters.
How we use water matters.
How we produce and consume food matters.
How we use energy matters.
How we treat one another matters.
And the choices we make today shape the world available to future generations.
The question is not whether we will have an impact.
The question is what kind of impact we will have.
Colonialism and the Erasure of Knowledge
Colonization has often involved the imposition of one language, culture, religion, and system of knowledge over others. This process has frequently been accompanied by violence and the suppression or displacement of Indigenous peoples and their ways of life.
When a society repeatedly uses violence to solve problems, it should not be surprising when that violence creates additional problems.
We should therefore ask a difficult question:
Why would we assume that the same systems and approaches that created a problem will necessarily be able to solve it?
Some of the environmental, social, and cultural challenges we face today require us to consider different approaches.
That does not mean romanticizing Indigenous peoples or pretending that every decision made by every Native person or community has always been correct. Indigenous people, like everyone else, live in a changing world and have also been affected by colonial systems.
But Indigenous knowledge contains perspectives that can expand the ways we think about problems and solutions.
We need to learn from one another.
What Indigenous Knowledge Can Offer
Across Indigenous communities, there are diverse bodies of knowledge and ways of knowing that offer different perspectives on humanity's relationship with the natural world.
These perspectives can challenge the assumption that land is simply a resource to be extracted, that water is merely a commodity, or that success should be measured primarily through short-term economic gain.
They can also remind us that knowledge is relational.
Our responsibilities extend beyond ourselves.
They extend to our families, communities, ancestors, the natural world, and people who have not yet been born.
The value of Indigenous knowledge is not that it provides a single answer to every modern problem. Rather, it can introduce different questions, different relationships, and different ways of evaluating the consequences of our decisions.
Aanikoobijigan: Seven Generations of Relationship
There is a beautiful concept in the Ojibwe language that helps express this long view.
The word aanikoobijigan can refer to both a great-grandparent and a great-grandchild.
One word connects generations in both directions.
Think about what that means.
When we look backward, we are connected to people who lived generations before us. When we look forward, we are connected to people who will live generations after us.
Seven generations becomes a way of thinking about responsibility.
Imagine people seven generations ago facing extraordinary challenges. They may have been dealing with treaties, allotment, dispossession, and profound changes to their communities and ways of life.
They could not know who their descendants would be.
They could not know our names.
But they could ask:
What will our descendants need?
The answer was not necessarily complicated.
They would need land.
They would need clean water.
They would need their language.
They would need their culture.
And they would need one another.
Despite enormous challenges over generations, those things have survived.
We are here.
We still have language.
We still have culture.
We still have relationships.
That is a powerful inheritance.
What Will Seven Generations From Now Need?
Now turn the question toward the future.
Imagine seven generations from now, when no one remembers our names.
No matter how many books I write, there will come a time when people will not know who I was.
And that is okay.
The important question is not whether people remember my name.
The question is:
What will they need?
I believe they will need many of the same things our ancestors hoped to preserve.
They will need land.
They will need clean water.
They will need language and culture.
They will need strong relationships.
They will need communities.
They will need a healthy planet.
Thinking this way changes the nature of decision-making.
The Long View Makes Decisions Clearer
When we take a seven-generation view, some decisions become easier to understand.
A choice that looks profitable today may look very different when we consider its consequences for our great-grandchildren.
A decision that seems inconvenient in the present may look entirely reasonable when we consider the world it creates for people who will come after us.
Too often, we mortgage the well-being of our great-grandchildren for the next quarterly shareholder profit statement.
Seven-generation thinking asks us to reverse that calculation.
Instead of asking only:
What do we gain today?
we also ask:
What are we leaving behind?
That question can apply to environmental stewardship, education, economic development, public policy, community relationships, and cultural preservation.
Indigenous Education and the Responsibility to the Future
This perspective has important implications for Indigenous education.
Education is always about the future.
When we teach a child a language, we are not simply transmitting vocabulary. We are helping carry knowledge into another generation.
When we teach Native American history accurately, we are helping students understand the forces that shaped the present.
When we support Indigenous language revitalization, we are investing in a future in which the language can continue to be spoken.
When we teach students about relationships with land and water, we are helping them understand responsibilities that extend beyond their own lifetimes.
This is why Indigenous education should not be confined to a single unit or an annual observance. Indigenous knowledge, history, languages, and contemporary Native communities belong in the broader educational story.
We All Have a Role in the Future
Seven-generation thinking is an Indigenous teaching, but the responsibility it points toward is shared by all human beings.
We all live on the same planet.
We all depend on clean air and water.
We all depend on healthy ecosystems.
We all depend on relationships and communities.
And every generation inherits a world shaped by the decisions of those who came before.
The goal is not to create a perfect world. It is to recognize that our decisions are part of a continuum.
Someone made decisions for us.
Now we are making decisions for people we will never meet.
The question is whether we will leave them with fewer possibilities or more.